Yes, We Are The World's Policeman

While humans may be basically and mostly good, we are not good enough for anarchy. A review of Robert Kagan's big-picture review of US foreign policy.

The international system is not a system, it is anarchy. Russia, like a wolf, just took a bite out of Ukraine, and China has recently been taking bites out of the maritime territiories of its neighbors. Whether due to moral progress, American imperialism, or the specter of nuclear war, the last sixty years have been relatively peaceful. There are far more functional democracies around the world, and for that we can be very thankful. There are some forms of international law and some helpful institutions. But in any heated situation, there is a playground kind of hierarchy, where the bigger players do unto the smaller ones unless even bigger ones stop them.

The US has been the biggest for two generations, using its powers for.. well, there certainly is a big debate whether we generally keep the world stable, peaceful and increasingly democratic, or whether we mostly do the reverse through our blundering about, even when our intentions are good, which they often are not, given the intense greed that drives much of the business-government nexus. Iraq is a good example. Be that as it may, we have been the top bully / policeman, and Robert Kagan asks whether we are giving up on this enormous task and turning in an isolationist or "normal" direction, which is to say concerned with our own interests, and not that of the system as a whole, such as it is.

In a lengthy article, Kagan offers a panoramic view of US foreign policy for the last 100 years or so, focusing particularly on the turn that the US took from traditional isolationism from the Revolution through the Depression, towards enormous and invasive world-wide interests after World War 2. Woodrow Wilson turned out to be the true prophet of this later American policy, announcing (if prematurely) that the US is the indispensible nation for keeping the world safe for democracy. Even his mechanism of an international organization was re-animated in the form of the UN, a way for US power to hide, in Augustinian fashion, behind a cloak of international legitimacy: the new world order.

Kagan focuses also on the unique properties of the US that brought this opportunity about- our geographic isolation, and thus lack of immediate threats or entanglements. And our relative disinterest in the particulars of foreign problems, making us a somewhat honest broker. Not mentioned is our overwhelming power, in economic as well as military terms, which put the world at our feet whether they wished or not. It has been an odd imperium.

Kagan's basic point is that the American public (and that lily-livered Obama!) seem to have lost the will to keep up the imperial banner, now that the clarity of the cold war has been lost, and the world becomes ever messier as our various imperial projects of the past (Cuba, Iran, Iraq) keep blowing up in our faces. But not to worry, he assures, imperiums are never perfect, and don't have to be to keep a lid on the more serious trends of instability.

Even if you are not a neocon, however, there is something to be said for the basic point. Because there is no question that the international system needs more structure. The Europeans recognize this, and have been laboring, with very mixed success, on a sort of united states of Europe. And every flareup around the world, where militants and terrorists, generally of an islamist character today, but of other millennial persuasions in the past, seep into weakly governed areas to spread offensive mayhem, reminds us that chaos and anarchy is the worst of all conditions. It is not some libertarian, Galtian paradise. No, it is a dog-eat-dog, zero-sum hell. Voters in Egypt gave a lesson in this, however bitter, by favoring the military's order over an incompetent democracy.

The key is to think about the policeman's role, which is not one of depotism. It is a delicate working around the edges to limit the worst behavior (WMD's, genocide) while building support through community understanding and deference to local sentiments on the vast majority of issues. It is not imperialism, but a more collaborative process where the stakeholders of the international system, by their weight of numbers, led from time to time by the US, and undergirded by the overwhelming force the US can bring to bear, can put boundaries on acceptable behavior of many kinds, but especially on political violence. It ain't a global government, but is better than nothing.

Specifically, it is better than relying on a balanced system of competitive alliances, (the Kissingerian ideal), which never stays in balance and breeds perpetual competition. With the rise of China, we may take the world into such a two-pole system again, which is likely to be unstable. That is why the recent pivot to Asia has been taking place, to convince the smaller powers that the monopolar world has legs for a few decades more.

But there are many problems with the policeman system. If the central policeman presumes too much on its prerogatives, (such as G. W. Bush and Iraq), the legitimacy of the whole system frays, since it only works when the other countries think it serves their interests better to participate and accept US leadership than otherwise (if grudgingly). Secondly, there is a general free-rider problem and indeed a tendecy for the secondary countries to gang up on the leader, just because they can, to score political points, out of spite, etc. South America has been a hotbed of such grievance and bitterness over the last couple of decades, often for the good reason of being the subject of the most retrograde US meddling. The US (or any leader of an implicit police system) makes an easy target. We saw this in the 60's domestically in the US with the groundswell of antipathy to the pigs, the man, the system, etc.

The central reason to save the policeman system is, as Wilson recognized, to make the world safe for democracy. As hackneyed as it sounds, it remains as true today as then. Democracy is not the historically normal form of government nor an easy system of government, as we have found out so sadly in Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey, Egypt, Hungary, etc.. You don't just hold an election and declare history at an end. Democratic countries have voted themselves into autocracy, and weak ones are preyed on constantly by their more decisive competitiors, both state-ful and state-less. Yet once it takes hold culturally, it is extremely hard to dislodge, making sense of the project of international policing as a temporary way-station to universal democracy and more rationalized, federal-ish world government that is able to tackle the real issues of our time, such as climate heating. If one views democratic government as a better form than others, then having an international system that fosters it consistently under a police-type sponsorship makes a great deal of sense (if the policeman truly does sponsor it, which has been in doubt from time to time). Indeed, the long game vs China as well as vs Russia is a matter of playing for time as they become truly democratic, before the relative power of the US declines out of the policeman role.

• Alternate views on Kagan.
• A contrasting view from the "No, we can't" side.
• Newsflash to libertarians.. government is not, and can not be, voluntary. That would be anarchy.
• Corporations just can't help themselves from cheating on taxes. They are human, after all.
• More Obama heroics ... protecting (some of) the Pacific.
• Martin Wolf on "waking up" to climate change.
• The one PAC to rule them all, but probably not.
• Average Americans are not all that bright, in political and historical terms, sad to say.
• Devolution in Teatopia.
• Some thoughts on economics as a curriculum.

End Of Days: I am extinct- the European Houting.

West Antarctic Ice Sheet: Who Cares?

So the oceans rise by nine feet ... we all will be long dead.

One hears occasionally about the West Antarctic ice sheet "collapse". That seems pretty far off and over-wrought. How can ice sheets collapse? That doesn't make much sense. If an ice sheet is already over the ocean, then its melting wouldn't affect the water level anyhow. So what is the deal?

In this case, the sheet is a large land-based glacier (not an ice shelf, like the Ross ice shelf) whose bottom lies far below sea level by nearly 4,000 feet, though its top rises up over sea level by another mile. This glacier holds about a half million cubic miles of water. Its collapse is going to take maybe 400 years: fast if you are a geologist, but pretty slow for most other people, so it is a bit of a misnomer. Perhaps megamelt might be a better term.

Thwaites glacier forms most of the West Antarctic ice sheet that is shrinking and being undermined.

The problem is that most of the glacier is over land that is far below sea level. Over the last (cold) millennia, it has pushed all the sea water out and stabilized as an enormous glacier. But with climate heating, sea water has begun infiltrating under the glacier, and, with its salt, is going to undermine the whole glacier, melting it far more rapidly than the rest of Antarctica is going to melt in response to rising air temperatures. That is what the observers are talking about.

Cross section view showing how much of the glacier is under sea level and prone to  "collapse".

The researchers in a recent paper describing this situation do two things. They state that based on its recent flow and water loss, that this glacier has already begun collapsing / being undermined by sea water. Secondly, they put together some modelling of the melting process and estimate that even without more global warming, this glacier will unload all its water within 200 to 900 years, contributing on its own about 9 feet to higher global sea levels. Naturally, the rest of the glaciers in the world aren't sitting on their hands either, so it is just one more nail in the coffin of our lovely biosphere as it has been for the last few thousand years since the last ice age. And over the last

It is a classic slow-motion, far away, hidden-under-a-pile-of-ice process, particularly ill-suited to our communal forms of decision-making, i.e. politics. While in terms of geology and evolutionary biology, the melting is going at lighting speed, it is glacial in terms of our day-to-day public policy concerns and decision making. So Barack Obama's heroic regulations of vehicle emissions and power plant emissions are pushing against a vast conspiracy of apathy, inertia, greed, and myopia. They are far too little, far too late, though better than nothing. If CO2 were purple, we would naturally be much, much farther along by now.

Earth's CO2 history, inferred from various fossil and geologic data and models. Present time is on the far left. I have added a teal line at about 500 ppm CO2, which is where we will be in 2050, and which exceeds what Earth has seen for the last ~20 million years (the period marked "N" for Neogene).

And the response really has to be at the level of public policy, nationally and globally. Without a carbon tax or regulated cap, and without natural shortages of fossil fuels (which seem to be in much larger supply than the atmosphere can take), any CO2 that one virtuous tree-hugger spares the atmosphere simply reduces the price of fuels, helping some one else to use more. If renewable energy sources reach economic parity with essentially free fossil fuels, this situation may change. But for now, fossil fuels always win on pure, amoral, economics. Any effective solution has to be common across all users, to address this mounting tragedy of the commons.

And what does morality have to do with it? Why are tree-huggers regarded as virtuous? It is not out of sheer asceticism. It is pertinent to note that the most significant metric & consequence of global heating isn't geology, or climatology, or economics ... it is biology. The problem is not that rocks are getting warmer, or that ocean water is getting acidic. And the problem is not, (mostly), that humans will have to move a few miles inland or start growing crops in Siberia. All that can be accommodated, or has no moral consequence. The real problem is that climate heating is destroying our biosphere with increasing thoroughness, leaving only weeds and jellyfish behind.

We have already done a bang-up job of biological destruction, starting with the megafaunal extinctions of the Pleistocene (courtesy of human hunters). The last couple of centuries have seen a new mass extinction event gathering steam, as humans have commandeered the entire arable biosphere as well as rangelands, ocean productivity, and forests. Then we poisoned everything with DDT, radioactivity, and currently the neonicotinoid insecticides. Now we are placing the final nails, driving up temperatures beyond where they have been in millions of years, and shredding whole ecosystems by acidifying the ocean. It is going to be a doozy of an extinction event, up there with the greatest of all time. What seems to us slow motion is just an instant in the tapestry of life's history on earth- an incredibly destructive one.

When you see iconic species trotted out as examples of saving rare species, like pandas, condors, and tigers, you can be pretty sure that they are the walking dead. Their populations are so small and habitats so vestigal that they have lost genetic & ecological viability. Unless enormous amounts of healthy habitat are set aside, (and air conditioned!), they will go fully extinct sooner or later. One of the basic values of humanity has always been an appreciation for the beauty of nature and a recognition of the bonds we share, from its incredibly varied resources to its spiritual sustanance. We are animals, and we are dust, after all. Another basic value has been to provide for our children and the ensuing generations, which constitutes one the basic drives of life. But if we eat & heat their environment now, what will they have left? Even if we manage to keep our world on an even keel in social terms and refrain from incinerating ourselves in a nuclear war, we will, at the current pace, leave them a pale shadow of the nature that we inherited, and that is a deep and depressing shame.

• Global warming ... is politically global.
• National Review: To hell with planet Earth.
• The arctic? It's melting, too.
• Yes, the stupid party, and proud of it.
• Truth dawns in Saudi Arabia.
• Tyson and scientism.. we don't discover meaning, we construct it.
• Our electricity system needs a regulatory overhaul.
• As wealth concentrates upward, debt concentrates downward. The poorer you are, the more you need it, the worse the terms, and the more predatory the sharks.
• Anatomy of the financial crisis, in official narratives.
• The story behind the (lack of) cramdown, in 2008.
• Marx was sort of right.. capitalism could use another big war right about now. Or at least intelligent economic policy.
• About all those new jobs... they aren't very good.
• This week in the WSJ, Warmists = Hitler.

Magical multiple sequence alignments

How to use evolutionary sequence alignments to map protein-protein interfaces.

Wonk alert: this is a bioinformatics post of limited interest to lay readers. While researchers have diligently been crystalizing proteins and generating large numbers of structures, the problem of protein structure determination remains, since after getting a single structure, we want to know how a complex of multiple proteins looks, and then how they look in various active states, and on and on. The questions tend to be endless, and the capacity of structure determination methods quite limited despite their amazing advances over the years. RSCB / PDB, the protein structure database, now has about 100,000 structures, of 230,000 protein chains. But many are from obscure species, or from experiments where the same structure was solved many times, with small variations. Most are also static structures, derived under unnatural conditions.

At any rate, researchers are constantly on the lookout for new ways to gain insight into protein structure, be it using fluorescence energy transfer metrology, NMR, photocrosslinking, computational brute force prediction, ... the list is quite long. A recent paper adds another interesting method to this list, which focusses on sites of interaction between proteins, and whose materials are the growing pile of sequences that are streaming out of those ever-more productive DNA sequencers.

The principle behind this method is that evolution is naturally conservative, so one can hunt for sites of protein-protein interaction in the protein's own linear sequences, by noting where individual amino acids change in coordinated ways over evolutionary time. That is to say, if on a protein interface, one partner has an asparagine (+ charge), and the other facing it has an aspartic acid (- charge), if one of them mutates in one lineage of species to the opposite charge, the partner will typically switch as well, under pressure to preserve the strength of the interaction. These are called "covarying residue pairs". Likewise, a spatially bulky amino acid like phenylalanine might covary with a smaller partner like alanine, switching sides in an interaction to keep the interface properly shaped.

This method has been understood and applied previously to interactions within single proteins, which is a more tractable problem. This paper claims to make it a practical method to apply to multiple proteins, as long as you have an enormous amount of sequence information (i.e. as many different related sequences from various species as the segments being compared are long, in amino acids).

Contacts derived from the computational analysis of miscellaneous proteins with solved structures (using what the authors term "Gremlin" scores for amino acid proximity) are shown as yellow, orange, and red lines, extended for clarity. The red connections are ones that in the known structures are over 12Å apart, so the authors suggest that their method shows contacts that depend on flexibiliy or regulatory conditions that are not apparent in the static crystal structures. Part B shows proteins of the Complex I electron transport chain, which are very tightly complexed in the mitochondrial membrane.

The image above shows how well their method detects amino acids in structurally solved complexes that are at interfaces between proteins. It really is quite impressive, though one has to know beforehand that two (or a few) proteins interact for this method to work. It is not something one yet can deploy over a whole genome in blind fashion to find proteins that interact with each other, which would be extremely useful.

To test their method a bit more critically, they predict interacting amino acids for a set of protein pairs with unknown complex structure, though some of the proteins have known individual structures. Mostly this is grist for other researchers and future validation. But they take a few of the pairs whose individual structures are known, (or could be estimated denovo using computational methods), and put them through a static molecular docking protocol, where the virtual structures are fitted together according to their predicted interface. The results shown below make a good deal of sense, (both prima facie, and based on other work on those proteins), and they feel it validates the method.

More complex structures, this time with interfaces predicted entirely by the sequence alignment method, not from prior structural information.

"Taken together, these results suggest that in cases with small conformational change, the docking protocol can recover the entire interface to high accuracy and in cases where binding is accompanied by a large conformational change, the protocol recovers the largest intact and/or unobstructed interface."

The need for large amount of sequence makes this method a bit restricted for the moment, (the researchers used only bacterial proteins), but it is a very clever way to use evolutionary data to gain structural knowledge about complex interactions. It can be appied to stuctures that are otherwise very difficult to study, like membrane proteins, and may eventually provide data on more dynamic interactions that can not be validated by reference to static crystal structures.

• Molecular machinery, and other PDB posters.
• Annals of our dying environment ... the Monarch butterfly.
• Why do we still work? Why is so much work useless? "Suddenly it became possible to see that if there’s a rule, it’s that the more obviously your work benefits others, the less you’re paid for it."
• This week in the WSJ, Review of another Bonhoeffer bio ... still hunting for an absent god. "It is evident in the conflicted way in which he approached divinity: the awful longing for an absent God, the hunger for the hot touch of an absolute Christ."
• "Every single state taxes those in the bottom income quintile at a higher rate than those at the top."
• War on coal? Bring it on.
• Is reality (and anti-humanism) worth all the trouble? Zizek vs Chomsky.
• " ... almost everyone who deconverts from religion and declares themselves a nonbeliever does so because of a compelling need to talk about reality."
• John Oliver on Comcast and our crappy internet.
• What goes on in hedge funds ... opacity is the business model.
• US policy on Syria is a disaster from start to finish.
• Little on Piketty.
• When libertarians have problems with people with too much money, they...
• Why do we have economists?
• Why do we have GDP?
• They built it ... gilded age loggers raping the land, with fraud and despotism into the bargain.

END OF DAYS: I am critically endangered: the la hotte whistling frog of Haiti.

Which Came First, Sex or Death?

Bodies to do the dirty work: on the origin of germ cells, somatic cells, and bodies.

Imagine you are a termite colony. The vast majority of termites can not reproduce- they are disposable workers for the good of the whole, while the alates, or winged reproductive caste, are set aside to reproduce new colonies. Your body works the same way ... virtually all its cells are on a one-way trip to death, with only the germ cells, and a vanishingly small proportion of those, giving rise to descendents in a bid for immortality.

Once upon a time, all cells were immortal. That is to say, they had no intrinsic lifespan, and could live as well as reproduce endlessly. Why give that up? A recent paper discusses the ins and outs of germ-somatic cell and tissue separation which happened early in multicellular animal evolution.

There are several theories about why this division of labor would take place. One is simple practicality- that not all cells are in a position to reproduce. Would you like your bone cells to send out new embryos to form babies? Such a democratic system would be a big mess, though plants approach it with their capacity to generate reproductive structures from any active meristem. And anyhow, every cell shares the same genome, so it shouldn't make that much difference which one in a body makes the germ cells, right?

Other theories focus on what a germ tissue can be optimized for, such as going through relatively few rounds of replication, thus minimizing mutation, or being fed by other cells, so that they do not have to do their own metabolism, which is mutagenic, again reducing the rate of mutation. While female germ cells often adhere to the former theory, male germ cells tend not to, being produced in vast profusion, requiring high rates of replication. The authors of a recent paper focus on the latter hypothesis, called the "dirty work" hypothesis; that bodies are devised to do all the dirty work of life, while the germ cells are protected from dangers of many sorts, especially from metabolic damage.

Metabolism is a messy process, spewing free radicals and other damaging chemicals about the cell. Both the production of carbohydrates using solar energy to split water molecules, and the process of using carbohydrates by splitting oxygen and returning CO2 to the air are very high-energy processes, as one can see any time something burns. Metabolic enzymology controls them, but at some point, free radicals have to be made, high-energy electrons need to be shot from one place to another, and there is no perfectly safe way to do this. The mitochondrion is an attempt to keep the danger contained in a membrane-enclosed space, but that is not completely effective either.

The paper is computational one, modelling various ecological strategies connected with this hypothesis.

"We tested the dirty work hypothesis using digital evolution, an approach where digital cells are self-replicating computer programs that evolve in an open-ended fashion and are theoretically capable of performing any computational function. For this study, we consider a world of 400 multicellular organisms (“multicells”) that compete for space, where the rate of reproduction of each multicell depends on the number and rate of computational functions being executed by constituent cells."

Basically, if you impose a mutagenic cost of doing the basic processes of life- gathering food, digesting it, metabolizing it, etc., then it stands to reason that if germ cells are spared these risks in a multicellular colony or organism, they will be able to spread their genomes with less mutagenic risk to future generations. Of course, some mutations are needed. A minimal level is required for adaptation and evolution, and some organisms even ramp up their rates of mutation when under stress, in a somewhat desperate bid for success. But on the whole, evolution has put vast resources and endless optimization into the project of high-fidelity reproduction, because as any Darwinian knows, most mutations are harmful.

So it should not be surprising that multicellular organisms rapidly took advantage of this opportunity to increase fidelity by segregating germ cells away from everything else, and building bodies to do all the so-called dirty work, including sex and thinking- which is, incidentally, very metabolically expensive.

Segregation of germ and non-germ cells, in a virtual evolution program, plotted on the X-axis, vs bands of mutagenicity going downwards from  zero (top) to high levels (bottom). 

The experimenters set various levels of mutagenicity to their virtual life tasks, and found that at intermediate levels, their virtual life forms would segregate non-reproductive cells into a soma with pretty much complete probability. At very low mutagenisis levels, there was no advantage to such segregation, and it did not evolve. At very high levels of mutagenicity, specialization of some cells (i.e. the body) to deal with mutagenic activities was essentially lethal, so such environments were avoided entirely rather than adapted to. Their simulations are clever, if very schematic. But they get the simple point across, that the origin of divided somatic / germ bodies is easily understood as a natural consequence of multicellular evolution.

So what about sex? Many bacteria have some form of sex, exchanging bits of their DNA, despite being single-celled and having only one genome to play with. Therefore sex developed long before death did, in the sense of the programmed death of a somatic body after reproduction, as is common among all animals and plants. No cell lives forever, but those that reproduce by binary division have no clear point of death. In contrast, our bodies, specialized for the complex operations of getting a living in a hostile world up to the point when a new generation can be created and nurtured out of the germ cells, have a very definite, genetically programmed (if only by default) endpoint. The way life spans vary between species of animals, but much less within them, suggests strongly that life span is not an accident, but is part of the developmental program, making way for the new generation on an optimized schedule, for evolutionary, and even cultural, rejuvenation.

As one might imagine, these ideas are related to the selfish gene hypothesis, put forth by George Williams and popularized by Richard Dawkins. Which is that bodies are the robotic (and disposable) entities devised by genes for their propagation. That is a strongly skewed perspective, however, making of the gene an almost conscious, greedy, self-sufficient, anthropomorphised totem, which is more than a little fanciful. Rather, organisms are complex communities with delegated and divided functions, one of which is to keep safe the genetic code that the whole community relies on for high-fidelity propagation. Even if the body and its mind can be viewed as disposable cat's paws for that code, they are the only part of the community that can be cognitively selfish; the gene is just a large molecule.

"The same information-work tradeoff may also have motivated a switch from RNA to DNA as the molecule of heredity. According to the RNA world hypothesis, RNA initially served as both a carrier of genetic material and a catalyst for metabolic work. However, RNA instability may have motivated a shift to DNA genomes and catalytic proteins. This is a type of molecular division of labor, ensuring both high fidelity transmission of hereditary information and the execution of critical chemical work."

• Reagan, evangelicals, and the Klan.
• Enlightenment? Not so fast!
• Just how powerful is their god, anyhow?
• Real climate action would cost only 0.2% of GDP. This is very significant news.
• Kids these days ... can not deal with the 70's.
• Sustainable economics- why GDP is not the right measure, or the right worry.
• Secrecy, corruption and fraud in private equity companies. We are shocked!
• "Yet another example of lazy, both-sides-do-it journalism."
• Otters playing the organ? What next?
• Whose side is Mary Jo White on? Shame on the SEC, as usual.
• Why incompetent men dominate in management ... we are suckers for narcissism and overconfidence.
• "Bank of America runs its business through more than 300 offshore tax-haven subsidiaries. It reported $17.2 billion in accumulated offshore profits in 2012. It would owe $4.3 billion in US taxes if these funds were brought back to the US."

The Naked One: Jainism

The sramana movements of ancient India- Buddhism, Yoga, and Jainism.

What is the best religion? One's own, doubtless. But supposing that you had to choose a different one or had none to start with, which ones do the best job of promoting human flourishing and peace, in some general and long-term sense? Most of the prime candidates (i.e. the least blood-soaked, the most philosophical) come from the East. Which is sort of a bitter pill for a Westerner to swallow. But perhaps our tendency to crazy religion bred its opposite as well- the desire to throw its chains off entirely. Be that as it may, it seems fairly obvious that peacefulness and calm are particular specialties of Eastern practices like Taoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism. And the philosophical cores of some of these are even non-theistic, which is remarkable in a culturally durable religion, considering the popularity of gods in all times. Indeed, theistic elements have crept back into most of these religions, sometimes floridly so, as has polytheism in the West.

The Axial age was a time of great religious innovation, when history starts in earnest across multiple cultures, and religious thought and doubt is first extensively recorded. Greece transitioned from Homer to Pericles, Persia adopted Zoroastrianism, China brought forth Confucious and Lao Tzu, and Buddhism was born in India, along with the Upanishads. It was perhaps humanity's first brush with broad cosmopolitanism, which brought new questions and perspectives. A new focus on the individual and the pursuit of spirituality for its own sake rather than as a quid-pro-quo for some harsh and demanding god made room for true philosophy and philosophically driven life styles. Perhaps the most peaceful of all these movements were the Jains of India, also first recorded during this time.

Jainism, Buddhism, Yoga, as well as the Ajivika and atheistic Carvaka movements, were part of a broad reaction to Brahmanic Hinduism, called the Sramana movements (from sram, or making effort, such as the various austerities that typify its practices, maybe at an asram). Its wellsprings may go back to before the Aryan invasion that generated the Brahmanic / Vedic system, but at any rate, it constituted a sort of dramatic reformation / alternative to the dominant system. It renounced caste entirely, refused to recognize the higher status of the Brahmins or their sacrificial rituals, and set up what one might term a merit-based system of spiritual attainment, typically characterized by austerities like celibacy, begging for sustenance, minimal clothing, lack of possessions ... the opportunities are endless. It also generated the idea of life as a problematic cycle of suffering, karma and rebirth, with the goal of release from rebirth.

Jina, 11th century, unspecified, Gujarat.

The origins of Jainism are rather obscure, but the story is that there were twenty-four Jinas, who are the Jains of highest merit, having achieved liberation (from rebirth, from ignorance, etc.) through their meditative and mortifying efforts. They are typically portrayed in utterly peaceful sitting or standing meditation, clothed or naked according either of two Jain branches (Svetambara and Digambara, respectively). The last Jina, Mahavira (540-468 BCE), is most historically attested, and was a contemporary of Siddhartha Gautama. He was not the Jain founder, however, so the religion had a long and hazy history prior, of which he was a reformer and proselytizer. Indeed, Siddhartha Gautama seems to have a student of the Jains in his formative period, prior to breaking with all the strenuous penance and founding his own philosophical school / religion. Which may indeed just have been a variant of Jainism at the time. Yoga is similarly an ascetic strain of non-Brahmanic practices, even more inwardly focussed than Jainism.

The first of the twenty four Jinas, Rishaba, is of particular iconographic interest, as he is the only one with long flowing hair, which Jain monks pluck out when joining, and keep short generally. But Rishaba tends to get the aboriginal / Rastafari treatment, which to me is a striking tie to the deep history of humanity.

Jina Rishaba in standing meditation, ~3rd century, Bihar.

The philosophical focus of Jains is on a sober life and strict morality towards all living beings. The jewels are non-harming, asceticism, and non-absolutism. They theorize that bad actions (even inadvertant ones) harm the person in a physical way, accumulating karma-icules which are tiny bits of physical matter that stick to one's soul, bind one to the cycle of rebirth, and induce spiritual blindness. Their aversion to harming all life forms extends to complete vegetarianism for all practitioners, lay and monk, and even an avoidance of root crops whose harvesting (at least traditionally) involved more disruption of the ground & animals than other crops. One couldn't imagine a stronger repudiation of the classic Vedic rituals of animal sacrifice.

One wonders what Jains make of modern microbiology, not to mention their entrapment in a modern world where any participation in normal life implicates one in vast slaughter and mass extinction. They rate self-starvation to death a highly meritorious act, which goes somewhat against the human flourishing part of my criteria above, even while general abstemiousness and consciousness of ecological harm is in the long run a very positive ethic. One can tell that these philosophies had a revolutionary effects on Indian history & philosophy, for example on Mahatma Gandhi.

Jains originated in the Kshatriya caste, of warriors and administrators, one step below the Brahmins. Being a warrior is obviously not consistent with their philosophy, and Jains have gravitated toward commerce, where they have been very successful. Through history, they also have benefitted from strong alliances with some rulers, who often had political and cultural conflicts with the Brahmanic system. They have built extensive temple complexes at sites reputed to be where various Jinas attained enlightenment, and which serve as pilgrimage sites for all Jains.

Example of a pilgrimage site painting, which is displayed once a year for lay Jains who may not have a chance to go on an actual pilgrimage, and can attain some merit by viewing this portrayal of the site, full of pilgrims. No date or origin given. The location is Shatrunjaya, in Gujarat.

Their doctrine of non-absolutism deserves special comment, as it is a very mature philosophical approach completely unlike the bombastic Ja-way-or-the-highway approach one finds in typical, and especially Western, religions. It proclaims un-certainty. That any truth is provisional and different from different perspectives. Some truths may be partial rather than universal. For example, the Buddhist proposition that change-is-the-only-eternal, and the contrasting permanence of the Brahman in Hinduism each have some merits, depending on what one is talking about, from the Indian / Jain perspective. And that is surely an appropriate way to deal constructively with complex ideas with a great deal of imaginative content. It also leads to a distinct lack of a missionary impulse, one reason why Jainism remains small in number (maybe ~5 million adherents).

Over time, as is natural, Jains have made up stories about their Jina's pre-existing divinity and virgin births from which they arrived to the acclamation of various Hindu gods, etc. and so forth. It is par for the course, and has led to some remarkable art. But the basic philosophy is far less complicated, and well-versed practitioners do not expect anyone to listen to their devotions and prayers- they are understood to be meditational acts of self-improvement, not transactions with beings occupying the void. The Jinas have disappeared completely.

Many religions, indeed all social systems, harness guilt to promote good behavior, conformity, and a stable hierarchy. Jainism does take this aspect to extremes, though in light of our current planetary woes, it does so in a relatively constructive way, in a program of reducing its adherent's footprint of social violence and ecological harm. It easily ranks as the outstanding religion, if one must have one, for the present and future.

Jina, ~900, unspecified, from Karnataka or Tamilnadu.

• Same as it ever was... Chesterton was "disappointed" with the atheists of his day! "They are doubtful in their very doubts. Their criticism has taken on a curious tone; as of a random and illiterate heckling. ... Their suggestions are more vapid and vacant than the most insipid curate in a three-act farce... Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith."
• Honor among traders- why some cultures don't get capitalism.
• Keynes was right about the 1980's, but who was paying attention?
• " ... people who lost their jobs in 2009, when unemployment peaked at 10 percent, had a 30 percent chance of ending up long-term unemployed."
• Sometimes, government does things better.
• Guess who worships the almighty dollar ... yes, the jihaddis.
• Peak fish: global fisheries peaked back in 1988.
• News flash: pesticides kill insects.
• Corporate felony means no one goes to jail, or even loses a job, or any pay.
• A little background on the Kochs. And present-day practice.
• The minimum wage is a human rights issue.
• Even France works harder than the US, thanks to better policy.
• DeLong on Piketty and the PikettyWorld.
• This week in the WSJ: 

"A March Gallup poll finding that most Americans worry about climate change "a little" or "not at all" is consistent with other surveys showing that the issue is not even close to being a top priority for U.S. voters." ... But when 67% want wealth in the US more equally distributed, then the majority is perhaps not always right after all.

The Science of Magic

A review of James Frazer's classic of anthropology and religion, The Golden Bough.

While the Golden Bough has come in for a great deal of criticism over the ninety years since it was published, it remains as a highly readable and innovative analysis of religion, magic, and superstition. Frazer hangs the book (an abridgement of a nine-volume monster) on the question of an obscure ritual of antique Italy, where a sacred grove of oak trees has a resident "king", the king of the grove of Nemi. This king is supposedly subject to replacement by any challenger who breaks a golden bough from the sacred tree, and defeats the king in battle. Frazer ranges (700 pages) over space and time to assemble an explication of this ritual, based on the sacred-ness of the oak to the old Celts, the especial sacredness of the mistletoe that grows on the oak, the impersonation of the god of the oak and mistletoe by the king, and the need of the community to have this king/avatar in a healthy and fertile state (i.e. killed while in good health) for its perpetually renewed fertility and happiness.

But Frazer's more important program is far less prone to criticism, surely appropriate, about the validity of his specific and quite fanciful speculations and associations, with regard to oaks, death by trial, fecundidty of crops, and all the rest. That program is to show in very general terms that magic is the science of the primitive conditions, and religion a somewhat more chaotic, though equally logic-driven, intermediary between the two. It revolves around a few key premises, on which are built, with inexorable logic, the myriad rituals and superstitions of humanity. Human history becomes a very continuous, more or less desperate, and highly affecting, effort to make sense of our bewildering surroundings and hard fate.

"In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends. When he discovers his mistake, when he recognizes sadly that both the order of nature which he had assumed and the control which he haad believed himself to exercise over it were purely imaginary, he ceases to rely on his own intelligence and his own unaided efforts, and throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself. Thus in acuter minds magic is gradually superceded by religion, which explains the succession of natural phenomena as regulated by the will, the passion, or the caprice of spiritual being like man in kind, though vastly superior to him in power."

Unfortunately ...

"Small minds can not grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves. Such minds hardly rise into religion at all. They are, indeed, drilled by their betters into an outward comformity with its precepts and a verbal profession of its tenets; but at heart they cling to their old magical superstitions, which may be discountenanced as forbidden, but cannot be eradicated by religion, so long as they have their roots deep down in the mental framework and constitution of the great majority of mankind."

Naturally, the conception that the wheels of nature are entirely without personality, remorse or recourse, is extremely foreign, and remains foreign to human nature. Yet when the more careful investigations of modern science point in that direction, religion inevitably (if reluctantly, and noisily) trails off towards ever more impotent and indiscernible deities, falls by the wayside, and becomes a species of psychotherapy rather than an unassailable, holistic system of explanation for the social, moral, physical, and invisible worlds.

Ironically, as Frazer puts it, the scientific world-view is closer to the primitive magic than it is to the intermediate stage of religion. Magic assumes a relatively law-ful system of invisible nature, where supernatural beings and arcane rules, though plentiful, are also easily compelled by ritualistic formulae. For example, step in a crack, and break your mother's back. Or break a mirror, and get seven year's bad luck. On a more positive note, wearing the costume of an animal will make that animal more available, and less reluctant to be killed. Just because none of the magic works doesn't mean that logical thought based on lawful premises isn't taking place. The propositions of religion, however, are typically far less certain. Gods can not be so easily compelled, so the idea of cause and effect recedes into the background, from which it can take a very long time for scientific thought to proceed to the next stage of existential theory.

"The fatal flaw of magic lies not in its general assumption of a sequence of events determined by law, but in its total misconception of the nature of the particular laws which govern that sequence. If we analyze the various cases of sumpathetic magic which have been passed in review in the preceeding pages, and which may be taken as fair samples of the bulk, we shall find, as I have already indicated, that they are all mistaken applications of one or other of two great fundamental laws of thought, namely, the association of ideas by similarity and the association of ideas by contiguity in space or time. A mistaken association of similar ideas produces homeopathic or imitative magic: a mistaken association of contiguous ideas produces contagious magic. The principles of association are excellent in themselves, and indeed absolutely essential to the working of the human mind. Legitimately applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science. It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science. From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of the golden and some of them mere dross."

For example, the idea of contamination by contiguity is surely very close to the truth of the germ theory of disease, so it counts as a dim harbinger of a true scientific theory, however much abused. And even imitative magic, if one counts it under the banner of the placebo effect and related social influences which we learn increasingly have strong effects on health, has its place in the history of proto-scientific ideas.

But what seems to me even more basic than these two principles which Frazer returns to time and again is the power of thought itself. What seems to run through the core of magical thinking is not just the rituals of imitation and purification that make up its outward preoccupations, but the conviction that our thoughts themselves are enormously powerful, and are listened to with great attentiveness by one's adversaries and boon-givers, from the lowly animist placation of vegetable spirits to prayers sent to highest theological riddle. Just as a baby assumes that its intensely thought will, accompanied by a good bit of crying, will, indeed must, gain a response, adults habitually assume that they inhabit a world that is always paying attention. To them.

We seem naturally to assume that the whole world thinks as we do, and indeed with even greater clairvoyant responsiveness. Magic generally involves an effort of thought, by individuals or a whole community. When the hunt is danced in the costumes of the prey, no one thinks that the deer are lurking in the shadows watching and awarding points for artistry. No, the thought-waves are assumed to radiate through the magical channels, to make known the intense desire of the tribe, and bend the prey or its superintendent deities to the people's will.

Likewise with voodoo, with sympathetic medicine, and all sorts of magical thinking. The critical component is not the stage prop, but the intense thought and will brought to bear in a ceremonial ritual, combined with a healthy dose of optimism. Why would anyone think this works? One reason is that our natural milieu is social. We are even more social than we think we are. Our brains seem to have evolved principally out of social competition, and we hang desperately on our social status, which is indeed a matter of life and death. The second reason is that our principal mortal adversaries are conscious agents, whether other people (such as in war) or wild animals for whom we are (were) prey. So naturally we evolved to think of our most significant interactions with the world in social terms, with some thinking entity on the other side, just waiting to do us in, or help us out.

But even those two reasons don't fully suffice, since however close we are to someone, they still do not read our minds to such an extent. No, the fundmamental reason has to be simple narcissism & immaturity. That if we wish for something hard enough, the cosmos is sure to listen and heed. However wonderful Neil DeGrasse Tyson's vast and orderly Cosmos is, it can't hold a candle to that cosmos.

Surely, we didn't have much else to go on in primitive times. So making ourselves feel a bit more powerful by way of intense thought concentration couldn't have done much harm, and might have done a great deal of good, by way of vivid visualization of intended results. However little effect it may have had on its intended targets, it had very significant, and probably quite beneficial effects on us.

And that is one reason to bring magical thinking back, at least a little. Medicine is an example of science gone a little overboard, with patients pinioned in a sterile, inhumane, unsupportive environment. This environment used to betoken a priestly class of innovative healers, with white lab coats and all, but by now it is just a harried and unwelcoming factory. The enormous success of alternative medicine, herbalife, and all the rest is a testament to the failure of the regular medical system to truly care for its subjects. A rapprochement would not to allow bad medicine, like homeopathy and noxious herbs, in the door, but would encourage ritual, arts, community interaction, and supportive psychological practice to permeate the medical establishment at all levels, putting people, not diseases, back into the focus of medico-community care.

The basic point is, insofar as ritual, hope, and narcissism are conducive to comfort and social ease, we may need more of them, even while keeping magic well away from the philosophical and scholarly pursuits that drive our rigorous knowledge of reality forward.

"Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather supplemented, by a religious theory. For although men now attributed the annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding changes in their deities, they still thought that by performing certain magical rites they could aid the god who was the principle of life, in his struggle with the opposing principle of death.
...
And as they now explained the fluctuations of growth and decay, of reproduction and dissolution, by the marriage, the death, and the rebirth or revivial of the gods, their religious or rather magical dramas turned in great measure on these themes. They set forth the fruitful union of the powers of fertility, the sad death of one at least of the divine partners, and his joyful resurrection. Thus a religious theory was blended with a magical practice. The combination is familiar in history. Indeed, few religions have ever succeeded in wholly extricating themselves from the old trammels of magic. The inconsistency of acting on two opposite principles, however it may vex the soul of the philosopher, rarely troubles the common man; indeed, he is seldom even aware of it. His affair is to act, not to analyze the motives of his action. If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime."

• Luhrmann on god: the imaginal dialog.
• Epilepsy and god ... a tangled history!
• What happens when truth loses to mythos and shameless egoism.
• A history of Social Security "reform". Remember that about 1.5% of every 401K goes into the pockets of the financial industry, year in and year out, with no risk, while participants are lucky to break even.
• The man who saved Wall Street, and let Main Street rot.
• Are unions the answer to inequality and excess corporate power?
• The GDP we devote to climate care will not be "lost".
• Dysfunctional culture, dysfunctional religion.
• The Phillips curve is dead. The inflation-unemployment environment is more dynamic.
• Summers on Piketty.
• Bruenig on Summers.
• Economics needs some help. "I sincerely doubt that methodology is discussed little because mainstream macroeconomists think it is unproblematic. I am quite confident that it is discussed little, because the methodology of mainstream economics is indefensible."
• WSJ Quote of the week, a neat bit of circular logic on climate heating, er, global warmism:

"This columnist is probably as unqualified as Marcus or Lapidos to evaluate the scientific merits of global warmism. But because we distrust climate scientists, we're with Rubio in being inclined to think it's a bill of goods. The trouble for global-warmist journalists like Marcus and Lapidos is that an appeal to the authority of a distrusted source undermines rather than strengthens one's argument."

Watching the Watchers

Signs and theories of consciousness; review of Consciousness in the Brain, by Stanislas Dehaene.

We love it, can't do without it, and wouldn't be without it. We worship it, and warp it with drugs and crazy religion. But what is it? Consciousness is rather hard to describe. Stanislas Dehaene does an excellent job, however, in a status report on what is known about the physical correlates of consciousness, showing that consciousness can indeed be studied and conforms to the "workspace" theory elegantly elaborated by Bernard Baars almost 30 years ago.

Most of what our brain does is unconscious. When we lay eyes on something, imagery just happens. We have no introspective knowledge of the enormous processing that goes into rendering a visual scene. It was only with the invention of computers and the pursuit of artificial intelligence (and of modern animation with its farms of rendering computers) that its scale could be properly appreciated. The refined end-product just pops into consciousness, making it seem oh so easy. What is important to realize, however, is that vast and various processes are taking place in the background, all the time, whether we attend to them or not. Writing in 1988, Bernard Baars paints it as follows:

"A fourth popular metaphor may be called the "search light" or Theater Hypothesis. This idea is sometimes called "the screen of consciousness." An early version may be found in Plato's classic Allegory of the Cave. Plato compared ordinary perception to the plight of bound prisoners in a cave, who can see only the cave wall with the shadows projected on it of people moving about in front of a fire. The people projecting the shadows are themselves invisible; they cannot be seen directly. We humans, according to Plato, are like those prisoners -- we only see the shadows of reality. Modern versions of the Theater Hypothesis may be found in Lindsay & Norman, Jung, Crick, -- and throughout this book. It has been beautifully articulated by the French historian and philosopher Hyppolite Taine (1828-1893): "One can therefore compare the mind of a man to a theatre of indefinite depth whose apron is very narrow but whose stage becomes larger away from the apron. On this lighted apron there is room for one actor only. He enters, gestures for a moment, and leaves; another arrives, then another, and so on ... Among the scenery and on the far-off stage or even before the lights of the apron, unknown evolutions take place incessantly among this crowd of actors of every kind, to furnish the stars who pass before our eyes one by one, as in a magic lantern." Taine managed to combine several significant features in his theater image. First, he includes the observation that we are conscious of only one "thing" at a time, as if different mental contents drive each other from consciousness. Second, he incorporates the Tip-of-the-Iceberg Hypothesis, the idea that at any moment much more is going on than we can know. And third, his metaphor includes the rather ominous feeling that unknown events going on behind the scenes are in control of whatever happens on our subjective stage (cf. Chapters 4 and 5)."

 ...

"Thus consciousness involves a kind of a filter -- not an input filter, but a distribution filter. The nervous system seems to work like a society equipped with a television broadcasting station. The station takes in information from all the wire services, from foreign newspapers, radio, and from its own correspondents. It will analyze all this information quite completely, but does not broadcast it to the society as a whole. Therefore all the various resources of the society cannot be focused on all the incoming information, but just on whatever is broadcast through the television station. From inside the society it seems as if external information is totally filtered out, although in fact it was analyzed quite thoroughly by automatic systems. Consciousness thus gives access to internal unconscious resources."

Putting it in my own words, what is the point of consciousness? It seems to be the caboose on the train of thought, seeing things well after they occur, getting highly summarized and schematized reports, whether of perceptions, or even of actions we are doing. The key function seems to be its role of integration, memory, and broadcast. Subliminal (unconscious) data that don't get into consciousness seem to die forthwith. The parallel processing capacity of the brain seems to send the vast majority of what it does into the circular file, never to enter memory, never to be weighed and considered, never to be transformed into language, the coin of much internal thinking as well as social community and extended consciousness. Consciousness seems be the narrow, single-lane road that imposes a top-level, purpose-driven time-sequencing on our brain, so that the most important thing at any given time can be attended to in isolation and with all needed resources, from the large variety available.

The core of the book reports from Dehaene's own work, which uses the visual system to demonstrate a dramatic phase transition between unconscious and conscious mental events. His group, and many others, use a rapidly presented image, which is quickly followed by some other "masking" image, which is is a noisy kind of background that doesn't trip the same kind of consciousness (i.e. subjective recognition) that the discrete test image, of, say, a face, presents. The subject reports whether the first image was seen or not, and can be subjected to various brain imaging tests, bias tests, etc. Typically, if the first image was presented for 60 milliseconds before being superceded by something else, it is consciously perceived and reported. If it is presented for less than 40 milliseconds, subjects never report it, if it is subsequently masked. But brain scans, and other subtle responses, indicate that their visual systems did process that brief image to an extensive degree. It just didn't make it into consciousness.

Experimental method. Top shows locations of surface EEG electrodes. Bottom shows the image presentation sequence, with consciousness-tripping words shown briefly between neutral "masking" symbols. 29 milliseconds is typically too brief to register consciously, if replaced with a subsequent masking image.

When an image does make it into consciousness, the researchers see a diagnostic EEG wave from a high-density array of electrodes on the subject's head, a strong "P3" wave of electrical voltage over the parietal lobe about 300 to 500 milliseconds after the stimulus. This is proposed as a signature of consciousness, which can be studied, manipulated with TMS, and even used diagnostically to evaluate patients in comas or other vegetative states for "locked-in" consciousness. It tracks with high fidelity the subjective state of the observer, rather than their objective inputs. Likewise, when epilepsy patients getting electrodes provide access directly to their brains, the same things are observed at the cellular level. Individual cells can be recorded, generally in the frontal areas, that only fire when, say, a picture of Bill Clinton is subjectively observed, and not when it is presented and ignored, or not recognized. There is much more to be said on the topic, but it is clear that we have some very definite, if rough, physical correlates of consciousness in hand.

From his most recent paper, Dehaene reports more of the same, using EEG electrodes all over the subject's head, which produce event-related potentials, and, after computation, event-related spectral perturbations. Phase coherence also gains significantly when the perceived word comes into consciousness. In the figure below, the beta-band brain waves are tracked, about 400 ms after image presentation, and the Granger correlation presented between discrete brain areas. An enormous leap in activity and coherence happens in the experimental condition, on right.

Point-to-point Granger correlation of beta brain waves, compared between masked (left) and unmasked (right) procedures, of which the latter is subjectively conscious, and shows here dramatically increased phase coherence.

It is very heartening to see the field of consciousness studies take off and make concrete findings, even to the point of saving locked-in patients from gruesome fates. But I was expecting another chapter in the book, where Dehaene would explain how consciousness actually works! Some parts of his model are not problematic. There seem to be many processes, from all the senses, from our memory, and elsewhere, that all get computed and prepared for conscious presentation. There is a continual competition for getting onto that "stage" by way of complicated salience calculations, always weighing the importance of each stream of input. I experience this one-at-a-time limitation all the time when I try to read something at the same time I listen to a podcast or a phone meeting.. it simply can't be done. I can attend to only one language-related task at a time, period.

And, reading a bit between the lines, it is also quite reasonable to posit that our ability to think about something, such as keeping an image in mind, involves recurrent loops of data going between the executive areas (frontal and parietal) to the input module involved, such as the visual areas. It is reasonably well-understood that the lower-level processing areas get very active connections back from the frontal areas both for attention focussing, and for re-generating their inputs for continued keeping-in-mind. Thus the information is not just tranferred from A to B, and deposited. Rather, the content is always re-presented by the originating system, though it can then be remembered, dissected mentally, rotated, expressd in language, etc. This implies a strong neural activity signature in the source areas of sensation as well as frontal areas of the brain when consciousness is active, which is indeed seen, as global connectivity and correlated waves/ firing, vs fragmented, localized patterns of activition under anaesthesia. It also implies some kind of code or lingua franca going back and forth that we really have very little idea of at this point.

I would go farther to propose that autism may be a defect in this one-at-a-time system, where the subject is inundated with excess stimulation, and perhaps unregulated stimulation. In cases where some particularly ornate unconscious calculation is mistakenly injected directly, rather than summarized as is usual, one may see the savant syndromes that are so amazing and correlated with autism. (I'll note that Dehaene posits a simlar theory for schizophrenia, as a fragmented consciousness, with insufficient filtering of images, voices, etc.) To extend the study of consciousness to a serious explanation of its defects and syndromes would be extremely rewarding.

I also agree with Dehaene when he dismisses the philosophical "free will" problems of agency for a putative artificial consciousness with a page or two of rather sharp argument. On the other hand, he waves away the so-called "hard" problem of consciousness with a paragraph of his faith that it will be dissolved in further data. But it is worth grappling with more explicitly. How exactly does a stab of pain affect us subjectively when a robot would not be so affected, as it is not conscious? How do we differ from machines, or if we don't, how can machines be made conscious?

Both Dehaene and Baars have a conviction that if the phenomenon of consciousness is described in ever more detail, at some point an understanding of this issue will naturally emerge. That may be so, but it would be highly beneficial if some theoretical insight could be developed beforehand. That is the position, incidentally, of Giulio Tononi and colleagues, whose recent paper offers a blizzard of obscure theorization about information density and consciousness, which I can't begin to interpret. They offer one interesting observation, however:

"Under special circumstances, such as after split brain surgery, the main complex may split into two main complexes, both having high ΦMax. There is solid evidence that in such cases consciousness itself splits in two individual consciousnesses that are unaware of each other."

Unfortunately, neither approach seems to have really pulled into the station yet, so we can only continue to make up metaphors for what is going on, based on ever more detailed observations of the phenomenon. I would propose something like an engine turning over, based on a basic awake + conscious cortical-thalamic loop of activity, which then pulls in (with brain wave synchrony) perceptual and other loops reverberating to all the other parts of the brain whose processing is available. Dehaene does offer one vision, speaking of the workspace model of consciousness:

"The entire machine is only partially affected by external inputs. Autonomy is its motto. It generates its own goals, thanks to spontaneous activity, and these patterns in turn shape the rest of the brain's activity in a top-down manner. They induce other areas to retrieve long-term memories, genrate a mental image, and transform it according to linguistic or logical rules. A constant flux of neuronal activation circulates within the internal workspace, carefully sifting through millions of parallel processors. Each coherent result moves us one step forward in a mental algorithm thta never stops- the flux of conscious thought. Simulating such a massively parallel statistical machine, based on realistic neuronal principles, would be fascinating...."

But how is that going to work, and are there current systems that provide a kernel for such a dream? I think there are, in the form of the UNIX operating system. It runs countless parallel or near-parallel processes, with its capability of sending jobs to multiple processors and splitting processor time in very fine slices among many users and sub-processes. It can even share results between processes, though they have to be carefully structured. What is needed is a separate computer of a substantially different stucture that interacts with such a unix-type machine, picking off its most significant results to a single constantly running thread of very general rumination on its own conditions, and the most significant happenings internally and externally. It would transmute this into language when possible, internally, if not to external listeners.

Now, one has to realize that all of our mental experiences are the firings of neurons. This is equally true for the plainest visual scene as for the sharpest bite of pain or sweetest apple. Nothing is direct. Yet it feels like there is a watcher inside- a soul, or homunculus, which is the "real" perceiver and target of all the complex data processing. From all we now know, this can not possibly be true. And it would make little sense anyhow, since that homunculus would have to have some mechanism of its own to feel qualia, plus mechanisms to communicate out and back to the rest of the brain system which we know with certainty does at least part of the data processing.

No, the perceiver is part of the system itself, somehow, transmuting all those qualia from electrical buzz into poetry. This is the hard problem- how some portion of the brain system, i.e. consciousness, is the perceiver while most of the rest of our brain and body goes about its business in the dark. And this perceiver is also a powerful director of other activities and agent, interacting with the unconscious systems, getting data, setting alarms, applying focus and attention, getting inundated with streams while trying desperately, during meditation, to get nothing at all.

One gets the distinct sense that is one of the brain's great illusions, like making a pain in the toe feel like it really is in the toe, not in the brain. Or like re-setting time so that we don't notice the ~400 milliseconds it takes for any perception to come into consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is the master illusion, enabling all the others. But how does the magic work? It remains a work in progress.

• "We find that completely closing the HS to fishing would simultaneously give rise to large gains in fisheries profit (>100%), fisheries yields (>30%), and fish stock conservation (>150%)"
• Even more lame than the creationists hating on Cosmos: the recent film God's not dead, about a totally realistic philosophy class.
• But sectarian prayer.. now OK in government, for those grievously oppressed Christians.
• Speaking of oppressed, some billboards.
• That is some kind of god they've got...
• Pakistan, as usual, is a threat to the entire world.
• Which computer languages are hot, which not?
• Yes, Virginia, there really is junk DNA.
• "Not a single U.S. airport is among the top 100 airports in the world."
• Is Obama for real on climate heating? I hope so.
• Stanford divests from coal.
• New England is being set up for an Enron-tastrophe.
•  Some technical notes on savings gluts. And stagnation.
• Martin Wolf is turning against capitalism. Maybe the shareholders are not the be-all and end-all. Who really bears the risk of corporate idiocy? The employees do, in very large part. "All those who have stakes in the company that they are unable to hedge bear risks. The most obvious such risk-bearers are employees with firm-specific skills. Human capital is perhaps the least diversifiable and insurable of all our valuable assets. Among all forms of human capital, the least hedgeable are firm-specific skills."
• A little honesty on the right: The plutocrats are in charge, and thank god!
• Quote of the week, from Answers in Genesis:

"This episode of “Cosmos” offers a lot of beautiful graphics and special effects, but in the end it should be lumped with fairy tales like Tinker Bell or Shrek. Yet Bible-believing creation scientists who are willing to look at the world through the history provided in God’s Word without the prejudice and blind ignorance can “read” in earth’s geology a true and exciting account of our history. And biblical truth is a much better account than fiction."