Greater than the Golden Rule

Most every religious, spiritual, and ethical tradition expresses an admonition that is often called the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” It is an elegant way to describe one's moral behavior towards others. Whether secular or religious, Western or Eastern, this concept of treating those you encounter in a way that you'd prefer to be treated makes logical and ethical sense. If we all would follow this rule, our society would be far more peaceful and kind.

But too often we do not observe this tenet. Our society is replete with behaviors that follow something more like, “Do to others, before they get a chance to do it to you.” “Strike first and ask questions later.” “Make them fear you, so they'll be less likely to threaten you.” This last thought is often expressed in street language by those who seek the respect of their peers, when they really mean they want others to feel apprehensive about them, or even intimidated. So, while the Golden Rule gets paid a lot of lip service, it often is not adhered to.

Despite its sage advice, there are a couple of valid criticisms of the Golden Rule. One that I've heard expressed is that it assumes that what you do to/for others is what they really want. However, it's based more on what you want, implying that your desire is universal. For example, I may want to be the center of attention and would prefer to have others place me in the limelight. But it could backfire if I focus that public recognition on a shy person. What is good for me may not at all be good for another person.

This criticism is quite similar to another one: that the Golden Rule can be a little too egotistic. The thrust behind this second critique suggests that we tend to be self-centered. The implication is that we must strive to overcome our self-interest, in order to make the world a better place. We must work against our inherent nature—which can be dishonest, if not corrupt—in order to improve society. But is this necessarily true?

There is an alternative view to either of these ideas, as put forth by the ancient Chinese philosopher Mengzi (or Mencius, as he became known in the West). His approach is that, at our core, we are good. This natural tendency towards goodness of ours gets exhibited in two ways: (1) we naturally feel love and compassion for those closest to us, and (2) our gut reaction, when we see innocent people suffering, is to help them.

Thus Mencius tells us that we are inherently not self-centered, thus our task is not to overcome an egocentric nature, but to extend our natural compassion we have for those nearby, to those at a distance. It's a very different way of opening our heart. He makes the crucial point that those people at a distance are really similar to close-by loved ones, so why not feel as much care for them?

A valuable byproduct of Mengzi's philosophy is that if we learn to extend kindness outwards across the world, we can also learn to do it for ourselves. It goes both ways. Some of us can be hard on ourselves. We could often use a little self-compassion.

Green Tree Frog

Back in early September I posted photos of a tree frog that had taken up residence between concrete blocks, and was colored a mottled gray, very similar to the blocks. I recently found this guy hiding on a plant, coloring itself green, as a disguise. It seemed content to sit on my hand, as if waiting to be photographed. Click to enlarge.

SETI Reset—Part 3: Simulation Hypothesis (11/19/19)

There is yet another possibility that might explain why our SETI searches have so far been unsuccessful. The lack of contact could be the result of what’s been dubbed the Simulation Hypothesis, which has been proposed in recent decades. It results from our spectacular advances in computer technology. The basic idea is that our technological innovation seems to be leading towards a point in time when we will be able to create, not only artificial intelligence (AI), but artificial life as well!

This is a bizarre thought that I will attempt to sketch out here, in a simplified form. There is a concept called Moore's Law—which was proposed some 50 years ago by Gordon Moore, a computer geek. It suggests that computer power doubles every couple of years—yielding smaller and smaller computer chips using less and less electrical power. Over recent decades Moore's Law has held. If it continues to hold, we may reach a point, in something like 50-60 years, where our computers will be complex and fast enough that we'll be able to simulate the human brain in the digital world. We already have created deep-learning software programs that have badly beaten the world's human geniuses in chess, Jeopardy!, and Go. The next leap is to mimic the capabilities of the human brain. It's only a matter of time. 

The huge advantage of creating artificial life is that we'd be able to produce and employ an entity as smart—or smarter—than our brain, at a tiny fraction of the required energy. This is due to a byproduct of Moore's Law: as we continue to multiply computing power, it comes at decreasing needs for energy. To keep a human being going requires a lot of energy. We need calories to fuel our big bodies and our brain is an energy hog. If we could develop the equivalent amount of brain power at a tiny fraction of the energy cost, how could we refuse such a bargain?

Our haste to expand computing power also posits an alternative, though much less desirable outcome of our technological race into the future: the strong likelihood that we'll destroy ourselves, before we reach the technological maturity of being able to simulate life. Many philosophers and scientists think that in our headlong rush to develop our technological prowess, we may well make ourselves go extinct. We seem to insist on playing with dangerous machines, with minimal ability to rein ourselves in. We've already perched at the edge of nuclear annihilation, several times.

Thus the Simulation Hypothesis brings up the possibility—if we survive—that we may someday be able to create a non-biological world that will mimic intelligence. It will be contained wholly within the confines of a digital simulation. In fact, what we are convinced is our real biological existence may simply be that we've been living in such a simulated world all along. Those advanced civilizations that SETI is looking for may have arrived long ago and programmed us. We may be nothing more than artificial entities in some highly-intelligent superbeing's game. The movie “The Matrix” suggests such a possibility.

This thought of our living out some kind of virtual digital life seems preposterous to us. Do we not know that we are flesh-and-blood critters? But how do we know that? Some of the sharpest scientific minds have suggested the virtual possibility. Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing pondered it. Plato suggested something similar in his “allegory of the cave,” 2,500 years ago. Nick Bostrom of Oxford University formally presented the Simulation Hypothesis, nearly two decades ago.

Here’s yet another question: If we are not an electronic simulation, but real, flesh-and-blood beings as we think we are, could our current biological existence be just a step on the way to a post-biological type of digital life? That possibility may become proven or denied in just a few decades. Whatever we learn, our current SETI communication attempts may continue to go unanswered, until a deeper understanding arrives. We are yet infants in the advanced technological world. We have a lot to learn and a lot of control to develop, if we wish to stick around to see.

SETI Reset—Part 2

In the last post I began to describe a few possible reasons why our Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has as yet not found any signals arriving from outer space. Here are a few more suggestions I offer.

(2) Other alien civilizations may not have chosen to pursue a similar technological path as we have. Our technology too often has led to weapons that harm living beings. I can conceive of a civilization deciding to have taken a more sensible and peaceful approach and thus avoided technology’s harmful side effects, by avoiding much of our problematic technical inventions, such as the many types of weapons we’ve created. Would it not have been possible for Earth’s humans to have decided to put its energies into a spiritual society, rather than a high-tech and dangerous existence?

(3) Life may indeed be common out there, but the chances of it progressing beyond a single-celled state to a multi-cellular, more complex phase, may be quite low. Life on this planet stayed at a microbial state for about three billion years, before favorable conditions evolved to allow it to grow large enough to build things like cars and computers. Those propitious conditions were not inevitable. Life on Earth could still today easily be simple, single-celled critters, waiting patiently to grow more complex. 

(4) It took 4.5 billion years for “intelligent” life to evolve on Earth, so there's a low probability that life elsewhere (at the present) is at a similar stage of technological development to us. They may not reach that stage for a few billion years yet, or have long ago passed through it. I say “pass through it,” because an argument can be made that if life is to survive in the long term, it may have to get past dabbling with hazardous technological toys.

And finally, (5) Life anywhere in the universe may be doomed to evolve into a technological stage, after which it inevitably extinguishes itself. We on Earth seem to be headed towards what is often called an “omega point”—a time where we dramatically transform from civilization’s chaotic and exponential path, towards a sustainable way. It may be that that omega point could be the arrival of a completely different kind of intelligent life on Earth… if we survive to that time.

So the search for SETI will go on. We are curious creatures, and we want to know if there are others like us out there. It appears increasingly likely that extraterrestrial life might well exist, given our recent discoveries of extrasolar planets and Earth-bound extremophile-kinds of life. If the discovery of life in the vastness of the universe comes about, it would be an incredible discovery.

We cannot yet travel to the many distant worlds and directly observe life there... and maybe we never will—given the immense distances. So we continue look out there, building receivers to apprehend any EM signals flying through our region of space; which could prove that we are not alone. But is the presence of an “intelligent” species out there really going to be detected only by our reception of a technological signal they emit? Could there be other kinds of contact that we’ve not yet imagined? We'd best keep our minds open.

Next time I will describe yet another, rather weird possibility, for reconsidering the SETI issue… that we may already have been contacted and absorbed into a super intelligent civilization’s domain.

SETI Reset—Part 1

I have been taking an online course on astrobiology from the University of Arizona—where robust astronomical research has been the norm. I have taken a couple of previous courses from the university's astronomy team and appreciate their teaching abilities. This course blends their preeminence in astronomy with some of the latest discoveries of thousands of Earth-like planets around other stars and the potential for these planets to harbor life in some form; maybe similar to Earth.

Here is a question that has repeatedly arisen in the human mind: Is planet Earth alone in the universe at harboring life, or might there be other life-sustaining worlds? Is life common, rare, or nonexistent elsewhere in this cosmos? Does intelligent life exist out there—say, critters as smart as we think we are?

We are getting closer and closer to finding answers to these questions. As I have posted here several times, our search is being aided and abetted by the recent discovery of thousands of planets circling local stars. Without planets, you can't have life elsewhere.

A consistent search process for extraterrestrial life was begun a few decades ago—dubbed SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Its premise is that intelligent civilizations “out there” would have reached a technological capability at some point—as we have—and would have transmitted electromagnetic signals (EM) into space; signals that could eventually arrive at Earth. If so, might we receive them and verify that we're not alone? After all, we've been inadvertently transmitting EM signals from our planet for decades. Old TV episodes of “I Love Lucy” are currently flying through interstellar space, just waiting to be captured by some alien technology; maybe to the amusement of otherworldly beings.

So SETI was established decades ago—having been designed to receive some of those alien civilizations' equivalent TV programs, or, hopefully (and more likely) signals consciously sent out to inform beings like us that we're not alone. Yet my online course professor made the point that, although we're searching for outer space life, SETI is not really designed to locate outer-space intelligent life, but to discover extraterrestrial technology that is similar to ours.

We haven’t yet detected a signal, let alone determined the presence of either intelligence or the existence of life elsewhere. At best we currently can register the presence of EM signals that would indicate some sort of advanced technological civilization. One issue in our search for ET that possibly is being dealt with inappropriately is, Would intelligence “out there” display itself anything like what on Earth has evolved?

Furthermore, there is another key question that was posed many decades ago, by a prominent physicist/astronomer: If there are other advanced civilizations in outer space, where are they? Why haven't we already heard from them? This is a troubling question for many cosmologists. Again, we're not yet able to determine if there is or is not intelligence out there—we're asking if they have evolved technologies like ours, and, if so, where are the signals?

I can imagine several reasons why we've yet to capture a signal that we can confidently say came from outer space (and maybe never will): (1) The distances are simply too vast; signals from even the closest stars take many years to reach us; so, were we to detect a more distant signal, it may have been transmitted thousands of years ago. Any signal we might receive could be from a distant past, from a civilization that is no longer even existing. Where might our technology be, in another thousand years? Would our current primitive way of interstellar communication even be useful then? 

Other possibilities next time…

Placebo Palliative—Part 2

Yet another fascinating example of the power of the placebo effect was described in the late 1880s by the famous anthropologist Franz Boaz. He wrote about an interview with an elder Kwakiutl shaman named Quesalid. (The Kwakiutl people are a tribe in the Vancouver Island region of Canada.) When Quesalid was a boy he thought that the tribe's shamans were fakers, so he plotted to expose them. He ingratiated himself with a shaman, who took him on as an apprentice.

Quesalid eventually learned the tricks of the shamanic trade—particularly one ritual in which a shaman attended to a sick member of the tribe. The ritual was to call for a ceremony, in which tribal members danced and chanted, while the shaman had secretly stuck a wad of eagle down feathers in his mouth. He would place his mouth on the body, over the “source” of the ailment, bite down on his tongue to draw blood, spit out the bloody wad, and pronounce the sick person cured, as if he had drawn out the sickness.

Quesalid realized that he had evidence of fraud he wanted. But before he could expose their hoax, he was summoned to the dwelling of a gravely sick boy. He was trapped. He decided to proceed with what he was convinced was a phony ceremony, and so he did. The boy immediately recovered. Quesalid went on to become a venerated shaman. (This episode is described in a 2011 book, Born Liars: Why We Can't Live Without Deceit, by Ian Leslie.)

Countless similar stories have been recorded by anthropologists. As in the case of Quesalid, many shamans know they engage in subterfuge, but still believe in their powers. And it works. Illusions do heal.

Decades after Quesalid’s confession to Franz Boaz, Henry Beecher discovered the power of subterfuge on the operating tables of WWII's Italy. He went on to test his hypothesis in carefully-controlled clinical trials at Harvard. And now in 2019, researchers at Dartmouth showed how anyone who believed in the potency of their treatment—even if it was phony—could cure. The human mind is a powerful organ. Belief is a powerful drive. Our bodily healing mechanisms can appear to make miracles.

Placebo Palliative—Part 1 (11/1/19)

The so-called “placebo effect” has been around, in one form or another, for millennia. In its simplest form, it is the relief that one gets from a treatment that has no medical basis. It stems from a person's expectations of the treatment, rather than from the intervention of any active medicine. The root of the word is from Latin “I shall please.” Throughout history, the placebo effect has often been derided as a fake or fraudulent type of treatment, but both the medical and psychological sciences today recognize it as real.

In fact, it is responsible for the use of double-blind medical and psychological tests, wherein neither the patient nor the personnel delivering the treatment know if the procedure is real or not. That is because subtle hints transmitted by the caregiver may give away the truth of the treatment. Of course, this is exactly what many practitioners depend on, as the examples below demonstrate.

One of the first modern experiences of the placebo effect occurred during WWII in Italy, when an American physician, Henry Beecher, who specialized in pain relief, found himself conducting surgeries on wounded American soldiers. Medical supplies ran low, just as Beecher needed to operate on a badly-wounded soldier. The usual pain reliever, morphine, was exhausted. Desperate to perform the surgery, Beecher gave the wounded man an injection of diluted salt water—lying to him that it was a powerful anesthetic. The soldier calmed himself and endured the operation with very little pain.

Beecher was forced to repeat the ruse several times in the heat of battle and with short supplies, and it worked every time. Back home after the war, Beecher and his Harvard colleagues performed several controlled studies that confirmed the efficacy of placebos. They showed that imaginary medications worked! A few years later he published a paper which argued that clinical trials on any new drug must be conducted as a double-blind test, meaning that neither the experimenter nor the patient knows if the treatment is real or just a placebo, since the experimenters could reveal the truth through subtle clues, if they knew.

The placebo effect was once again recently confirmed in a clever study at Dartmouth University, which demonstrated the power of a physician's attitude, when administering medications. The study randomly and arbitrarily assigned a group of undergraduate students, some to be patients and some doctors. The “doctors” were given a cream to be used to treat induced (but harmless) burns in the “patients.” Half of the doctors were told that the cream they had was real medicine and the rest were told they had a placebo. The kicker was that all the creams were fake—all were placebos.

Those “doctors” who administered what they thought was a legitimate treatment found that their patients got pain relief—better than those who thought they were using a placebo. Why did it work, despite the fact that all of the creams were the same and were bogus? Careful analysis of videos showed that the “doctors” who believed their salve was effective showed their confidence in their conversations and facial expressions, while those who believed their treatment was fake revealed their disbelief in a similar manner, even though they tried not to show their bias. The “patients” responded to the nonverbal positive empathy and faith of their “physician.”

More on placebos next time…