From democracy to tyranny

According to Freedom House, a democracy and civil liberties monitoring organization, 2015 marked the 10th straight year (pdf) of declines in global freedom. The report, Anxious Dictators, Wavering Democracies: Global Freedom under Pressure observes: “The world was battered in 2015 by overlapping crises that fueled xenophobic sentiment in democratic countries, undermined the economies of states dependent on the sale of natural resources, and led authoritarian regimes to crack down harder on dissent.”

Given a decline in respect for democracy in the US and more tolerance for a more autocratic form of governance, it makes sense to consider how democracy can slide into some form of a populist autocracy, a potential precursor to dictatorship. Writing for Bloomberg Businessweek (Nov. 28 - Dec. 4 issue, pages 6-7), Joshua Kurlantzick describes the growth and nature of some recent autocracies that have arisen from democracies. In recent years, transitions toward autocracy have occurred in a number of democracies including the Philippines, Thailand, Poland, Hungary, Ecuador, Italy, Russia and Turkey.

Kurlantzick makes the following observations.
1. The new autocrats usually have little or no government experience, instead they build cults of personality centered on themselves and their personal images.
2. The new autocrats usually win elections with less than 50% of the vote.
3. Autocrat political elections are often accompanied by unusual impacts on the press-media, e.g., (i) they sometimes directly own major media outlets, (ii) they tend to bypass the traditional press via social media, (iii) they generally attack the press-media, sometimes suing for libel, and (iv) they stoke press-media distrust by their attacks on the press.
4. The new autocrats build administrations that are dependent more on the leader’s personal influence than on political operational precedents.
5. Once in office, the new autocrats tend to begin to “slowly suffocate the civil service, military bureaucracy and other government networks that are supposed to be apolitical”, e.g., they seed civil service, police and military posts with family, friends and loyalists.
6. Once in office, the new autocrats tend to attack the courts and work to undermine judicial independence.
7. By being surrounded with unqualified family, friends and sycophants, the autocrats foster corruption and graft for personal and loyalist gain by disabling oversight mechanisms that are supposed to keep corruption in check.
8. Once out of power and the personality cult collapses, autocrats can leave their countries economically weaker and with weaker legal institutions.

Some or all of that sounds quite familiar.

B&B orig: 12/3/16

The neuroscience of religion

By definition, science is concerned with natural phenomena that can be tested or detected in some way. Also by definition, religion, or more broadly supernatural spirituality, is concerned with supernatural phenomena that cannot be tested or measured.

There can be grey areas. When Einstein proposed the existence of gravity waves in 1916, there was no way to test or detect gravity waves until a large detector came online in 2016. Gravity waves were detected almost immediately and Einstein’s belief in gravity waves went from something akin to both science and spirituality to real science. The same can be said of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. The Higgs particle was suspected beginning in the 1960’s but it was not detectable until a big atom smasher was built and went online and 2008 and the particle was detected in 2012.

Is the neuroscience of religion an oxymoron?: Since supernatural spirituality or religion is never detectable or testable, can there ever be science of any kind that’s directed to testing or detecting it? There’s two answers to that, no and yes. No because true supernatural spirituality, including all formal religions that hold belief in supernatural events will never be testable or detectable at least for the supernatural parts. Known laws of the universe, e.g., mathematics and entropy, help define the outer limits and contours of what’s knowable and what isn’t. What's outside the realm of the knowable is the realm of the supernatural.

On the other hand, all natural human phenomena are subject to analysis and understanding by science. From a pure science point of view, anything detectable that goes on in the human brain when a spiritual event is perceived to occur are subject to research, analysis and data interpretation. That’s no different than ongoing studies of all sorts of mental experiences.

The neurobiology of spiritual experience: It turns out that spiritual experiences are detectable. The results weren’t surprising. Researchers exposed devoutly religious people to several different religion-related experiences that were intended to elicit a spiritual response. The study participants were asked "Are you feeling the spirit?" Response choices ranged from "not feeling" to "very strongly feeling." At the same time, participants’ brains were scanned to determine areas of the brain that were active during various degrees of spiritual response.

Human brain during a spiritual experience

The brain scan data showed that spiritual experiences activated brain reward or pleasure circuits about the same way that love, sex, gambling, drugs and music do. In other words, responses to, or perceptions of, supernatural beliefs or experiences operate through the same or similar brain circuits that other pleasurable experiences trigger.

Questions: Since supernatural phenomena cannot be detected or tested, is brain scan data showing a more or less normal pleasure or happiness response real science or mere coincidence? If supernatural phenomena are real, why should they elicit any detectable biological response at all? Or, is it perfectly obvious to think that since humans are sentient biological beings, all spiritual experiences must operate through the biological mechanisms that all other sentience experiences operate through?

B&B orig: 12/4/16

The Case Against Objective Reality

After the fire

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Irvine argues that what humans believe they see is more illusion than reality. An article published in The Atlantic discusses Hoffman's conclusions from 30 years of research.

His conclusions are stark: “The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality. What’s more, he says, we have evolution itself to thank for this magnificent illusion, as it maximizes evolutionary fitness by driving truth to extinction.”

From the cognitive science point of view, the aptly named “hard problem” is understanding how a human brain operating with ordinary laws of physics gives rise to first-person conscious experience. From the physicist's point of view an object doesn't have an objective independent existence until an observer comes along and observes it. Physicist John Wheeler puts it like this: “Useful as it is under ordinary circumstances to say that the world exists ‘out there’ independent of us, that view can no longer be upheld.”

The Atlantic article observes that “getting at questions about the nature of reality, and disentangling the observer from the observed, is an endeavor that straddles the boundaries of neuroscience and fundamental physics. . . . . So while neuroscientists struggle to understand how there can be such a thing as a first-person reality, quantum physicists have to grapple with the mystery of how there can be anything but a first-person reality.”

Hoffman points out that “evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger [an evolutionary threat] would eat you.”

The bit about hiding stuff from us refers to the process discussed in The User Illusion by which the unconscious mind discards information such that our conscious minds and reason are aware of only a small trickle of reality.

Hoffman's comments on objective reality: “I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind.”

Implications for politics: For the most part, modern civilization doesn't present the same survival threats that humans faced in evolution. Americans rarely have to run away from predators and they usually buy food and clothing in stores instead of hunting and gathering those things to survive. The cognitive capacities that supported early human survival aren't necessarily the same as what might be needed for peaceful, stable societies and nations. Despite that, we have what evolution gave us and that's all there is.

If our cognitive abilities routinely yield perceptions of reality that are little or nothing like objective reality, then it's reasonable to believe that fact and reality distortion applies to politics as much as it applies to other human endeavors.

Questions: If humans evolved to distort reality and to apply distorted or biased reason to what we think we see, is there any point in attempting to separate truth from falsity or to try to apply less biased conscious reason to the distorted realities we think we see? Is truth even relevant to politics or to long term human survival?

B&B orig:

Dark free speech & the public interest

Exuma Island Iguana

Legal Context: “But it cannot be the duty, because it is not the right, of the state to protect the public against false doctrine. The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.” U.S. Supreme Court, Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516, 1945.

Cultural context: “The age of neutral journalism has passed. It is impossible because what you select from the huge sea of information is already subjective.” Dmitry Kiselyov, Russian propagandist, 2016.

The scope of free speech: With few exceptions, the US Constitution legally equates truth and even handed honesty (honest free speech) with lies, deceit, misinformation and unwarranted character assassination (dark free speech). The rare exceptions include illegal speech, mostly libel, slander, incitement to violence and false advertising. In politics, those exceptions are almost irrelevant, e.g., ‘Hillary is a crook and I’ll put her in jail.’ In other words, lies and deceit are just as legal as honesty. The constitution is simply neutral about it.

Post truth politics: With this election, America has arguably entered an era of post truth politics. For many Americans (~33-45% ?), truth is secondary or completely irrelevant. For that highly vocal group, politics is much more a matter of feeling good, vilifying the opposition and/or advancing personal or ideological agendas than trying to see the truth and apply reasonably unbiased conscious reason. In essence, American politics is more a matter of entertainment and/or self-interest than any serious attempt at objectivity. The US Constitution and courts have nothing to say about this either.

Social and cognitive science convincingly argue that politics for almost everyone is as much or more based on emotion, personal morals and beliefs in false information than reality and reasonably unbiased conscious reason. The evidence on that point seems to be solid. The reason for that flows from how the human mind processes information about reality and facts and then applies conscious reason. Both perceptions of reality and reason are heavily biased and distorted by personal ideology, morals, social identity and an array of powerful unconscious reality- and reason-distorting biases. That’s not a criticism of the human condition. It's a statement of fact.

Reason and the public interest: Given the self-deceived nature of politics, essentially everyone knows they base their politics on unbiased reality and unbiased reason. Of course, that knowledge isn’t knowledge. It’s personal opinion. And it’s usually wrong. Everyone knows that their personal politics would best serve the public interest. Just ask any conservative or liberal to compare their conception of the public interest with the other side’s concept and the contradictions are instantly obvious.

What’s the value of dark free speech?: If dark free speech is defined to as any form of speech or expression that’s intentionally or unintentionally false, misleading and/or deceptive, what is the value of dark free speech to the public interest compared to honest speech? One answer is there’s no way to weigh the effect of dark free speech because (i) the public interest is a personal meaningless concept, and/or (ii) truth in politics is subjective and personal. Another is to say it’s bad, but in a general, ill-defined sort of way. Another is to say it’s good if it serves a noble cause, e.g., liberalism or conservatism, but bad if it harms the cause.

Social and cognitive science make it clear that the point of people discussing politics is to convince others to accept their own opinions and beliefs. Conscious human reason isn’t applied to critically analyze personal beliefs. It’s usually (>95% of the time?) used to convince others, even when we are wrong about what we believe. Social scientists have documented the personal, moralistic, intolerant nature of belief and judgment in politics. One puts it this way: “Morality binds and blinds. . . . . We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment. . . . . We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.”

If one accepts that as a reasonably accurate description of personal politics, the purpose of dark free speech is obvious. It serves to convince others, regardless of how well or badly our own beliefs affect the ‘true’ public interest.

Dark free speech arguably is insidious, difficult to see and a major threat to the long term survival of modern human civilization, if not the species. Nonetheless, that’s part of the human evolutionary legacy. Whether it better serves (i) human survival and peace or (ii) human misery or destruction is an open question. From this observer’s point of view, it’s more a force for human misery or destruction than survival and peace.

Questions: When someone uses dark free speech, intentional or not, should that person be accorded the same respect and opportunity to speak as a person who tries to be even handed and honest? Does it matter if dark speech is used to advance a good cause? If so, who defines a cause as good? Should the analysis be based on how objective facts are treated? If so, who defines what a fact is? In this era of (i) sophisticated propaganda, (ii) public disengagement from and distrust in politics and political institutions, and (iii) rampant lying and deceit, why should liars and deceivers and dark free speech be accorded equal respect and opportunity to speak? Does honest free speech deserve just as much deference and respect than dark free speech, even if dark speech arguably increases the odds of war or other catastrophes? Or, is what’s being asked here simply hopeless?

B&B orig: 11/29/16