News: New Supreme Court term; Thoughts on tyranny of the minority

The scene outside the New York Supreme Court in Lower Manhattan today 

before the expected arrival of former president Donald Trump for his fraud trial

NPR reports about cases the USSC is going to hear this term, which is now underway:

Abortion: Abortion is back in court, this time presumably to further obliterate abortion rights. The case comes from the authoritarian radical right (ARR) 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, TX, LA and MI. That court has directly attacked the authority of the FDA to approve the chemical abortion pills, which are now often sold by mail. The pills now account for more than half of all abortions in the US. This is a clear example of creeping authoritarianism and overreach that ARR Christian nationalist judges are feeling empowered to impose God's sacred moral standards on American society. 

Gun control: Gun control is back, presumably to for the ARR USSC to obliterate more gun safety laws. This time the law at issue is one that bans gun possession for anyone who's a subject of a domestic violence restraining order. In 2022, the six ARR USSC judges issued a very broad decision declaring that the right to possess and carry a gun is a fundamental constitutional right. In that case, the court said that constitutional laws and regulations about guns have to be analogous to laws on the books at the time of the founding. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that crackpottery which has been used to overturn  down various important gun safety laws. 

What controls is the meaning of the Constitution at the time the Bill of Rights was written in 1789. in that case,  NYSRPA v. Bruen, the text, history, and tradition test (the hopelessness of this cherry picked test for constitutionality is discussed by a gun law expert in this 7-minute video) now governs laws restricting the right to keep and bear arms – invalidating any gun laws that fail to meet its standard. The problem for gun safety laws is that there are many modern situations involving guns that didn't exist in 1789. 

In this case, the government defending the federal law, points to what it calls analogous laws in 1789. But that's weak because there weren't domestic violence laws because women didn't have many rights in 1789. They didn't have the vote or property rights, for the most part, and they had little to no recourse under the law from an abusive husband. Given that, one case easily see the ARR USSC striking the law down. That would allow wife beaters to happily buy a gun and shoot her dead at the husband's pleasure. What great fun, go buy a gun!

Context bit: In 2021, I posted about the original research paper that showed gun ownership is a risk factor for domestic homicide. That 1993 paper triggered a ban on federal money for gun violence research in 1996. That ban was still largely in place in 2021. It probably still is mostly in place today.

Killing federal agencies: Another gigantic case the ARR USSC is going to decide deals with how federal agencies are funded. This is another case from the ARR 5th Circuit. The case argues that funding for some major federal agencies is unconstitutional. The case focuses on killing the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, originally proposed by Elizabeth Warren. Brass knuckles capitalist business elites and ARR Republicans hate, hate, hate the CFBP. They want it dead, dead, dead because it protects consumers from capitalist fun and profitable things like price gouging, predatory lending, false advertising and blatant business fraud, which is sometimes conducted on a massive scale. 

The NPR segment commented: 

The 5th Circuit ruled that the Constitution requires an actual appropriation by Congress each year or every other year. And if that is so, if the 5th Circuit is right, it could put not just the CFPB out of business but lots of other agencies, including the Federal Reserve itself and the FDIC, which ensures bank deposits, both of which are funded in similar ways.

ELIZABETH WARREN: If this Supreme Court says that Congress doesn't have the power to set up government agencies and laws without going through appropriations, understand not only do all the banking regulators fall on their faces, Social Security and Medicare are now at risk. They don't run through appropriations. They are funded through a separate tax, a separate way to have an agency organized. So the implications of this case - this could echo through the lives of every person in America.

This case could wind up dealing a death blow to many federal agencies, a long-cherished goal of the government-hating ARR Republican Party, brass knuckles capitalist elites and Christian nationalist elites who also hate government and consumer protections. According to CN elites, protecting consumers is God's job, not the government's job.

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Vox writes about the always fun topic of tyranny of the minority in America today: 

In their new book Tyranny of the Minority, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt — the authors of How Democracies Die — argue America’s founders faced a [] problem: navigating between two types of dictatorship that threatened to devour the new country.

The founders, per Levitsky and Ziblatt, were myopically focused on one of them: the fear of a majority-backed demagogue seizing power. As a result, they made it exceptionally difficult to pass new laws and amend the constitution. But the founders, the pair argues, lost sight of a potentially more dangerous monster on the other side ....: a determined minority abusing this system to impose its will on the democratic majority.

“By steering the republic so sharply away from the [monster] of majority tyranny, America’s founders left it vulnerable to the [monster] of minority rule,” they write.

This is not a hypothetical fear. According to Levitsky and Ziblatt, today’s America is currently being sucked down an anti-democratic whirlpool.

The Republican Party, they argue, has become an anti-democratic institution, its traditional leadership cowed by Trump and a racially reactionary base. As such, it is increasingly willing to twist legal tools designed to check oppressive majorities into tools for imposing its policy preferences on an unwilling majority. The best way out of this dilemma, in their view, is radical legal constitutional reform that brings the American system more in line with other advanced democracies.  

The United States is “the only presidential democracy in the world in which the president is elected via an Electoral College,” “one of the few remaining democracies that retains a bicameral legislature with a powerful upper chamber,” and “the only democracy in the world with lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices.” Moreover, they note, “the U.S. Constitution is the hardest in the world to change” — making it extremely difficult for reformers to do anything about America’s minority-empowering institutions.

These institutions allow the Republican Party to rule despite being a distinctly minority faction — one that holds extreme positions on issues like taxes and abortion, and has lost the popular vote in seven out of the last eight presidential elections.

As we all know, it is currently politically impossible to institute significant constitutional reform. It just might be too late for that and for American majoritarian democracy.

Consciousness science update: Panpsychism, et al.

Scientific American writes about the ongoing mystery of consciousness and how scientists and philosophers are thinking about it. There is still plenty of disagreement. Sci Am writes about a recent workshop at Marist College in New York state:

Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?

Physicists and philosophers recently met to debate a theory of consciousness called panpsychism

More than 400 years ago, Galileo showed that many everyday phenomena—such as a ball rolling down an incline or a chandelier gently swinging from a church ceiling—obey precise mathematical laws. For this insight, he is often hailed as the founder of modern science. But Galileo recognized that not everything was amenable to a quantitative approach. Such things as colors, tastes and smells “are no more than mere names,” Galileo declared, for “they reside only in consciousness.” These qualities aren’t really out there in the world, he asserted, but exist only in the minds of creatures that perceive them. “Hence if the living creature were removed,” he wrote, “all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.”

As philosopher David Chalmers asked: “How does the water of the brain turn into the wine of consciousness?” He famously dubbed this quandary the “hard problem” of consciousness.

Part of the appeal of panpsychism is that it appears to provide a workaround to the question posed by Chalmers: we no longer have to worry about how inanimate matter forms minds because mindedness was there all along, residing in the fabric of the universe. Chalmers himself has embraced a form of panpsychism and even suggested that individual particles might be somehow aware. He said in a TED Talk that a photon “might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness.” Also on board with the idea is neuroscientist Christof Koch, who noted in his 2012 book Consciousness that if one accepts consciousness as a real phenomenon that’s not dependent on any particular material—that it’s “substrate-independent,” as philosophers put it—then “it is a simple step to conclude that the entire cosmos is suffused with sentience.”

Yet panpsychism runs counter to the majority view in both the physical sciences and in philosophy that treats consciousness as an emergent phenomenon, something that arises in certain complex systems, such as human brains. In this view, individual neurons are not conscious, but thanks to the collective properties of some 86 billion neurons and their interactions—which, admittedly, are still only poorly understood—brains (along with bodies, perhaps) are conscious. Surveys suggest that slightly more than half of academic philosophers hold this view, known as “physicalism” or “emergentism,” whereas about one third reject physicalism and lean toward some alternative, of which panpsychism is one of several possibilities.

Yanssel Garcia, a philosopher at the University of Nebraska Omaha, believes that physical facts alone are inadequate for such a task. “There is nothing of a physical sort that you could provide [a person who sees only in shades of gray] in order to have them understand what color experience is like; [they] would need to experience it themselves,” he says. “Physical science is, in principle, incapable of telling us the complete story.” Of the various alternatives that have been put forward, he says that “panpsychism is our best bet.”

But panpsychism attracts many critics as well. Some point out that it doesn’t explain how small bits of consciousness come together to form more substantive conscious entities. Detractors say that this puzzle, known as the “combination problem,” amounts to panpsychism’s own version of the hard problem. The combination problem “is the serious challenge for the panpsychist position,” Goff admits. “And it’s where most of our energies are going.”

Others question panpsychism’s explanatory power. In his 2021 book Being You, neuroscientist Anil Seth wrote that the main problems with panpsychism are that “it doesn’t really explain anything and that it doesn’t lead to testable hypotheses. It’s an easy get-out to the apparent mystery posed by the hard problem.”  

Seth, the neuroscientist, was not at the workshop—but I asked him where he stands in the debate over physicalism and its various alternatives. Physicalism, he says, still offers more “empirical grip” than its competitors—and he laments what he sees as excessive hand-wringing over its alleged failures, including the supposed hardness of the hard problem. “Critiquing physicalism on the basis that it has ‘failed’ is willful mischaracterization,” he says. “It’s doing just fine, as progress in consciousness science readily attests.” In a recently published article in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Seth adds: “Asserting that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous does nothing to shed light on the way an experience of blueness is the way it is, and not some other way. Nor does it explain anything about the possible functions of consciousness, nor why consciousness is lost in states such as dreamless sleep, general anaesthesia, and coma.”  

Even those who lean toward panpsychism sometimes seem hesitant to dive into the deep end. As Garcia put it, in spite of the allure of a universe imbued with consciousness, “I would love to be talked out of it.”

The article notes that some experts object to panpsychism because it doesn’t address what philosophers call the “other minds” problem, where a person has direct access to their own mind but can't know anything about another person’s mind. This reasoning is grounded in concern that invoking an underlying layer of mindedness is a bit like invoking God. One expert commented: “I sometimes wonder if the panpsychist position is similar to ‘god of the gaps’ arguments,” referring to the idea that God is needed to fill the gaps in scientific knowledge.

Another idea cosmopsychism was floated at the workshop. It is the notion that the universe itself is conscious. A philosopher participating in the workshop floated a slightly different idea known as “psychological ether theory,” which says that brains don’t produce consciousness but rather make use of consciousness. In other words, consciousness existed before brains existed, like an all-pervasive ether. That reasoning was that if psychological ether is real, then in all likelihood God exists.

A cognitive scientist at the University of California, Irvine rejected the idea of spacetime and looking for something deeper. That was based on an increasingly popular idea in physics that space and time may not be fundamental but may instead be emergent phenomena themselves. The deeper entity related to consciousness may consist of “subjects and experiences” that “are entities beyond spacetime, not within spacetime.” That idea developed in a 2023 paper entitled “Fusions of Consciousness.”

That paper comments:

Consciousness is perplexing, even for expert researchers. Witness the recent plethora of conflicting theories. Even their core ideas are at odds: quantum states of neuronal microtubules, causal architectures that integrate information, neuronal global workspaces, user illusions and attentional schemas, panpsychism, and various forms of dualism. However, most of these theories of consciousness agree on a key assumption: spacetime, and some of its particles, are fundamental, i.e., ontologically primitive, irreducible, and non-emergent. For example, physicalist theories assume this and nothing more, while many panpsychists likewise assume this but would add that the “intrinsic nature” of such particles is nothing other than consciousness.

Hm, looks to me like we've got a way to go before the concept of consciousness gets tidied up and nailed down. Get me another brain.

Online privacy for Chrome and other browsers

Google has recently implemented a gigantic scam to harvest personal information and monetize it. The chances are recent and touted by Google as for privacy, even thought it is for loss of privacy. The Register writes:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has urged folks to switch off several Privacy Sandbox settings in Google Chrome to mask their online habits, or to consider switching to Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari.

Chrome's Privacy Sandbox is neither private – preventing one from being observed – nor a sandbox – an environment in which code can be executed in isolation. Rather it's a suite of advertising, analytics, anti-spam, and anti-tracking technologies. The goal for some of these is to replace third-party cookies.

Third-party cookies, because they harm privacy by permitting people to be tracked online, are scheduled to be phased out next year in Chrome. But the online advertising industry isn't entirely sold on Google's replacement technology, and it may be that antitrust cases or other regulatory pressure will lead websites away from Privacy Sandbox and toward industry-backed ad tech like IAB's Seller Defined Audiences.

Google says its Privacy Sandbox has five major goals: fighting spam and fraud on the web; showing relevant ads and content; measuring digital ads; strengthening cross-site privacy boundaries; and limiting covert tracking.

"Topics is a response to pushback against Google’s proposed Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC), which we called 'a terrible idea' because it gave Google even more control over advertising in its browser while not truly protecting user privacy," said Thorin Klosowski, EFF security and privacy activist, in a web essay.

Mozilla and Apple have rejected Topics in Firefox and Safari respectively due to privacy concerns. And earlier this year, the Technical Architecture Group (TAG) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the web's technical body, panned Topics for being opaque and diminishing user control.

"Google referring to any of this as 'privacy' is deceiving," said the foundation's Klosowski.

"Even if it's better than third-party cookies, the Privacy Sandbox is still tracking, it's just done by one company instead of dozens. Instead of waffling between different tracking methods, even with mild improvements, we should work towards a world without behavioral ads."

Klosowski explains that for those who won't give up Chrome there's a way to opt out of Topics, of ad retargeting, and of giving advertisers storage space in your browser for ad performance data. Doing so requires navigating through Chrome's three-dot icon to the ad privacy settings page: (⋮) > Settings > Privacy & Security > Ad Privacy. Or copy this URL chrome://settings/adPrivacy into the address bar and press enter.

Once there, he advises disabling Ad topics, Site-suggested ads, and Ad measurement.  

The EFF also makes Privacy Badger, a browser extension for blocking tracking scripts that was just recently updated to remove tracking links. 

A related story discusses the EFF's Privacy Badger:

We released a new version of Privacy Badger that updates how we fight “link tracking” across a number of Google products. With this update Privacy Badger removes tracking from links in Google Docs, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Images results. Privacy Badger now also removes tracking from links added after scrolling through Google Search results.

Link tracking is a creepy surveillance tactic that allows a company to follow you whenever you click on a link to leave its website. As we wrote in our original announcement of Google link tracking protection, Google uses different techniques in different browsers. The techniques also vary across Google products. One common link tracking approach surreptitiously redirects the outgoing request through the tracker’s own servers. There is virtually no benefit 1 for you when this happens. The added complexity mostly just helps Google learn more about your browsing.

It's been a few years since our original release of Google link tracking protection. Things have changed in the meantime. For example, Google Search now dynamically adds results as you scroll the page ("infinite scroll" has mostly replaced distinct pages of results). Google Hangouts no longer exists! This made it a good time for us to update Privacy Badger’s first party tracking protections.

Privacy Badger is downloadable here. The commentary at that site: 

Privacy Badger automatically learns to block invisible trackers. Instead of keeping lists of what to block, Privacy Badger automatically discovers trackers based on their behavior. Privacy Badger sends the Global Privacy Control signal to opt you out of data sharing and selling, and the Do Not Track signal to tell companies not to track you. If trackers ignore your wishes, Privacy Badger will learn to block them. 

 Besides automatic tracker blocking, Privacy Badger replaces potentially useful trackers (video players, comments widgets, etc.) with click-to-activate placeholders, and removes outgoing link click tracking on Facebook and Google, with more privacy protections on the way. To learn more, see our FAQ at https://privacybadger.org/#faq

An interesting water desalination advance

The boffins at MIT have come up with a desalination device that runs on sunlight and the laws physics. No electricity is required, so this thing operates completely off the grid.  They have designed a box a square meter in size (~10.8 sq ft) that can produce 5 liters of drinkable water per hour from seawater. The system can operate for several years without maintenance. The price for the water is less than the average US price for tap water. The system should be scalable to very large sizes.

A tilted ten-stage prototype floating in a salt water container -- the

tilt is needed to passively create water circulation which

prevents salt from accumulating and clogging the system

MIT News writes:

In a paper appearing today in the journal Joule, the team outlines the design for a new solar desalination system that takes in saltwater and heats it with natural sunlight.

The configuration of the device allows water to circulate in swirling eddies, in a manner similar to the much larger “thermohaline” circulation of the ocean. This circulation, combined with the sun’s heat, drives water to evaporate, leaving salt behind. The resulting water vapor can then be condensed and collected as pure, drinkable water. In the meantime, the leftover salt continues to circulate through and out of the device, rather than accumulating and clogging the system. 

The new system has a higher water-production rate and a higher salt-rejection rate than all other passive solar desalination concepts currently being tested.

The researchers estimate that if the system is scaled up to the size of a small suitcase, it could produce about 4 to 6 liters of drinking water per hour and last several years before requiring replacement parts. At this scale and performance, the system could produce drinking water at a rate and price that is cheaper than tap water.  

The small circulations generated in the team’s new system is similar to the “thermohaline” convection in the ocean — a phenomenon that drives the movement of water around the world, based on differences in sea temperature (“thermo”) and salinity (“haline”).

“When seawater is exposed to air, sunlight drives water to evaporate. Once water leaves the surface, salt remains. And the higher the salt concentration, the denser the liquid, and this heavier water wants to flow downward,” Zhang explains. “By mimicking this kilometer-wide phenomena in small box, we can take advantage of this feature to reject salt.”

The research paper is here (behind a paywall). A figure from the paper shows more clearly how the device works. The paper comments:

Using a confined saline layer as an evaporator, we initiate strong thermohaline convection to mitigate salt accumulation and enhance heat transfer. With a ten-stage device, we achieve record-high solar-to-water efficiencies of 322%–121% in the salinity range of 0–20 wt % under one-sun illumination. More importantly, we demonstrate an extreme resistance to salt accumulation with 180-h continuous desalination of 20 wt % concentrated seawater. With high freshwater production and extreme salt endurance, our device significantly reduces the water production cost, paving a pathway toward the practical adoption of passive solar desalination for sustainable water economy.