The Shadow of the Observer

Albert Einstein once likened the body of scientific knowledge to an ever-expanding circle of light, and made the point that because of the expansion, the frontier of knowledge--the perimeter of the circle--will likewise be ever-expanding. I think that a more important point can be made; Einstein's circle of light has a shadow in the center where we the observers are standing. This shadow is the continuing lack of understanding of human nature in terms that relate back to the hard sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology. Before we can relate it that far back, we must first pass through neuroscience, genetics, and evolutionary psychology. Especially evolutionary psychology. Only then will we be able to devise efficient solutions to the problems that still beset humanity, because our solutions will touch the true causes of things.

Countless earnest workers in the humanities and soft sciences have been seeking an understanding of human nature. Why has this not sufficed? I suspect it is because key determinants of human behavior are processed through the unconscious pathways of the brain and are therefore never available for conscious introspection. For example, I strongly suspect that crowding stress is the master variable governing human history. This would simply be humans per hectare. Why are we therefore not acutely aware of it at all times? Because (hypothetically) it is represented in the right amygdala, which is known to be specialized for unconscious emotion processing. (The left amygdala is known to be specialized for conscious emotion processing.) This is an easily tested prediction.

The computations of the amygdala are most usefully understood in terms of the evolutionary selection process that created the human brain. This is why I think it important at this time to devote public funding to evolutionary psychology, the study of evolution as it pertains to explaining human behavior. You may object that generations of research investment will be needed before such an abstruse-sounding discipline will begin to yield practical benefits, but I beg to differ. Evolutionary psychology is a new field, and in new fields, there is still low-hanging fruit. In my theory blog, "Theoretician's Progress," at http://mmmtheory.blogspot.com, I have been scouting some of this low-hanging fruit, and there is plenty. My preliminary conclusions are written up in that blog in posts tagged as containing evolutionary-psychological subject matter.

We have to solve the ancient problems with ourselves before we can hope to solve the new problems such as climate change. Imagine, for example, that a narrowly technological solution to climate change is attempted, such as an orbiting space mirror. Who then decides what the target set point for the global temperature shall be? Temperate  countries will want it set higher; equatorial countries will want it set lower. The first country that feels left out of the decision-making process will start a vigorous space program aimed at blowing up the space mirror. Assuming the terrorists or some small, selfish interest group nobody ever heard of before does not get to it first. How can we hope to control the temperature of a whole, damned planet when we can't even control ourselves?

Signaletics for Salvation

"The Broken Link," a fast-acting, tactile reminder of "the three sinces" stated in the diagram below, at lower right.
It is a severed chain link. You can get these for free at hardware stores. File off the burrs first.

The core tenets of what I call "Signaletics" are as follows:

1. Human unhappiness comes from destructive, escalating signaling cycles, usually between two persons. Examples: arguments, feuds, schools of thought, gang wars, revolutions.
2. The signals exchanged are initially personal expressions of anger.
3. These expressions are MULTIMODAL, and therefore highly redundant. (e.g., threatening utterances, tones of voice, facial expressions, gait, crashing and banging things, spying, following, etc.) Your anger comes out of you "through every pore."
4. These signals are too many and varied for conscious control, which is why most people remain enslaved by their signals and cycles.
5. The many signals of anger all have a common root in the emotion itself, which is where control must be focused.
6. Anger is fear in disguise.

The flow diagram summarizes the Signaletics solution: a thought cycle called Radical De-escalation. "Radical" is Latin for "root," and the method focuses on the unitary root of your many signals, the emotion of fear, to break the cycle.

Unfortunately, there is another source of Signaletic danger beyond the anger cycle, namely the sadness cycle. The sadness cycle is asymmetric, however; sadness on one side, and contempt on the other. People trapped in this cycle would probably have been described by Stephen Covey, author of "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," as having the lose-win and win-lose negotiation styles. The treatment proposed here for the anger cycle can hopefully serve as a template for treating the sadness cycle. This is a direction for future research.

Signaletics is based on a home-made theory that could be classified as evolutionary psychology. The anger cycle is presumed to escalate until one of the parties must leave the country. When people are threatened, they seek allies, so all of society eventually gets drawn in and polarized as the escalation proceeds apace, like a black hole. Therefore, it is a group that must eventually leave, not a single individual, which is the basis of the refugee phenomenon. In ecological terms, the refugee phenomenon is clearly sub serving the function of dispersal. However, dispersal-producing behavior is fundamentally altruistic in a backhanded way. The benefit to the supposed loser, the group that eventually gets driven out, is that occasionally they find a newly-emptied vacant habitat in which to settle and therefore can reproduce without competition. This is a tremendous benefit in evolutionary terms and may once have been great enough to redeem all the waste and suffering of human-style dispersal.

However, altruistic behavior cannot evolve in the presence of non-altruists unless a signaling system is established to ensure that altruists are only altruistic to other altruists. That is why I lay so much emphasis on signaling here. I am basically teaching you how to game the dispersal algorithm and act like a non-altruist, but in a good cause: the preservation of civilization. The reason why the signals are so multimodal is that such gaming has probably happened many times in the past and the broken algorithm was repaired each time by natural selection with the addition of yet another signal component. The present solution promises to be permanent, however, because of its focus on the unitary emotion at the root of all these signals.

05-22-2020: The author is probably abnormally concerned with anger control because I acquired a bad temper from my military father, leading to inconsistent self presentation.

Why Don't We Cover the Sidewalks?

1-09-2018

I live in Ottawa, Canada, a place known for its harsh winters, and so far, the present winter has been the worst yet (or maybe I have never been so old before). In December, we got end-of-January weather a month in advance, and if this is Canadian-style extreme weather, indirectly related to climate change, then there is more and worse to come.

I am a public transit user with no personal car, and I found conditions imprisoning. You can only cocoon for so long, and then you need to go and buy groceries. In my case, this involved a fifteen minute walk, under conditions that made a fifteen-minute walk onerous. This collective ordeal lasted for a full week at least, without a break.

Sheltering in the lobby of a restaurant with my bags of groceries and looking out the window, I watched the bundled-up young people go by on the sidewalk with looks of outright pain on their frost-punished faces. Not a good advertisement for old Ottawa.

Why don't we cover the sidewalks?

Cover them, and heat the resulting enclosed spaces in the winter and air-condition them in the summer. Don't ask me how; I'm not a civil engineer. To aid in the execution phase, we have the creative, young minds at Algonquin College. They have a Center for Construction Excellence right there.

Make the project a multi-generational effort, to be advanced incrementally as cash flow permits, like the way they built the great cathedrals of Europe. The many benefits would likewise increase incrementally; you wouldn't need to wait for some distant completion date to begin enjoying them. Begin building at the main transitway stations where there are already predictable crowds of people predictably exposed to the elements with no car. Build the network of covered sidewalks radially and progressively outward from these stations until the whole city is served by the new infrastructure. As a practical matter, each house or workplace would also have a covered passageway connecting it to the sidewalk.

1-13-2018

Such a system could also be viewed as a network of large air ducts that could be used to distribute centrally heated/cooled air to local homes and businesses, resulting in economies of scale. Therefore, individual homes and businesses would need much smaller furnaces and air conditioners, just sufficient to make up the difference between personal preferences and the publicly available temperatures. An all-purpose Peltier-effect device in each building might be sufficient.

1-14-2018

The system would have to be built through people's back yards, rather than their front yards, to avoid interference with garbage pickup and garage access. Where there are no back yards, such as downtown, it would have to be built above-grade, with access via the second stories of buildings. The system could be called CHAPP, for "central heating, air-conditioning, and pedestrian plan," and would be paid for mostly by subscriber fees, like any other utility.

1-19-2018
A windowless but sky lighted version of the duct/via system could also provide the privacy between adjacent lots now provided by the backyard hedge. Just build it where the hedges are now.

11-21-2020

When the Rideau street mall was built, it soon became a haven for homeless people and people with addictions looking for a warm place to sleep, and several businesses allegedly failed as a result. The city's response was to tear down the covered mall, at great expense. Will the same thing happen to the system proposed here? Where was the problem with Rideau street, exactly? You figure it out. This will be your homework assignment.

1-09-2018

Leadership will be required. Expect people to object to the city-borne part of the costs, such as expropriation of rights-of-way, preferring to just endure the hardships; right now, they know no better. Mayor Jim, I'm talking to you: Will you step up to the promotion and oversight of this great enterprise in its formative years and go down in history as one of the great mayors of Ottawa?

• Then the sidewalks will not have to be shoveled and salted in the winters.
• Then our old people will no longer break their bones slipping on ice that no amount of sanding and salting could have prevented.
• Then the city can finally begin to get people to leave their cars at home, relieving downtown congestion and the madness of rush hour.
• Then there will be fewer vehicles on the road, there will be less air pollution and less consumption of gasoline, resulting in healthier Ottawans and a reduced carbon footprint for the city.
• Then people will walk way more, again resulting in healthier Ottawans.
• Then Ottawa will be even more of a magnet for tourists in the winter.

A highly pedestrian population may even be a mellower population, if my theories of human dispersal are correct (See "The Pilgrim and the Whale" in my theory blog, "Theoretician's Progress," at https://mmmtheory.blogspot.com), leading to less crime and a higher quality of life.