What we need to learn from future robots on Mars... and Bees

On this weeks ever-excellent Skeptics Guide to the Universe, I heard tell of a possible future plan for exploring the surface of Mars. Rather than use a single rover, the idea is to use a swarm of robots that will spread out from the landing spot, search a wide area and then return to upload and share data and presumably recharge. Each robot would have searched for the same list of pre-defined information and used common measuring techniques so that when the data is shared, a consensus can be reached as to the value of each robots findings.  Should a particularly interesting spot have been found, a larger group could go to analyse in more depth, or perhaps nothing of interest was found and the search could continued elsewhere.

The inspiration for the idea came from bees. It is the same process that is involved in looking for a new place to start a hive.  Each bee will scout before reporting its findings back to the hive, which will then come to a collective decision.  In each case, consensus is possible because each individual is part of the same shared reality, which is in turn interpreted the same way, according to the same rules. So what the hell is it that robots and bees have that humans don't?! Well, the question actually needs to read, "What do we humans have that these bees and robots don't?"

Here's a thought experiment (I will use the robots for the comparison, since the concepts are more familiar to us, being tools of our creation, than the inner-workings of a bees brain): Clearly the robots represent a highly simplified model of what our society actually represents.  To make analogy true therefore, we would need robots that were looking for different things, with different measuring devices, and different concepts of what information was of most importance. Furthermore, instead of each robots having an equal voice, a small percentage of the robots spoke for all the others, thereby ensuring that all but a few of the observations were ignored and consensus remains an impossibility.

We humans do not all share the same software; we are not the Borg. Indeed, geographical separation alone has ensured radically different coneptions of what has value and how to measure that value, simply by virtue of the natural environment one inhabits. On top of that, more abstract separations have further undermined the unity of our judgement: Religion, race, sex, gender, wealth, even being ginger for crying out loud; All of these things and a thousand more have ensured that we are far from the robot ideal in terms of reaching consensus. All of these things I have mentioned, together they form culture, the software, our imagined community, our political identity.  It is thousands of years of top-down cultural (bio-political as Micahel Hardt and Antonio Negri call it) production, shaping our identities, passing from generation to generation; religious, nationalistic, commercial. It is what we believe, where we live, what we do... that is what we have that bees and robots do not.  That is what gets in the way of us sharing an understanding our reality, the same shared reality that makes consensus possible in bees and robots. 

Notice above that I blame top-down cultural production for our woes? Top-down production of our identities is, by definition, synonymous with political power, not in the strict 'state' defintion but political in terms of the power to govern peoples lives in any form. This includes the religious and commercial as well. Each time communication structures have progressed, the political structure has been forced to evolve, open-up, in a constant struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. Yet always the oppressors had the power of identity creation, thereby ensuring that whenever the tension did finally break, the oppressed would, like an abused child, know nothing other than retribution-in-kind.  This no longer holds.  The internet is ushering in a new dawn of democratised cultural production, horizontally-derived identity that can, in all but a few countries, ignore all of the boundaries that stop us from reaching consensus (Anonyminity being the extreme conclusion).  Note here the I'm not saying that the Web is some sort of ready-made utpoia; all I am saying is that is can allow you to ignore those boundaries and that, since kids enjoying the internet have in many cases not yet internalised prejudice and ignorance quite yet, it can innoculate the young from the prejudice filled fear-politics used by their apparent elders.  Unfortunately, evolution is slow, condemning the Internets early years to cultural production whose authors were still very much of the top-down identity.

Another criticism would be that I am arguing for us to literally become the Borg, something that is further reinforced by the fact that I'm totally up for transhumanism. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. Robots and bees have one primary function.  We do not; we have and should cherish our subjectivity. Consensus need only be reached in political arenas, in areas of societal organisation that has the power to impose identity upon us. We must work toward a complete split of past culture and politics, a counterintuitive notion yet only so to that part of us that has been directly formed from hundreds of years of top-down political identity.  To put it a less counterintuitive way: Do we want the fundamentalist religious, nationalistic or capitalistic ideologies of the few to determine the organisation of all of society? For all of past identity is the creation of the few, ensuring that public policy is determined by religious ideas thousand of years old, 18th Century political philosophy and institutions or wealth grabbing corporations fresh from the 19th century.  The alternative is to allow reality, evidence, to guide us, to recognise our own flaws and the insignificance of the individual, to harness, trust and give equal voice to all of the swarm.  If we were to work toward that then, far from becoming a mindless bee, you would become free in all the other areas of your life to be more than simply an indictrinated robot.  All that is being asked is that in political arenas, where people make decisions that are imposed upon others (whether willingly or not), that those decision makers leave their personal past, their personal judgement, their concept of right or wrong at the door, and allow the evidence to dictate the end results.  This could not fail to be more humanitarian, since all of the evidence points to us all being one system.

None of us should trust our own judgement.  We must all recognise our own pejudices, reflect on the perhaps instinctive rejection of the idea of splitting our known-culture and politics. Even our physiology works against us, showing patterns that aren't there, showing us a limited confabulation of reality. Slowly we are coming to realise these things, something epitomised by the exploding growth of the skeptic movement. Consensus is possible in science, precisely because it understood very early on that culture was an impediment to truth and thus attempted to filter out its effects. It has advanced tremendously, a testament to our ability to work together toward understanding ourselves and our environment. It is by defintion a step-by-step process evolution; but we are beginning to walk the right way.

Some predictions for humanities continued progress

 Extrapolating from the Historical Progress of Identity

After reading the inspirational predictions for the next 25 years on the Guardian website, I felt inspired to expand on my theories of the correlation between identity and communication technology and attempt to extrapolate my own predictions from the historical progress of identity and humanities study of the complex system that is society.

Here is the chart I drew up giving a rough outline of the cycles and progression of memetic production (identity), as accelerating advances in communication technology take our complex system to greater scales of connectivity: http://tinyurl.com/2ub9khm

Nb. For the sake of identifying key features, simplification and generalisation are to some extent necessary. Exceptions will always be found since the spread of communication technology (the framework of the complex system) is not universally even.  Indeed, accross the world all stages of identity may be present at any one time until we converge together.

The following identities are based upon the catagorisation of what Anderson termed 'imagined communities', those identities that transcend the local and which bind humans together into large enough groups to constitute emergent properties we know as History.  Emergent properties of complex systems are self-similar, and so we see at each definition of scale self-similar processes and cycles regardless of the actual content of these imagined identities...



Fundamental Imagined Identities

Three fundamental identities have arisen on Earth: Religion, State and Commerce. These identities have found homes within each of us to varying degrees of dominance in what we believe, where we live and what we do, respectively.  Each arose in times of expanded communication technology (language, mathematics, transport, media, digital etc) and became seemingly permanent by attaining a monopoly of memetic production which then suffused cultures with language, symbolism and memes which persisted beyond the control of the monopoly itself, continuing to influence future individuals identities.

As each new identity emerges it goes through a cycle.  Firstly, it identifies itself in relation to the older identity, by definition a necessity since this is the memetic monopoly one has to play with.  Thus States began as theocracies, corporations evolved from National enterprises and individualism is the progeny of the corporately defined 'individual as consumer'.  There have been three fundamental identities thus far, but a fourth is now emerging, that of the autonomous individual. 

Each progression is the result of an increase in knowledge facilitated by a more detailed, diverse and extensive complex system (society).  Each progression of identity represents a new level of emancipation, with greater sharing of power, more feedback, more freedom and importantly greater democratisation of memetic production.  This last point is crucial.  Since identity is produced from culture, the less monopolised memetic-production is the more emancipated individual identity can be.  It represents the opposite of dogma, of ideology.  Democratised memetic production means the elimination of whole-scale identity creation of the many by the few and the exposure of that manipulation through contact with the demonised, mythologised 'other' of which they speak.

Driving this emancipation is rationality and cognitive dissonance.  Each new identity succeeds the last because it's embracing amalgamation of more diverse memes results in a closer approximation of reality.  As the anachronisms of prior identities become visible through the advance of knowledge, cognitive dissonance increases also, leading to new generations to come to predominantly new conclusions contrary to the dogma of the established order.  It is precisely because we grow old and die, together with the rebellious, adaptive, open-mindedness of youth, that society is able to progress politically as our technologically driven shifts in identity occur.




The cycle of each fundamental identity

Emergence
As dogma becomes exposed through increased communication, ideas begin to form from the emerging cognitive dissonance.  These ideas are presented as rationalisations within the context and under the regulation of the existing memetic monopoly (as cause-and-effect demands).  As knowledge advances and more of the unknown becomes known (diluting the power of the mythological other), these sporadic rationalisations become untenable and cognitive dissonance spreads with more veracity for it, eventually leading to a paradigm shift in political governance and identity creation.

Co-opted Monopoly
Emerging from the language and culture of the previous fundamental identity comes a new monopoly on memetic production.  Religion is divorced from the state, corporations go from state enterprises to multi-national to supranational.  And yet, despite gaining absolute power, they still feel the need to dress themselves in rationalisations of memetic identities past, co-opting the power of reminiscence .  Hitler draped his genocide in divine garb, corporations practice with 'national interest' and individualism defines itself according, for now, to the corporate plan.  Each subverts the last to saturate our culture with their identity-creating memes common interests: power, wealth and the wilful ignorance of dissonance that may shake their self-serving, manufactured, yet no less sincere rationalisations for maintaining their brief turn at benefiting from inequality.

Peak identity
Our innate nature insists we continue to communicate, the obvious benefits that result maintaining a drive at increasing our communication networks.  Whilst political structures may come about through a domino-like paradigm shift, communication technology keeps accelerating exponentially, telescoping the rate of change dramatically as we get to ever finer definitions of this networked complex system we call society.  As such, there comes a point where dissonance becomes too great for the rationalisations of the ruling elites to make sense any longer. Take the Democratic system.  Founded on the inherently nationalistic doctrine of the social contract, it's usefulness is drastically outdated and unsuited to a globalised world.  It represent a broken network, with nodes that shut themselves off from one another, polluting the system. When communication structures available to the public exceed what is directly manageable by the ruling class, reality will begin to contrast with the official line, creating dissonance and the desire for change.

Decline
As our newly emerging identity (more complex network) forms, it's greater scope and scale of identity emancipation produces far more rational memes than those that came before.  This exposing of anachronisms is most keenly felt in the young, those who have yet to be infected with the dogmatic ideology they have had forced into their brain.  Dogma dies, to be replaced with better dogma, more inclusive dogma, until finally we break the cycle altogether.....


So what happens next?

I think Hegel will be happy to hear that his notion of History being mankind coming to know itself is truer than most gave him credit for.  As communication technology spreads to the masses one step at a time, political structures follow suit by slowly adjusting, sometimes piecemeal, sometimes radical and violent, much as an earthquake does depending on how much tension has arisen.  The Internet is a radical technological invention and its effect on that tension cannot be over-estimated.  The corporate meme-machine as been busy telling us we are individuals, the by-product of which (lets not forget it's central aim is to flatter us into buying stuff) has resulted in a radical notion of the self as an autonomous unit, a self-contained bundle of rights and privileges.

This information age, where the democratisation of memetic production has exploded in a noisy, ill-defined sea of identity bits and bytes, isn't the utopia people make it out to be however.  It's message is better for sure, we are sovereign citizens of our own mass-manufactured castles, walled off mentally and physically in order to capture that essence of individuality, that false veneer of material possession hiding us from ourselves.  This hyper relative individualism, combined with the concept of competition that previous rulers deemed a virtue, plays havoc with peoples minds! The dissonance between the religious, state and corporate  models of perfected form and the reality we as individual live with is vast, resulting in depression, mental health problems and growing neurosis.

These problems, together with the Wests emerging relationship with those that have until now silently shouldered the burden of manufacturing our continued opulence, will expose the anachronisms of the corporate subversion of the state.  The supranational manifestation of wealth production will lose it's facade of greater good once the publics idea of what 'greater' constitutes exceeds that of their former creators.  Religious identities will continue to decline in-line with access to communication technology, with only those shunning the technolgoy itself left to ever-more radical ratioanlisations of their own actions.  The state will follow a similar course, with direct-democracy coming to those who recognise and escape the crip of corporate co-opting. 

The advantages of this progression are vast.  The information age will at last recognise humanity as one complex system, eliminating much of the discrimination and prejudice the exploitation of the 'other' has caused.  The corporate co-opting of the state will be exposed mainstream, with a separation similar to that of church and state (already a publicly stated ideal, it is never-the-less another lie rationalised from above) and the autonomous individual will demand greater power and control over their political lives through the co-opting of corporate ideals of individual freedom from outside forces.  The availability of information will need to adjust to the finer definition of network connections, recognising that democratised memetic production invalidates the rationalisation for such extensive centralised power and access to knowledge.


And beyond that...

Religion will become an ever decreasing force though still visible as memetic echoes of a former age.  States will be udner ever greater pressure to stampt out corruption, open itself to accountablility and allowing the public to govern itslef to ever greater degrees.  Corporations will be under similar pressure, perhaps basing themselves within those states that are most stubborn in embracing progress (since those conditions best for profit also appear to be worst for the public as a whole).  Free from national obligation, they could become even more explicitly dangerous, even to powerful states slow to change, before subsiding themselves into a rather different legacy than they currently envisage in their assumed noble ideals.

I am reminded at this point of an interview in the film Waking Life.  Aklilu Gebrewold talks about humans coming to understand themselves, how our minds work, what and who we waking up to in this new age of hypersubjectivity.  Only when our individual minds fully understand themselves in relation to reality can we then look outside of ourselves anew with a radical objectivity.  The ideas in this essay are in a similar vein, having come from an attempt to work my knowledge of philosophy and cognitive science to the world of the emergent properties of complex human systems (what we call History).  And so it goes with identity.  Once we understand ourselves as part of a complex system, it is a small step to recognise that that system is not closed, the sole dmoain of monosapien. No, we are but one part of a greater system, that of Nature, which in turn is but one insiginficant part of even greater, galactic, universal systems.

This will become the next source of conflict, the recognition of Nature and the environments place within our network.  Although communication structures will encompass all of humanity, we will still need to hear from Nature itself in order to understand our effect on it.  Dwindling resources and growing destruction of habitats and wildlife cannot continue if we are to exist peeacefully.  As such, practices and beliefs that run contrary to this will in turn produce enough dissonance to ensure that after the age of the individual comes the age of Earth itself: An identification with and recognition of this global biosystem and our place in it.  Once we are there, there is no other to be exploited and we will finally be able to live in harmony before amking the jump of understanding our place not simply on this planet, but within our galaxy, our universe.  We are still only at the beginning of that journey.

The case of the controversial evolution article by Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian

Yesterday I saw an article on the front page of the Guardian website that caused widespread anger and controversy.  Under possibly the worst headline of the year, "Why everything they told you about evolution is wrong", the piece was a review of Fodor's latest book 'What Darwin got Wrong' (only slightly less a disingenuous title).

The piece drew a lot of instant criticism, from Adam Rutherland's Comment is Free piece published the same day on the Guardian site (kudos for that) and, rather more extensively, by Coyne's great blog on Why Evolution is True.  The criticisms drew on the numerous scientific inaccuracies and the muddled, unenlightening way that Fodor's arguments were presented.  The title in particular seemed to vex many who commented.

Unfortunately, in my desire to vent spleen having read through the rather lengthy review, I had a rant on the Today in Sport blog of the Guardian site, only to be banned a few minutes before comments opened on Burkeman's article.  I contacted the editors and copied Burkeman in which, to his credit, he replied to.  I have decided to publish those emails here because I feel that, given the vitriol that the article created, it needs more context and a fair hearing of Burkeman's side of things.

Here is the email exchange in full:

I read all the way to the end just so that when it came time to write my damning comment clarifying the whole matter I wouldn't miss out any of the absurdities.... only to find there are no comments at the end!

How do these people get published? Fodors argument is absolute nonsense, the fallacy of 'selecting for' meaning design is one that High School children are taught. And as for the fucking title the sub-editors gave it! Thats a title the Mail would be happy with.

Honestly, when I read bollocks like this it makes me so angry about 1) someone getting a book published that even I could debunk and 2) someone seemingly utterly incapbale of grasping the matter being paid to write a review about it!

FFS! A couple of interesting studies that needed to be expanded upon are merely touched on at the start (not even clear if they have anything to do with Fodors book) and then, to back up Fodors claim turns to that well-known expert on evolution, right-wing fundamentalist Anne Coulter, the woman who thinks Jews need to be 'perfected'.

I mean, Anne Coulter? I can't believe I just wasted so much time on something so utterly worthless.

Ben

Dear Ben:

Thanks for your thoughts, however contemptuously expressed.

To respond to your points: 1. My piece made amply clear, several times, that Fodor's argument is thought by many to be absolute nonsense, and 2. I can't see how anyone cojld read that piece and not see that I was bringing up Ann Coulter to criticise her and point out that her argument was rubbish.

Still, thanks for reading!

Oliver

You say that despite coulters record, her argument is persuasive.
That's only if you have no idea about evolution. It had no place in
the article. And what on earth did the missing day BS have to do with
anything? With a topic such as this you need to be aware of the
dangers of misinformation. People are already using your article as
evidence seemingly based on the title alone.

Have you nothing to add regarding the title? Absolutely shocking
behaviour. Designed to get hits and advertisers?  Did you seek an
expert opinion on anything? Are the two PhD students who looked it
over studying Art?

Ben

I am honestly astonished that anyone could read that piece and not see that the hilarious Creationist urban myth about Nasa was included because it is so comically ridiculous.

And as I make completely clear, Coulter is *wrong*. Of course she is — she's Ann Coulter!

It's very strange to me, this position that holds that you're somehow helping the forces of irrationalism by *mentioning* the fact that people believe these things, even if you point out (several times in a row) that they're wrong.

I do (sincerely!) wish you an excellent weekend, nonetheless.

Oliver

Thanks for the reply. The tone you intended for Tue piece didn't come across at all well. Such a long article on such a contentious book is hardly the place for it though. 

Chalk it as a lesson learned. A long piece on a serious matter needs proper accuracy and understanding else you will get this sort of reaction. Too many people do not know, or want to know, about evolution enough to be able to read between the links so to speak.  It sorely needed fact checking.

Also I really want to know about that title. It has really given the guardian some bad press, and rightly so. Are you not pissed about it? 

Ben

And thanks for your reply.

For the record, I firmly believe that it isn't a viable approach to journalism to spend one's time worrying how a piece might be used by people who utterly misread it either wilfully or out of ignorance.

Provocative headlines is an interesting question — feel free to raise it with our readers' editor if you wish. It is entirely outside my role at the paper, so I'm not in a position to say much more than that. In general, though, I think a headline coexists with the piece, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to critique the headline in a stand-alone way.

I guess this is all coming down to the same basic point: I don't think anyone of average intelligence who reads my whole piece could possibly come away with the misimpression that it's somehow pro-irrational-thinking, and I'm not prepared to start writing pieces in order to please people who can't be bothered to read them all the way through (and in good faith) — it would make the journalistic enterprise essentially impossible!

All best

Oliver

That doesn't excuse the gross inaccuracies as shown in coyne's piece,
that a simple cross-check with an expert couldn't correct.  These
things matter since science rarely get mainstream coverage and leaves
those doing hard work educating the public exasperated.

You say the title and the piece should be regarded as one falls down
when they bare no resemblance to one another.  Such a juxtaposition is
deserving of a parody piece and is getting the ridicule it deserves.
It smacks of trying to get the hits up.  Neither is this the first
time. It is becoming a running joke with the guardians readership,
something that needs to be flagged with the superiors.

You either overestimate your readership or, judging by the comments
section, failed to get across your intended tone for the piece. Since
it wasn't clearly a comic piece, due to the subject at hand, the
length of the piece, the admittance of its complexity and subsequent
attempt to explain, it was treated as a science piece.  This is where
the criticism stems from.

 Ben

I think these emails reveal important context within the wider questions of mainstream reporting of science and the limitations of the textual medium.  I don't doubt Burkeman when he says that bringing up Ann Coulter was a joke, though I seriously doubt if starting a new paragraph with the line, "This argument, perhaps uniquely among all arguments ever made by Coulter, feels persuasive, not least because it is a reasonable criticism of some pop-Darwinism" is the best way to go about creating comic effect.   

He says that, "I am honestly astonished that anyone could read that piece and not see that the hilarious Creationist urban myth about Nasa was included because it is so comically ridiculous". I too would be astonished by that.. had I included it in a clearly scientific review context.  The problem comes in the fact that it had no serious counter-balance.  See, this is what it boils down to.  I believe Burkeman is sincere when he says that these references, through their tenuousness to the subject matter, are meant as a joke.  But where does the joke end and the science begin?

This is a very lengthy piece reviewing a contentious book about very interesting science.  Now, I wouldn't have any problem with jokes (given the level of fallacy in Fodor's book) had it been included within a proper and clever rebuttal.  Yet even where the jokes ended according to Burkeman, for people with proper knowledge of evolution they simply kept on coming.  As seen in Coyne's piece, there is an awful lot wrong here.  Oliver, correct me in the comments if I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that you read the book and took a little too much of it at face value, relaying mistakes from the book as fact.  Had you got an expert opinion, your attempts at humour wouldn't have blended so seemlessly with the rest of the article.

For any journalist out there: If you contact any scientist, I can guarantee that 95% of them would drop everything at being asked to look over an article pre-publication just in the hope that it might actually lead to an accurate depiction.  When Burkeman says, "For the record, I firmly believe that it isn't a viable approach to journalism to spend one's time worrying how a piece might be used by people who utterly misread it either wilfully or out of ignorance" he misses the point entirely.  People do not need to misread his article, it was factually inept in reality.  Had it been looked at by an expert, had it been accurate, I would agree 100%.  There are people striving all the time to try and educate the public: it is immensely frustrating for those experts to see such a mainstream platform get science wrong time and time again.  All for the lack of a quick email.  The article appeared 'pro-irrational thinking' simply on the basis that a feature writer had written it and not got any expert opinion (pretty irrational).  The Guardian claimed that two PhD students looked over it, to much hilarity from commenter's with biology backgrounds.  Not. Good. Enough.

 "It is entirely outside my role at the paper, so I'm not in a position to say much more than that. In general, though, I think a headline coexists with the piece, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to critique the headline in a stand-alone way."

This is important.  It must be a source of constant frustration that the title of articles isn't chosen (or necessarily even run-by) the person who wrote it.  As suspected, Burkeman wasn't responsible, though neither does he seem too bothered.  As for co-existing with the piece, this is nonsense.  He just said it's chosen by someone else, and besides, what if the title bares absolutely no relation to the article?  What if, say, the story of a bake sale in a village hall had the title "Grannies in cake orgy scandal!"?  The title of Burkeman's piece was a travesty and it gives the Guardian a bad name.  The only way that title could be excused was if Charlie Brooker was writing the review, it was 600 words long and featured nought but Coulter and 'missing days'. 

By making the article an attempt to explain, by making it seem an outwardly science-like piece, it merely smacks of trying to cheaply generate controversy and hits to sell to the advertisers.  At last looking it was the second-highest read piece.  Strange that the Guardian sees large viewing figures for it's most shameful pieces as a success.  

Oliver, I don't hold it against you.  Your not alone in all of this.  There are serious deficiencies in the way in which mainstream press covers these things and you have to admit that getting a feature writer (which I often enjoy) to cover such a complex and contentious topic is just asking for trouble.  It is so easy to fact-check today.  There is absolutely no excuse.

Update:


As quite a humorous aside, if you type 'Burkeman evolution article' into google, the first hit hows this:

Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong | Science ...

19 Mar 2010 ... I can see it for myself thankyou) on evolution is wrong'. Shame, shame, shame. P.S To Mr Burkeman: Are you Happy with the title? ...

 For some reason the search result for the article itself has a snippet of a comment left early on in the message board on my behalf (I had recently been banned remember).  Does someone choose that?    For the life of me I can't imagine what determines the text in the search result, but I love the fact it's my comment (that has over 150 recommends at last viewing) there as well as my blog being fourth.