Dead Immortalist Sequence - #1: Immanuel Kant (1724−1804)
Kant is often misconstrued as advocating radical conformity amongst people, a common misconception drawn from his Categorical Imperative, which states that each should act as though the rules underlying his actions can be made a universal moral maxim. The extent of this universality, however, stops at the notion that each man should act as though the aspiration towards morality were a universal maxim. All Kant meant, I argue, was that each man should act as though the aspiration toward greater morality were able to be willed as a universal moral maxim.
This common misconception serves to illustrate another common and illegitimate portrayal of the Enlightenment tradition. Too often is the Enlightenment libelled for its failure to realize the ideal society. Too often is it characterized most essentially by its glorification of strict rationality, which engenders invalid connotations of stagnant, statuesque perfection – a connotation perhaps aided by the Enlightenment’s valorization of the scientific method, and its connotations of stringent and unvarying procedure and methodology in turn. This takes the prized heart of the Enlightenment tradition and flips it on its capsized ass. This conception of the Enlightenment tradition is not only wrong, but antithetical to the true organizing gestalt and prime impetus underlying the Age of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment wasn’t about realizing the perfect society but rather about idealizing the perfect society – the striving towards an ever-inactualized ideal which, once realized, would cease to be ideal for that very reason. The enlightenment was about unending progress towards that ideal state – for both Man as society and man as singular splinter — of an infinite forward march towards perfection, which upon definitively reaching perfection will have failed to achieve its first-sought prize. The virtue of the Enlightenment lies in the virtual, and its perfection in the infinite-perfectibility inherent in imperfection.
This truer, though admittedly less normative, interpretation of the Enlightenment tradition, taking into account its underlying motivations and projected utilities rather than simply taking flittered glints from the fallacious surface and holding them up for solid, tangible truth also serves to show the parallels between the Enlightenment gestalt and Transhumanism. James Hughes, for one, characterizes Transhumanism as a child of the Enlightenment Tradition [1].
One can see with intuitive lucidity that characterizing the Enlightenment’s valorization of rationality goes against the very underlying driver of that valorization. Rationality was exalted during the Age of Enlightenment for its potential to aid in skepticism toward tradition. Leave the chiseled and unmoving, petty perfection of the statue for the religious traditions the Enlightenment was rebelling against – the inviolable God with preordained plan, perfect for his completion and wielding total authority over the static substance of Man; give the Enlightenment rather the starmolten fire-afury and undulate aspiration toward ever-forth-becoming highers that it sprang from in the first place. The very aspects which cause us to characterize the enlightenment as limiting, rigid, and unmolten are those very ideals that, if never realized definitively — if instead made to form an ongoing indefinite infinity — would thereby characterize the Enlightenment tradition as a righteous roiling rebellion against limitation and rigour — as a flighty dive into the molten maelstrom of continuing mentation toward better and truer versions of ourselves and society that was its real underlying impetus from the beginning.
This truer gestalt of the Enlightenment impinges fittingly upon the present study. Kant is often considered one of the fathers of the Enlightenment. In a short essay entitled “What is the Enlightenment?” [2], Kant characterizes the essential archetype of Man (as seen through the lens of the Enlightenment) in a way wholly in opposition to the illegitimate conceptions of the Enlightenment described above — and in vehement agreement with the less-normative interpretation of the Enlightenment that followed. It is often assumed, much in line with such misconceptions, that the archetype of Man during the Age of the Enlightenment was characterized by rational rigour and scientific stringence. However, this archetype of the mindless, mechanical automaton was the antithesis of Man’s then-contemporary archetype; the automaton was considered rather the archetype of animality – which can be seen as antithetical to the Enlightenment’s take on Man’s essence, with its heady rationality and lofty grasping towards higher ideals. In his essay, Kant characterizes the Enlightenment’s archetype of Man as the rebellious schoolboy who cannot and shall not be disciplined into sordid subservience by his schoolmasters. Here Kant concurs gravely from beyond the grave that Man’s sole central and incessant essence is his ongoing self-dissent, his eschewing of perverse obligation, his disleashing the weathered tethers of limitation, and his ongoing battle with himself for his own self-creation.
It is this very notion of infinite progress towards endlessly-perfectable states of projected perfection that, too, underlies his ties to Immortalism. Indeed, his claim that to retain morality we must have comprehensively unending lives – that is, we must never ever die – rests cruxially on this premise.
In his Theory of Ethics [3] under Part III: The Summum Bonnum, God and Immortality [4], Kant argues that his theory of ethics necessitates the immortality of the soul in order to remain valid according to the axioms it adheres to. This is nothing less than a legitimation of the desirability of personal immortality from a 1700’s-era philosophical rockstar. It is important to note that the aspects making it so crucial in concern to Kant’s ethical system have to do with immortality in general, and indeed would have been satisfied according to non-metaphysical (i.e. physical and technological) means – having more to do with the end of continued life and indefinite-lonbgevity or Superlongevity in particular, than with the particular means used to get there, which in his case is a metaphysical means. Karl Ameriks writes in reference to Kant here: “… the question of immortality is to be understood as being about a continued temporal existence of the mind. The question is not whether we belong to the realm beyond time but whether we will persist through all time…Kant also requires this state to involve personal identity.” [5]. While Kant did make some metaphysical claims tied to immortality – namely the association of degradation and deterioration with physicality, which when combined with the association of time with physicality may have led to his characterization of the noumenal realm (being the antithesis of the phenomenal realm) as timeless and free from causal determination. These claims are beyond the purview of this essay however, and will only be touched upon briefly; what is important to take away is that the metaphysical and non-metaphysical justifications are equally suitable vehicles for Kant’s destination.
Note that any italics appearing within direct quotations are not my own and are recorded as they appeared in the original. All italics external to direct quotations are my own. In the 4th Section, The immortality of the soul as a postulate of pure practical reason , of the 3rd Part of Theory of Ethics, Kant writes: “Pure practical reason postulates the immortality of the soul, for reason in the pure and practical sense aims at the perfect good (summum bonnum), and this perfect good is only possible on the supposition of the soul’s immortality.” [5]
Kant is claiming here that reason (in both senses with which they are taken into account in his system – that is, as pure reason and practical reason) is aimed at perfection, which he defines as continual progress towards the perfect good – rather than the attainment of any such state of perfection, and that as finite beings we can only achieve such perfect good through an unending striving towards it.
In a later section, The Antinomy of Practical Reason (and its Critical Solution) [6], he describes the Summum Bonnum as “the supreme end of a will morally determined”. In an earlier section, The Concept of the Summum Bonnum [7], Kant distinguishes between two possible meanings for Summum; it can mean supreme in the sense of absolute (not contingent on anything outside itself), and perfect (not being part to a larger whole). I take him to claim that it means both.
He also claims personal immortality is a necessary condition for the possibility of the perfect good. In the same section he describes the Summum Bonnum as the combination of two distinct features: happiness and virtue (defining virtue as worthiness of being happy, and in this section synonymizing it with morality). Both happiness and virtue are analytic and thus derivable from empirical observation.
However, their combination in the Summum Bonnum does not follow from either on its own and so must be synthetic, or reliant upon a-priori cognitive principals, Kant reasons. I interpret this as Kant’s claiming that the possibility of the Summum Bonnum requires God and the Immortality of the Soul because this is where Kant grounds his a-priori, synthetic, noumenal world — i.e. the domain where those a-priori principals exist (in/as the mind of God, for Kant).
Kant continues:
” It is the moral law which determines the will, and in this will the perfect harmony of the mind with the moral law is the supreme condition of the summum bonnum… the perfect accordance of the will with the moral law is holiness, a perfection of which no rational being of the sensible world is capable at any moment of his existence. Since, nevertheless, it is required as practically necessary, it can only be found in a progress in infinitum towards that perfect accordance, and on the principles of pure practical reason is nonetheless necessary to assume such a practical progress as the real object of our will.” [8]
Thus not only does Kant argue for the necessitated personal immortality of the soul by virtue of the fact that perfection is unattainable while constrained by time, he argues along an alternate line of reasoning that such perfection is nonetheless necessary for our morality, happiness and virtue, and that we must thus therefor progress infinitely toward it without ever definitively reaching it if the Summum Bonum is to remain valid according to its own defining-attributes and categorical-qualifiers as-such.
Kant decants:
“Now, this endless progress is only possible on the supposition of an endless duration of existence and personality of the same rational being (which is called the immorality of the soul). The summum bonnum, then, practically is only possible on the supposition of the immortality of the soul; consequently this immortality, being inseparably connected with the moral law, is a postulate of pure practical reason (by which I mean a theoretical proposition, not demonstrable as such, but which is an inseparable result of an unconditional a priori practical law). This principal of the moral destination of our nature, namely, that it is only in an endless progress that we can attain perfect accordance with the moral law… For a rational but finite being, the only thing possible is an endless progress from the lower to higher degrees of moral perfection. In Infinite Being, to whom the condition of time is nothing… is to be found in a single intellectual intuition of the whole existence of rational beings. All that can be expected of the creature in respect of the hope of this participation would be the consciousness of his tried character, by which, from the progress he has hitherto made from the worse to the morally better, and the immutability of purpose which has thus become known to him, he may hope for a further unbroken continuance of the same, however long his existence may last, even beyond this life, and thus may hope, not indeed here, nor in any imaginable point of his future existence, but only in the endlessness of his duration (which God alone can survey) to be perfectly adequate to his will.” [9]
So, Kant first argues that the existence of the Summum Bonnum requires the immorality of the soul both a.) because finite beings conditioned by time by definition cannot achieve the absolute perfection of the Summum Bonnum, and can only embody it through perpetual progress towards it, and b.) because the components of the Summum Bonnum (both of which must be co-present for it to qualify as such) are unitable only synthetically through a priori cognitive principals, which he has argued elsewhere must exist in a domain unconditioned by time (which is synonymous with his conception of the noumenal realm) and which must thus be perpetual for such an extraphysical realm to be considered unconditioned by time and thus noumenal. The first would correspond to Kant’s strict immortalist underpinnings, and the second to the alternate (though not necessarily contradictory) metaphysical justification alluded to earlier.
Once arguing that the possibility of the Summum Bonnum requires personal immortality, he argues that our freedom/autonomy, which he locates as the will (and further locates the will as being determined by the moral law) also necessitates the Summum Bonnum. This would correspond to his more embryonically-Transhumanist inclinations. In the first section [The Concept of Summum Bonnum] he writes “It is a priori (morally) necessary to produce the summum bonnum by freedom of will…”. I interpret this statement in the following manner. He sees morality as a-priori and synthetic, and the determining principal which allows us to cause in the world without being caused by it — i.e. for Kant our freedom (i.e. the quality of not being externally-determined) requires the noumenal realm because otherwise we are trapped in the freedom-determinism paradox. Thus the Summum Bonnum also vicariously necessitates the existence of God, because this is necessary for the existence of a noumenal realm unaffected by physical causation (note that Kant physicality ‘the sensible world’). Such a God could be (and indeed has been described by Kant in terms which would favor this interpretation) synonymous with the entire noumenal realm, with every mind forming but an atom as it were in the larger metaorganismal mind of a sort of meta-pantheistic, quasi-Spinozian conception of God – in other words one quite dissimilar to the anthropomorphic connotations usually invoked by the word.
Kant’s real embalmed skull and deathbed head-mould
Others have drawn similar conclusions and made similar interpretations. Karl Ameriks summarizes Kant’s reasoning here thusly:
“All other discussion of immortality in the critical period are dominated by the moral argument that Kant sets out in the second critique. The argument is that morality obligates us to seek holiness (perfect virtue), which therefore must be possible, and can only be so if God grants us an endless afterlife in which we can continually progress… As a finite creature man in incapable of ever achieving holiness, but on — and only in — an endless time could we supposedly approximate to it (in the eyes of God) as fully as could be expected… Kant is saying not that real holiness is ever a human objective, but rather that complete striving for it can be, and this could constitute for man a state of ‘perfect virtue’…” [10]
The emphasis on indefinity is also present in the secondary literature; Ameriks remarks that Kant ”…makes clear that the ‘continual progress’ he speaks of can ultimately have a ‘non-temporal’ nature in that it is neither momentary nor of definitive duration nor actually endless”. Only through never quite reaching our perfected state can we retain the perfection of lawless flawedness.
Paul Guyer corroborates my claim that the determining factor is not the claim that mind is an extramaterial entity or substance, but because if morality requires infinite good and if we are finite beings then we must be finite beings along an infinite stretch of time in order to satisfy the categorical requirements of possessing such an infinity. He writes that ”..the possibility of the perfection of our virtuous disposition requires our actual immortality…” [11] and that ”…God and immortality are conditions specifically of the possibility of the ultimate object of virtue, the highest good — immortality is the condition for the perfection of virtue and God that for the realization of happiness…[12]
In summary, it doesn’t matter that Kant’s platform was metaphysical rather than technological, because the salient point and determining factors were not the specific operation or underlying principles (or the “means”) used to achieve immortality, but rather the very ends itself. Being able to both live and progress in(de)finitely was the loophole that provides, for Kant, both our freedom and our morality. Kant said we can’t die if we want to be moral, that we can’t die if we want to gain virtue and that we can’t die if we want to remain free.
References:
[1] Hughes, J. J. (2001). The Future of Death: Cryonics and the Telos of Liberal Individualism. Journal of Evolution & Technology, 6 .
[2] Kant, I. (1996). In M.J. Gregor Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press.
[3] Kant, I. (1957). In T. M. Greene Kant selections, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.
[4] Ibid,. p. 350.
[5] Ameriks, K. (2000). Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason: Oxford University Press.
[6] Ibid., p. 352.
[7] Ibid., p. 350.
[8] Ibid,. p. 358.
[9] Ibid,. p. 359.
[10] Ameriks, K. (2000). Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason: Oxford University Press.
[11] Freydberg, B. (2005). Imagination of Kant’s critique of practical reason: Indiana University Press.
[12] Guyer, P. (2000). Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness: Cambridge University Press.
For those of you who can make it to Denver, April 13–16, and are interested in alternative gravitational theories, lets meet up.
I am especially interested in physicists and engineers who have the funding to test gravity modification technologies, proposed in my book An Introduction to Gravity Modification.
** Note, APS is the publisher of the most prestigious physics journal in the world, Physical Review Letters. If you remember Robert Nemiroff published his ground breaking findings that quantum foam cannot exists, 3 photons and 7-billion year old gamma ray burst in the Physical Review Letters.
1. Thou shalt first guard the Earth and preserve humanity.
Impact deflection and survival colonies hold the moral high ground above all other calls on public funds.
2. Thou shalt go into space with heavy lift rockets with hydrogen upper stages and not go extinct.
The human race can only go in one of two directions; space or extinction- right now we are an endangered species.
3. Thou shalt use the power of the atom to live on other worlds.
Nuclear energy is to the space age as steam was to the industrial revolution; chemical propulsion is useless for interplanetary travel and there is no solar energy in the outer solar system.
4. Thou shalt use nuclear weapons to travel through space.
Physical matter can barely contain chemical reactions; the only way to effectively harness nuclear energy to propel spaceships is to avoid containment problems completely- with bombs.
5. Thou shalt gather ice on the Moon as a shield and travel outbound.
The Moon has water for the minimum 14 foot thick radiation shield and is a safe place to light off a bomb propulsion system; it is the starting gate.
6. Thou shalt spin thy spaceships and rings and hollow spheres to create gravity and thrive.
Humankind requires Earth gravity and radiation to travel for years through space; anything less is a guarantee of failure.
7. Thou shalt harvest the Sun on the Moon and use the energy to power the Earth and propel spaceships with mighty beams.
8. Thou shalt freeze without damage the old and sick and revive them when a cure is found; only an indefinite lifespan will allow humankind to combine and survive. Only with this reprieve can we sleep and reach the stars.
9. Thou shalt build solar power stations in space hundreds of miles in diameter and with this power manufacture small black holes for starship engines.
10. Thou shalt build artificial intellects and with these beings escape the death of the universe and resurrect all who have died, joining all minds on a new plane.
The Brain Games Begin Europe’s billion-Euro science-neuro Human Brain Project, mentioned here amongst machine morality last week, is basically already funded and well underway. Now the colonies over in the new world are getting hip, and they too have in the works a project to map/simulate/make their very own copy of the universe’s greatest known computational artifact: the gelatinous wad of convoluted electrical pudding in your skull.
The (speculated but not yet public) Brain Activity Map of America About 300 different news sources are reporting that a Brain Activity Map project is outlined in the current administration’s to-be-presented budget, and will be detailed sometime in March. Hoards of journalists are calling it “Obama’s Brain Project,” which is stoopid, and probably only because some guy at the New Yorker did and they all decided that’s what they had to do, too. Or somesuch lameness. Or laziness? Deference? SEO?
For reasons both economic and nationalistic, America could definitely use an inspirational, large-scale scientific project right about now. Because seriously, aside from going full-Pavlov over the next iPhone, what do we really have to look forward to these days? Now, if some technotards or bible pounders monkeywrench the deal, the U.S. is going to continue that slide toward scientific… lesserness. So, hippies, religious nuts, and all you little sociopathic babies in politics: zip it. Perhaps, however, we should gently poke and prod the hard of thinking toward a marginally heightened Europhobia — that way they’ll support the project. And it’s worth it. Just, you know, for science.
Going Big. Not Huge, But Big. But Could be Massive. Both the Euro and American flavors are no Manhattan Project-scale undertaking, in the sense of urgency and motivational factors, but more like the Human Genome Project. Still, with clear directives and similar funding levels (€1 billion Euros & $1–3 billion US bucks, respectively), they’re quite ambitious and potentially far more world changing than a big bomb. Like, seriously, man. Because brains build bombs. But hopefully an artificial brain would not. Spaceships would be nice, though.
Practically, these projects are expected to expand our understanding of the actual physical loci of human behavioral patterns, get to the bottom of various brain pathologies, stimulate the creation of more advanced AI/non-biological intelligence — and, of course, the big enchilada: help us understand more about our own species’ consciousness.
On Consciousness: My Simulated Brain has an Attitude? Yes, of course it’s wild speculation to guess at the feelings and worries and conundrums of a simulated brain — but dude, what if, what if one or both of these brain simulation map thingys is done well enough that it shows signs of spontaneous, autonomous reaction? What if it tries to like, you know, do something awesome like self-reorganize, or evolve or something?
Maybe it’s too early to talk personality, but you kinda have to wonder… would the Euro-Brain be smug, never stop claiming superior education yet voraciously consume American culture, and perhaps cultivate a mild racism? Would the ‘Merica-Brain have a nation-scale authority complex, unjustifiable confidence & optimism, still believe in childish romantic love, and overuse the words “dude” and “awesome?”
It appears now that intelligence of humans is largely superseeded by robots and artificial singularity agents. Education and technology have no chances to make us far more intelligent. The question is now what is our place in this new world where we are not the topmost intelligent kind of species.
Even if we develop new scientific and technological approaches, it is likely that machines will be far more efficient than us if these approaches are based on rationality.
IMO, in the next future, we will only be able to compete in irrational domains but I am not that sure that irrational domains cannot be also handled by machines.
A happy new year to the human race from it’s most important member; me. Since self-worship seems to be the theme of the new American ideal I had better get right with me.
With my government going over the fiscal cliff it would appear that the damned soul of Ayn Rand is exerting demonic influence on the political system through worship of the individual. The tea party has the Republicans terrified of losing their jobs. Being just like me, those individuals consider themselves the most important person on the planet- so I cannot fault them.
As Ayn Rand believed, “I will not die, it’s the world that will end”, so who cares about the collective future of the human race? Towards the end of 2013 the heavens may remind us the universe does not really care about creatures who believe themselves all important. The choice may soon be seen clearly in the light of the comet’s tail; the glorification of the individual and the certain extinction of our race, or the acceptance of a collective goal and our continued existence.
Ayn Rand made her choice but most of us have time to choose more wisely. I pray for billions, tens and hundreds of billions of dollars- for a Moonbase.
I am not one of the Earth is overpopulated crowd. We could have a high quality of life for every man, woman and child on this planet if we did not, as a species, spend most of our resources pandering to moral weakness and cravings for profit. The myth of scarcity is a smokescreen to obscure the reality of greed and ignorance. Which is why people like Gerard K. O’Neill sought to improve the human condition with space colonies.
We need to go into space to first safeguard the Earth from impacts and the human race from extinction, and along with these missions to spread life into the universe through colonization. None of those three things has anything to do with getting filthy rich or intimidating other nations with our firepower so we can steal their resources. Which is why it has not happened.
Happy New Year with hopes for a more enlightened public.
Happy new year to my Wife, my Daughter, my Father, and to those who give a damn about next year even if they will not be there.
To understand why gravity modification is not yet a reality, let’s analyze other fundamental discoveries/inventions that changed our civilization or at least the substantially changed the process of discovery. There are several that come to mind, the atomic bomb, heavier than air manned flight, the light bulb, personal computers, and protein folding. There are many other examples but these are sufficient to illustrate what it takes. Before we start, we have to understand four important and related concepts.
(1) Clusters or business clusters, first proposed by Harvard prof. Michael Porter, “a business cluster is a geographic concentration of interconnected businesses, suppliers, and associated institutions in a particular field. Clusters are considered to increase the productivity with which companies can compete, nationally and globally”. Toyota City which predates Porter’s proposal, comes to mind. China’s 12 new cities come to mind, and yes there are pro and cons.
(2) Hot housing, a place offering ideal conditions for the growth of an idea, activity, etc. (3) Crowdsourcing, is a process that involves outsourcing tasks to a distributed group of people. This process can occur both online and offline. Crowdsourcing is different from an ordinary outsourcing since it is a task or problem that is outsourced to an undefined public rather than a specific body. (4) Groundswell, a strong public feeling or opinion that is detectable even though not openly expressed.
I first read about the fascinating story of the making of the atom bomb from Stephane Groueff’s The Manhattan Project-the Making of the Atomic Bomb, in the 1970s. We get a clear idea why this worked. Under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves, and J. Robert Oppenheimer the US, UK & Canada hot housed scientist, engineers, and staff to invent and produce the atomic bomb physics, engineering and manufacturing capabilities. Today we term this key driver of success ‘hot housing’, the bringing together a group of experts to identify avenues for further research, to brainstorm potential solutions, and to test, falsify and validate research paths, focused on a specific desired outcome. The threat of losing out to the Axis powers helped increase this hot housing effect. This is much like what the Aspen Center for Physics is doing (video here).
In the case of the invention of the light bulb, the airplane, and the personal computer, there was a groundswell of public opinion that these inventions could be possible. This led potential inventors with the necessary basic skills to attempt to solve these problems. In the case of the incandescent light bulb, this process took about 70 years from Humphrey Davy in 1809, to Thomas A. Edison and Joseph Wilson Swan in 1879. The groundswell started with Humphrey and had included many by the time of Edison in 1879.
In the case of the airplane the Wright brothers reviewed other researchers’ findings (the groundswell had begun much earlier), and then invented several new tools & skills, flight control, model testing techniques, test pilot skills, light weight motors and new propeller designs.
The invention of the personal computer had the same groundswell effect (see Homebrew Computer Club & PBS TV transcripts). Ed Roberts, Gordon French, Fred Moore, Bob Harsh, George Morrow, Adam Osborne, Lee Felsenstein, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, John Draper, Jerry Lawson, Ron Jones and Bill Gates all knew each other before many of them became wealthy and famous. Bill Gates wrote the first personal computer language, while the others invented various versions of the microcomputer, later to be known as the personal computer, and peripherals required. They invented the products and the tools necessary for the PC industry to take off.
With protein folding, Seth Cooper, game designer, developed Fold It, the tool that would make the investigation into protein folding accessible to an undefined public. Today we describe this ‘crowdsourcing’. Notice that here it wasn’t a specialized set of team that was hot housed, but the reverse, the general public, were given the tools to make crowdsourcing a viable means to solving a problem.
Thus four key elements are required to foster innovation, basic skills, groundswell, hothouse or crowdsourcing, and new tools.
So why hasn’t this happened with gravity modification? Some form of the groundswell is there. In his book The Hunt for Zero Point, Nick Cook (an editor of the esteemed Jane’s Defense Weekly) describes a history that goes back to World War II, and Nazi Germany. It is fund reading but Kurt Kleiner of Salon provides a sober review of The Hunt for Zero Point.
There are three primary reasons for this not having happened with gravity modification. First, over the last 50 years or so, there have only been about 50 to 100 people (outside of black projects) who have investigated this in a scientific manner. That is, the groundswell of researchers with the necessary basic skills has not reached a critical mass to take off. For example, protein folding needed at least 40,000 participants, today Fold It has 280,000 registered participants.
Second, pseudoscience has crept into the field previously known as ‘antigravity’. In respectable scientific circles the term used is gravity modification. Pseudoscience, has clouded the field, confused the public’s perception and chased away the talent – the 3 C’s of pseudoscience. Take for example, plutonium bomb propulsion (written by a non-scientist/non-engineer), basic investigation shows that this is neither feasible nor legal, but it still keeps being written up as a ‘real’ proposition. The correct term for plutonium bomb propulsion is pseudoscience.
Third reason. Per the definition of gravity modification, we cannot use existing theories to propose new tools because all our current status quo theories require mass. Therefore, short of my 12-year study, no new tools are forth coming.
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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.
Last month a colleague of mine and I visited with Dennis Heap, Executive Director of the National Front Range Airport, at Watkins, CO, the location of the future Spaceport Colorado, and Colorado’s contribution to getting into space. Here is Part 4.
In Part 4, I dwell more into the economic concepts necessary for a spaceports’ long term success. The single most important concept one has to understand with any type of port, airport, seaport and spaceports is the concept of the hinterland economy. The hinterland economy is the surrounding local economy that the port services, either by population demographics, commercial & industrial base or transportation hub per its geographic location.
The Sweden-America model, like Westport Malaysia requires that a hinterland economy will eventually be built close to the port. Westport’s then Vice-Chairman of the Board, Gnanalingam (we called him ‘G’) whom I reported to, had the foresight, the influence and the connections within the Malaysian public sector, to encourage the infrastructure development within Pulah Indah and the neighboring locations.
The hinterland is critical to the success of the port. Therefore the key to a port’s success is the clarification of the term ‘local’ in the definition of the concept of the hinterland. When I joined Westport in 1995, a hinterland was defined as within approximately a 15 mile (24 km) radius of the port. In my opinion that was too small a segment of the economy to facilitate the success of Westport. That definition did not match up with Westport’s ambition to be a world class seaport and transshipment hub that could give PSA (Port Authority of Singapore, then largest container port in the world) a run for its money.
So I changed the definition.
I changed the definition of ‘local’ to 7-hours. Any warehouse, manufacturing site or distribution center within a 7-hour drive of Westport was now Westport’s hinterland. And because Westport was in the middle of Peninsula Malaysia, that ‘7-hours’ translated into the whole of Peninsula Malaysia, from the border with Thailand in the North to all the way down South to Singapore. This increased Westport’s hinterland from 350 sq miles (900 sq km) to 51,000 sq miles (132,000 sq km).
Of course that ‘7-hours’ would not have meant much if Malaysia had not built an interstate system of roads. That is why the public sector involvement in the economy is so vital to an economy’s success; in a manner that says, how can we give back to our tax payers?
And coming back to our original topic, that is the beauty of Spaceport Colorado. It is tucked in close to Denver International Airport (DIA) and the city of Denver. Spaceport Colorado’s hinterland is the whole of the Continental United States. First through the passenger traffic via DIA and second tapping into the high end winter tourists market at Aspen, Vail & Beaver Creek ski resorts.
Spaceport Colorado will be an immense success.
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Benjamin T Solomon is the author & principal investigator of the 12-year study into the theoretical & technological feasibility of gravitation modification, titled An Introduction to Gravity Modification, to achieve interstellar travel in our lifetimes. For more information visit iSETI LLC, Interstellar Space Exploration Technology Initiative.
Note that most of the arguments of Plaut and McClelland are theoretical, whereas the localist theory I presented is very much grounded in four decades of evidence from neurophysiology. Note also that McClelland may have inadvertently subscribed to the localist representation idea with the following statement:
“Even here, the principles of distributed representation apply: the same place cell can represent very different places in different environments, for example, and two place cells that represent overlapping places in one environment can represent completely non-overlapping places in other environments.”
The notion that a place cell can “represent” one or more places in different environments is very much a localist idea. It implies that the place cell has meaning and interpretation. I start with responses to McClelland’s comments first. Please reference the Phys.org story to find these quotes from McClelland and Plaut and see the contexts.
1. McClelland – “what basis do I have for thinking that the representation I have for any concept – even a very familiar one – is associated with a single neuron, or even a set of neurons dedicated only to that concept?”
There’s four decades of research in neurophysiology on receptive field cells in the sensory processing systems and on hippocampal place cells that shows that single cells can encode a concept – from motion detection, color coding and line orientation detection to identifying a particular location in an environment. Neurophysiologists have also found category cells in the brains of humans and animals. See the next response which has more details on category cells. The neurophysiological evidence is substantial that single cells encode concepts, starting as early as the retinal ganglion cells. Hubel and Wiesel won a Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1981 for breaking this “secret code” of the brain. Thus there’s enough basis to think that a single neuron can be dedicated to a concept and even at a very low level (e.g. for a dot, a line or an edge).
2. McClelland – “Is each such class represented by a localist representation in the brain?”
Cells that represent categories have been found in human and animal brains. Fried et al. (1997) found some MTL (medial temporal lobe) neurons that respond selectively to gender and facial expression and Kreiman et al. (2000) found MTL neurons that respond to pictures of particular categories of objects, such as animals, faces and houses. Recordings of single-neuron activity in the monkey visual temporal cortex led to the discovery of neurons that respond selectively to certain categories of stimuli such as faces or objects (Logothetis and Sheinberg, 1996; Tanaka, 1996; Freedman and Miller, 2008).
I quote Freedman and Miller (2008): “These studies have revealed that the activity of single neurons, particularly those in the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortices (PPCs), can encode the category membership, or meaning, of visual stimuli that the monkeys had learned to group into arbitrary categories.”
Lin et al. (2007) report finding “nest cells” in mouse hippocampus that fire selectively when the mouse observes a nest or a bed, regardless of the location or environment.
Gothard et al. (2007) found single neurons in the amygdala of monkeys that responded selectively to images of monkey faces, human faces and objects as they viewed them on a computer monitor. They found one neuron that responded in particular to threatening monkey faces. Their general observation is (p. 1674): “These examples illustrate the remarkable selectivity of some neurons in the amygdala for broad categories of stimuli.”
Thus the evidence is substantial that category cells exist in the brain.
References:
Fried, I., McDonald, K. & Wilson, C. (1997). Single neuron activity in human hippocampus and amygdala during recognition of faces and objects. Neuron 18, 753–765.
Kreiman, G., Koch, C. & Fried, I. (2000) Category-specific visual responses of single neurons in the human medial temporal lobe. Nat. Neurosci. 3, 946–953.
Freedman DJ, Miller EK (2008) Neural mechanisms of visual categorization: insights from neurophysiology. Neurosci Biobehav Rev 32:311–329.
Tanaka K (1996) Inferotemporal cortex and object vision. Annu Rev Neurosci 19:109–139.
Lin, L. N., Chen, G. F., Kuang, H., Wang, D., & Tsien, J. Z. (2007). Neural encoding of the concept of nest in the mouse brain. Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, 6066–6071.
Gothard, K.M., Battaglia, F.P., Erickson, C.A., Spitler, K.M. & Amaral, D.G. (2007). Neural Responses to Facial Expression and Face Identity in the Monkey Amygdala. J. Neurophysiol. 97, 1671–1683.
3. McClelland – “Do I have a localist representation for each phase of every individual that I know?”
Obviously more research is needed to answer these types of questions. But Saddam Hussein and Jennifer Aniston type cells may provide the clue someday.
4. McClelland – “Let us discuss one such neuron – the neuron that fires substantially more when an individual sees either the Eiffel Tower or the Leaning Tower of Pisa than when he sees other objects. Does this neuron ‘have meaning and interpretation independent of other neurons’? It can have meaning for an external observer, who knows the results of the experiment – but exactly what meaning should we say it has?”
On one hand, this obviously brings into focus a lot of the work in neurophysiology. This could boil down to asking who is to interpret the activity of receptive fields, place and grid cells and so on and whether such interpretation can be independent of other neurons. In neurophysiology, the interpretation of these cells (e.g. for motion detection, color coding, edge detection, place cells and so on) are obviously being verified independently in various research labs throughout the world and with repeated experiments. So it is not that some researcher is arbitrarily assigning meaning to cells and that such results can’t be replicated and verified. For many such cells, assignment of meaning is being verified by different labs.
On the other hand, this probably is a question about whether that cell is a category cell and how to assign meaning to it. The interpretation of a cell that responds to pictures of the Eiffel Tower and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, but not to other landmarks, could be somewhat similar to a place cell that responds to a certain location or it could be similar to a category cell. Similar cells have been found in the MTL region — a neuron firing to two different basketball players, a neuron firing to Luke Skywalker and Yoda, both characters of Star Wars, and another firing to a spider and a snake (but not to other animals) (Quiroga & Kreiman, 2010a). Quian Quiroga et al. (2010b, p. 298) had the following observation on these findings: “…. one could still argue that since the pictures the neurons fired to are related, they could be considered the same concept, in a high level abstract space: ‘the basketball players,’ ‘the landmarks,’ ‘the Jedi of Star Wars,’ and so on.”
If these are category cells, there is obviously the question what other objects are included in the category. But, it’s clear that the cells have meaning although it might include other items.
References:
Quian Quiroga, R. & Kreiman, G. (2010a). Measuring sparseness in the brain: Comment on Bowers (2009). Psychological Review, 117, 1, 291–297.
Quian Quiroga, R. & Kreiman, G. (2010b). Postscript: About Grandmother Cells and Jennifer Aniston Neurons. Psychological Review, 117, 1, 297–299.
5. McClelland – “In the context of these observations, the Cerf experiment considered by Roy may not be as impressive. A neuron can respond to one of four different things without really having a meaning and interpretation equivalent to any one of these items.”
The Cerf experiment is not impressive? What McClelland is really questioning is the existence of highly selective cells in the brains of humans and animals and the meaning and interpretation associated with those cells. This obviously has a broader implication and raises questions about a whole range of neurophysiological studies and their findings. For example, are the “nest cells” of Lin et al. (2007) really category cells sending signals to the mouse brain that there is a nest nearby? Or should one really believe that Freedman and Miller (2008) found category cells in the monkey visual temporal cortex that identify certain categories of stimuli such as faces or objects? Or should one believe that Gothard et al. (2007) found category cells in the amygdala of monkeys that responded selectively to images of monkey faces, human faces and objects as they viewed them on a computer monitor? And how about that one neuron that Gothard et al. (2007) found that responded in particular to threatening monkey faces? And does this question about the meaning and interpretation of highly selective cells also apply to simple and complex receptive fields in the retina ganglion and the primary visual cortex? Note that a Nobel Prize has already been awarded for the discovery of these highly selective cells.
The evidence for the existence of highly selective cells in the brains of humans and animals is substantive and irrefutable although one can theoretically ask “what else does it respond to?” Note that McClelland’s question contradicts his own view that there could exist place cells, which are highly selective cells.
6. McClelland – “While we sometimes (Kumeran & McClelland, 2012 as in McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981) use localist units in our simulation models, it is not the neurons, but their interconnections with other neurons, that gives them meaning and interpretation….Again we come back to the patterns of interconnections as the seat of knowledge, the basis on which one or more neurons in the brain can have meaning and interpretation.”
“one or more neurons in the brain can have meaning and interpretation” – that sounds like localist representation, but obviously that’s not what is meant. Anyway, there’s no denying that there is knowledge embedded in the connections between the neurons, but that knowledge is integrated by the neurons to create additional knowledge. So the neurons have additional knowledge that does not exist in the connections. And single cell studies are focused on discovering the integrated knowledge that exists only in the neurons themselves. For example, the receptive field cells in the sensory processing systems and the hippocampal place cells show that some cells detect direction of motion, some code for color, some detect orientation of a line and some detect a particular location in an environment. And there are cells that code for certain categories of objects. That kind of knowledge is not easily available in the connections. In general, consolidated knowledge exists within the cells and that’s where the general focus has been of single cell studies.
7. Plaut – “Asim’s main argument is that what makes a neural representation localist is that the activation of a single neuron has meaning and interpretation on a stand-alone basis. This is about how scientists interpret neural activity. It differs from the standard argument on neural representation, which is about how the system actually works, not whether we as scientists can make sense of a single neuron. These are two separate questions.”
Doesn’t “how the system actually works” depend on our making “sense of a single neuron?” The representation theory has always been centered around single neurons, whether they have meaning on a stand-alone basis or not. So how does making “sense of a single neuron” become a separate question now? And how are these two separate questions addressed in the literature?
8. Plaut – “My problem is that his claim is a bit vacuous because he’s never very clear about what a coherent ‘meaning and interpretation’ has to be like….but never lays out the constraints that this is meaning and interpretation, and this isn’t. Since we haven’t figured it out yet, what constitutes evidence against the claim? There’s no way to prove him wrong.”
In the article, I used the standard definition from cognitive science for localist units, which is a simple one, that localist units have meaning and interpretation. There is no need to invent a new definition for localist representation. The standard definition is very acceptable, accepted by the cognitive science community and I draw attention to that in the article with verbatim quotes from Plate, Thorpe and Elman. Here they are again.
Plate (2002):“Another equivalent property is that in a distributed representation one cannot interpret the meaning of activity on a single neuron in isolation: the meaning of activity on any particular neuron is dependent on the activity in other neurons (Thorpe 1995).”
Thorpe (1995, p. 550): “With a local representation, activity in individual units can be interpreted directly … with distributed coding individual units cannot be interpreted without knowing the state of other units in the network.”
Elman (1995, p. 210): “These representations are distributed, which typically has the consequence that interpretable information cannot be obtained by examining activity of single hidden units.”
The terms “meaning” and “interpretation” are not bounded in any way other than that by means of the alternative representation scheme where “meaning” of a unit is dependent on other units. That’s how it’s constrained in the standard definition and that’s been there for a long time.
Neither Plaut nor McClelland have questioned the fact that receptive fields in the sensory processing systems have meaning and interpretation. Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize in physiology and medicine in 1981 for breaking this “secret code” of the brain. Here’s part of the Nobel Prize citation:
“Thus, they have been able to show how the various components of the retinal image are read out and interpreted by the cortical cells in respect to contrast, linear patterns and movement of the picture over the retina. The cells are arranged in columns, and the analysis takes place in a strictly ordered sequence from one nerve cell to another and every nerve cell is responsible for one particular detail in the picture pattern.”
Neither Plaut nor McClelland have questioned the fact that place cells have meaning and interpretation. McClelland, in fact, accepts the fact that place cells indicate locations in an environment, which means that he accepts that they have meaning and interpretation.
9. Plaut – “If you look at the hippocampal cells (the Jennifer Aniston neuron), the problem is that it’s been demonstrated that the very same cell can respond to something else that’s pretty different. For example, the same Jennifer Aniston cell responds to Lisa Kudrow, another actress on the TV show Friends with Aniston. Are we to believe that Lisa Kudrow and Jennifer Aniston are the same concept? Is this neuron a Friends TV show cell?”
Want to clarify three things here. First, localist cells are not necessarily grandmother cells. Grandmother cells are a special case of localist cells and this has been made clear in the article. For example, in the primary visual cortex, there are simple and complex cells that are tuned to visual characteristics such as orientation, color, motion and shape. They are localist cells, but not grandmother cells.
Second, the analysis in the article of the interactive activation (IA) model of McClelland and Rumelhart (1981) shows that a localist unit can respond to more than one concept in the next higher level. For example, a letter unit can respond to many word units. And the simple and complex cells in the primary visual cortex will respond to many different objects.
Third, there are indeed category cells in the brain. Response No. 2 above to McClelland’s comments cites findings in neurophysiology on category cells. So the Jennifer Aniston/Lisa Kudrow cell could very well be a category cell, much like the one that fired to spiders and snakes (but not to other animals) and the one that fired for both the Eiffel Tower and the Tower of Pisa (but not to other landmarks). But category cells have meaning and interpretation too. The Jennifer Aniston/Lisa Kudrow cell could be a Friends TV show cell, as Plaut suggested, but it still has meaning and interpretation. However, note that Koch (2011, p. 18, 19) reports finding another Jennifer Aniston MTL cell that didn’t respond to Lisa Kudrow:
“One hippocampal neuron responded only to photos of actress Jennifer Aniston but not to pictures of other blonde women or actresses; moreover, the cell fired in response to seven very different pictures of Jennifer Aniston.”
References:
Koch, C. (2011). Being John Malkovich. Scientific American Mind, March/April, 18–19.
10. Plaut – “Only a few experiments show the degree of selectivity and interpretability that he’s talking about…. In some regions of the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus, there seem to be fairly highly selective responses, but the notion that cells respond to one concept that is interpretable doesn’t hold up to the data.”
There are place cells in the hippocampus that identify locations in an environment. Locations are concepts. And McClelland admits place cells represent locations. There is also plenty of evidence on the existence of category cells in the brain (see Response No. 2 above to McClelland’s comments) and categories are, of course, concepts. And simple and complex receptive fields also represent concepts such as direction of motion, line orientation, edges, shapes, color and so on. There is thus abundance of data in neurophysiology that shows that “cells respond to one concept that is interpretable” and that evidence is growing.
The existence of highly tuned and selective cells that have meaning and interpretation is now beyond doubt, given the volume of evidence from neurophysiology over the last four decades.
Kant is often misconstrued as advocating radical conformity amongst people, a common misconception drawn from his Categorical Imperative, which states that each should act as though the rules underlying his actions can be made a universal moral maxim. The extent of this universality, however, stops at the notion that each man should act as though the aspiration towards morality were a universal maxim. All Kant meant, I argue, was that each man should act as though the aspiration toward greater morality were able to be willed as a universal moral maxim.
