Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

on The Three Box Game:

Three boxes, all closed, one ten-dollar bill hidden in one of them; the experimenter knows which. Subject chooses one box, at that point left closed. Experimenter opens one of the other two boxes, always an empty one. Subject then offered a chance to either stick with his first choice, or switch to the other closed box. What should he do?

Frank had decided it didn't matter, fifty-fifty either way. He thought it through.

But each box at the start had a one-third chance of being the one. When subject chooses one, the other two have a two-thirds chance of being right. After the experimenter opens one of these two boxes, always empty, those two boxes still have a two-thirds chance, now concentrated in the remaining unchosen box, while the subject's original choice still had its original one-third chance. So, one should always change one's choice.

Shit. Well, put it that way, it was undeniable. Though it still seemed wrong. But this was the point. Human cognition had all kinds of blind spots. One analyst of the studies had concluded by saying that we simulate in our mind actions we wish we had already happened. We act in short, by projecting our desires.

Well -- but of course. Wasn't that the point?

But clearly it could lead to error. The question was, should one's desires be defined in such a way as to suggest actions that were truly going to help make them come to pass in one of those futures still truly possible, given the conditions of the present.

p. 73

Where to begin? I guess with the comment that this was made into a great TV show hosted by Monty Hall - he always revealed the door not chosen. I wonder what other cognitive traps are revealed by game shows. Maybe we should ask Alec Trabec about directions for further research. LOL

More seriously, if we alter our perceptions based on our desires, and don't get me started on reflector neurons here, how can we see what is truly happening? Can we even see what our true desires are? How can we start to make plans to realize our desires, when they are affecting the perception of reality we need to make those plans. 

A thorny knot indeed. I will have to think about this, but a first approximation of the solution may be to not think for a while. Meditation or contemplation anyone? 

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

from the Green candidates inaugural address as President of the US:

In the years since we used our government to help us get out of the Great Depression, it has sometimes been fashionable to belittle the American government as some kind of foreign burden laid on us. That attitude is nothing more than an attack on american history, deliberately designed to shift power away from the American people.

p. 63

I Think this often. It is why I consider Rush Limbaugh unAmerican. He attacks the institutions of government. He want to allow the robber barrons to rule us without any democratic controls to stem their greed. I am not against attacking bad government and arguing to make it better. Any big system has lots of room for error. But just saying the government is bad is anti-American. Government was what the constitution was designed to create. Can't knock that.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

Charlie wanted to live on in this life forever. Or if not forever, then as long as the stars. And he feared change, as being the probable degradation of a situation that couldn't be bettered.

But here it was anyway, and there was no avoiding it. All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived. 

p. 55

The eternal now. It is the only moment we ever have. We have to be in the moment and live it as it comes. And it is always new. It just depends on our point of view.

Yeah.

Sixty Days and Counting by Kim Stanley Robinson

The president of the United States might be many thins, but unpowerful was not among them. Many of the administrations preceding Phil's had worked very hard to expand the powers of the executive branch beyond what the framers had intended -- which campaigns made a mockery of the "strict constitutionalist" talk put out by these same people when discussing what principles the Spreme Court's justices should hold, and showed they preferred a secretive executive dictatorship to democracy, especially if the president was a puppet installed by the interested parties.

p. 51

What a nice summation of the constitutional damage done by the Bushies!

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

Frank is talking with Rudra, his Tibetan friend,

"There's too many ... different things going on at once. I go from thing to thing, you know. Hour to hour. I see people, I do different things with them, and I'm not ... I don't feel like the same person with these different people. I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know what to do. If anyone were watching they'd think I had some sort of mental disorder. I don't make any sense." 

"But no one is watching."

"Except what if they were?"

Rudra shook his head. "No one can see inside you. So no matter what they see, they don't know. Everyone only judges themself."

"That's not good!" Frank said. "I need someone more generous than that!"

p. 405

Lord have mercy on us because we have none on ourselves.

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

a green presidential candidate speaking:

The President isn't going to do anything. He and his oil-and-guns crowd will just try to find an island somewhere to skip to when they're done raiding the world. They'll leave us in the wreckage and build themselves bubble fortresses, that's been their sick plan all along. building a good world for our kids is our plan, and it's as scientific as can be, but only if you understand science as a way of being together, an ethical system an not just a method for seeing the world. What this political endorsement underlines is that science contains in it a plan for dealing with the world that we find ourselves in, a plan which aims to reduce human suffering and increase the quality of life on Earth for everyone.

p. 371

I like the idea of science as an ethical system. The excesses of modern life are not a result of science, but of marketing: big companies trying to get everyone to buy one thing. They often leap on a single scientific idea and then push it to death. They have no flexibility. They have invested so much in one idea that they cannot switch. Look at the recent revelations about the manipulation of drug studies by the pharmaceutical industry. What a racket and then people blame science an scientists.

Just today, there was an article in the N Y. Times about the life span of a company. It was about Microsoft's complete failure to jump from the hardware/software business to the interent. It suggested that companies have "term limits." The idea actually came from Bill Gates who suggested that companies cannot survive a paradigm shift in their industries. And he quit this week, too.

Science at its best would take to common goals of a society and then try to find the best answers. Even the goals of cooperation are scientifically valid. Not only is science based on sharing of ideas and a cooperative building of knowledge, the idea of sharing for the common good is provable as a survival benefit. Wouldn't it be nice if we were all that rational.

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

"From the nose to the brain." Oh, my: there were synapses that ran from one end of the brain to the other. They went from the nose to everywhere. Scent, memory, behaviors associated with pleasure. These tapped into the dopamine that was made available in the nucleus accumbens in the basal forebrain, behind the back of the mouth. This availability depended on a long biochemical sequence functioning well at every point.

The right frontal cortices were more associated with negative emotions than the left; the right somatosensory cortices were active in integrating body movement, which might be why they were the apparent seat of empathy. Blocking oxytocin in a female prairie vole did not interfere with its sex drive, but with the attachment to its partner that would usually correlate to sex. Suppressing vasopressin had the same effect on male voles, who would normally be faithful for life, voles being monogamous. You needed both the insula and the anterior cingulate working well to be able to experience joy. Fluency of ideation increased with joy, decreased with sorrow. The brain was often flooded with endogenous opoid peptides such as endomorphines, enkephalin, dynorphin, endorphins -- all painkillers. You needed those. Brain systems that supported ethical behaviors were probably not dedicated to ethics exclusively, but rather also to biological regulation, memory, decision-making, and creativity. In other words, to everything. You needed joy to function well. In fact, it appeared that competent, successful decision-making depended on full capacity in all the emotions; and these in turn depended on a healthy prefrontal cortex.

p. 300

"Fluency of ideation increased with joy" -- I am thinking of the structured decision making processes that we have been working with in the NEAD project and groups such as the Institute for 21st Century Agoras. They begin with a meal so that all the participants see each other as people, not labels or groups. But it also creates satiation and hence joy - and thus ideation. It all fits.

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

For a while they talked in a different way than they normally did, about how things felt; and they agreed that lives were not easily told to others. Frank speculated that many life stories consisted precisely of a search for a reiterated pattern, for habits. Thus, one's set of habits was somehow unsatisfactory, and you needed to change them, and were thereby thrown into a plot, which was the hunt for new habits, or even, but exceptionally, the story of giving up of such a hunt in favor of sticking with what you have, or remaining chaotically in the existential moment (not adaptive if reproductive success were the goal, he noted under his breath). Thus Frank was living a plot, while Anna was living a life, and when they talked about personal matters he had news while she had the "same old same old," which was understood by both to be the desired state, irritating though it might be to maintain.

Anna merely laughed at this.

p. 143

Habitual existence as a life and interesting existences as "plots." And the Chinese say, "May you live in interesting times." LOL

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

The thing is, he thought as he waited, nobody knows you. No one can. Even if you spend almost the entirety of every day with someone, and there were people like that -- even then, no. Everyone lived alone in the end, not just in their heads but even in their physical routines. Human contacts were parcellated, to use a term from brain science or systems theory; parcelled out. There were:

1. the people you lived with, if you did; that was about a hundred hours a week, half of them asleep;
   
2. the people you worked with, that was forty hours a week, give or take;
   
3. the people you played with, that would be some portion of the thirty or so hours left in a week;
   
4. then there were the strangers you spent time with in transport, eating out or so on. This would be added to an already full calendar according to Frank's calculations so far, suggesting they were all living more hours a week than actually existed, which felt right. In any case, a normal life was split out into different groups that never met; and so no one knew you in your entirety except you yourself.
   

One could, therefore:

1. pursue a project in paleolithic living,
   
2. change the weather
   
3. attempt to restructure your profession, and
   
4. be happy,

all at once. although not simultaneously, but moving from one thing to another, among different populations; behaving as if a different person in each situation. It could be done, because there were no witnesses. No one saw enough to witness your life and put it all together.

p. 57

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

It was easy in these arguments to see the way people thought of agencies in terms of human qualities, so that the agencies ended up behaving in the world like individuals in terms of power, will, skills, and effectiveness. Some were amazingly effective for their size, others were permanently hampered by personality and history.

p. 94

I like the metaphor of the individual to understand the government's agencies. Can FEMA ever get beyond its personal history? And we wonder why Myanmar doesn't want our emergency response teams? And we will think it is politics, rather than images of New Orleans on the net. LOL

Fifty Degrees Below by Kim Stanley Robinson

Nobody likes Washington, D. C. Even the people who love it don't like it. Climate atrocious, traffic worse: an ordinary midsize gridlocked American city, in which the plump white federal buildings make no real difference. Or rather they bring all the politicians and tourists, the lobbyists and diplomats and refugees and all the others who come from somewhere else, often for suspect reasons, and thereafter spend their time clogging he streets and hogging the shows, talking endlessly about their non-existent city on a hill, whole ignoring the actual city they are in. The bad taste of that hypocrisy can't be washed away by even the food and drink of a million very fine restaurants. No -- bastion of the world government, locked vault of the World Bank, headquarters of the world police; Rome, in the age of bread and circuses -- no one can like that.

p. 3

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

on having poison ivy:

Putting on clothes was like a kind of skin-deep electrocution.

It had only taken a few days of that to reduce him to a kind gibbering semi-hallucinatory state. Now, over a week later, it was worse. His eyes were sandy; things had auras around them; noises made him jump. It was like the dregs of a crystal-meth jag, he imagined, or the last hours of an acid trip. A sandpapered brain, spacy and raw, everything leaping in through the senses.

p. 320

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

It takes no great skill to decode the world system today. A tiny percentage of the population is immensely wealthy, some are well off, a lot are just getting by, a lot are suffering. We call it capitalism, but within it lies buried the residual pattern of feudalism and older hierarchies, basic injustices framing the way we organize ourselves. Everybody lives in an imaginary relationship to this real situation; and this is our world. We walk with scales on our eyes, and only see what we think.

And all the while on a sidewalk over the abyss. There are islands of time when things seem stable. Nothing happens but the rounds of the week. Later the islands break apart. When enough time has passed, no one now alive will be still be here; everyone will be different. Then it will be the stories that link the generations. history and DNA, long chains of the simplest bits -- guanine, adenine, cytosine, thymine -- love, hope, fear, selfishness -- all combining again and again, until a miracle happens

and the organism springs forth!

p. 313

What a concept - relating  stories and DNA - chains of the simplest bits linking the generations! WOW!

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

"We are animals, animals whose wisdon has epanded so far as to tell us we are mortal creatures. We die. For fifty thousand years we have known this. Much of our mental energy is spent avoingding this knowledge. We do not like to think of it. Then again, we know that even the cosmos is mortal. Reality is mortal. All things change ceaselessly. Nothing remains that same in time. Nothing can be held on to. The questions becomes, what do we do with this knowledge? How do we live with it? How do we make sense of it?"

[And now they hook Frank with an evolutionary idea!]

"One of the scientific terms for compassion ... you say, 'altruism.' This is a question in your animal studies. Does true altruism exist, and is it a good adaptation? Does compassion work, in other words? You have done studies that suggest altruism is the best adaptive strategy, if seen from a group context. This then becomes a kind of ... admonishment. To practice compassion in order to successfully evolve -- this coming from your science, which claims to be descriptive only! Only describing what has worked to make us what we are. But in Buddhism we have always said, if you want to help others, practice compassion; if you want to help yourself, practice compassion. Now science adds, if you want to help your species, practice compassion."

p. 243

All throughout the book, our hero, Frank, keeps thinking about the prisoner's dilemma game and its strategies. It does seem that in repeated games the best strategy is to be generous the first time. It sort of makes sense in the way of holding a group together. The Golden Rule is an evolutionary adaptation. 

Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson

speaking of science and Buddhism:

Drepung [a Tibetan Buddhist monk] said, "The two are now parallel studies. One the one hand, science has specialized, through mathematics and technology, on natural observation, finding out what is, and making new tools. On the other, Buddhism has specialized in human observation, to find out -- how to become. Behave. What to do. How to go ahead forward. Now, I say, they are like the two eyes in the head. Both are necessary to create whole sight. Or rather ... there is an old saying: 'Eyes the see, feet that walk.' We could say that science is the eyes and Buddhism is the feet."

p. 242

This is a great part of the book and the next several posts are from this lecture given by Tibetan Buddhists st the NSF. I was particularly struck by this section because I was reading it a few weeks ago, as the protests over Chinese occupation of Tibet have been going on. It is a shame to see the domination of one system over another, but in the book, the Tibetans are careful to say that it is not a place, but a state of mind. I am not sure that this is really what they believe, biut the characters in the novel are quite well expressed and seem very real.

Of course, that is what a novel is all about. And this is a major turing point in this book for the main character, Frank. The rational man of science, a bit ruthless, and always thing of the evolutionary underpinnings of behaviour is blown away by an old Tibetan monk talking about science and Buddhism. But we need a theory of behaviour, which science cannot provide. We can talk about political science or social science and use observation techniques and rational logic to analyze what we see, but we then need to be able to say "This is what we should do!"

This is a recurring problem in the ISSS organization. There are academics who are looking at how systems work and the best way to create, repair and sustain human systems, but they are often uncomfortable with the idea that it means we should do something. Similarly, in my school, the School of Policy Studies, very smart individuals, who teach how to make good policies often become idiots and make bad policy because they do not want to take their academic expertise and apply it in the real world. I think it is fear - they are afraid that their research is not valid or not really anything. And that is where Buddhism is a very brave thing - the will to do.