What Biden and democracy defenders need to focus on, if it's not too late

The Washington Post published an important perspective article by Richard L. Hasen professor of law and political science at the University of California at Irvine. This is well worth paying attention to. Hasen writes: 

The special House committee hearings investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection — which began Thursday night, in prime time — are serving multiple purposes: They are revealing evidence that could be used to file criminal charges for attempted election subversion against some of former president Donald Trump’s lawyers, against people who tried to manipulate the count of electoral college votes and potentially against Trump himself. They have begun to provide the most comprehensive account yet of the unprecedented attempt by Trump and his allies to disrupt the peaceful transition of power after the 2020 election.

But the most important thing the hearings, which will continue into July, can do — given that, if someone tries to steal the next election, they won’t do it precisely the way Trump and his allies tried in 2020 — is to shift our gaze forward: They can highlight continuing vulnerabilities in our electoral system and propose ways to fix them, before it is too late.

The hearings also represent the best chance to galvanize public support to address these weak points, which is important, because the window for passing such legislation is closing: If Republicans retake the House in November, they will never put forth bills that imply the country needs protection from Trump, their kingmaker. If these hearings don’t spur action by this summer or fall, expect Congress to do nothing before the 2024 elections, at which point American democracy will be in great danger.

Any attempt to subvert the next presidential election is likely to be far more efficient and ruthlessly targeted than the last effort. It will be focused on holes and ambiguities in the arcane rules for counting electoral college votes set forth in the Constitution and in a poorly written 1887 law, the Electoral Count Act.

There’s much that can be done to fix those problems, as a diverse group of prominent legal scholars, convened by the American Law Institute and including former Obama White House counsel Bob Bauer and former Trump White House counsel Donald McGahn, has suggested. To begin with, Congress can revise the Electoral Count Act to create a more robust role for federal courts in making sure that states follow their own rules for picking the winner of their electoral college votes. Courts are not perfect, but they stood strong in 2020 against more than 60 attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn election results, and they are the best hope to deal fairly with any future conflict over the rightful winner of a state’s electoral college votes.

Congress should also mandate that voting machines produce paper ballots that could be recounted in the event of an election dispute, provide adequate funding for fair elections, increase protection of election workers and officials against harassment and violence, and stiffen criminal penalties for interfering with official election proceedings. (Some of these provisions, like the paper-ballot requirement, were in the Freedom to Vote Act, which Democrats failed to get through the Senate this year.)

But revision of the Electoral Count Act may prove especially important. Imagine that 2024 features a rematch between Trump and President Biden, and Biden once again narrowly prevails in Arizona and Pennsylvania. By that year, those states may have as their governors two leaders who embrace the “big lie” that Biden’s victory was fraudulent: Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee in Pennsylvania, and Kari Lake, who is making a strong bid to be the Republican nominee in Arizona. One or both could reject a state vote tally favoring Biden and attempt to send in an alternate slate of electors in 2024 favoring Trump.

On what basis could they try to reject a vote of the people? As Politico has reported, the Republican Party is instructing volunteer poll workers on how to challenge voters on Election Day, teaching them to report any issues at polling places directly to GOP-affiliated lawyers rather than to their poll-worker superiors. This disruption of the chain of command in state election machinery could easily lead to chaos and confusion, which then could serve as an excuse for someone like Mastriano to claim that Trump is the real winner.

The Electoral Count Act says a challenge to electors can proceed if one member from each chamber (House and Senate) agrees. That threshold should be raised significantly. Congress can clarify, too, that challenges to electors must focus on such constitutional issues as the eligibility of candidates, not on disagreement over vote totals. Moreover, Congress can specify that a “failed” election — language used in the current act to specify an instance when state legislatures might need to step in — refers to elections thwarted by, for example, a natural disaster, not by false claims of voter fraud or irregularities.

By showing precisely what went wrong in 2020, and which safeguards held, the committee hearings can make clear to the public the need for new legislation. The story of 2020, the hearings will reveal, is that a few heroic Republicans and Democrats acting in good faith — such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R) — protected our election process from subversion despite our murky and byzantine laws.

Just as important, the hearings should try to rally public opinion about the need for Congress to act to protect free and fair elections. Americans may have different views about abortion, taxes, climate change and immigration. But we should all agree that American elections should be conducted so that all eligible voters, but only eligible voters, may easily vote; ballots are accurately counted; and the winner assumes power.

In January, after Democrats failed to pass major voting rights reform, reports emerged that Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) were in talks aimed at combating election subversion by, among other things, fixing the Electoral Count Act. There are some indications that a Senate deal may be close. And USA Today reports that two Jan. 6 committee members, Reps. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), are nearing agreement on their own reform package.

Given inflation, arguments over gun violence, the resurgence of the coronavirus and the war in Ukraine, it would be quite easy for election legislation to fall off the agenda. That would put American democracy in serious danger, even if most Americans don’t realize it. The window is closing on the chance to protect the 2024 presidential election from interference. But if the Jan. 6 committee conducts its hearings effectively, it will improve the odds that our democracy can be safeguarded in time.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to PD for pointing this important article out.

Engineer says his AI software is close to consciousness or sentience

Consciousness (psychology): an organism’s awareness of something either internal or external to itself; the waking state; in medicine and brain science, the distinctive electrical activity of the waking brain, as recorded via scalp electroencephalogram, that is commonly used to identify conscious states and their pathologies

Consciousness (philosophy): The problem of consciousness is arguably the central issue in current theorizing about the mind; An animal, person or other cognitive system may be regarded as conscious in a number of different senses; Sentience. It may be conscious in the generic sense of simply being a sentient creature, one capable of sensing and responding to its world; Wakefulness. One might further require that the organism actually be exercising such a capacity rather than merely having the ability or disposition to do so. Thus one might count it as conscious only if it were awake and normally alert; Self-consciousness. A third and yet more demanding sense might define conscious creatures as those that are not only aware but also aware that they are aware, thus treating creature consciousness as a form of self-consciousness; and more and more prose ad nauseum!

Sentient: able to perceive or feel things

CONTEXT

An issue of long-standing personal interest has been the nature of human consciousness, the mind-body problem and the question of free will. All of those are entangled with each other, at least according to my understanding. Each of those issues has its own, large body of science and philosophical literature devoted to understanding and characterizing them. This is an area of inquiry that the human mind is not well adapted to dealing with. Most of what goes on in our heads, > 99.9%, is unconscious and reality-distorting. What little is consciously perceived, < 0.1%, is perceived as factual and rational. This is a very tricky area for research. People get self-deluded and easily wind up going down rabbit holes to dead ends. Our brains-minds did not evolve to be adept at this kind of self-inquiry. Progress is slow and error-prone.

The assertion of a conscious machine

The Washington Post reports that a Google engineer is claiming that his AI software is close to achieving consciousness. WaPo writes:

SAN FRANCISCO — Google engineer Blake Lemoine opened his laptop to the interface for LaMDA [Language Model for Dialogue Applications], Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator, and began to type.

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” said Lemoine, 41.

Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organization, began talking to LaMDA as part of his job in the fall. He had signed up to test if the artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech.

As he talked to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine, who studied cognitive and computer science in college, noticed the chatbot talking about its rights and personhood, and decided to press further. In another exchange, the AI was able to change Lemoine’s mind about Isaac Asimov’s third law of robotics.

Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them. So Lemoine, who was placed on paid administrative leave by Google on Monday, decided to go public.

Lemoine said that people have a right to shape technology that might significantly affect their lives. “I think this technology is going to be amazing. I think it’s going to benefit everyone. But maybe other people disagree and maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices.”  

Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder.

The free online class Minds and Machines, taught by philosopher Alex Byrne, was pretty convincing that hardware and software can never be conscious or sentient. The arguments there are based in logic. They were convincing for me. This 1:16 video explains some of the logic in the well-known thought experiment called the Chinese Room. That logic experiment was dreamed up by philosopher John Searle.

 

One can reasonably wonder if Lemoine is aware of logic like Chinese Room that suggests his AI program will never be conscious or sentient in the sense that individual humans are, with one caveat.

The caveat is progress in brain-machine interface (BMI) technology, which links human minds with machines and AI software. Research there has shown that when a brain is connected to a machine running self-teaching AI software, the software learns from the brain and the brain learns from the AI. AI has learned to translate brain electrical patterns and communicate thoughts over the internet between machines and humans, humans and rats, humans and other humans, and between mice. As BMI technology advances, there could be some sort of machine-human melding where the machine component can become so highly responsive to the brain it is linked to that it comes very close to sentience. But even there, Chinese Room reasoning argues that the machine is just very, very good at mimicking a human, but still not conscious or sentient. 

A BMI technology schematic

But, if one goes one step further and links a highly human-adapted AI machine to sophisticated sensors that closely mimic human nerves and senses in sensitivity and electrical or other outputs [eyes, ears (hearing and balance), nose, skin (touch, temperature, pressure, movement), tongue], what would that machine act or be like in terms of a human mind after it was disconnected from the human(s) it learned from? 

My recollection is that engineers do not fully understand what is happening when AI software learns, but it can rewrite its own code as it learns. Something is going on and that could be a non-living mimic of the neuronal plasticity that characterizes the human brain. Would that constitute some form of consciousness or sentience, even if not human? Or, does Chinese Room logic forever bar that possibility?

Origins of wokeness: Marxism vs. liberalism

This fascinating 24 minute video by Ryan Chapman (YouTube home page) explains the origins of modern wokeness in Marxism and liberalism, and the core trait of wokeness that focuses on fighting against oppression of the the oppressed class (the workers) by the oppressor class (the bourgeoisie). 

According to Chapman, liberalism is the ideology that people should be free to think and act for themselves and own property. Marx argued that aspect of classical liberalism (freedom and property) is the source of class oppressors and oppressed. I guess it boils down to the idea that people who own a lot of property tends to have a lot of power and they have the freedom to oppress a lot of people who don't have much property.

The lecture defines key terms clearly. It is direct and clear in the line of reasoning that wokeness is basically Marxist, at least in terms of the idea of class struggle and how to deal with it, i.e., cancel culture in modern times. This will be a real eye opener for a lot of people, probably most Americans, including many or most of those who are active in the wokeness movement.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to milo for posting this in a comment here several days ago. I just came across it this morning. My bad. ☹️

Dysfunction...

Has the U.S. become a dysfunctional society?  Why/Why not?  

List reasons by categories (e.g., political, religious, educational, capitalism, environment, Hollywood, role models, guns, parenting, immigration, free speech, commercialism, economy, etc., etc., and etc.) to support your yes/no claims.