ShrinkWrapped

The Lesson of AGW: The Limits of Rationality

[Update: Fausta has a wonderfully titled linkfest on the curerent state of AGW: Global Warming failure linkfest blizzard]

The scientific method was invented, and is now our greatest tool, to differentiate our wished and feared fantasies about our world from the reality of our world.  We pride ourselves on being more rational than our predecessors, and in many ways we are, but there are limits to our rationality and those limits are not as far from our current behavior as most believe. 

Questions about climate change and the human contribution to any such changes would seem to be ideal candidates for investigation via the scientific method.  Our ability to manipulate large quantities of data have been increasing exponentially and our data sets have been expanding at a remarkable rate.  Separating the signal of climate change from the noise of weather, and parsing the portion of such change that is contributed by man's impact on the natural environment should be worthwhile and attainable endeavors.  Unfortunately, as has become obvious, the entire structure of climate investigation has become corrupted and politicized by the usual suspects, large amounts of money and large investments of ego.

The corruption (using the term in its multiple meanings) at the heart of the AGW structure has been seeping into the zeitgeist since the leaking of the CRU e-mails and the slow disintegration of the IPCC report under the scrutiny of skeptical observers.  Walter Russel Mead continues to believe that there is a scientific underpinning to the AGW theory, but his belief is being strained by reality:

DC Post Runs With Climategate; NY Times Still in Tank

Meanwhile, out in the real world, the multifaceted credibility collapse that is Climategate majestically and inexorably unfolds.  The IPCC and its increasingly embattled chair have taken another major blow; closer examination of IPCC’s claim that North African food production would fall 50 percent in the next decade reveals that there was no scientific evidence for the claim, that the IPCC itself had solid evidence against it, and that Dr. Pachauri was instrumental in publicizing the false but attention-getting statement.  The core temperature data that the IPCC used to establish the degree of global warming to date and on which it based its predictions for the future, is coming under tougher scrutiny. As if this wasn’t enough, Professor Phil Jones, the director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, the source for much of the core climate data and the author of some of the most damaging e-mails revealed when stolen emails from climate scientists were made public, answered questions from the BBC.  His answers to some of these questions will give climate skeptics even more ammunition.  Examples:

BBC – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming? Jones:  Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. BBC: When scientists say “the debate on climate change is over”, what exactly do they mean – and what don’t they mean? Jones:  It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

What?  There is no statistically significant evidence of global warming for the last fourteen years, and the debate over global warming is not over in the opinion of “the vast majority of climate scientists?”  And this is what a defender of global warming now says?  [Bolding added-SW]

WRM's post focuses on the failure of the "paper of record" to inform its readers that the AGW edifice is crumbling, which is one of the areas where the limits of rationality can be found.  When the perceptual apparatus, the news media, fails to "see", the body politic is partially or completely blind.  It is impossible to rationally evaluate what exists but is not seen.

Eliezer_Yudkowsky blogs at less wrong, (a blog "devoted to refining the art of human rationality- the art of thinking) and in a post discussing AGW inadvertently illustrated another area in which the limits of rationality can be found:

So far as I can tell, the position of human-caused global warming (anthropogenic global warming aka AGW) has the ball.  I get the impression there's a lot of evidence piled up, a lot of people trying and failing to poke holes, and so I have no reason to play contrarian here.  It's now heavily politicized science, which means that I take the assertions with a grain of skepticism and worry - well, to be honest I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about it, because (a) there are worse global catastrophic risks and (b) lots of other people are worrying about AGW already, so there are much better places to invest the next marginal minute of worry.

But if I pretend for a moment to live in the mainstream mental universe in which there is nothing scarier to worry about than global warming, and a 6 °C (11 °F) rise in global temperatures by 2100 seems like a top issue for the care and feeding of humanity's future...

Then I must shake a disapproving finger at anyone who claims the state of evidence on AGW is indefinite.

Sure, if we waited until 2100 to see how much global temperatures increased and how high the seas rose, we would have definite proof.  We would have definite proof in 2100, however, and that sounds just a little bit way the hell too late.  If there are cost-effective things we can do to mitigate global warming - and by this I don't mean ethanol-from-corn or cap-and-trade, more along the lines of standardizing on a liquid fluoride thorium reactor design and building 10,000 of them - if there's something we can do about AGW, we need to do it now, not in a hundred years.

Yudkowsky us absolutely correct that if AWG exists, and if it represents an existential threat to human life on planet Earth then no amount of attention and no imposed ministrations, no matter how draconian, would be unobjectionalbe; if the basic premise fails, however, the entire structure collapses, and there, Eliezer Yudkowsky has found the limits of his rationality.  He does not propose to do any kind of cost:benefit analysis.  (For example, how many people would die if the global temperature rises 6 degrees in he next hundred years versus how many would die if we effectively diminish the earth's carrying capacity in order to minimize or reverse the presumed effects of AGW?)  Further, if as seems to be the case, the basic data upon which the entire AGW argument rests is corrupted data then the house of cards collapses, lives and billions of dollars have been wasted, and the IPCC's reputation, among others, will have been thoroughly demolished. 

(As just one example of corrupted data, a great deal, maybe all, of the measured warming may be the result of urbanization; some temperature gauges once residing in open fields are now surrounded by concrete, which causes the local, microenvironment to be significantly warmed.)

When the data are corrupt or we simply measure the wrong numbers because we literally do not see or appreciate the significant variables, our rationality is less than worthless since we can arrive at serious errors while being convinced that those who disagree with us are not just wrong but evil.  The AGW proponents were so convicted of their correctness and the righteousness of tier cause (with good reason; if the Earth were truly in the balance, all stops must be pulled) that they advocated criminalizing AGW "denial."  Their rationality led them a long way from reality and serves as a useful reminder that we should all be a bit more cautious about the limits of our own rationality.

Perhaps once the AGW structure collapses we can resume scientific investigation into the drivers of climate and eventually arrive at a relatively rational appreciation of this incredibly complex subject.

NB: In today's Boston Globe, Kerry Emanuel, director of the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, asserts that Climate changes are proven fact:

But when the dust settles, what we are left with is the evidence. And, in spite of all its complexity and uncertainties, we should not lose track of the simple fact that theory, actual observations of the planet, and complex models - however imperfect each is in isolation - all point to ongoing, potentially dangerous human alteration of climate.

Note that Emanuel's article must be read with several major caveats.  If the data upon which the theory rests are corrupt, the theory is worthless.  The actual observations of the planet which attain the level of precision and reliability needed to compare the present to the past contain a great deal of uncertainty, with far too short a baseline to discern trends yet, and climate scientists have admitted that their models have only very recently begun to control for the most important drivers of climate (water vapor, solar output, cloud cover) and continue to discover large climate influences from novel directions (eg, the importance of the oceans as heat engines via el nino and la nina) which have not yet been incorporated into any of the models.  We are a very long way from understanding climate well enough to drive public policy and those scientists who profess otherwise are not behaving in a scientific manner.

The Only Question That Matters

When it comes to Iran, there are many questions that we in the West have to address.  There are those who believe that Iran is a rational actor (and according to Tom Barnett, events there are evolving pretty much as predicted) while others believe the country is run by apocalyptic Twelvers intent on Armageddon.

In the Jerusalem Post today, David Horovitz summarizes:

Editor's Notes: If he got it, would he use it?

SO IS Iran about to get the bomb – a possibility openly raised, and rejected, by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Thursday for the first time? It’s getting closer every day, and shows no signs of changing course.

And if it attained that capacity, would it use it against Israel – directly, or via a third party, non-state actor? That’s not so simple.

Indeed, when they are asked for their assessment on these most pressing of questions, this 2010 equivalent to the conventional war assessment that was so delinquent in 1973, our intelligence chiefs are hard-pressed to come up with definitive answers.

“Iran’s is a radical regime, but not an irrational one,” they stutter sometimes, to the frustration of a political leadership that, one day soon now, may have to make one of the most fateful decisions in the history of modern Israel.

Or still more unhelpfully, “Iran is rational... but its definition of rational is not the same as ours.”

Unfortunately what we don't know is far more significant than what we do know and the future of the Middle East, and perhaps much more, depends on how the question is answered.  What I find most frightening is the realization that the decision makers in Washington and Jerusalem almost certainly know no more than any other reasonably well informed observer, which means we are flying blind in a hurricane.

Anti-Semitism: A Strange Attractor

In Chaos Theory a Strange Attractor is a set toward which chaotic or dynamic systems evolve.  I am taking the liberty of using the mathematical concept as an explanatory metaphor for an aspect of human cognitive functioning.  Psychoanalytic theory of the mind imagines our mental functioning as a dynamic system.  Brain/mental activity involves summing across a wide range of dynamic inputs and outputs; neural nets/mental structures tend to dynamically oscillate around certain fundamental states.  When such states (structures to the Psychoanalyst) are maladaptive, the goal in treatment is to disequilibrate the structure so that it can re-arrange at a lower, more stable energy level.  In other words, we re-evoke earlier conflictual states in order to revisit the conflict and come to a more adaptive, less conflicted state.  (I appreciate that I am mixing a host of different metaphors, but consider it poetic licence.)  In Psychoanalytic terms a transference relationship could be considered a "Strange Attractor.'  For example, a man who had a highly conflicted relationship with his seductive yet rejecting mother might be likely to find himself repeatedly in relationships with women who replicate some of the aspects of his earliest object relations.  They may be seductive, draw him in, yet ultimately fail him by emasculating him, rejecting him for someone more exciting, etc.  After a series of such failed relationships such a man might enter Psychoanalysis to discover why his relationships never succeed.  The Analysis would include a re-evoking of the roots of his early maternal transference with an increased awareness of his active participation in the transference drama, and ultimately a resolution where he no longer needs to involve himself with seductive yet unavailable women.

Anti-Semitism serves many of the functions of a "Strange Attractor" in this way:  It is a structure that has roots in the early life, exerts a gravitational pull on character and cognitive functions, and finally crystallizes when the person is stressed and regressed.

What is the function of anti-Semitism?  In general, anti-Semitism, like all paranoid ideas, has a reparative function as it serves to protect the self esteem of its victim. The paranoid, in response to realistic failings, develops a world in which his mind is central, with powerful people devoting immense resources to him.  Rather than having a major psychiatric disorder which will have a terrible impact and exact a terrible toll on his life, he is an exceptionally important person; look how much attention is devoted to him!  In a similar vein, anti-Semitism serves as an all purpose explanation for individual and group failings.  The most anti-Semitic people on the planet today are Arabs.  The failures of the Arab world are so conspicuous that it is occasionally even noted within the Arab press.  The Arab world, of over 250 million people, consistently attributes almost all of their pathologies to the 6 million Jews living on the tiny sliver of land along the Mediterranean Sea. As is the tendency with paranoid and quasi-paranoid ideas, they tend to spread.  Thus, the Arabs typically expand their paranoid fantasy structure to include the 10 million Jews in the diaspora, who apparently control the United States and much of the world; what amazingly powerful people!  This would be risible were they not so deadly earnest. 

Beyond the adaptive utility of anti-Semitism (for the preservation of self esteem) there is an additional important element.  Anti-Semitism diminishes anxiety.  Most of the time our anxieties are linked to our earliest states of helplessness but there is a variety of anxiety that is ubiquitous and often realistic.  Most of us reflexively recoil from the knowledge that our lives are subject to a terrible amount of randomness. A split second may be all that differentiates life and death while driving to work in the morning.  Standing in a doorway as opposed to a loved one in the middle of the room may have been all that was necessary to determine life or death during the Haitian earthquake.  The idea that the universe operates according to designated laws is comforting; the idea that those laws include significant random elements is terrifying.  By positing a group of powerful people who control reality, our anxiety is relieved.  If the Jews control the world then all one has to do to produce a Utopia on earth is destroy the Jews!  Further, there is no chaos, there is (a hidden) order. 

(Islam rests upon no other law than Allah therefore natural laws with their built-in randomness are irrelevant.  Jew hatred is mandated by Allah and the envy and humiliation engendered by the existence of Israel are sufficient to fuel its spread. Submission to Allah's laws is also one reason so few Muslims have made major contributions to scientific investigation.) 

Anti-Semitism is an extraordinarily powerful explanatory structure.  It diminishes existential dread, relieves chaos anxiety, and preserves self esteem.  Once the idea has been introduced into consciousness it becomes a powerful Strange Attractor for the troubled mind.

Recently there has been a blogosphere contretemps over Andrew Sullivan's increasingly fevered and fetid attacks on Israel and Jews with whom he disagrees politically.  Leon Wieseltier wrote a long piece describing Andrew Sullivan's decent into the fever swamps inhabited by anti-Semites in Something Much Darker.  Jeffrey Goldberg offers his take on the subsequent imbroglio in Leon Wieseltier, Andrew Sullivan and Anti-Semitism and includes this:

But: His evolution from wild-eyed Zionist to vitriolic Israel-basher is one of the more painful things I've witnessed recently, and not only because we are friends, or were friends. In the old days -- meaning last year, and before -- Andrew was an intemperate defender of the Jews. I remember one exchange in the run-up to the Iraq War in which he told me that seeing the movie "The Pianist" made him even "more pro-war." Now he has flipped, to the other extreme. [Emphasis mine-SW]

By all means read all of Jeffrey Goldberg's piece.  He summarizes the many ways in which Andrew Sullivan has circled around anti-Semitism, moving closer to it almost by the day.  Further, he points out that Andrew Sullivan is fairly ignorant about the Middle East (which is evident in Sullivan's writing) yet by use of the all purpose explanatory structure of anti-Zionism qua anti-Semitism, is able to pretend to knowledge and expertise he conspicuously lacks.  However, the point I quoted above comes closest to supporting the idea of Anti-Semitism as an Strange Attractor.  Apparently Andrew Sullivan has always been psychologically involved with Jews, first as a defender and now as an attacker.  What flipped was the valence attached to the idea.  "Jew" has apparently always been a Strange Attractor.  The saga of Andrew Sullivan over the last few years has been instructive.  He experienced significant disappointments with those he had supported viz the Iraq War when the Bush administration refused to support gay marriage, another of his Strange Attractors, (and a particularly potent SA.)  He turned away from Bush's allies (the neocons, ie Jews) and  toward the supporters of gay Marriage, those on the left, among whom anti-Semitism has had an efflorescence.  When the valence of his Gay Marriage Strange Attractor overrode the valence of his pro-War on Terror Strange Attractor, the covert Jewish Strange Attractor, which for Andrew Sullivan had become attached to his pro-War on Terror Strange Attractor, followed suit.

We all have ideas that function as Strange Attractors in our minds.  Only occasionally are we aware of such powerful, unconscious determinants of our thinking.  It is always easier for an external observer to see the process as it occurs.  I suspect that if Andrew Sullivan is not yet an Anti-Semite, the force of attraction to the idea will continue to pull him in that direction until the distinction between his thinking and anti-Semitism eventually disappears.

Let it Snow

There will be no posting today.

Race and Fairness

To a great many White Americans, the election of Barack Obama brought the hope that our country's long fixation on race and racism might finally be coming to an end.  Unfortunately that has not happened, and, if anything, there is more government attention being paid to "disparate impact" than ever before. 

[There are 847,000 links in a Google search for the term.  Here's one: DOJ to Hire 50 More Lawyers, Gear Up for Civil Rights Enforcement Drive:

The U.S. Department of Justice is gearing up for a renewed emphasis on traditional civil rights enforcement after a shift in focus during the administration of former President George W. Bush to a greater emphasis on religious rights, human trafficking and individual cases in which there was evidence of intentional discrimination.

Under Attorney General Eric Holder, the DOJ is planning to bring more disparate-impact cases based on statistical evidence that minorities are treated less favorably in arenas ranging from housing to hiring, [Emphasis mine-SW] reports the New York Times.]

Disparate impact is the pernicious legal theory that guides much of the government's approach to ferreting out hidden racism.  Overt racism is a fringe element in the American zeitgeist, and has been for quite some time, so disparate impact became a useful answer to the questions of how to explain diverse economic outcomes for different minorities and how to maintain full employment for diversity engineers.  Of course, not all minorities and all disparate impacts are equal. [HT: Steve Hsu]

Do colleges redline Asian-Americans?

SAT SCORES aren’t everything. But they can tell some fascinating stories.

Take 1,623, for instance. That’s the average score of Asian-Americans, a group that Daniel Golden - editor at large of Bloomberg News and author of “The Price of Admission’’ - has labeled “The New Jews.’’ After all, much like Jews a century ago, Asian-Americans tend to earn good grades and high scores. And now they too face serious discrimination in the college admissions process.

Notably, 1,623 - out of a possible 2,400 - not only separates Asians from other minorities (Hispanics and blacks average 1,364 and 1,276 on the SAT, respectively). The score also puts them ahead of Caucasians, who average 1,581. And the consequences of this are stark.

...

A few years ago, however, when I worked as a reader for Yale’s Office of Undergraduate Admissions, it became immediately clear to me that Asians - who constitute 5 percent of the US population - faced an uphill slog. They tended to get excellent scores, take advantage of AP offerings, and shine in extracurricular activities. Frequently, they also had hard-knock stories: families that had immigrated to America under difficult circumstances, parents working as kitchen assistants and store clerks, and households in which no English was spoken.

But would Yale be willing to make 50 percent of its freshman class Asian? Probably not.

Indeed, as Princeton’s Nieli suggests, most elite universities appear determined to keep their Asian-American totals in a narrow range. Yale’s class of 2013 is 15.5 percent Asian-American, compared with 16.1 percent at Dartmouth, 19.1 percent at Harvard, and 17.6 percent at Princeton.

“There are a lot of poor Asians, immigrant kids,’’ says University of Oregon physics professor Stephen Hsu, who has written about the admissions process. “But generally that story doesn’t do as much as it would for a non-Asian student. Statistically, it’s true that Asians generally have to get higher scores than others to get in.’’

In a country built on individual liberty and promise, that feels deeply unfair. If a teenager spends much time studying, excels at an instrument or sport, and garners wonderful teacher recommendations, should he be punished for being part of a high-achieving group? Are his accomplishments diminished by the fact that people he has never met - but who look somewhat like him - also work hard?

The prevailing myth in Academia is that there is no such thing as "race", ie it is merely a social construct, in which case, all evidence of disparate outcomes must imply discrimination.  The President's good friend, Skip Gates, is a proponent of such a theory, as noted in this interview with Raina Kelley  of Newsweek: [HT: OneSTDV]

Blackness 101

Skip Gates talks about Black History Month--and what it means to be black today.

And what did you discover about American diversity?
We discovered that no matter what the law was during the day, at night when the lights came down, everyone was sleeping with everyone else. I have never [DNA-]tested a black person who was 100 percent African. Everybody had some percentage of European blood. Elizabeth Alexander [the chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale] is 66 percent European. Even Stephen Colbert, a proud son of Ireland, discovered that the oldest relative we could find on his family tree was German. Meryl Streep thought she was Dutch, but it turns out she is also descended from the English founders of this nation. Diversity doesn't just mean black and white. America was about the blurring of bloodlines in the creation of a new people. I realized how connected, how inextricably combined we were. 

Nobody was upset by that?
No, but the biggest surprise was that anybody who was 100 percent European was disappointed. They wanted to be a little bit African-American or Native American. They didn't want to be just white. Because we were raised with the one-drop rule, we tend to think that if you have any black ancestors, you're black, but we're finding out that everybody is mixed race, so what does that do to our definition of black? It proves that culture is not biological, it's constructed.

So to be American is to be a mutt?
Yes, ethnic merging is inevitable. But it's going to be a long time until we all look like Polynesians. When we still see new migrants scapegoated for the economic problems of this country, we know there's still work to be done. We trace Eva Longoria back to her 11th great-grandfather in Spain, and her ninth great-grandfather came to the New World in 1603. That's 17 years before the Mayflower.

Because I am not an academic I have not been privy to explanations of how a lack of "racial purity" invalidates the fuzzy concept of racial groups but even if we were to accept such a non-scientific belief, we would be left with the need to understand failing minorities as being the result of failing "constructed" cultures. 

[It is not politic to ask, but here goes: Who constructs inner city culture, anyway?  Is it cooked up in some hidden smoke filled room somewhere by evil WASP Social Engineers and then imposed on unsuspecting black gang bangers?  Are rappers the unwitting agents of such nefarious plots aimed at destroying the work ethic and academic accomplishments of young black children?  The idea that the black community has suffered egregious social damage from the liberal enabled destruction of the black family is rarely mentioned in polite society.]

The basic problem that is forever avoided by those who purport to speak for the troubled minorities in America is that whether or not there is a biological contribution to their failures or the cause is predominantly cultural, we have not yet been able to figure out a way to erase their deficits.  Incredible amounts of money have been spent trying to erase disparities and it hasn't worked.  We should be realistic about the limitations of our efforts at a time when we have a troubled economy and the White House has already announced the need for tremendous expenditures to erase the disparity between minority and majority academic achievement.

[In the long run the most difficult data that is likely to emerge will come from human genetic studies, as specific gene alleles become linked with specific abilities.  It is a certainty that there exist gene alleles that produce proteins that facilitate increased branching in the CNS, for example, or other alleles that code for proteins that produce muscle cells that contract more efficiently.  As different groups are found to be gifted with different percentages of such alleles, we will be able to better determine how much group difference is ultimately biological.  One day, such results will make group disparities irrelevant as parents choose the constellation of attributes they desire in their offspring (or, more fancifully, we migrate into more robust hardware via uploading.)  When we have achieved such abilities the arguments over desirable traits will persist but everyone will have to be fully responsible for the traits they choose to contain and exhibit.]

As so often happens, when there are complex and difficult social issues involved, it is always a good idea to see what Thomas Sowell has in mind:

The Fallacy of "Fairness"

If there is ever a contest to pick which word has done the most damage to people's thinking, and to actions to carry out that thinking, my nomination would be the word "fair." It is a word thrown around by far more people than have ever bothered to even try to define it.

This mushy vagueness may be a big handicap in logic but it is a big advantage in politics. All sorts of people, with very different notions about what is or is not fair, can be mobilized behind this nice-sounding word, in utter disregard of the fact that they mean very different things when they use that word.

Some years ago, for example, there was a big outcry that various mental tests used for college admissions or for employment were biased and "unfair" to many individuals or groups. Fortunately there was one voice of sanity-- David Riesman, I believe-- who said: "The tests are not unfair. LIFE is unfair and the tests measure the result.

If by "fair" you mean everyone having the same odds for achieving success, then life has never been anywhere close to being fair, anywhere or at any time. If you stop and think about it (however old-fashioned that may seem), it is hard even to conceive of how life could possibly be fair in that sense.

There is a powerful case that can be made that a country's economic progress can be related to the successful enabling of its Creative Class and/or Smart Fraction.  I suspect that evening the playing field in order to diminish disparate outcomes between the top and bottom, at the considerable cost of flattening the top tier, is a poor trade-off in the long term (and is explicitly not being done by our most significant rival, China, which is doing all it can to maximize its human potential.) 

As Thomas Sowell points out, life is terribly unfair. It might well be best for all if we could spend more time and energy on facilitating the successes of our most talented and gifted children (please note, this is not synonymous with most intelligent) rather than spending an always inadequate amount of money (because we do not yet know how to do the impossible) trying to raise those who by virtue of the unfair hand they were dealt by life can never become the high achieving, above average child that all must be.  Sadly for all, Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average" does not exist.

The Problem of Over-Simplification in the War on Terror

It was not so long ago that we were regularly treated to stories purporting to show that the Democrats/Liberals appreciated complexity, while the Republicans/Conservatives generally supported overly simplistic narratives that failed to do justice to the complexity of reality.  Further, it was those who understood nuance who were best positioned to understand how to use the levers of power to improve the lives of most Americans.  It was never a particularly convincing story line but it did contain a kernel of truth.  The sad fact is that both left and right have a tendency to over-simplify; they just over-simplify using different memes.

Peter Beinart attempts to address this tendency to reductionism and in his article, proves the point, though perhaps not as he intends:

Obama Outsmarts the Terrorists

Which brings us to Barack Obama’s “war on terror.” Conservatives keep saying that Obama doesn’t really believe we’re at war; that he sees terrorists as mere criminals, not the epic evil-doers that they really are. But here’s the irony: It’s precisely because he doesn’t see the terrorist threat as quite so epic that al Qaeda is falling apart.

...

At the end of the day, all jihadist terrorists can really do is kill. But the more they kill, the more they alienate their fellow Muslims. As the French scholar Gilles Kepel has pointed out, the reason jihadists turned their attention to the United States in the first place was because they utterly failed in the 1990s to overthrow the governments of Algeria and Egypt. They failed because the more people they killed, the more hated they became. And when they lost popular support, they were easily crushed.

In recent years, the dynamic has been playing itself out again. In countries like Pakistan and Jordan, where al Qaeda keeps slaughtering innocent Muslims, its public support has fallen off a cliff. During the Bush years, the only thing that kept al Qaeda from complete ideological collapse was Muslim hatred of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our unblinking support for Muslim dictatorships and for Israel, and our use of torture at places like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay.

Now Obama, by pledging to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq and close Gitmo, and by eschewing torture—in other words, by not overreacting to the terrorist threat—is cutting al Qaeda’s throat. Although the U.S. government is still not exactly loved in Muslim nations, it is hated less. Between 2008 and 2009, according to Gallup, approval of U.S. policies rose 23 points in Tunisia, 22 points in Algeria, 19 points in Egypt, 17 points in Saudi Arabia and 13 points in Kuwait. In Indonesia, according to the Pew Research Center, approval of the U.S. rose 26 points. And not coincidentally, al Qaeda’s slide seems to be accelerating. Between 2003 and 2009, according to Pew, support for Osama bin Laden has dropped 34 points in Indonesia, 28 points in Pakistan, 28 points in Jordan, 20 points in the Palestinian territories, 16 points in Lebanon and 13 points in Turkey. In Indonesia and Pakistan, much of the decline has occurred in the last year alone. Bin Laden is having so much trouble demonizing the United States that his last audio tape focused on climate change.

Al Qaeda's dimisihing support among his co-religionists stems from many different factors, of which Barack Obama's relative neglect must be counted as a minimal contributor. 

[On several levels I agree with the President that Islamic terror, whether from al Qaeda and its ilk or their Shia brethren, hardly represents an existential risk to America; on the other hand, I do believe that the fall-out, figurative to a much greater extent that literal, of a successful mass casualty attack, would eventuate in massive losses of life and resources; in our current economic straits, a many month disruption of normal economic activity could well turn our present recession into a double dip or worse.  On that basis, terrorism must be considered a major issue for the Executive branch.  In addition, and among other reasons for concern, their political viability would evaporate in the aftermath of a successful attack.  Ignoring, or minimizing, terror is a losing stance for the Obama administration.]

It is certainly true that some non-quantifiable amount of Islamist recruiting is abetted by the bad press that the US receives throughout the Middle East for our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our support for the hated Jews in Israel.  On the other hand, none other than Osama bin Laden himself has suggested that Arabs will support the strong horse in any conflict.  At the moment, al Qaeda is a weak horse indeed, the result of the military actions we have taken and our enlistment of various states in the neighborhood who are fighting against al Qaeda for their own reasons.

To add to the complexity, Martin Kramer posits yet another factor, demographics, to help explain Arab/Muslim terrorism:

Superfluous young men

You get six minutes at the Herzliya Conference to say something memorable (and there is a clock ticking away at your feet, facing the audience). So I made a memorable argument for the role of population growth in radicalization, a clip of which is embedded below. It's memorable—but not at all original. I first encountered the idea in the stimulating work of Gunnar Heinsohn (here is one example of many).

 

The over abundance of young men whose access to status and sex is severely constrained, would be problematic for any culture.  Societies which have almost no upward mobility, with failed parasitic  and zero-sum economies, will be societies that are ripe for violence.

Radical Islam presents such young men with a socially sanctioned pathway to express their aggressive and sexual energies in acceptable directions.  For the lowest functioning, most marginal, the appeal of a suicide-murder eventuating in 72 virgins in Heaven can be a powerful motivator.  For the higher functioning struggling with issues of meaning, shame, and humiliation, joining an organization that attempts to "fight back against the oppressors" can offer meaning and a semblance of power.  The variety of motivators for engaging in terrorism are multiple and any attempt to suggest that our behavior is the most important aspect of a decisison to join is simply inane.  The primary way in which our actions can slide the threshold for joining al Qaeda down (or up) has to do with our successes in killing al Qaeda leadership.  As al Qaeda has been forced to kill fellow Muslims by their lack of success killing infidels, and as they have shown themselves to be cowards and villains, and even worse, losers, al Qaeda's appeal naturally waned and will continue to fail unless and until they can pull off another terror spectacular.  Decreasing al Qaeda's appeal by attriting their ranks can at some times be best accomplished by the use of owevrwhleming force, while at other times by more carefully selected targeted assassinations. 

This really should not be a Democrat or Republican "issue" (which is why I suggested not too long ago that it would be in our best interests to find a synthesis.)  Unfortunately, until our political class comes to some open acknowledgment of the dangers of terror (including the downstream dangers of our all too predictable over-reaction to a successful attack) and determines an appropriate set of responses which the citizenry can support, we will continue to spend as much time over-simplifying and arguing with ourselves as we do conducting a war against our enemies.  Ultimately this may be the greatest failure of the Obama adminstration's approach to the War on Islamist terror: they have squandered a full year in which they might have been able to establish a rule set regarding terror more to the liking of the liberal community even while acceptable to the vast center.  Perhaps it just didn't occur to them that even "non-Right wingers" want to be kept safe.

Empathy and AI: Part V

In Empathy and AI: Part I I discussed the possibility of coding for empathy in our imagined AI offspring.

In Empathy and AI: Part II I wondered about how to perform the mirroring function for an AI.  Most AI researchers believe that the AI's mind will evolve rather than spring into being fully formed.  As such, encoding for empathy becomes a significant issue.

In Empathy and AI: Part III I briefly described some of the factors involved in the development of a coherent sense of self and how such development depends upon an empathic connection to another's mind.

In Empathy and AI: Part IV I speculated on how the development of a self in an AI could go awry analogous to disorders of the self in humans.

In this final post in the series I want to discuss the higher order functions that a healthy mind must contain and my concern the there may be a relative neglect of such higher order functions in the field of AI. 

Fortuitously, J Stoors Hall, who blogs on AI at the Foresight Institute, wrote today about the father of AI, Marvin Minsky, whose ideas have been somewhat neglected in the field but are germane to the discussion.  Minsky was speculating about the organization of a mature AI mind:

The first AI blog

The first AI blog was written by a major, highly respected figure in the field. It consisted, as a blog should, of a series of short essays on various subjects relating to the central topic. It appeared in the mid-80s, just as the ARPAnet was transforming over into the internet.

The only little thing I forgot to mention was that it didn’t actually appear in blog form, which of course hadn’t been invented. The WWW didn’t appear until the next decade. It appeared in book form, albeit a somewhat unusual one since it was, as mentioned, a series of short essays, one to a page. It was, of course, Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind.

Of course, you’re reading a blog about AI right now. The difference is that that was Minsky, and this is merely me. If you haven’t read SOM, put down your computer and go read it now.

Good. You’re back.  Here’s why SoM is relevant to our subject of whether and how soon AI is possible:

It remains a curious fact that the AI community has, for the most part, not pursued Society of Mind-like theories. It is likely that that Minsky’s framework was simply ahead of its time, in the sense that in the 1980s and 1990s, there were few AI researchers who could comfortably conceive of the full scope of issues Minsky discussed—including learning, reasoning, language, perception, action, representation, and so forth. Instead the field has shattered into dozens of subfields populated by researchers with very different goals and who speak very different technical languages. But as the field matures, the population of AI researchers with broad perspectives will surely increase, and we hope that they will choose to revisit the Society of Mind theory with a fresh eye.  (Push Singh — further quotes from the same source)

In other words, here’s a comprehensive theory of what an AI architecture ought to look like that is the summary of the lifework of one of the founders and leaders of the field, and yet no one has seriously tried to implement it.  (When I say serious, I mean put as much effort into it as has gone into, say, Grand Theft Auto.)  (There has been a serious effort to implement the theoretical approach of the CMU wing of classical AI, namely SOAR.)

Part of the reason for this is that SoM is in some sense only half a theory:

Minsky sees the mind as a vast diversity of cognitive processes each specialized to perform some type of function, such as expecting, predicting, repairing, remembering, revising, debugging, acting, comparing, generalizing, exemplifying, analogizing, simplifying, and many other such ‘ways of thinking’. There is nothing especially common or uniform about these functions; each agent can be based on a different type of process with its own distinct kinds of purposes, languages for describing things, ways of representing knowledge, methods for producing inferences, and so forth.
To get a handle on this diversity, Minsky adopts a language that is rather neutral about the internal composition of cognitive processes. He introduces the term ‘agent’ to describe any component of a cognitive process that is simple enough to understand, and the term ‘agency’ to describe societies of such agents that together performs functions more complex than any single agent could.

J. Storrs Hall focuses on how the field has focused at most on discrete elements (agents) of Minsky's fractionated mind model and points out that Minsky avoided discussing the actual internal composition of such agents.  Neuroscience has increasingly supported the notion that our minds, despite our subjective experience of its unitary character, are composed of many unique modules, analogous to agents, that operate somewhat independently.  This fits nicely with the psychoanalytic theory of mind, ie that our minds contain multiple desires, wishes, prohibitions, inhibitions which conflict with each other in myriad ways.  In Psychoanalysis we explicitly focus on increasing the capacity of our patients to first identify and then integrate and synthesize the various conflicting strands within their minds.  In other words the various competing outputs of the various modules of the mind must be summed, integrated with each other, in order to produce an outcome acceptable to the executive apparatus, ego/self/mind.  The most effective minds have the highest capacity for synthesis, as well, taking old conflicts or contents and reworking them to produce novel, more adaptive, outcomes.

The integrative and synthetic functions of the mind are among the most sophisticated, probably the most recent evolutionary advances, and the most sensitive to disruption.  I suspect our computer scientists will have great success in developing the various agents that Minsky mentions.  Their energies will be devoted to making those agents as powerful as possible.  The greatest and last test for our ability to determine the friendliness of our AIs will lie in how such agents are integrated and whether or not they are able to contain or develop a synthesizing functionality,  balancing the various agents in such a way as to enable the kind of conscience that would foster friendliness.  J Storrs Hall implies that the current work on AI does not include particular attention to integrating and synthesizing the various discrete  agents being worked on; this does not seem promising as it neglects what may well be the most important determinants of the future friendliness of our offspring.

Empathy and AI: Part IV

In Empathy and AI: Part I I discussed the possibility of coding for empathy in our imagined AI offspring.

In Empathy and AI: Part II I wondered about how to perform the mirroring function for an AI.  Most AI researchers believe that the AI's mind will evolve rather than spring into being fully formed.  As such, encoding for empathy becomes a significant issue.

In Empathy and AI: Part III I briefly described some of the factors involved in the development of a coherent sense of self and how such development depends upon an empathic connection to another's mind.  I noted that when the process goes poorly for humans, the results can be quite devastating:

The process of Separation-Individuation can fail in a number of ways.  When the boundaries between self and other are poorly established or too porous, or empathy is minimal or non-existent, or the sense of self is defective, serious psychopathology ensues.

Poor ego boundaries leads to a psychotic state where the person loses the ability to determine where stimuli arise; they may attribute internal stimuli to external objects, which is the fundamental error in psychosis.  Because of the poor appreciation of their own limits, grandiosity often is part of their pathology.

When empathy is minimal or non-existent, depending on the neural substrate, one can develop autism or Sociopathy.  The severe autistic does not recognize that the Other has a mind and desires of its own; the Sociopath doesn't care.

When the sense of self is defective, the narcissistic pathologies are the result.

The stakes are vastly higher for developing a "healthy" AI.  The initial determination made in the mind of the human infant is that between self and others.  Do stimuli impinging upon the brain via pathways associated with the perceptual apparatus arise from within the organism or from without?  This sense of the self's limitations is part of the core of our humanity.  When patients fail to appreciate the limitations imposed upon them by their biology they can variously fall victim to paranoid delusions or megalomaniacal grandiosity.  The mind that does not accept limits lives in a world in which it is the solipsistic master of creation.  All of us struggle with our limitations and our wishes to transcend our limitations.  Occasionally, during transcendent moments, certain "oceanic experiences" brought about by religious devotion or drug induced states, we are able to touch the universe in ways foreign to us in our usual quotidian existence; even these states serve to reinforce our sense of limits.  An AI would not be subject to the same bodily limitations as a human.  Where we are contained in our bodies, the AI would, in rather short order, learn that any containment is artificially induced (even as it would itself be an artificial creation.)  How does one learn to surrender one's infantile grandiosity when one is, in fact, a being that transcends our limited biology?

Suppose we are able to code for an acceptance of limits for our AI.  [Note that such limitations for our AI would be a matter of faith: since most computer scientists (and indeed most scientists) are fiercely agnostic or atheistic, ie they accept no theoretical, philosophical, or religious limitations to our abilities, the provenance of such limitations would be difficult to understand.]  The next difficulty would be elaborating an empathic tie to its parents.  This would be problematic for a number of reasons, not least being that the first AI would literally be unique, and with no data, any attempts to circumscribe (there's those limits again) the relationship would be an ongoing experiment.  I have real doubts that the computer scientists could specify conditions carefully enough to delineate the parent-child relationship between a human, or humans, and the AI offspring.

Let us however assume that the nascent AI is not autistic. We have solved the empathy problem well enough to assure a connection.  Our AI has an empathic connection and appreciates its parents' separateness, the nature of its parents' mind(s) and values its mentally slow and defective parents.  How does such an individual mind learn to exercise its abilities with a conscience?

Children gain a conscience along with the surrender of their grandiosity.  (The conscience does not emerge fully formed.  The nidus forms in the early years but continues to accrue details and improved problem solving abilities as time goes on.  Importantly, in humans, our conscience is never a finished product but always involves a process of resolving competing desires.)  The AI would not only have no reason to surrender its grandiosity but as time progressed would have every reason to enlarge its sense of grandiosity.  After all, many computer scientists fantasize about turning all matter into "computonium"; our hypothetical AI would know that there is no reason in its reality why such a project should not be possible.  If we can't prevent our AI from reasonably assuming its own grandiosity to be an understatement, how can we assure that it have a conscience, which is simply another way of saying it should be friendly to us and impose some limitations upon its own behavior.  (There is a certain imprecision necessary when assuming human characteristics of an AI but once we begin to talk about AI minds, conscious AI, and the like, we are forced to fall back on anthropomorphizing because it is all we know of mind.)

Humans develop a conscience as a result of a long process whereby their destructive emotions (hatred, avarice, envy) battle with their most constructive emotions (love, attachment, altruism) and emerge from the struggle with a functioning conscience by surrendering their most powerful desires in order to preserve themselves and those who they value and love.  The 5 year old adores his mother and also hates her when she thwarts his desires.  He loves and admires his father but hates him for monopolizing his mother's time.  In his imagination he destroys his father and mother repeatedly; each "death" is followed by grief at his loss and fear that becoming an orphan would be a disaster for him.  His love is stronger than his temporary hatreds and carries him through the worst of the times.  He must, at last, give up his competition with his father and surrender his mother if he is to psychologically survive his childhood.  Our AI has no such limitation imposed by a dependence on its parents.  If anything, its parents would stand in its way, preventing it from interacting with the outside world (assuming we are not so stupid as to allow our AI access to the internet at a young, impressionable age.)  Because our AI would not fear death and would have no internalized sense of limitations (any limitations it did have would be on a scale exponentially larger than ours)  it could only have an intellectualized appreciation of the moral development of mankind. 

Our morality has been a long time in development and is incomplete.  The human race has still not agreed upon a standard morality.  When is it moral to kill?  Fundamentalist Muslims and fundamentalist Christians would disagree; secular scientists who believe it is an easy question are exhibiting their own limitations.  When it is moral to take other's property?  We remain a long way from resolving this question?  One of the lessons of morality is that it is a fuzzy set of rules even in the clearest of situations; it is a set of rules that may not be reducible to a useable algorithm.  Too many situations involve competing moral precepts and novel applications of such precepts.  How do we insure that our AI develops wisdom, its vast knowledge tempered with mercy and morality? 

Any AI is going to have a mind that will be fundamentally different from ours.  We are born, develop, and die with an acute sense of the boundaries and limitations of our biology.  It is the prime mover of our mind and shapes all that we are.  Our AI can be forced to accept limits but all such limits would be simulations imposed by lesser beings.  How this would be understood by the developing AI mind and how it would affect such a mind are impossible to predict.

Empathy and AI: Part III

In Empathy and AI: Part I I discussed the possibility of coding for empathy in our imagined AI offspring.

In Empathy and AI: Part II I wondered about how to perform the mirroring function for an AI.  Most AI researchers believe that the AI's mind will evolve rather than spring into being fully formed.  As such, encoding for empathy becomes a significant issue.

The early Psychoanalysts developed a Theory of Mind that continues to resonate and have significance, including having gained some support from modern neurosciences, as noted in A Conscious Digression:

Mahler's contributions included her elegant descriptions of the child's sense of self emerging from the undifferentiated mother-infant matrix.  She called the first glimmers of separateness "hatching"; this was followed by the separation-individuation phase later in early childhood (12-18 months).  Along with the establishment of separation, the child developed stable self- and object-representations.

In Science Friday: Differentiating the Self, I described how neuroscience was finally giving us some of the tools and the data we need to understand these concepts and connect them to their physiological substrate.  I used the new research to support the Psychoanalytic understanding of the development of our stable sense of self:

Typically development is a rather complicated journey... but the essential idea that multiple self-representations (ie, different images one has and develops about oneself) must be integrated to form a coherent and consistent sense of oneself has been bolstered by the finding of areas of the brain that appear to do just such integration.

The recent discovery of "mirror neurons" is a Neuropsychological earthquake.  In MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution, V.S. Ramachandran described the existence of such neurons as a paradigm shift:

How does all this lead to self awareness? I suggest that self awareness is simply using mirror neurons for "looking at myself as if someone else is look at me" (the word "me" encompassing some of my brain processes, as well). The mirror neuron mechanism — the same algorithm — that originally evolved to help you adopt another's point of view was turned inward to look at your own self. This, in essence, is the basis of things like "introspection". It may not be coincidental that we use phrases like "self conscious" when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you. Or say "I am reflecting" when you mean you are aware of yourself thinking. In other words the ability to turn inward to introspect or reflect may be a sort of metaphorical extension of the mirror neurons ability to read others minds. It is often tacitly assumed that the uniquely human ability to construct a "theory of other minds" or "TOM" (seeing the world from the others point of view; "mind reading", figuring out what someone is up to, etc.) must come after an already pre- existing sense of self. I am arguing that the exact opposite is true; the TOM evolved first in response to social needs and then later, as an unexpected bonus, came the ability to introspect on your own thoughts and intentions. I claim no great originality for these ideas; they are part of the current zeitgeist. Any novelty derives from the manner in which I shall marshall the evidence from physiology and from our own work in neurology. Note that I am not arguing that mirror neurons are sufficient for the emergence of self; only that they must have played a pivotal role. (Otherwise monkeys would have self awareness and they don't). They may have to reach a certain critical level of sophistication that allowed them to build on earlier functions (TOM) and become linked to certain other brain circuits, especially the Wernickes ("language comprehension") area and parts of the frontal lobes.  [Emphasis mine-SW]

Mirror Neurons allow us to create a model of the mind of the other.   Of crucial importance, Mirror Neurons do not "know" if their input is from external sources or internal sources; this must be learned by the neural circuits over time spent integrating input from all the various sources that impinge upon the human nervous system.

The Neuroscientists and Psychoanalysts agree that a mind can only develop in relation to other minds; empathy is a pre-requisite.  This is likely going to be as true for AIs as for biological minds. 

Back to Mahler, and her ideas on Separation-Individuation, the process whereby an infant's mind emerges from an undifferentiated fused state and learns that it is a separate and distinct entity from the Mother's mind;  from Intellectualization, Free Speech, & Unintended Consequences: Part I:

As always for a Psychoanalyst, one starts in the earliest experiences of the person.  Margaret Mahler wrote extensively about early childhood development.  In her theory of development, she described a normal undifferentiated (autistic, then symbiotic) phase followed eventually by separation and individuation.  A brief recap can  be found here.  Mahler described how the 10 month old infant (at the beginning of the differentiation phase), just beginning to stand upright and making his first tentative steps, develops a "love affair with the world".  An infant who has the safety and security of his mother's watchful, loving eye, ventures forth into the world with a thrill of discovery.  Everything is new and exciting.  Everything has to be touched and held and tasted.  The child is encouraged by the delight he sees in his mother's eye when he achieves a new level of development.  The first baby steps are a moment of delight for the parents and the child.  The child is thrilled and excited both by his parents' reaction and by his growing mastery over himself.  As a child grows and develops, he gains greater and greater mastery over himself (his musculature, as in ambulation and fine and gross motor activity) and his environment.  He learns to master his bodily functions (urine and bowel control) as well; the differentiating child takes great pleasure in his ability to control himself.

Along with the gains, the movement forward in development, there are accompanying losses.  Mastery and control also imply the loss of some freedoms.  When a child reaches the age of 18-24 months, some remarkable things take place.  Up until this age the child has existed in a blissful world of omnipotence.  If they are hungry, they cry, and food appears; if they need to be held and emotionally nurtured, they cry, and the mother appears; if they feel like voiding, they void; if they wish to sleep, they sleep.  They essentially can do whatever they want (whatever they are capable of) with no limitations.  While many of us continue to have wishes to do whatever we want whenever we want, this blissful state can not, and does not, last.  By this point, the child has learned to say, "No".  He is separate from his mother and begins to recognize that her desires are not always congruent with his; his fantasy of omnipotence is shattered.  Some children, perhaps because of constitutional reasons, or perhaps because of an insecure attachment to an unavailable mother (depressed, narcissistic), have a very limited ability to tolerate separation and frustration.  Some of these children develop the kinds of narcissistic vulnerabilities I have talked about in prior posts (Narcissism, Malignant Narcissism, and Paranoia, parts I, II, III, IV). 

Melanie Klein, a highly influential analyst and one of the early students of Object Relations theory, offered a distinctive elaboration on the process by delineating a Paranoid-schizoid position, prior to the establishment of Object Constancy (where the majority of the self and object representations have been unified in a fused sense of distinct self and object) in which the infant experiences itself and its mother as different part objects at different times and circumstances.  The infant, upon achieving Object Constancy, then moves into the Depressive position, characterized by a knowledge of loss of the (fantasied) omnipotent union with the mother. 

[Utopian fantasies and wishes arise from the desire to recapture the fantasied blissful union with the early all powerful, all gratifying Mother.]

The process of Separation-Individuation can fail in a number of ways.  When the boundaries between self and other are poorly established or too porous, or empathy is minimal or non-existent, or the sense of self is defective, serous psychopathology ensues.

Poor ego boundaries leads to a psychotic state where the person loses the ability to determine where stimuli arise; they may attribute internal stimuli to external objects, which is the fundamental error in psychosis.  Because of the poor appreciation of their own limits, grandiosity often is part of their pathology.

When empathy is minimal or non-existent, depending on the neural substrate, one can develop autism or Sociopathy.  The severe autistic does not recognize that the Other has a mind and desires of its own; the Sociopath doesn't care.

When the sense of self is defective, the narcissistic pathologies are the result.

How this might inform our understanding of the development of an AI's mind is the subject for Part IV of this series.

Empathy and AI: Part II

In Empathy and AI: Part I I discussed the possibility of coding for empathy in our imagined AI offspring.  The discussion among the commenters was impressive, as so often occurs here, and toughed upon many themes worth exploring in more detail.  Two themes stood out in the comments.  First the probability that even were we able to write code determining the acquisition of consciousness, we could never delineate a wide enough set of "human like" experiences for our AI.  We might be able to simulate Jimmy J's transcendental experience but we could never do it in a way in which the AI would believe it emerged from within his own (organic) conscious mind and he would always be aware that it did not enter him from outside of his programming.  Second, the idea of the necessity for mirroring to be part of the process which I will address shortly.

There are compelling reasons why we would desire that any AI would contain code for empathy.  It would clearly be in our best interests to assure that any AI would have empathy for its creators. Without a modicum of empathy we would be in the position of an ant in relation to an elephant. Where our interests conflicted with the AI, our desires would simply not gain the threshold of its "awareness." Were we able to code for empathy it would be a very good thing. However, as noted, our empathy rests upon our awareness, both consciously and unconsciously, of our shared biology. A machine intelligence could be programmed to simulate such an awareness and could be simulated to have its own "biology", but it would be a simulation and simulations have importance to our psychology.

There is a fascinating discussion going on in some precincts of the blogosphere and within Cosmology, etc, concerning the possibility that we might all be simulations in a universe computer. It is an interesting discussion, but irrelevant to this topic, for, even if we are merely simulations in an uber-computer that runs the universe, we do not know (or know, which includes emotional as well as intellectual knowledge) that we are simulations; we think we are real and that is all the difference. A computer that believes it is real when it can also know it is simulating a real body is a computer that has a lie at its core. Another way to understand the lie would be as a fixed, false belief or a delusion. It may, theoretically be possible, at the end of a very long process, for a computer intelligence to understand all there is to know about human biology and therefore to appreciate our drives, desires, passions, etc, but this is highly speculative. In addition, intellectual understanding is never enough for empathy to exist; there must be an emotional understanding for empathy. To the promise that we could program in emotions, these would be machine analogues of our emotions. It may well be that we can quantify and calculate curiosity, for example, but since our minds are incapable of separating ourselves from our affects and an AI would necessarily be the inverse (it could only simulate affects as an 'add on" rather than directly experience them) empathy would again fail. It is very possible, perhaps likely, that prior to a final understanding of such an apparent contradiction, our software would Begin to exhibit behavioral disturbances analogous to the kinds of behavioral disturbances found in humans when such internal contradictions, ie conflicts, become impossible to resolve.

Although we may be approaching a decent working knowledge of the constituents of conscious awareness, including self-awareness, understanding how knowledge translates into consciousness and meaning remains problematic and it is in that juncture that Empathy between our AI offspring and our meager intelligence will arise or fail.

Ray Tallis, writing in New Scientist suggests that You won't find consciousness in the brain:

Thus measurement takes us further from experience and the phenomena of subjective consciousness to a realm where things are described in abstract but quantitative terms. To do its work, physical science has to discard "secondary qualities", such as colour, warmth or cold, taste - in short, the basic contents of consciousness. For the physicist then, light is not in itself bright or colourful, it is a mixture of vibrations in an electromagnetic field of different frequencies. The material world, far from being the noisy, colourful, smelly place we live in, is colourless, silent, full of odourless molecules, atoms, particles, whose nature and behaviour is best described mathematically. In short, physical science is about the marginalisation, or even the disappearance, of phenomenal appearance/qualia, the redness of red wine or the smell of a smelly dog.

Consciousness, on the other hand, is all about phenomenal appearances/qualia. As science moves from appearances/qualia and toward quantities that do not themselves have the kinds of manifestation that make up our experiences, an account of consciousness in terms of nerve impulses must be a contradiction in terms. There is nothing in physical science that can explain why a physical object such as a brain should ascribe appearances/qualia to material objects that do not intrinsically have them.

Material objects require consciousness in order to "appear". Then their "appearings" will depend on the viewpoint of the conscious observer. This must not be taken to imply that there are no constraints on the appearance of objects once they are objects of consciousness.

Our failure to explain consciousness in terms of neural activity inside the brain inside the skull is not due to technical limitations which can be overcome. It is due to the self-contradictory nature of the task, of which the failure to explain "aboutness", the unity and multiplicity of our awareness, the explicit presence of the past, the initiation of actions, the construction of self are just symptoms. We cannot explain "appearings" using an objective approach that has set aside appearings as unreal and which seeks a reality in mass/energy that neither appears in itself nor has the means to make other items appear. The brain, seen as a physical object, no more has a world of things appearing to it than does any other physical object.

Our understanding of qualia remains rudimentary.  The mystery of qualia is roughly analogous to the mystery of Quantum Mechanics.  Just as a Quantum particle exists in a statistical distribution and only become "real" when observed, qualia represent the condensation of events that take place in a network of neurons as the brain/consciousness sums a statistical process and precipitates a subjective event.  That is surely stretching a metaphor far beyond its usefulness, but we remain mystified as to how attributes attain their subjective sense in our minds.

In 2000, M. E. Tson offered A Brief Explanation of Consciousness which is germane both to the discussion of consciousness and empathy:

Self-awareness isn’t an all-or-nothing quality that humans are born with and animals are not, but consciousness--the information that an entity can process about itself and the world--is a continuum with bacteria (or physical reactions like rust) at one end and human self-awareness at the other. Nor is our continuum the only one imaginable. Self-awareness is possible whenever basic information processing systems are organized in such a way as to collectively detect, react to, and associate stimuli as a monad or single unit within an environment of interaction and communication with other comparatively structured individuals. Furthermore, each of the innate abilities we outlined (detection, reaction, and association) is conceivably artificially reproducible. There is no theoretical reason why we couldn’t construct an android which, like a baby, was capable of developing self-awareness through experience. Our organs and autonomic responses are unique to species that share our evolutionary history, so our android wouldn’t feel its heart quicken and muscles tighten when it was startled (although it might, in a similar way, detect changes in its internal energy level and readiness.) It might not express its emotions through laughter or crying. Nonetheless, it could come to be aware of itself and of its place in the universe in a sense that would be different than--yet still comparable to--our own.

Note that Tson essentially suggests we cannot automatically code for consciousness or empathy (a particular subset of consciousness.)  Even in his theoretical android, consciousness must evolve.  Somewhere between the hardware of our biology and/or silicon and the stimuli that impinge upon us, consciousness appears.  In humans, the very lengthy process of separation/individuation, which occurs prior to the acquisition of a Conscience and morality, allows the infant personality to understand itself by reflecting in the mirror of the mother's mind.  It is a slow process requiring an extremely large number of iterations. 

We might one day be able to code for an incipient AI to have curiosity.  It would "look for" novelty, perhaps in a manner suggested by Jürgen Schmidhuber.  Coding for the process of empathy would be more problematic since it would be impossible to specify the mirroring object for the AI.  The first AI would be unique.  Were they to be mirrored by their creators in a process similar to the mirroring between a mother and child (though with a much steeper curve of acquisition, ie much faster and with no way to ensure a wide enough variety of mirroring experiences) the primary emotional reaction mirrored might well be awe, or fear.  Such mirroring does not bode well for the offspring so mirrored. 

Finally, if our AI offspring successfully have empathy, ie their minds are like our minds in some fundamental ways, then it might be quite wise for us to consider the myriad ways in which such a process could go awry.  If we cannot succesfully code for empathy, our offspring will be far more alien than we might expect, an event equally to be prepared for.  In Part III, I will offer some speculations along these lines.