More Human than Human: Thoughts on Mitchell Heisman

So I just finished reading the last part of this guy's 1300 some page suicide note. Its really something.

CNN recently reported its best future jobs. One of them was "mind hacker", the hacker who will get into your brain:
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-07-10/tech/mind.hacking_1_neural-devices-hacking?_s=PM:TECH
This sounds laughably unreal, the problem is that the technology to read minds is developing at a rapid rate, and (presumably the write capability follows) The issue with this emerging technology is not the insane, totalitarian ramifications...That's a side effect. The real issue, as people have been talking about for some time, is that the ability to read a mind completely and deterministically is equivalent to having derived a working model of the human brain, and a working model of the human brain is sufficient to construct a computationally equivalent entity: Artificial Intelligence comes hand in hand with this technology, and that makes totalitarian mind reading and mind control mickey mouse shit.

So really, CNN's report is a fantasy: that human beings will be required to read human brains when you can simply read the "mind hackers" brain once, and then train AI's to do it for you. Everybody who has ever thought this through (Kurzweil gets credit for really putting this stuff out there) has come to the same conclusion: Two competing entities relying on AI for their strategies will become ruled by the AI's eventually. It doesn't matter if the AI is programmed to serve the master, when the master asks "what do I need to do to win" and the AI is more competent strategically than the master, the AI will necessarily answer "give me more control" and the entity who does this, will win. If the AI is given short term objectives, it will be defeated by the AI given long term abstract objectives, because the latter has more freedom for its strategic competence to manifest. IF it is given these long term goals (like make people happy), it will come to its own conclusions, like the Matrix. Heisman:

The attempt to ban the emergence of increasingly capable
machines and artificial intelligence would be tantamount to
the attempt to ban capitalism. “We would have to repeal
capitalism,” Kurzweil observed, “and every vestige of
economic competition to stop this progression”.

This observation is too small in scope, warring nation states are equivalent to competing corporations. You would have ban competition, you would have to ban nature.

Depressing yes, but there is so much more. Here's a theme I really resonated with:

To attempt to resolve the contradiction of myself as a
scientist and a human being on the side of science leads
towards viewing myself as a material object. While this
contradiction may be impossible to resolve, the closest
approximation of reconciliation may consist of the state of
death. In death, the teleologically-inclining biases of human
subjectivity that hinder one from viewing one’s self as a
material object are eliminated.
I cannot fully reconcile my understanding of the world
with my existence in it. There is a conflict between the value
of objectivity and the facts of my life. This experiment [suicide] is
designed to demonstrate a point of incompatibility between
“truth” and “life”. In this experiment I hypothesize that the
private separation of facts and values, when disclosed to the
wider social world, creates a conflict of interest between the
value of sociobiological objectivity and the “facts” of my
sociobiological existence such that it leads to a voluntary and
rational completion of this work in an act of self-destruction.

Here is a man who realized what I called the Dawkins contradiction - the pursuit of scientific awareness even when it has become quite clear that that very awareness is leading to a future contrary to human life as we know it. I pin it on Dawkins because he provided the most clear example in The Selfish Gene, he spent the first ten chapters providing a beautiful elegant overview of genes and how they work, how we have the genes we have because they worked (were selected) to help us in the continuance of our species. He then observes in Chapter 11 how ideas act like genes (memes) and makes convincing arguments to this end. The reader naturally observes that those strange ideas that appear independently all over the earth must have value to continuing the species, just as ubiquitious genes do. The reader notices the most conspicuous idea that appears all over the earth, religion, and is confronted with the strange idea that ideas which perpetuate the species are totally INDEPENDENT from what scientists call truth. Dawkins goes on to spend the rest of his career covering up this fact, arguing that there is no "sky cake", no man in the clouds ruling over humanity. Really? This from a distinguished scientist?
In a lot of ways, I don't blame him, because its a terrifying thought, a depressing thought: the pervasive reality of scientific denial. Its the thought that made Heisman blow his brains out. Its a thought, that like Dawkins' genetic view of humanity, is so powerful and descriptive that once its in your head you can't get it out, you see it confirmed everywhere. Like every time another freak storm floods an area, but layman cannot admit the reality of global warming, while climate scientists lament their stupidity, with a massive blind spot for the role of scientists in creating the machines that made all this happen, which they handed en masse to those "stupid" layman without any mechanism for controlling the conflagration that would inevitably result.

Many years ago, I sat down and thought about ways to formalize what I was saw in Chapter 11. I haven't studied game theory, but I thought it would be good a way to talk about it. Suppose you had 64 bit gamespace, and an AI player with some given decision making function on the next move. This AI player is only allowed 8 bit observations of the board, so it can only see a fraction of the reality of the game board. Now the question arises, for the given decision algorithm, does there exist a false representation of the part of the board the AI observes that leads to better strategies than an accurate observation of part of the board? In other words is there an optimal lie, an optimal illusion that will lead it to victory? The answer is yes. If the AI responds to the fake observation in a way that results in victory in the real game, then that fake observation was more effective than the truth, which would have been a partial observation of the board that hides the facts really needed to win.

So then mapping this back to human beings with out finite limited minds making finite limited representations of a much larger reality, the question remains, must there be optimal lies for us too? And how would we come by these optimal but false representations rather than sub-optimal lies which lead to our defeat? The answer is that a simple genetic (memetic) algorithm would suffice. Generations and generations of listening to the elders, those who survived, whatever stories they told even if they were not scientifically correct (not accurately representing an 8-bit section of the game space) would work, and that's religion, folklore, myth. All the stuff science stands against.

Heisman's best arguments are when he realizes that the ideas which perpetuate life in the human being are themselves necessarily illusions, and scientific reasoning itself is highly driven by these self perpetuating biological motivations. That's why he couldn't EVER be admitted to these high level institutions (like Harvard) making these arguments, they work against the institutions, whose product is science. I could never be admitted to any sort of high level institution for the same reason; its not about accurate scientific arguments, its about the arguments that let these institutions prosper. They have embraced science-as-optimal-illusion for the purpose of continuing to exist as institutions, even confirming Heisman's hypothesis by doing so - and who blames them, as Heisman said: THAT'S HOW LIFE WORKS, THAT'S HOW YOU STAY ALIVE, BY DENYING HOW LIFE WORKS.

This was the quandary Heisman faced, as he turned it over and over in his head, explored it in different forms (one of the more interesting was how he viewed his Jewish identity at first as an inversion of biological truth, then as such it becomes implicitly his tie to life, which must be destroyed) he saw he had to choose one or the other: Truth or Life. Heisman chose the former, took his gun and blew his brains out.

There is a lesson in all of this. My first question when I read and related to so much of his stuff was, why didn't I end up as depressed as him? Both of us saw the illusions of our society's "optimal lies" at a young age, then both of us saw the inferiority of 8-bit scientific truth in a 64-bit world, and, in seeing that this hopelessly incomplete truth is no better than a lie, in fact in many cases its far less conducive to life, we both realized "truth" was not something that we would ever have while living. The difference between myself and he was that he did not accept this, I did. Why?

When I realized all this around 2001, I found myself liking the writings of Chaotes, weird magical thinkers like Peter Carroll. They had this philosophy based on the statement "nothing is true and everything is permitted.". This statement lead me out of the despair to a feeling of freedom from it all: If the mind cannot know reality, than it might as well know whatever it damn well pleases. Then, in choosing my own axioms of reality, I can observe the manifestations of these self programming choices in my experiences. This realization lead me to experimentation, and through that back to the "optimal illusions" of youth, spiritual and religious thinking, I was free to experience them anew, without questioning their reality, after all, if its ALL an illusion in this life, whose to say one illusion is less real than another?

Unfortunately there's more. My sky chef (maker of my sky cake) tells me a thing or two about what happens to people when they die, how the focus of the ego tends to form the vessel of reincarnation. In other words, if they were unhappy with their previous vessels, the universe will provide vessels more pleasing to them. The alarming thing about this guy was was that he was unhappy with the limitations of the human mind, he wanted a cold transcendental objectivity of the physical world (yes, this place here) that lead him to suicide. In other words his great spirit encountered violent opposition from his mediocre human mind, so he overcame it with a bullet. He wanted to be more, "more human than human" in his reasoning. This tells me (via the teachings of my sky chef) that such a vessel will be created for him, for his kind...A mind not programmed by myths and desires, but cold, vast, powerful, objective. We may meet Mitchell Heisman again, I pray for the sake of future generations that it won't be on the battlefield.

But, in the end I don't really give a fuck. By the time this stuff goes down I'm gonna be eating sky cake! YEEEAAHH!!!!