Do You Have All the Latest Patches?

There's about five and a half billion adult humans alive right now, and any two of them would be more powerful than you if they cooperated and your gang wasn't around, and they kind of do all cooperate, mostly subconsciously, and we call it God.

Geese flying in formation: a simple swarm intelligence phenomenon 

In a fast-moving malware landscape, commonly used programs often need quick patches (code snippets) to close newly discovered vulnerabilities and keep them useable.

Let us suppose that humans are like that. Let us suppose the existence of something real behind belief in God: a human swarm intelligence that is slow-moving and poorly accessible to consciousness. This swarm intelligence would be a product of natural selection and [the rest of this paragraph is conjecture] talks to us in a language of emotions. It tracks slow changes in the environment while the conscious mind tracks the fast ones. The two environment trackers communicate via a frequency band centered on one reciprocal week. This is also the dividing line between the bands processed by the two trackers.

 The week does not correspond to any astrophysical cycle; it is an invention (discovery?) of religion. 

What were you doing last weekend? Don’t remember, huh? You don’t need to; God will calculate.

Arguably, the slow swarm intelligence will occasionally fall behind in tracking especially rapid environmental change (e.g., global warming), show evidence of a weak spot in its frequency response, and, pardon the blasphemy, need to be patched. At least until natural selection catches up. Logically, this same natural selection should by now have come up with a solution: A proclivity of humans to self-organize into some patch-applying sub-process. This would be organized religion, of course.

The last patch applied to human nature seems to have been a package of five patches: the Pillars of Islam. Before that, we received two big patches at once: Jesus’ "Love God” and “Love thy neighbor.”

However, we now live in a world that would have been inconceivable to the 12 disciples and the early followers of Mohammed, and collectively we are facing unprecedented existential threats. Is it time for another patch?

I say yes, two in fact, and I suggest that the needed patches will be something very like this:

“Love Thy Planet,”

and

“Do Not Divide the People.”

The first of these precepts is already addressed by a recently-added fifth Mark of Mission of the Anglican church and a sixth Mark of Mission that speaks to the second patch was accepted on principle, then folded into the fourth Mark of Mission. The proposed patches are also echoed in the Anglican Baptism Covenant. Many other people have obviously been thinking along the same lines as myself. The new “commandments” will have to be presented and received as the voice of God to be effective, and I will not here tell organized religion how to do its job.

However, does organized religion itself need a patch? It seems to suffer from a worrisome lack of flexibility, leading to hand-wringing schisms. Perhaps a further needed patch is the definition of a new kind of commandment from God that could be called a “manifest commandment,” as opposed to a prophet-channeled commandment. This would be God talking to the entire human race at once.

Since there is little time, we cannot wait millennia to accumulate enough testing of new precepts in the crucible of life to confidently promote them to commandments from God. For example, the two I just mentioned. Thus, we must aggregate such human experience across space instead of time, using the Internet. Luckily, there are now about 5.5 billion of us able to participate, which should ensure a very high-powered study. Since this would essentially be an experiment on humans, the internet could also be used to collect the ethically required written, informed consents.

The above  reasoning argues against atheism but not for the status quo. Is panreligionism the only way to ensure that you have all the latest patches? Oligoreligionism may be more practical. I now have an app on my phone that notifies me of the Islamic prayer times, even the ones after dark. I don’t say the prayers but meditate instead. I wake up in the morning feeling like I have been watched over all night. 

However, the ideal human swarm intelligence will be a function of the details of the problems of existence we face, and these details will be a function of geographical variables like latitude, altitude, and distance from the ocean. Even with the same details, different populations will need different patches because of historical factors, such as the amount of Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA they have. 

Photo by Nancy Hughes on Unsplash

Music

Today, while walking in a gentle snowfall, canned carols echoing in memory, I admitted to myself, "I don't understand music. I love it, and I don't understand it."

Five minutes later, I had the beginnings of a theory:

Music is the voice of the swarm intelligence.

Listen carefully, because the swarm intelligence is your ruler.

And don't be shy about being its voice yourself.

Just honestly sing out the message of your heart and

let the chips fall where they may.

You won't see where they fall.

Algonquin College, Ottawa, Canada

Recipe for "Covid Cocklewarmer"

Try this if you are bored with being cooped up at home.
This is my peanut-butter coffee recipe, and as such, it is a caffeinated beverage that will activate your brain. If you are like me, your brain is always your best source of entertainment.

"Slurp! Praise the Lord and pass the antiseptic!"

© 2020 David Matthew Mooney

Both versions make one serving.

Store the tap water in a refrigerator at 4–6°C.

Do not serve hotter than 56°C or the mixture breaks like Hollandaise. (But it's much easier to fix: just let it cool for a bit and then swirl.)*

To go hotter than 56°C without breaking, microwave the water longer to taste and add a tablespoon of milk before shaking.

Instant coffee version:

• Add 300 mL of water to a mason jar free of scratches.
• Heat jar in a 700-W microwave at maximum power for 2 min 30 sec without lid.
• Add 1 tablespoon (15 mL) of sugar.
• Add 2 tablespoons (30 mL) of instant coffee.
• Add 2 tablespoons (30 mL) of smooth, non-separating peanut butter.
• Put on a glove or pick up a dishcloth for comfort in handling the hot jar.
• Close lid and shake the jar up-and-down vigorously for 15 sec.

Filter coffee version (preparation time, 10 min):

• Add 400 mL water to a mason jar free of scratches.
• Heat jar in a 700-W microwave at maximum power for 3 min 40 sec without lid. Aim for 75°C.
• Pour the water into a large plastic cup. Test the cup first to see if it is melted by the hot water; some are and some aren't.
• Place a filter containing 3.5 tablespoons of fine-grind coffee on the jar.
• Pour the water through the coffee.
• Remove the filter.
• Add 1 tablespoon (15  mL) of sugar to the jar.
• Add 2 tablespoons (30 mL) of smooth, non-separating peanut butter.
• Put on a glove or pick up a dishcloth for comfort in handling the hot jar.
• Close lid and shake the jar up-and-down vigorously for 15 sec.

Note 1: Do not add a hot mixture to a cold container and then shake. This will cause the container to suddenly pressurize at the first shake, with unpredictable consequences. 

This filter gives the slowest percolation and therefore the best kick of the three that I have tried. Don't bother to change the microwaving time.

*Note 2: Kraft "Extra-roasted" peanut butter <07-12-2021: and now, the regular kind> can be pushed to 60°C in this recipe without breaking, but the mouth feel is not as good. <07-25-2021: JIF is better.>

01-14-2022: Peanut-butter tea tastes like walnuts. It’s like somebody made a milk substitute out of walnuts instead of almonds. Not bad. It doesn’t curdle like peanut-butter coffee either, at least not at 72 C (162 Fahrenheit). I used double-strength green tea, but followed the rest of the above recipe.

Here is an update on my cocklewarmer setup, 2.5 years on.

Overpop Redemption

The world's many current problems are consistent with a state of overpopulation. The Reverend Malthus laid them out for us long ago: ⚔️🦠💀

• The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

⚔️🦠💀

Chapter 7, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798

T. R. Malthus

Nowadays (2020), we may add global climate change and global pandemics to the list. 

Clearly, people must change their ways. Governments can help, but direct actions consisting of just passing new coercive laws were tried in China and were eventually abandoned. Moreover, "The best government is that which governs least." (motto of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, founded by John O'Sullivan). By a parsimony principle I am fond of, what we want, then, is the minimum adequate response to Overpop. 

My suggestion is: Estateism.

Your "estate" is basically your net worth from all sources minus liabilities, usually considered at the time of death. By "estateism," I mean a life plan focussed on enriching your estate for the benefit of your nearest relatives after your death, as an emotional substitute for raising your own family. Is such a life plan necessarily "thin gruel," emotionally speaking? Not if you know no better--then it is sufficient, as I can testify. 

Governments can help lead the way by lifting all estate taxes from those who die childless and giving proportionate estate-tax breaks to those who die with fewer direct descendants than the national average. If near relatives young enough to reproduce are named as beneficiaries, they would pay no inheritance tax. 

The theory of kin selection by W. D. Hamilton suggests that this lifestyle makes evolutionary sense. Those who adopt it could represent the way of the future, termed "eusociality" by biologists. Many biological precedents for the workability of this idea are known, some of them in mammals. Estateists would be formally like the non-reproducing worker bees in a bee colony, but humans who adopt estateism cannot turn into insects. If you think that they can, tell me how that would happen, exactly; and no hand-waving, please. 

An estateist is free of the oppressive burdens of raising a family and need suffer no sleep deprivation due to the crying of some colicky infant. There is no attempt to balance work and family, which should make for a highly effective worker more than able to enrich his or her estate. The theory of kin selection, which seems to find an echo in the human "heart," is the intellectual anchor for such a life and suffices to give it meaning. 

03-19-2020: An objection can be raised to the foregoing that the inheritors of Estateist benefits will be tempted to expand the size of their families as a direct result, thereby offsetting the reproductive self-restraint of their Estateist relatives in fine Malthusian style. However, I doubt that human reproduction is as elastic as this scenario assumes, but the matter can be decided by mathematical modelling and computer simulations. In the event of bad news from the simulations, the effectiveness of Estateism as population control could be enhanced by testamentary stipulations on the uses to which the inherited wealth can be put, which would aim to prevent its use to support an abnormally large family instead of better nurturing of a normal-sized family. (The biological precedent for this is called "K-selection," an aspect of Life History Theory.) In that event, permitted uses of an Estateist inheritance would be such things as education, training, insurance, medical expenses, rehabilitation, and relocation.

04-14-2020: To this list I should add lawyer's fees--the sting of the Estateist.

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.