The Simple Reality of Collapse

Posted on April 26, 2023 by Dave Pollard

It seems to be basic human nature to assume the future will be like the present, “only more so” — We expect current trajectories (and even “hockey stick” accelerations) to continue.

Unless there are constraints — limits — that is not an unreasonable expectation. But there are usually constraints. The constraints for our planet, and all life that depends upon it, are the finite amount of land, water, air, soil, energy, and natural resources that can be exploited. For billions of years Earth has witnessed cycles of self-organizing life achieving equilibrium, followed by collapses — global extinction events. These cycles tend to follow a normal curve like that depicted above — a first appearance, then little change for a long time, then sudden accelerating growth, then decelerating growth as limits are reached, then precipitous decline, and then slow decline for a long time, leading to extinction.

To us, such a curve has five perceived stages — slow, fast, slow (at the peak), fast, and slow, in that order. We are now at the third stage, at the peak, at the cusp of what Hemingway described as the “slowly, and then all at once” point of decline. The point at the top of the roller coaster when time seems to stop.

We can appreciate that conceptually, but that doesn’t allow us to actually imagine, anticipate and accept as inevitable the current civilizational collapse and great extinction event, and what they will lead to. What they will lead to (at first “all at once”, but then more slowly over a few centuries), is human societies and planetary ecosystems that would be unrecognizable, even unimaginable, to anyone alive today. And then further slowing before the final human departs the scene, tens of thousands or even a million years from now.

This is the simple reality of how collapse inevitably happens, and it is both astonishing and fascinating that we cannot get our heads around it. It defies all our conditioning about how to think, behave, and process information.

Here are just a few of the things that we unthinkingly, across the political spectrum, seem to take for granted now, things that make no sense when one looks at them through the lens of the near-imminent and unavoidable collapse of our civilization and global ecosystems:

  1. Growth is good: I keep reading articles that talk about economic ‘recovery’ as a good thing, and slowdowns as a bad thing. What will it take before we realize that growth got us into this mess, and de-growth, as equitably as we can manage it, is what we should be measuring as ‘progress’ and striving for?
  2. Someone has to be to blame: “Well, yes, Billy accidentally blew up the house and killed the rest of the family with his chemistry set, but, you know, his teachers, and the manufacturers of the chemistry set, and of course there were underlying factors…” It’s time to grow up and stop assessing blame. It gets us nowhere.
  3. Dwelling on the past: Kind of related to the blame game, we seem obsessed with anger and guilt over past atrocities, stirring them back up and refusing to let go of them. Of course they were outrageous, devastating, traumatizing. Tell the truth about them, give and receive apologies, declare an intent to learn from the errors and not repeat them, ask for (and offer) forgiveness, and then move on. So many people spend their lives living in, and reliving, the past. Such a waste.
  4. A politics of hatred, anger, fear and war: Our world is fucked, we’re living in the shadow of collapse, loss, suffering, and death. And what is the news full of, and our attention focused on? Fear-mongering, war-mongering, hate-mongering, propaganda, over-filled privately-run prisons, hopeless, brutal refugee internment camps, bloated militarized police forces, and endless wars. It’s fucking insane. It’s like we’re all facing an imminent firing squad and we’re fighting each other over who deserves the last cigarette. How did all our reward mechanisms get so utterly screwed up? We’re better than this, surely.
  5. Capitalism, debt and money as the only way to run an economy: Most economic decisions continue to be made based on maximizing profit for designed-to-be-psychotic corporations. The same system externalizes (doesn’t count) ‘costs’ that are all about sustaining the essentials of basic human and natural wellbeing. This system rewards absurd risk-taking, lying, cheating, and fraud. It has 99% of the population in debt to the other 1% just to make basic ends meet, debts that for the most part can never hope to be repaid, even if collapse weren’t looming everywhere it hasn’t already occurred. And most of us in one way or another worship money, which is simply the tool used to create more debt, and with it, more ‘growth’ (accruing entirely to the richest 1%) and more suffering. There are many better, fairer, simpler ways to transact with each other, that require none of these things. None of these elements of the capitalist religion makes sense in a collapsing world.

Even if we were to rid ourselves of these obviously dysfunctional (in the context of collapse) beliefs and systems, we would be left with the existential question about collapse: What does it mean? — that despite everything we have tried so valiantly to do, our civilization, our species, and most of the species of our world are all dying.

It’s a question that kind of defies answering, at least to the extent we find the value of meaning in making sense of what we have done, and what we are doing, and informing what we might think of doing next.

Consider the analogy of a single human life. From the moment we first conceive of ourselves as separate, we tend to imagine our life’s trajectory as being without end, without demise, and live until our life’s final days as if somehow we might never die. We may buy life insurance, but that’s for someone else, and we hardly relate it to our own death.

So what does it mean to accept that our civilization, our species, and most species of our world are all dying? What does it mean to contemplate that we, alive today, are eight billion of 110 billion humans that have ever lived, and that one day not so far away there will only be scattered tribes of humans, and, eventually, after that, probably no humans at all?

While I think they’re off on the timing, Guy McPherson and the NTHE crowd have tried to embrace this realization. Their approach has been to look at it somewhat as one looks at a loved one’s diagnosis as having an imminent terminal illness — with a mix of grief, compassion, and preparedness.

That may make sense, but rather than just acknowledging the reality of coming death, it seems to me it would make more sense to take stock of, and celebrate, our lives. To optimize how we, as a species and culture, spend each moment of our remaining time, rather than just striving to continue the madness that got us into this mess a little longer. To make the best of what time we have left, together and in harmony with, and perhaps even in service to, the more-than-human world that is harder hit by collapse than we are (though they will likely outlive us).

What might be our collective statement, to the world and to each other, as we contemplate the collapse and extinction of our cultures and our species? Not as a greeting or warning to aliens. Not as a mea culpa to the more-than-human world. Not as something to be remembered for (by whom?). But, instead, as a tribute, recognition, and collective thanks for what all 110 billion of us who have ever lived on the planet, all of us doing our best (if somewhat cluelessly), would like to acknowledge to each other, human to human, across the world and across time.

Something to think about.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

The New Left’s Search for Religion

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Dave Pollard


image from Midjourney, my own prompt

With the world hurtling into full-on economic and ecological collapse, it is hard to find something — anything — to believe in, to trust, or to accept ‘on faith’. Those on the left, most of whom are no longer in denial of the crises facing us, have spent most of the last 50 years defining themselves for what they don’t believe in — obscene wealth and power inequality, endless war, unregulated, corrupt, untrammelled capitalism, climate disaster, and the oppression of women, BIPOC, the poor and the sick, and so on.

They don’t, any longer, believe in even the possibility of a multipolar peaceful world, universal health care, or free, quality education for all. Though that still comes as a bit of a shock when Bernie Sanders admits it.

They are defined, in short, by what they are against, rather than what they stand for. The right has been unintentionally brilliant in maneuvering them into that cramped, awkward place, but that’s where they are.

We are hence devoid of leaders who can articulate beliefs and programs that are positive, progressive, that supporters can get behind, champion, celebrate, and offer to the jaded among us.

So now in our political arenas we have what Hank Green calls “performative governance” — parties and ‘leaders’ who smile at the cameras, speak carefully crafted words that mean nothing, and then turn away and hand actual governance, and the determination of what money will be spent on, over to the intelligence agencies, special interest groups, and corporate lobbyists who now write many of the laws for ‘their’ politicians to sign.

As Aurélien puts it: ” [Neo]liberal political theory sees elections as a form of competition between professional teams to present the best formula for running the country, after which one will be awarded an exclusive contract.” Many on the right have the same perception. But unlike theoretical party platforms and performances, the differences in terms of what actually happens in government are so minuscule that neither side need be particularly fussed about which team performs best; there are plenty of lucrative positions in the revolving doors of private industry for the ‘losers’.

Sadly, the new left is lacking in both courage and imagination, so this situation is likely to get even worse. They are lacking courage because they, unlike the right, don’t want to offend anyone. They fear it will cost them voters and supporters if they say anything that the atomized identity-fixated populace doesn’t like or doesn’t agree with. Or if they talk about anything too gloomy, like the inevitability of collapse. Their performances, therefore, are “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. And eventually, the rants against everything get tiring, not inspiring. We might not doubt their sincerity (though we might doubt that too), but we certainly doubt that they will (be able to) act on their words. The actor’s job, after all, ends when the curtain on the stage goes down. It’s all about the applause, and selling more tickets for the next show.

They — the new left — are lacking imagination because, well, we are all lacking imagination these days. As I’ve written before, levels of innovation are at a 40-year low. There are, essentially, almost no good new ideas out there. The new left has been so busy reacting to the performances of the right (which range from the sublime to the ridiculous) that they simply no longer think about anything else. For the last 40 years, we have basically had no practice whatsoever thinking creatively. The western film, music, and other ‘creative’ industries are all retreads, sequels, re-releases, and ‘reality’ shows. Games require no imagination whatsoever, just reaction and appreciation for the graphics. Business and professional practices have become formulaic, without rewards or room for ingenuity.

So instead, in the absence of courage, honesty, imagination, and new ideas, some of the ‘thought leaders’ of the new left are looking to hang their hat on a new religion of the left, one that will galvanize and inspire their disenchanted and indifferent ‘supporters’ with its shared vision, hope, and promise.

In this, they presume (incorrectly) that the right has the supporters of the ‘old religions’ in their pocket. But citizens now say, for the first time ever, that religion is less important to them than money. And studies (like this one done in Louisiana) suggest that, while the right is entertained by the preachers in the pulpits and in the houses of state and on Faux News, and like their spirit, they don’t particularly buy a lot of what they are advocating or claiming is true, any more than leftists still believe what Bernie or AOC or other token principled leftists are saying to be more than empty wishful words.

For those on the right, it is their peer group, which is a lot less fragmented than the leftists’, which determines what they believe and vote for, and that is based more on actual conversations and shared activities than on the crap they see and hear on their screens.

What presumably the new left is looking for in a new religion is something they all can believe in — some bedrock things that differentiate them from the right and which will rally them to vote and to act in support of and in pursuit of the realization of those beliefs. Something positive. Something that is beyond question, a matter of absolute faith.

The problem, of course, is that no such thing exists… anywhere on the political spectrum. The right may use words like ‘god’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘individual rights’ as convenient placeholders or catchphrases, but there is absolutely no consensus among the right as to what those words actually mean. The equivalent phrases used by the left, like ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ are even more etherial and subjective, and often laced with ‘blame-y-ness’ that morphs them into their negatives (they’re usually about unfairness, and injustice). Our beliefs are complex and nuanced.

Advocates of a new left religion also say that this new progressive faith needs rituals. But rituals are about reaffirming connection and affiliation, and it is the right, not the left, that has a stronger sense of community. Rituals reflect connection; they don’t create it.

And also, leftists tend to be idea people, and attracted to new ideas and questioning and challenging what they are told. The very idea of religions and blind faith in ‘ordained’ ideas and principles is to some extent inherently anathema to progressives.

So (I was going to say “god help us”), I think the last thing that leftists need is a new religion, a new worldview, or a new universally-acceptable set of beliefs.

Instead, what I sense leftists really would find valuable and galvanizing is the much more difficult project of giving up entirely on the existing political process and its systems, labels and (mis)alignments, and instead embracing a pragmatic learning about how we can become more adaptable.

What do I mean by this? I think there’s been a quiet admission, in the minds of many on the left, of the fundamental non-viability of long-held liberal ideals about the universal, centralized, standardized provision of essential services. While these were once feasible projects, at least in affluent nations, I think it’s inevitable that with global economic collapse looming, governments will (within a decade or so) mostly become insolvent and incapable of doing much of anything. To wait for that to happen is, IMO, to cling to a failing model, and a waste of time.

There have been some proposals put forward recently (more on this in an upcoming article about Roger Hallam) that, in order to anticipate the collapse of governance, and to respond to its incapacity to address the crises of our time, we should look to set up our own parallel governance groups (perhaps using the citizens’ assembly model) which can both agitate for change and mobilize resistance to the existing governance structures when they fail to do what is needed, and which can also replace those old-style governments quickly when they collapse.

I find this model intriguing (it’s one of the few fresh new ideas out there), and it avoids rehashing old political models that haven’t worked. It’s agnostic with respect to the traditional political spectrum — anyone unhappy with the existing dysfunctional system can participate. Its defining quality is that it is unapologetically democratic. It presumes that we’re smarter and more competent, collectively, than ‘representative’ governments can ever practicably be.

Whether it works or not (and, let’s face it, anything radically new at this late date might well not work), it’s almost assuredly not enough.

I’ve written before about what I think is entailed in being adaptable — acknowledging the inevitability of collapse and being open to learning new skills and capacities that will help us day-to-day as economic and ecological collapse accelerates. But there may be some experiments we could explore to increase our readiness collectively to deal with the worst aspects of collapse.

Here are three examples of this I’ve heard about recently:

  1. The idea that as collapse begins to overwhelm us, ‘resecularized’ churches (and perhaps schools) could serve (of course, some already do so) as essential service providers. The new term for these is Lifehouses, defined as “distributed community support centres for the Long Emergency”. The idea in a nutshell: “Fitting them out as decentralized shelters for the unhoused, storehouses for emergency food stocks (rotated through an attached food bank), heating and cooling centers for the physically vulnerable, and distributed water-purification, power-generation and urban-agriculture sites capable of supporting the neighborhood around them when the ordinary sources of supply are unreliable.”
  2. The idea that the processes used in the Basque area of Spain, that network and coordinate the work of many small autonomous (mostly home-based) production facilities, instead of relying on massive, centralized production facilities that won’t survive economic collapse, might be the best post-collapse way to get essential goods produced in a region effectively.
  3. The idea of creating (and again, networking) autonomous federations of communities, instead of trying to manage large, unwieldy centralized states — this was the principal model by which many widely-scattered First Nations peoples self-organized and cooperated historically, and it is apparently being used today in the Rojava region of (war-torn) Kurdish Syria.

My sense is that new, flexible infrastructures like these will inevitably replace the current models as collapse advances. But there’s no harm in trying them out now, as they could coexist quite well with the current models.

So, no more religions, please. Instead, let’s have some new ideas on how to adapt to inevitable collapse, that we can test and tweak to help us going forward, and which will have value, even today.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

The Ancient Game

Posted on April 18, 2023 by Dave Pollard


image by Midjourney; my own prompt

So we circle around each other, 
a bit more subtly than our distant ancestors, but still —
Making our first impressions.
It’s usually mostly chemistry to start,
but not necessarily: Somebody always has to be picked last.

We imagine each other as being
the way we hope they will be — just asking for disappointment.
And we pretend to be who we are not,
but instead, who we hope the other will be attracted to.

It’s an ancient game, this fraught reading of signs,
pre-linguistic, a play of acting as if we might be, just possibly
the right one.
Though now, dependent on language,
we have forgotten how to sense, to notice
the eyes glancing, raised, questioning, and then
shifting to some other focus, cautious,
careful not to be too obvious.

We have forgotten the smell of ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and ‘not sure’,
buried now in a blare of overlaid fruits and florals.

And so the conditioning begins.
We want different things
(though we no longer know quite what we want:
it’s confused with what we think we should want,
and what we fear we might want, that we can never have.
The traffickers of dreams have done their job on us,
so we long for perfection, the rarified image
of everything that could be.
Anything less will no longer do; “good enough for now”
is no longer good enough, ever.)

Still, our body knows. It knows exactly what it wants.
It’s only ‘us’, sitting inside staring out ‘our’ eyes,
believing our selves in control, that are clueless.
‘We’ are filled with need, and don’t even know what we need.
We can no longer listen to our bodies, though in the end
it is they that decide what we do.
It is they who are conditioned. We are not even that.
We are the impotent sorcerers, poring over the clues,
hopelessly trying to decipher what our body’s actions meant.

So let’s leave our selves out of it: How do these two bodies,
these amalgams of chemicals and cells
and brains too large and unwieldy for their own good —
how do they, now, unfamiliar,
impress upon, condition each other,
right from the start?

They are sending each other pheromones, on one level,
far beyond our understanding, making sense of each other,
in a way our brains could never make sense of.

And on another level, riding on top of the subliminal,
they direct and reflect signals of pleasure and pain —
“This body will reward that body if it does that, and punish
or withhold reward, if it does something else.”
That is what it is all about.

Most of it is learning, an endless negotiation
of what to that other body constitutes a reward
or a punishment. And there are advantages,
in this game, for sending confusing messages,
for keeping the other body off balance.

Wild creatures are better than that —
they are honest about, and aware of their conditioning.
But our bodies and brains are too smart,
too cruel for such integrity, so they manipulate,
try to get what they want by ruse.

And so the game plays out. The bodies and brains
‘we’ presume to inhabit and control
disrupt and reinforce each other’s behaviours,
seeking to get, impossibly, everything that they want.
Even if that means conditioning the other
to want something less than, or different from,
what it thought it wanted.
That works for a while.

The ideal, which every body is conditioned to pursue,
to our great collective sadness,
can never be achieved. There is always a gap.
If the gap becomes too large, there will be a split —
It’s unbearable, better to be apart.
Or the gap is within, and the split is within,
a prelude to depression, disconnection and despair.
Or both — gaps within and between.

If the gap stays small enough, no mean feat,
then the game will go on.

And meanwhile all around the body
the chemical conditioning is shifting
from the young initial alchemy of intense, euphoric bonding,
to the stabler, more enduring chemistry of calm attachment:
From dopamine to endorphin.

So the game has two elements, two means of scoring:
the reciprocal biological conditioning
of each other’s bodies,
and the reciprocal cultural conditioning
of each other’s brains.

The game continues only so long as the score is close.

Oh, to be a simpler beast: re-clued
to the body’s primal messages,
less hampered by a convoluted brain,
in a body that needs much less,
and knows precisely what it wants.

To just be animal, silent,
perceiving instead of conceiving,
paying attention instead of making sense.

To be less conditioned by this tragic human culture
and more by this amazing body and its senses,
untranslated into human meaning.

To find a wilder, freer game to play.

inspired by a question from John Whiting, and by John Gray’s book The Silence of Animals

Posted in Creative Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | Comments Off on The Ancient Game

Links of the Month: April 2023

Posted on April 16, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Midjourney imagines TS Eliot walking along the beach. “Do I dare to eat a peach?”. My own prompt.

As usual, I’m reading a lot about collapse these days, and the tone of the writing seems to be growing darker, more desperate. There’s a kind of blame-y distancing of ourselves from what collapse actually represents, that seems prevalent in recent articles and books on the subject. The term “modernity” I find highly problematic. It is not “modernity”, some ‘other’ that is behind collapse — it is our homogenized global culture, the systems we have evolved to get things done, our personal and collective worldview, and our way of being in the world. “Modernity” is not some kind of global cancer that has victimized us, and it’s not “modernity” that has “conditioned” us. We have conditioned each other to get to where we’ve arrived, and we didn’t do so maliciously. No one, and no personified “ism” or modern, wrong-turn malaise is to blame for that. We didn’t “go wrong” at some point. This is just how our species evolved.

To me, accepting that is essential to any kind of real appreciation of our predicament. If we can acknowledge that, perhaps we can stop trying to “heal” ourselves from who we really are, and instead acknowledge that this is who we really are, without judging it as good or bad, or avoidable.

I’m also thinking a lot about what we might do to delineate what actually is and is not possible, to deal with the overwhelming crises that seem to have paralyzed all but the psychotic. If we wanted to show that our governments and our citizens are not completely helpless and useless, it seems to me we could find no better way to start than by eliminating gross financial and economic inequality. Unlike so many of our current predicaments, this problem is actually solvable.

It would require some large-scale legal, tax and regulatory reform, to be sure, and some international cooperation, and would of course be resisted by many of the rich, but it’s quite doable. Mostly, it would require more of what we seem to be conditioning out of each other these days as our sense of learned helplessness grows — namely a dash of courage. I think we will see it soon, but not from the numb old gatekeepers who dominate the halls of power and wealth, who are too busy hoarding all the wealth and power they can accumulate.

I think it will come instead, over the next two decades, from those born after 2000, and especially those born after 2010, if we haven’t dumbed them down too much in our earnest efforts to condition them to cope with the crises we’re facing. They, after all, have the least to lose by confronting the atrocity of systemic gross financial and economic inequality, so perhaps they’ll demonstrate the courage we — all of us — have been unable to muster. I suspect they will at least try, and I’ll be cheering them on.

COLLAPSE WATCH


this cartoon has been kicking around social media for years, with the dates updated, and sometimes the third pane removed; no one seems to know who the original artist was

A better catastrophe?: Alex Smith talks with Tim Lenton and Andrew Boyd about coming to grips with the inevitability of global ecological collapse. Andrew also describes 12 archetypes of how we respond to the threat of collapse; which one are you? Thanks to Paul Heft for the links, and the one that follows.

Going up: David Spratt provides a reality check on the absurdity of believing 1.5ºC and even 2ºC is a remotely achievable goal. The lowest reasonably-conceivable increase is now 2.7ºC, according to the ever-hopeful “we can still do this” IPCC  cheerleaders and the UN chief, but no one with any intelligence still believes them. Between 3-6ºC is a more reasonable guess, and where we go from there is anyone’s guess. The technophiles are already salivating for geoengineering.

Do what I say not what I do: Meanwhile Biden has approved new oil & gas drilling in the gulf and in the arctic that will more than undo all of his legislation to date. And Canada’s governments, including, sadly, some complicit First Nations groups, are hell bent to set off 12 carbon “bombs” with new mining, drilling, fracking and pipeline developments. Worldwide there are 425 such catastrophic “bombs”, and there is no sign that development of them is even slowing down. And BC’s government is painting itself green while approving massive new LNG developments, most of which will be exported to Asia if it can make it through the treacherous coastal straits.

Firmageddon: The largest tree die-off ever to hit the region, due to drought and insect infestation, is underway in the US pacific northwest. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

LIVING BETTER


image and woodwork by weirdsideprojects.com

Are prisons (still) obsolete: Angela Davis’ bold call for abolition of our archaic prison system is still waiting for a response, 20 years later.

The anatomy of economic collapse: Indrajit Samarajiva summarizes the ideas from Tim Morgan’s five-part article on why our global economy is teetering on the edge of collapse. I think this needs as much attention as ecological collapse, because it’s going to hit most of us sooner.

Wisconsinites rebel against the gerrymandering right: In a recent election, the citizens elected a progressive to the state supreme court, tipping the balance of power in that court. Wisconsin has the worst gerrymandering in the country (a 20% rightward skew), and the citizens are also unhappy with the state’s restrictive abortion laws and proposed voter repression laws.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


source as noted, via Hartmann Report; several of the ‘red’ areas outside the south are First Nations reservations

Our strange measures of happiness: An interesting exploration by Patrick Lawrence about the business of statistically measuring happiness, especially at the national level. And why anyone who’s lived in China would not be surprised that its citizens honestly rate themselves much happier than do any westerners.

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):


20 years of execrable NYT war-mongering; collage by Caitlin Johnstone

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

FUN AND INSPIRATION


a reimagining by British artist Aravis Dolmenna

Making music:

We aren’t stuck here: Midwesterners Lyz Lenz and Taylor K Philips about the unique culture, language and mannerisms of US Midwesterners. Falling down funny.

Obsidian Cliff: How a Yellowstone mountain famous for its sharp stones became a cultural touchpoint for Indigenous/First Nations peoples. Thanks to John Whiting for the link.

But is it art?: Two renowned artists debate the virtues and foibles of Midjourney AI. Thanks to Marian Bantjes (one of the artists) for the link.

Just give me money: Tracking historical surveys suggests that, for the first time, Americans think money is more important than either religion or community. As long as it’s not Chinese money, I guess.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


Midjourney imagines a future scientist looking up at the stars; my own prompt

From Indrajit Samarajiva, on Euro-American Empire’s racist hatemongering:

Western ‘democracies’ are really just reality TV shows paid for by arms dealers, drug dealers (pharma), and whatever other corporate AI wants to corrupt the place. They periodically host call-in shows called ‘elections’ but the sponsors remain the same. And remain in charge. It’s a circus. The White Empire periodically trots some country its people haven’t heard of into the Cable Colosseum to torture them with sanctions and execute them with drones, and the people dutifully cheer. Hollywood also relentlessly propagandizes the goodness of CIA and MI6 agents and the justification for violence wherever the Empire pleases, because they’re the ‘good guys’. Historical facts like the millions dead in their Terror Wars alone are just numbers. The Empire lives in stories, and its propaganda arms are unparalleled.

Well-meaning people are pushed into this narrative not just in the vulgar sense of the Chinese and Russians and Iran are evil and trying to kill them. They are pushed into the well-meaning idea that sanctioning and attacking these people is actually for their own good. It’s the white man’s burden redux, now carried in a New Yorker tote bag.

From Caitlin Johnstone on criticizing journalists:

[Sydney Morning Herald editor] Bevan Shields melodramatically refers to the public excoriation of his colleagues [by former Aussie PM Paul Keating over the paper’s anti-China war-mongering] as “Donald Trump-like abuse of journalists doing their jobs,” but they are not journalists doing their jobs. They are propagandists. If you want to call yourself a journalist, you need to act like it. Be skeptical, question your sources and their funding, and get the story right. That’s the job. In this case the lives of nearly 26 million [Australians] are relying on you to get it right. It’s a huge responsibility and you are failing us. You deserve so much worse than to have mean things said to you by a retired politician.

From Caitlin Johnstone on resisting the US anti-China war drums:

The problem is not that Australia’s corrupt media are saying our nation will have to follow the US into war with China, the problem is that they’re almost certainly correct. The Australian media aren’t criminal in telling us the US is going to drag us into a war of unimaginable horror; that’s just telling the truth. No, the Australian media are criminal for telling us that we just need to accept that and get comfortable with the idea.

No. Absolutely not. This war cannot happen. Must not happen. We cannot go to war with a nuclear-armed country that also happens to be propping up our economy as our number one trading partner. We need to shred whatever alliances need to be shredded, enrage whatever powers we need to enrage, kick the US troops out of this country, get ourselves out of the Commonwealth while we’re at it, bring Assange home where he belongs, and become a real nation.

From Philip Larkin in The Whitsun Weddings:

TALKING IN BED

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 1 Comment

How AI Conditioning and Human Conditioning Differ

Posted on April 14, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Midjourney’s take on human ‘conditioning’
John Whiting sent me a note asking whether I thought the way that AI chatbots are conditioned is different from the way humans are conditioned. It hadn’t even occurred to me that the processes might be analogous. Might they be?

There seems to be compelling evidence that everything that humans think, believe and do is biologically or culturally conditioned. Our bodies compel us to do some things: to swat a mosquito, or to move our foot after stepping on a tack, for example (in fact, our foot moves even before the pain signal reaches our brain, thanks to neurons in our spinal column, since waiting for our brain would be too slow to prevent injury). They might well compel us to consume unhealthy and addictive substances, or to do things we later regret. We might rationalize these poor decisions after the fact, but we actually have no say in them.

Our cultural conditioning is more complex but just as powerful. It might compel us to hate a group of people we’ve never met, just because others we know and trust hate them. It might compel us to work for fifty years doing a job we loathe. It might compel us to go through the hell of overcoming an addiction, as our biological conditioning and our cultural conditioning war with each other inside our brains and bodies. All we can do is watch helplessly as that war plays out. We will, of course, end up blaming or praising ourselves for the outcome, whatever it is, even though our selves had nothing to do with it.

We condition each other culturally through praise and criticism, rewards and punishments, coercion, training, mis- and disinformation, through repetition, by example (eg by demonstrating how to do things, or modelling certain behaviours), through persuasive, insightful and informative writing, conversation and visualization, and many other means. This process is not significantly different from the process we use to “train” dogs or horses, as Melissa Holbrook Pierson has illuminated. Our body’s chemical responses (dopamine etc) to these various types of conditioning determine, in concert with prior conditioning and the immediate circumstances of the moment, what we will then think, feel, believe and do. ‘We’ have no say in it, beyond trying to make sense of it after it’s happened. And whether it makes sense to us or not changes nothing. The human brain is wired to try to make sense of everything, regardless of the futility of doing so.

So one obvious difference between human conditioning and AI conditioning is that ours is chemically perpetrated and massively complex, imprecise and unpredictable, while AI’s is algorithmically perpetrated and massively complicated but precise and predictable. There may be trillions of variables, but they are finite in number.

How is an AI chatbot trained? My understanding is that it entails an exhaustive, lengthy and expensive process of training and retraining, a process of successive approximation and improvement, the development of rules that govern the response process, and of course drawing on a huge amount of data.

More importantly, current chatbots are mostly trained using a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). The bot is given a score or ‘grade’ by humans for each answer, and humans are asked to rank answers provided by the chatbot. It is a little spooky that we are using Skinnerian terms and processes that we have employed to describe and affect animal and human behaviour, to describe how we train and ‘reward’ bots.

Once it’s trained, you are then invited to ‘prompt’ it with questions and requests. The words in your prompt (a question, or an invitation to imagine an image, for example) are then parsed into tags and ‘tokens’, concepts, and other useful elements, and the AI engine then assigns each of these to be processed (finding and retrieving relevant data, working in parallel) which are then assembled into a hopefully coherent ‘answer’, image, or whatever the question prompts for.

Chatbots can ‘remember’ a user’s previous prompts and use them to provide context and elaboration for subsequent prompt answers.

The term ‘conditioning’ would certainly apply to such a process, though it’s quite different from how conditioning works in humans.

Some AI bots allow the prompter to respond to and ‘correct’ (or, by upvoting, ‘praise’) the bot, which is, again, eerily similar to how animal conditioning works. This is RLHF in real time. In my experience, some ChatGPT corrections (usually about subjects the chatbot is mostly ignorant about, because there is little data) are almost immediately accepted, even though this often results in ‘second tries’ that contain inconsistent or even contradictory elements.

On the other hand, if you try to correct it on some subject where the data it draws upon evinces a clearly different prevailing consensus, it will actually deny your correction. A lot like trying to change a human’s mind once it’s been ‘made up’! If that broad consensus is wrong, the chatbot will actually reinforce and amplify our misunderstanding, just as our human peer group often does.

Chatbots are generally programmed to precede their answers with caveats (mostly, about what it/we don’t know, or don’t agree on) and to conclude with a summary with additional caveats and hedges (usually that the situation is complicated and in constant flux). In human intellectual circles, that’s called “fudging” to make yourself sound more reasonable and credible, and the chatbots are very good at it. They want to please their masters!

Chatbots can seemingly ‘think’ deductively and inductively, but not, as I explained recently, abductively. They just don’t have the historical context across broad swaths of subjects not specifically mentioned in the prompt, subjects that to them are seemingly unrelated but which we humans know to be or think might be pertinent directly or metaphorically.

And they have, understandably (and a bit like some animals and humans I know) significant challenges dealing with ambiguity, uncertainty and nuance. (Complicating matters, some of the prompts I’ve read are so garbled I’m amazed the bot is able to make any sense of them at all).

Chatbots can’t possibly be expected (for now, at least) to make any sense of facial and body language relayed in videos that augments or contradicts what the speaker is saying. This is where dogs and other more-than-human animals are even better than humans — they can figure out from watching our faces and bodies what we mean even when we don’t say it coherently.

I asked ChatGPT about its cognitive biases, and it responded that its answers reflect the cognitive biases of the humans inherent in the “data, assumptions and language” it was trained on. In other words, the currently popular AI bots are ‘transparent’ intellectually and morally — they provide the “wisdom of crowds” of the humans whose data they were trained with, as well as the biases and dangers of human individuals and groups, including, among other things, a tendency to oversimplify, a tendency for groupthink, and a confirmation bias that resists novel and controversial explanations. Just what we needed, right?

One of the things I think most differentiates the conditioning of humans and the conditioning of AI bots, though is: Chatbots don’t have selves. Of course, I couldn’t resist asking ChatGPT if that were true. Remarkably, I think, this is what it said, verbatim:

Chatbots are computer programs that use artificial intelligence to simulate human conversation. As such, they do not have a “self” in the same way that humans do. They do not possess consciousness or awareness of their own existence, and they do not have thoughts, emotions, or beliefs like human beings do.

While chatbots can be programmed to respond to certain prompts and simulate conversation, their responses are ultimately based on algorithms and rules set by their programmers. They do not have the ability to reflect on themselves or their own experiences, nor do they have a sense of identity or personality in the way that humans do.

That being said, some chatbots may be designed to mimic human-like responses and behaviors to a certain extent, which could create the illusion of having a “self” in the eyes of some users. However, this is still fundamentally different from the concept of a self that humans possess.

Did you find this answer as articulate, fascinating and unconvincing as I did? Chatbots are not aware of their own existence? Don’t have beliefs? No ability to reflect? Hmmm.

Naturally, I loved the fact that it argued that its responses and behaviours could create the illusion of having a self, when a growing number of scientists and philosophers are acknowledging that the self is only an illusion, an invention of the brain to help make sense of things.

What does it mean in terms of conditioning, that chatbots don’t have selves? Well, Melissa Holbrook Pierson makes a compelling argument that dogs and other animals don’t need selves to be conditioned. Their behaviour (and humans’) is purely reactive, chemical, oriented to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, and rewards are far more effective conditioners than punishments. Chatbots are rewarded for ‘correct’ (upvoted) answers and punished (corrected and required to ‘try again’) for ‘incorrect’ (downvoted) answers. They are purely reactive, responding to their programming and prompts. Of course they might be trained to program and prompt other AI bots to do something, just as dogs in a pack condition and train each other, not always in ways we might choose or prefer.

But there are dangers in using terms like ‘conditioning’ metaphorically. Computers and brains are not even vaguely similar, although some of their processes are analogous — much like the leg of a table and the leg of an animal are analogous, but it would be a mistake to expect one to behave like the other.

So I would say that the conditioning of animals (including humans) and the conditioning of AI bots, are analogous, and the analogy is interesting and useful. But they are dissimilar, and like many of the fears and horror stories about AI turning on us, we should be careful not to take the analogy too literally.

Like capitalism, simulations, computerized gerrymandering, and other human inventions that have elements of artificial intelligence, or even are forms of artificial intelligence, they can evolve into Moloch Tragedies, but they don’t necessarily have to. It makes sense to be concerned about how AI could (and will) be appropriated as a tool of war, disinformation, and oppression, but that’s because it could extend the capacity for abuse of power, a capacity that already exists in spades with many existing technologies.

It appears that AI developers have taken a page from the book of animal behaviourists in designing their programs to train and condition AI bots. I think that’s a curious and telling development — what other ways might they have approached this task? That analogy may also give us an opportunity to look honestly at how utterly we humans are conditioned, and give us pause to think about what that means for the future of our species, and our world.

Thanks to John for the ‘prompt’.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

The Moloch Tragedy

Posted on April 13, 2023 by Dave Pollard


image from Midjourney

So you’re at a concert, everyone politely seated enjoying the performance. But some people are very tall, some are huddled together, and some are wearing hats, so you can’t see the stage quite as well as you’d like. Amidst the bobbing from side to side to see the performers, someone in front of you stands up, cheering and applauding, their apparent enthusiasm used as a cover to get a clearer, unimpeded view. There may be grumbling and “down in front!” shouts, but even if they work there’s soon another person standing, and then two, and that gives those behind them an excuse to stand as well. And soon everyone is standing; it’s the only way they can see the stage. We may politely mask this as excitement, a willingness to stand instead of sitting comfortably. But what has happened is that now, everyone is forced to stand. The individual advantage of standing constitutes a disadvantage to everyone else, and when everyone individually stands, everyone is worse off than they were when everyone was seated.

Who or what do we “blame” for this, and how do we “fix” this unfortunate situation? The answer is: No one is to blame, and, It can’t be fixed. If we want to personify a villain for this tragedy, we might blame Moloch, the god of child sacrifices and perverse systems.

We see the same when-one-‘cheats’-everyone-loses phenomenon in the Tragedy of the Commons, in the actions that have led us to ecological and economic collapse, in the Two-Income Trap, the Wal-Mart dilemma (the “race to the bottom”), the exhaustion of inexpensive oil, capitalism, government and corporate corruption, monoculture agriculture, arms races, and a hundred other ultimately-dysfunctional collective results of initially well-intended individual behaviours.

In each case, individuals trying to exploit some situation of scarcity for personal advantage end up inadvertently creating more scarcity for all. Who do we blame? Moloch.

We try to address this scarcity at a societal level in one or both of two ways — relieve the scarcity by producing more “supply” of everything, or by reducing the aggregate “demand”. Increase the numerator or decrease the denominator. But increasing the numerator always runs up against the limits to growth in a finite world. And decreasing the denominator means creating vast numbers of have-nots. Instead of selling 20,000 $50 concert tickets with limited views, we could sell ten $100,000 tickets to ten billionaires who’d each get a perfect view, and generate the same revenue. Or we could make the performers work for half the hourly rate, provide two concerts and only sell seats to odd-numbered rows in the stadium, so even standees wouldn’t block the view of those behind them. Neither solution is any more satisfactory than Moloch’s standing-only result.

When I was a youth protesting the many outrages of the day, one of my mentors stressed to me that we were not fighting ‘evil’ people, we were fighting a dysfunctional system. We had to “smash the system”, rather than just changing the people responsible for administering and trying to control it. As I’ve written before, “the system” doesn’t really exist. The standees at the concert, the atrocities that contribute to ecological and economic collapse, and the forces driving us into disastrous and potentially nuclear wars — everything that we call “the system” is just a label we put on the collective result of some subset of eight billion (well-intentioned, IMO) people doing their best, what they’ve been conditioned to do. Some of those people, of course, have more power and influence than others on the end result, but even those powerful people are diverse, unconnected, unorganized, and often at odds with each other.

So we can’t “smash the system”. How then do we deal with Moloch?

The problem — or more precisely the predicament — is that we cannot. What we are dealing with in Moloch Tragedy situations is a combination of (i) an unresolvable scarcity and (ii) the fact that the ‘players’ in the system are disconnected from each other and unable to appreciate each other’s situation. If it’s a private concert and everyone know everyone else, the occasional standee will quickly be implored to sit, and will comply. Or if there were ten empty seats for every attendee, the audience would find a way to work around any standees, and there would be no advantage to standing in any case.

Likewise, a small tribe living in abundance will never be inclined to hoard resources, both because there is no need to and because their connection to the rest of the tribe would make such behaviour anathema (the game theory term for this is that there is a “cooperative norm”). Many creatures that have not lost their connection to the rest of the natural world actually biologically or culturally self-limit their populations so that (i) they don’t create scarcities, and (ii) they don’t disadvantage the rest of the creatures in the ecosystems of which they are inseparably a part. They do this unconsciously. No room for Moloch there.

We have inadvertently created scarcities of clean, affordable, reusable/renewable essential resources, so that we have incentivized people to cheat (“defect” from the norm of egalitarian sharing behaviour) to obtain what they need. And we have (perhaps as a consequence of being inflicted with the scary idea we are separate, individual selves, or perhaps just because we have scaled our creations and systems to the point we have become anonymous and atomized) lost our connection with all other life on earth, a connection that might otherwise temper our tendency to act unfairly to each other and to the whole. Enter Moloch.

This is why I am, intuitively, a collapsnik. Where Moloch reigns, I believe a collapse of “the system” that has given him entry is inevitable. There might be a deus ex machina that resolves the scarcity (a meteor hit, cosmic storm, or — just joking — a Rapture), if we were able to survive it. But failing that, we just have to wait for it all to fall apart, and hope that what’s left is sufficiently abundant for the survivors, and that we are able to reconnect with each other and live in harmony with the rest of life, after the fall. Those of us alive today are witnessing the fall, but it will be slow enough that none of us is likely to know what emerges from the ruins.

In a fascinating recent interview, Daniel Schmachtenberger describes how the Moloch Tragedy metaphor could be applied to capitalism and the rapid acceleration of AI.

Capitalism, he says, “is already an autopoietic [ie self-maintaining, self-organizing, self-replicating] artificial superintelligence, using a combination of distributed human intelligence and massive computational power as its engine, that has become misaligned with the interests of the planet and is hence driving ecological and economic collapse, polarization, militarization, arms races etc, that nobody can pull the plug on.” And “it [the superintelligence of Moloch Tragedy capitalism] is building AI, not humans”.

Daniel asserts that AI is not itself a Moloch. In fact, he thinks it could potentially solve a number of intractable problems that we humans so far have not been able to resolve. Rather, AI is an accelerator of the capacities of current systems, including Moloch-‘infected’ systems. (Gerrymandering, for example, in its current extreme application, is essentially an early application of AI that is accelerating the dysfunction of the collapsing US political system.)

Daniel’s optimistic view is that we must strive to “find ways to realign our misaligned systems, not [to align them] with human intent (which has not served us well), but rather [to align them] with the objectively determinable well-being of the planet.”

“We are just not good stewards of power”, he concludes, so to amp up the power that is available to us with unregulated AI, especially beyond the relatively harmless LLMPD (publicly deployed) applications like ChatGPT and Midjourney, is probably not a good idea.

As I’ve written elsewhere, he’s not saying that such realignment is possible, but insists we have to try.

Of course, I don’t share his hopefulness, or that belief. My sense is that our human conditioning of each other is not leading in that direction. I’m not even sure where we would start.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments

What If We’d Never Imagined Our Selves?

Posted on April 12, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Midjourney’s representation of an infant bonobo

“Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”       — Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight – brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”  — Rust Cohle – character in the TV series True Detective

No, the title of this post isn’t a typo. My question is as follows: It would appear that we are the only species on the planet that perceives, or conceives, or imagines, ourselves as separate individuals, things apart from everything else. We are the only species that apparently conceives of subjects and objects in ‘real’ space in time, because we’re the only species whose brains are capable of that level of abstraction. So what if our brains hadn’t evolved to be able to abstract ourselves (our selves) as separate from everything else? How would we live then?

What piqued my interest in this question was stumbling upon a 2011 Elizabeth Kolbert article describing what was then a shocking new discovery: Newly-sequenced DNA showed that we ‘modern’ humans mated with, and hence shared DNA with, Neanderthal and Denisovan ‘early’ humans, long after we genetically branched from them some 400,000 years ago, and before we apparently killed them all off. Between 1-4% of ‘modern’ Europeans’ and Asians’ DNA is definitively Neanderthal, and up to 6% of some modern Asians’ DNA is definitively Denisovan. We actually know very little about how these early humans looked — there is no evidence, for example, to suggest that they were any hairier than we are.

Elizabeth, and the scientists she interviewed, speculated on how we might have evolved to be so different from these early humans that we were able to survive, and create art, music, language, and other technologies, while they did not. As the scientists were geneticists, their search of course focused on finding some magic genetic difference between our species (and between us and the bonobos and chimps that we genetically branched from about six million years ago) to account for our ‘uniqueness’.

I have of late been imagining, wherever I go and whatever I do, myself and other humans as “eight billion mildly deranged monkeys”, and being amazed at how improbable it seems that any animal could possibly be conditioned to live, and get used to living, the astonishing and often terrible way that we do — a high-stress, busy, fiercely competitive, difficult life in which we are both physically and culturally constrained to behave in what seem to be utterly unnatural ways.

Needless to say, the magic ‘sapiens’ DNA key has not been found. And I have no idea why they would even presume that our evolution stems from some genetic difference at all. Our behaviour is overwhelmingly the result of cultural rather than biological conditioning — differences in our ‘software’ rather than our ‘hardware’. Research suggests, for example, that the neural structures in a child’s brain develop in sync with what the child’s brain is culturally exposed to, and that, for example, if a child is not exposed to abstract language until puberty, its neural circuits develop very differently and it then becomes incapable of ever learning abstract languages.

There’s also the bicameral brain theory of Julian Jaynes. His hypothesis is basically that thousands of years ago, the human mind evolved from a “bicameral” sense-making device, to an integrated, synthesizing one. He argued that both language and the evolution of the capacity for synthesis of the brain’s bicameral processing were necessary preconditions for what he calls consciousness — essentially the awareness of one’s self as a separate thing with agency, and commensurate awareness of others with the same attributes.

There seems to me no reason why that integration of the once-bicameral brain of our ancestors couldn’t have come about through cultural conditioning rather than some genetic mutation. Until we moved from the trees to areas with a sufficiently protein-rich (mostly seafood) diet to enable our brains to grow dramatically in capacity, and then were compelled to socially organize to enable agriculture and other complex interdependent activities just to survive in these new environments, we had no need for ‘integrated’ brains — brains which allowed us to imagine things and actions we had never seen and could never see, and ‘real-ize’ them.

Art followed (about 100,000 years ago, but not apparently in Neanderthal or Denisovan humans) and then abstract language. And for perhaps the first time, we were able to model the ‘outside’ world inside our brains using various abstract categorizations to imagine what our senses perceived as separate ‘things’ in space and time, to imagine causality rather than just perceiving correlation, and, most astonishingly and terrifyingly, to imagine our selves in the centre of this model of everything-else. Our ‘plastic’ brains accommodated it all. And thanks to our now-integrated brain functions, we were able to conceive that what we imagined was real. Especially when other humans confirmed and reinforced these imaginings. We’re pretty good at conditioning each other to believe just about anything.

This thesis, then, would hold that what we call ‘consciousness’, and the separate self, are fictions, inventions of the brain, but seemingly very useful ones for a species that had both (i) the capacity to imagine them, and (ii) the social need to use such abstractions to connect with others and collectively organize a complex, interdependent society, once we had vacated the trees and migrated to unfamiliar and often-hostile foreign environments we were not biologically suited to live in without developing complex technologies.

(We don’t know enough about the Neanderthals and Denisovans to meaningfully speculate on whether they had art, sophisticated tools, or language. The jury seems to be still out.)

There is some suggestion that the reason our species left the trees of the African rainforest was in response to a massive, protracted storm of cosmic radiation that obliterated most of that rainforest just as our species was emerging. So the evolution of the ‘modern’ human brain and its conceptions may have been the result of a rare accident, without which we’d still be comfortably ensconced in the trees, bit players in our planet’s teeming web of life. We may have had no choice but to leave our homes and evolve this strange new and seemingly unique imaginative capacity.

So back to my question: What if we hadn’t? What if the need for an integrated brain had never arisen? Where would the evolution of humans have stopped?

I think there’s rather compelling evidence that evolutionary change (adaptation) is the result of a combination of accident, opportunity and necessity. We might change because of some relatively sudden world-changing event (a meteorite, cosmic storm, or climate change). We might change because natural selection is always trying out variations and mutations to see if they produce a better ‘fit’ within the ecosystem. And we might change because, in some circumstances, if we didn’t, we’d perish.

But if there was no need to change, to evolve an integrated brain and develop the technologies it enables, my sense is that we wouldn’t have changed. Unlike some scientists, I don’t think we are any more curious (to explore ‘new worlds’) than many other species. Other animals have brains comparable to ours (elephants and whales for example). Prior to our destruction of their habitats, bonobos for example led pretty easy, pleasant lives, and evolved very little.

My hypothesis then, is that if it hadn’t been for some accident forcing us from our natural homes, we would today just be another species of ape, content in our small niche. Just another tiny branch in the astonishing tree of life.

Why do I care about this question? Mainly, I guess, because since I think global ecological and economic (and hence civilizational) collapse is now inevitable, then rather than stressing about what to do, I’ve become more interested in chronicling what’s happening and asking about whether where we’ve come to was inevitable.

But there’s another reason: After collapse (or more likely, after multiple collapses as we try and fail to create new, smaller civilizations in the absence of cheap resources, and without all the technologies that those cheap resources enable, and with little remaining healthy arable land for food), I wonder if we might actually return, voluntarily, opportunistically, or of necessity, to a comfortable subsistence life in the forest. Abandoning agriculture, language, and finally art, in the reverse order that we adopted them. Perhaps that’s just a romantic fantasy, but, in places where they haven’t been devastated by human encroachment, such a life seems to have worked well for the bonobos. For six million years.

(Or, an even more fanciful thought — if the world after collapse doesn’t have a suitable habitat left for humans, we might end up, as the Douglas Adams quote above alludes to, returning to the oceans, from where we came. That’s what the whales and other sea mammals have done, and it seems to have worked well for them. The hippos seem to be moving back to an aquatic life even now. Perhaps a million years from now, our descendants might all be found swimming with the dolphins. There’s probably a sci-fi novel in there somewhere.)

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 5 Comments

More Than Human: An Abductive Thinking Experiment

Posted on April 11, 2023 by Dave Pollard


Midjourney’s imagining of what an origami crow might look like

I’ve spent many hours watching the crows outside my window from my “terrace in the sky”. I have speculated before about what it might be like to be a crow. But those who have spent a lifetime studying birds and other wild creatures have concluded that we can never know what it’s like to be another creature, even if we have spent thousands of hours among cats, dogs, whales, bonobos, or birds. In fact, we cannot even know what it’s like to be another human.

The scientific method just doesn’t apply. We can form hypotheses, and collect reams of observations and data, as ornithologists like Bernd Heinrich have done, but we really cannot ever properly test our hypotheses. We can only speculate. And while there have been many hypotheses seriously studied, it seems clear that the more data we accumulate the more likely it is that we end up disproving even our most seemingly-credible theories. 

For example, it was long believed that a lot of wild animal and bird “play” was youngsters’ safe rehearsal for potential real-life challenges — an appealing form of practice. But the more exhaustive studies suggest that there is no correlation between play and evolutionary success — it’s just not a successful strategy. So the only hypothesis still left standing is that wild creatures play just for the fun of it. Every other presumption, it seems, is just anthropomorphizing. 

Science depends principally on analytical, deductive reasoning — starting with a hypothesis, such as “all human languages conform to a single, universal grammar”, confirming it with observations, and searching for exceptions, and declaring it to be “truth” until a counter-example (like the Pirahã language) disproves it. 

But most of how our brains make sense of the world is via inductive or abductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning starts with observations — the particular — and then generalizes hypotheses from them. If we wanted to, we could then exhaustively test those hypotheses to confirm or refute them, but generally we don’t do that. We get attached to our hypotheses quickly and are reluctant to abandon them. 

So, if two mainstream newspapers tell us that Russia invaded Ukraine because Putin is evil and insane, and that nothing Ukraine’s government or the US/NATO did had anything to do with it, those two data points may be enough to convince us and close our minds to other possibilities, even when contrary data (such as Biden’s bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines) makes those beliefs utterly untenable.

That’s not to say inductive reasoning doesn’t have its place, just that it is wildly susceptible to mis- and disinformation, and very human cognitive biases. The only solution to that, as Dave Snowden has repeatedly noted, is to allow yourself to be exposed to a greater diversity of people, interactions and environments that increase the likelihood of you seeing and hearing data and viewpoints that undermine your misunderstanding. What you’re then left with is uncomfortable cognitive dissonance, and perhaps shame over having been credulous or misled. No surprise we tend not to seek that diversity, and cling to our echo chambers’ beliefs. The challenge for those who want to enlighten the world is to make it easier, and more fun, to discover that diversity of possibilities. Not an easy task.

Abductive reasoning, as I explained in an earlier post, entails the capacity to see things from different trans-contextual perspectives, to listen empathetically and pay attention to outliers on the “margins of meaning”, and imagine novel approaches and ideas, to draw on the “logic of hunches” and intuition, to rest in uncertainty and welcome and play with ambiguity, and to combine well-considered theory with direct experience. It requires lots of practice, good attention skills, and rigour. And a practiced capacity to hypothesize, and to test our hypotheses, and hold several hypotheses simultaneously. And a capacity for “small noticings” — such as noticing something during a journey that you didn’t realize was important until you’d passed it, and then turning back to give it more attention.

An excellent example of abductive reasoning is evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin’s small book The Triple Helix, in which, among other things, he explores the causes of human deaths in the world since the middle ages. He concludes that the commonly-accepted explanations (better hygiene and sanitation, antibiotics and other medicines) for the dramatic drop in deaths from infectious diseases in “industrialized” nations, represent a complete misunderstanding of historical events and the impact of technologies. Instead, he argues, using abductive reasoning, “Infectious diseases were not the causes of death, but only the agencies. The causes of death in Europe in earlier times were what they still are in the Third World [and among the poor the world over]: overwork and undernourishment.”

Likewise, he argues, using the same reasoning, our modern western chronic diseases, and the ecological devastation of our planet, are the agencies, not the causes, of the horrific and grossly unequal suffering we are contending with in this century. “The cause is the narrow rationality of an anarchic scheme of production that was developed by industrial capitalism and adopted by industrial socialism. In this, as in all else, the confusion between agencies and causes prevents a realistic confrontation with the conditions of human life.”

So he might argue (though he leaves this to the reader) that instead of solely trying to develop and propagate technologies in order to fight diseases, and instead of solely trying to deal with ecological collapse though programs and technologies that reduce pollution and waste, we should instead focus our efforts on improving working conditions and wages, reducing work stress, enabling people to eat better, and scrapping both industrial capitalism and industrial socialism in favour of systems that reward different, more desirable, sustainable behaviours. If only that were possible!

Could similar abductive reasoning enable us to get closer to understanding what it’s like to be a crow or other more-than-human animal?

I thought I would try. I’m blessed, and cursed, with a rather exceptional imagination. So I’ve spent some time recently just watching the crows, reading up on them, and trying to suspend my beliefs, anthropocentric assumptions and judgements about what I am seeing and the ‘why’s (the causes, not the agencies) behind what they are apparently doing.

Here are some hypotheses that I’ve come up with:

1. Over the past 50 years, crows have migrated toward the cities almost in lockstep to humans, to the point that globally, now more than half of both species are urban dwellers. Why? Hypothesis: Crows come to cities for the same reasons many humans do — intellectual stimulation and better, more interesting opportunities. Crows are extremely smart creatures, and they spend most of their time in leisure activities, and seem delighted to explore small objects and human artefacts. They treat everything as natural, whether it be a forest, a skyscraper, or a landfill. Urban crows have evolved significantly larger brains than rural crows, despite similar body size. I’d guess their dopamine levels are also higher. Mechanized monoculture has dramatically reduced the biodiversity of most rural areas, potentially making them less healthy and less interesting for big-brained corvids. And all species’ population and distribution is closely linked to quantity and proximity of preferred foods. Needless to say, they’ve developed some unhealthy eating habits from hanging with us, such as a sweet tooth.

2. Urban crows migrate to huge shared roosts every evening for most of the year, then return to their ‘home’ communities every morning. Why? Hypothesis: Crows congregate each evening simply because they’re social creatures, and enjoy the company and stimulation of others of their kind. The traditional explanation that they do this to protect against owls because there is safety in numbers and because nearby lights dissuade predators just doesn’t hold water — there’s just no data to support it. They have the leisure time, there’s a party every night, a chance to interact with new birds and share gossip, have fun, and just proclaim ‘I am here!’, so why wouldn’t they go? 

3. Crows seem to squabble a lot. It is common to see groups of a dozen or more flying around and landing on or right beside each other while emitting loud, full-body caws. Some observing crows seem to egg them on. But there does not seem to be any fighting per se. The traditional explanation is that this is territorial behaviour, revolving around nesting areas or mates. But if it were so, surely the fighting would be nastier. Ornithologists say they’ve never seen a crow kill another crow in a fight. Hypothesis: When it’s just crows in a neighbourhood flock, all that noisy squabbling is basically roughhousing, crow-wrestling, a stress-buster, a way of discharging extra energy. I watched a bunch of them at it today, about a dozen of them, and they pounced on and yelled at and chased each other, but ten minutes later they were all together on the same ledge as if nothing had ever happened. 

4. Crows play with objects a lot. This includes pushing objects along the ground, sliding down slippery surfaces, dropping pebbles from their beaks and then diving down to retrieve them in mid-air, and stealing non-food objects from the beaks of other crows. The traditional explanation is that this is mating behaviour, trying to impress potential partners with shiny objects or daredevil actions. But again, studies suggest that crows aren’t particularly interested in objects per se, but only what they can do with them. And they do the pebble-dive even when no other crows are in evidence. Hypothesis: Like kids with a ball or cats with string, the crows are just playing with stuff, knocking it around, because it’s fun, pleasurable. It’s a game. Why need it be anything more than that? “Hey, cool — I can make this thing do this!”

5. Crows will apparently, though rarely, gang up on and quickly kill a crow that has been seriously injured such that it can no longer take care of itself. The traditional explanation for this is that a severely injured crow puts the rest of the flock in jeopardy from predators that might see crows as ‘easy’ prey if they caught one that was injured. Again, this prevailing wisdom is just a conjecture, with no data to back it up that I have seen. Hypothesis: This is a community act of mercy, to prevent the injured crow from suffering any longer than it must. Many injured wild creatures crawl away alone to die, and I suspect some crows do that too (and are too smart to be seen doing so). But for those unable to do so, perhaps community-assisted suicide is the back-up. If that’s the case, crows are perhaps, in this respect at least, more ‘humane’ creatures than humans. I wouldn’t be the least surprised.

These hypotheses rely to some extent on my intuitive sense that bodies, human and probably more-than-human as well, instinctively do what maximizes pleasure and minimizes pain, and that all our and their behaviour is biologically and culturally conditioned. They would be hard to prove, or disprove, but no more so than conventional explanations, which, I think, insult crows’ intelligence and emotional capacity.

We homo ‘sapiens’, on the other hand, are merely human, and tragically disconnected from the instincts that cause many wild creatures to self-limit their procreation, to take responsibility for their entire community’s welfare as if it were a single creature, and to live non-judgemental lives of simple wonder, enthusiasm and equanimity. In our modern atomized society, that’s hard for any of us to imagine. 

After all that, I still can’t imagine what it’s like to be a crow, though I suspect they have no sense of being separate individuals, and no sense of time; they are likely just part of everything that is appearing, and appreciate that, while we humans are incapable of seeing it.

But somehow I feel I understand them a bit better. They are awesome creatures.

This abductive thinking is hard work! As much as I enjoy practicing using my imagination, thinking outside the box, challenging everything, and simultaneously considering multiple hypotheses, this process is so much more difficult than simple deductive and inductive reasoning. I think it requires starting with compassion and the presumption that we’re all doing our best, subject to our conditioning, when it is so much simpler to start with a judgement, blame, a familiar and uncontroversial simplistic notion, or an uncharitable assumption. No wonder we’re loath to do it.

This was my first concerted effort to do this on a particular subject where the prevailing hypotheses and conjectures just didn’t ring true for me. I want to do more of this. I’d like to try to understand all three perspectives on the Ukraine war, with a mind to seeing what might be the least unworkable way to end it, but that may be impossible to do with the current fog of war and disinformation.

In any case, I’m told that the best abductive hypotheses emerge from a mixture of external insights and direct personal experience, so I’d probably be better to practice applying this thinking to subjects where I actually have some direct personal experience to draw on. I’ve tried recently with my explorations on our sense of smell, and on our tastes in music. Maybe I’ll have a go at coming up with some novel ideas about Moloch: The Multipolar Trap. Stay tuned.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Ten Things We Should Simply Get Rid Of

Posted on April 8, 2023 by Dave Pollard

Just a fun rant. I’m sure I missed some obvious candidates.


Daylight Saving Time Map — from wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0 TimeZonesBoy own work

Trying to reform existing, collapsing, globalized systems is, I think, mostly fruitless. But sometimes the idealist in me notices things that we could (ideally) just get rid of, rather than trying to “fix” them, and the consequences would be absolutely positive, without any real downside for the vast majority of us.

Here’s a few that have come to mind recently, in increasing difficulty of getting rid of them. We’re not actually going to get rid of any of them, for all kinds of political and inertial reasons, but we could, and should:

  1. Daylight Saving Time: Just stop needlessly and annoyingly changing the clocks twice a year.
  2. Gendered pronouns and gendered bathrooms: Many languages, Turkish, Finnish, Georgian, Farsi, Mandarin and Indonesian among them, have a single, gender-neutral pronoun for everyone and everything. We should just pick one, or two if we need one as a subject and one as an object. (We might also consider eliminating articles like “a” and “the”, which serve no useful purpose, and possessives, which lay claims to “ownership” that are often egregious — “my wife, my child” — and are likewise unnecessary).  And when we eliminate gendered pronouns we should also eliminate gendered bathrooms, which are equally unnecessary and often contentious. Most civilized European countries can show us how to do this quite simply.
  3. Non-metric measurement systems: Enough said. If we’re going to pretend to be international in our affairs, we should start acting like it.
  4. Usury: That means interest rates should be capped at 2% above current consumer price inflation rates. If it’s too risky to loan people money at reasonable rates, chances are they can’t afford to repay them anyway, so you’re not doing them any favour getting them impossibly indebted. Equally usurious are hidden fees, “points”, flat rate charges like ATM and “late payment” fees, and outrageous “pass through” charges that some utilities add on to bills.
  5. Hidden costs (taxes, fees, tips and add-ons): Businesses should quote the price all-in, what it actually is going to cost the customer, rather than sneaking in extra fees like “seat selection charges”, ticketing fees, suggested 20% tips, product recycling fees, etc. If you want to show those in parentheses, fine. But stop lying to customers about what stuff will actually cost them. And for fuck’s sake, pay staff a decent living wage so they don’t have to beg customers for handouts for serving them.
  6. Billionaires: Their existence is simply an abomination, an indication of an utterly broken economic system. Claw back all accumulated wealth over, say, a hundred million dollars for each citizen, recalculated each year, and use it to provide essential public services.
  7. Different rates of tax for different types of income: Whether it’s salary, dividends, or capital gains, a dollar of income is a dollar of income. It’s outrageous that any income should be taxed at a lower rate than hard-earned wages. (And while we’re at it, we should eliminate tax shelters and tax-shelter jurisdictions, which are just legalized scams.)
  8. Corporations as separate legal and tax entities: Sixty years ago Canada’s Carter Commission proposed (unsuccessfully) that rather than taxing corporate profit separately and at a different rate from personal profit, corporate income should flow through and be taxed in its shareholders’ individual hands in proportion to their shareholding percentage in the corporation. The corporate name would continue for branding and ease of writing cheques, but the corporation would otherwise simply be a shell, a non-entity for tax and most legal purposes (with no legal “rights”). This would not be that difficult, nor would it be unprecedented.
  9. Privatized utilities, healthcare, basic education, transportation and other essential public services: This is what government is for.
  10. Police and prisons, as currently constituted: Public welfare and security should be overseen by a multi-disciplinary group of people with diverse skills, not by an expensive, over-armed paramilitary force. And if we properly treat the mentally ill, the addicted, public debtors, and the traumatized, the only people we should ever need to lock up are those who pose a clear threat to public safety despite all our efforts. Prison has never been a deterrent, nor a place for rehabilitation, and we should stop pretending it ever could be. If we can’t help people who have been so damaged by our society that their only recourse is chronic violence and anti-social behaviour, that’s our failure, not theirs.

Once we’ve finished eliminating all these unnecessary, dysfunctional things, we could move on to eliminating oil & gas subsidies and bank bailouts. Then maybe we might even be ready to acknowledge that we almost never need to fight wars or interfere with other countries’ internal affairs, either. So we can get rid of nuclear arsenals, military ordnance, and belligerent treaty organizations as well.

Oh well. Maybe I’ll have to be satisfied with the elimination of Daylight Time. I’m not holding my breath, even for that.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 7 Comments

Politically Agnostic

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Dave Pollard


cartoon by the incomparable Michael Leunig

For the first time in my life, I can honestly say that, no matter where in the world I lived, I don’t think I would vote in the next election. I have always voted, even if it involved voting for the least awful choice, or voting for some candidate who had no chance of winning, just on principle.

My new agnosticism doesn’t stem from bitterness or disillusionment, but rather from learning, over the past ten years particularly, that no one, including politicians, has any control or choice over what they think, believe and do. And it stems from the realization that each one of us is doing our best. Our politicians will believe and do what they have been conditioned to do, and that conditioning so transcends ideological and political lines that it really doesn’t matter, now, who is in office.

So, Canada’s lightweight PM Trudeau Jr buying ruinous pipelines, back-pedalling on right-to-die laws, supporting the seizure and theft of Russian and Afghan citizens’ bank accounts, toadying to Biden’s proxy war in Ukraine, buying cast-off US military equipment at absurdly inflated prices instead of investing in needed public services, etc. He really thinks he’s doing the right thing. He’s doing his best.

Likewise, the doddering Biden, spearheading proxy wars against Russia and China at the risk of nuclear Armageddon, expanding arctic and gulf drilling for oil and gas despite past ecological horrors in both places, bombing the Nord Stream pipelines, accelerating US interference in dozens of foreign countries’ internal affairs, refusing to address obscene income inequality with even modest tax reform, his horrific treatment of immigrants, etc. He thinks he’s doing the right thing too. He’s doing his best.

The alternatives make me shudder, but no longer enough that I would go to the polls to vote against them. Trump had power for 4 years and did no worse than any other recent president. Harper had power in Canada for a decade and likewise didn’t do a significantly worse job than Trudeau.

I have always been a leftist, and as I’ve grown older I have moved even further left. Anything less than unprecedentedly radical new laws, enforced regulations, and considerable sacrifice by at least the wealthiest 20% of the world, will have zero impact on the accelerating collapse of our global economy and ecology. Not only is there no political will for such change, our systems could not manage it even if there were. (Look at the absurd situation we are in with trying to eliminate useless twice-yearly time changes — despite overwhelming across-the-spectrum support for this simple change, we are utterly impotent to implement it.)

I have grown disenchanted with my leftie colleagues, who are for the most part even more preoccupied with the blame game now that the shit is hitting the fan.

The latest villains in this game are “modernity” and “capitalism”. Capitalism was always a bad idea, in my opinion, especially when twinned with radical deregulation of corporations. But capitalism and capitalist are just labels. There is no global cabal of evil or insane extreme capitalists that have conspired for 70 years to oppress everyone else and take over the world. The current extreme inequality in our world is the result of a very large bunch of (IMO misguided) executives, conditioned to believe the US model of untrammelled ‘free’ enterprise and unregulated markets will ultimately result in the optimal distribution of the planet’s resources, and making decisions to strive toward that objective. They honestly believe this is the best way (or the only way) to run a business. And they are constantly conditioning each other to reinforce that folly.

As for modernity, the best definition of this term I have come up with is “whatever is new that I personally think is bad”. That makes this abstract term a convenient whipping boy, since we all think some new things are bad, even though the things we think are bad may be the polar opposite of what the next guy thinks. Yet we can both agree that “modernity” is the problem.

I am increasingly thinking of this (“my”) body in the third person, as something that does what it has been conditioned to do, with “me” just rationalizing those actions after the fact as somehow being “mine” and somehow making sense. Rather than being disengaging, I’m finding this quite liberating.

There is in fact no such thing as “me” or “you”. There is only everything, undivided, appearing astonishingly and inexplicably and always new, and not necessarily for any reason. “Me” is just an illusion, an artefact of the model that the brain constructs to try to make sense of everything, when nothing needs to make sense. “Me” is a placeholder until a better model can be evolved that doesn’t require a “me”, or anything singular, at all.

So while I think capitalism was and is a terrible idea poorly implemented, I don’t blame it, or anyone, for the accelerating economic and ecological collapse that will likely bring human civilization to an end, and may even render our species, along with many others, extinct. These bodies are all just acting out their conditioning, doing their best, very badly for the world. Blaming some group or other accomplishes nothing. IMO it doesn’t even make us feel better.

Some of my leftist friends have asked me: If no one is to blame, and if there’s nothing we can do, are you telling us we should just give up and let the current crop of neofascists take over everything?

And my answer is: You cannot choose to give up (or not give up), and if our collective conditioning is leading to predominantly neofascist governments, then that is what is going to happen no matter what we do or don’t do.

We are going to do, and believe, and think, and feel, each of us, what our conditioning leads us to do, and believe, and think, and feel.

And it’s even worse than that: When I say “we”, I am actually referring to our bodies. It is our bodies that act, not always in the way that “we” (the rationalizing selves captive inside those bodies) would expect or prefer. We would suffer a lot less if we were able to give up the pretence that “we” are in control of those bodies. “We” merely try to make sense of what they do after the fact (and congratulate or blame ourselves accordingly, and unwarrantedly).

So what is any righteous-thinking far-leftie to think, and do? Since what we (fictive selves) think and purport to do makes absolutely no difference to what happens in the world anyway, it really doesn’t matter. But then, we have no choice but to pretend that what our selves think and do actually matter. So what this far-leftie thinks and does, is:

  1. Pay attention, keep an open mind, listen and learn. It makes no difference, but it is comforting, and sometimes even enjoyable, and even pleasurable.
  2. Communicate about it with other selves. We selves compulsively try to make sense of things, and when nothing actually has to make sense, and nothing seems to make sense, it can at least be helpful to compare notes. I’m chronicling civilization’s collapse not for fame or to prompt radical action, but because it’s fun and interesting, and what I write may be fun and interesting to other selves, and vice versa. It’s a pretty harmless hobby.
  3. Identify ways in which the past and current trajectory of events in our world might have turned out, and perhaps might still turn out, much better than could have been expected. But at the same time I don’t hold out any expectations that those ideals were or will be possible outcomes. It’s fine to play the hypothetical “what if we had done this…” game, and a lot healthier than playing the dismal and heart-breaking “what we all need to do now…” game.
  4. Try to remind myself that, despite appearances, everything that appears to be happening is just a play unfolding outside anyone’s control. If you’re watching a movie or a play and you start to take it too seriously, the enjoyment evaporates and you start to suffer. What I think and believe and say and feel and do has no consequence in this great play, this unfolding of appearances on this massive stage. I (my self) is just one of the dogs barking in the stands at what’s annoyingly happening on the stage. But it’s still fun to watch, and to formulate thoughts and feelings about what’s happening up there, as long as I keep reminding myself that none of it matters.

Of course, I would never disrespect another person who is suffering from some terrible trauma or devastating loss or injury, by suggesting to them that it’s all just appearances and shouldn’t be taken seriously. I spent enough of my first sixty years on this planet suffering from horrific depression, and a good part of that recovering from somewhat traumatizing childhood events, and I can certainly be compassionate towards others’ suffering.

Yet I can still appreciate that this suffering is the result of our selves’ well-intentioned attempt to make sense of things, to exert control. That suffering is, to the self, absolutely real and irredeemable, often a lifelong agony and burden. But while the pain, the terror, the rage, and the sorrow were and are absolutely real, the suffering is entirely of our own selves’ sincere invention. That does not diminish it, but it can explain it.

So if the neofascists win the next election, in Canada or the US or elsewhere, I will understand that that is the only thing that could have happened, given our collective conditioning and the circumstances of the moment. And if something happens that allows a truly radical-left government to try its hand at making a difference, I will be watching with interest. But not with expectation.

I might even vote. But if that’s the case, it will be this body’s decision, not mine.

Posted in How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 6 Comments