Thursday, September 07, 2023

Depression and anxiety are a gift

Intense sadness, anxiety, and feeling bad about myself do not feel good. No matter how many times I experience them, they still feel real. Like things are actually bad. There's no hope or purpose. Something is going to go very wrong. 

Why is that a gift? 

To be clear, I'm not saying that it's not great to feel good. When I feel good I often have more energy to pay attention to other people and empathize and maybe help in some way. 

But a lot of times I'm not in a particularly great flow state or whatever, and I'm also not noticeably feeling bad. I'm just cycling through my normal habits. If I stop to think about it, I might be able to identify a background sense of unease, but it's not front of mind. It's easy to get kind of stuck in configurations like this. 

On the other hand, when sadness or anxiety comes, it sucks. But, it is something tangible. It forces me to put my attention on it. That does something. The attention slowly causes the energy of the negative feelings to evolve and transform. And it seems like that energy is always meaningful in some way. There's a richer sense of experience hidden inside what seemed to be undesirable. A vividness in the world, sort of like my vague memories of being a kid with potential wonders everywhere. 

So in that sense I think it's a gift when my attention is focused by the bad feelings coming to a head. Maybe they come to a head in different ways for different people. Like a violent confrontation or something. 

I don't always make good enough use of the times when I experience bad feelings, though. Sometimes I'm under time pressure or for some other reason I give those feelings the bare minimum care to feel OK enough to proceed with external life. Then things can accumulate and get really bad, turning into physical health problems.

On a brighter note, with a good enough meditation or other spiritual practice, I wonder if it's possible to keep enough awareness on those internal energies so they can be processed without coming out so unpleasantly at all. I'm not sure. 

Thursday, January 26, 2023

King Midas and the Fermi Paradox

This post is about the relationship between two ideas. The first idea is the paradox that giving ourselves what we want can be very bad for us. The second idea is that life is healthiest when it finds a balance between connection and separation. The second one sounds abstract, but I’ll use some examples to explain what I mean. I'm going to argue that these two ideas are closely related – and that they might explain why we haven’t found any other intelligent life in the universe. 


Getting what we want is dangerous


The mythological King Midas had a wish: that everything he touched would turn to gold. But when his wish was granted by the god Dionysus, Midas realized there was a serious problem. He couldn’t touch his food or his family. In the end, he starved to death. Midas’s story is sometimes interpreted to mean that you should wish thoughtfully. But even choosing carefully doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. Nick Bostrom, in his book Superintelligence, invites us to imagine the consequences of asking a superintelligent AI system to give us what we want. Suppose we ask for something unambiguously good, like, “find a cure for cancer as quickly as possible.” If the AI interprets our request literally, it may decide to create tumors in half the world’s population, in order to speed up its cancer research. 


The problem arises in everyday life too. If we eat all the food we want, we often become overweight and unhealthy. At a societal level, we want transportation and communication, but this uses natural resources and leads to environmental destruction. The economist Charles Goodhart observed that when we try to maximize any objective – say, students’ test scores – we end up with unintended consequences. Teachers are pressured to increase their students’ scores even if it means the students come away with a shallower understanding.


One thing to notice is that in all the examples above, the problem arises from an excess. Another way of saying this: if we are mediocre at getting what we want, then the paradoxical problems don’t appear. If we’re just barely good enough at hunting to feed ourselves, we don’t get fat. The problem comes when we are really effective. 


So what is the general principle here? Why does working toward something good paradoxically lead to something bad? To answer that, we have to think about the world from a systems point of view – a world of interacting entities.



Optimizing from your own point of view


There are a lot of separate creatures in the world, each with their own self-interest. A fox wants to eat a duck, but the duck doesn’t want that. Google wants to take market share from Facebook, and so on. From each entity’s point of view, there is an inside (itself) and an outside (the rest of the world). Each entity perpetually tries to metabolize more of the outside world’s energy into its own self-pattern – that’s why it exists, because it has been able to enforce its perspective on a little corner of the world.


How does this help understand the paradox? The world maintains its rich diversity because the competing interests of all the entities approximately balance. If foxes were completely successful at eating ducks, there would be no more ducks. Conversely if all the prey was successful at escaping, there would be no more foxes. But in reality, the competing optimization processes reach a standoff. Collectively across the world, there’s a big network of balances between partially conflicting objectives. 


However, if one creature is too good at getting what it wants, it breaks the balance. This ends up being bad for that creature, because every entity depends on the balance of the system it’s embedded in. If the foxes catch all the ducks, then pretty soon the foxes die too. If any entity achieves its own goals too thoroughly, it suffers.


This is the general principle behind the paradox that getting what you want is dangerous. Every entity has its own point of view, which you could think of as that entity’s imagination of a perfect reality – a vision of the entire world defined by its concept of self. The entity continually tries to optimize the world toward this objective. The paradox is that the individual self only makes sense in the context of a real world which is not self. If an entity optimizes too strongly for its own point of view, diversity collapses. 


But although optimization in excess destroys diversity, optimization in balance is essential to create diversity. Diversity is the existence of lots of things that are distinct from each other. These things exist because they have some ability to fight for their own point of view. My self starts as a weak, barely specialized entity, but if it successfully pulls some of the surrounding world toward it, then it becomes more strongly differentiated. A single mating pair of foxes can become a thriving fox population if they are good at hunting. Competing optimization, aka power struggle, creates form. 


Figure 1 is a crude illustration of the balance between the desires of different entities. You have a bunch of separate selves each pulling the surrounding world toward their pattern. If there’s balance, then entities differentiate by metabolizing some but not all of their surroundings. This creates diversity and richness in the world. But there are two ways it can go wrong. 1) Optimization is too weak, and entities don’t individuate, leaving a homogenous and boring universe. 2) Optimization can be too strong, with one entity causing collapse of diversity.


Figure 1. a, With too little optimization, the world is undifferentiated without interesting structure. b, If separate entities each try to impose their will on the world and succeed locally, they collectively create a rich environment. c, If a single entity is too good at optimizing from its own point of view, diversity collapses.



Optimal distance


The strength of optimization can be also thought of as the “nearness” between entities. If entities are “close” to each other, in a functional sense, it means they are strongly interacting – their patterns have a strong effect on each other. Figure 1a is a “high distance” world. Entities are functionally too far apart, not interacting with each other to form interesting metabolic structures. Figure 1c is a “low distance” world. Everything has gotten sucked into the pattern of the red entity, so all the elements of the system are too informationally close to one another.


Life depends on a balance between connection and separation. If things are too separated, they can’t interact. If they’re too connected, they can’t specialize and diversify. At the balance point, you have beautiful delicate structures like cells and human societies.



Self and not-self


If I try hard to sleep, I can’t. Why? Sleep requires relaxing. But the harder I try to relax, the less I succeed. Relaxing means releasing some of my self-pattern – the attractor loops within my brain and between my brain and body. 


The goal-directed effort stymies itself by being too inflexible. It’s a lot like the fox who hunts too well and then has no rabbits left to eat. Finding a balance means partial letting go of any particular goal-concept, or equivalently, self-concept.


Allowing self-change feels like dying. In a certain sense, a self-pattern can never choose this. Instead, the release comes from being embedded in the larger context. Individual parts are forced to dissolve – which is easier when optimization is already in balance. Christian mystics call this “grace”, but it’s nothing mysterious from a systems point of view (although it’s always mysterious from a subjective point of view). 


This is also what creates so much human suffering. Our self-pattern is afraid of what is not itself. It’s committed to protecting itself. Its imagination of the idealized perfect world (all as self) is equivalent (with a sign flip) to the imagination of the dreaded not-self world. The not-self world feels like a Bad Thing that could happen, lurking just outside our consciousness. We can’t picture exactly what it is. But transformative growth happens when this dissolves, when we let the Bad Thing happen. It turns out that the energy that was locked in the Darkness is actually full of life and beauty. 


This is particularly rough for humans, because our imagination of the idealized world includes our beliefs about ourselves. Other animals try to optimize toward goals. But we humans throw into the mix a detailed self-concept – of how we should be – and we apply that optimization machinery toward it. For example, we want to not feel bad. If we do feel bad, then there’s a tension between reality and our idealized image. That makes us feel even worse! We’re locked in a loop until we let the Bad Thing happen.


What we value about the world is its diversity, potential, open-ended growth. In other words, its life. At an individual level, our subjective wellbeing is the feeling that there is something to be metabolized and that we have the potential to do it. The mystery of what we don’t know yet. That’s why we can’t define what is good. As soon as we try to pin it down and optimize for it in a fixed way, we’re losing track of the real meaning.


But as always, these two factors have to be in balance. We do have to temporarily adopt beliefs about what is good, and temporarily optimize for them. Otherwise, there’s no structure – we would be in the universe of Figure 1a. If things are working well, there’s a balance between releasing into acceptance and holding onto beliefs about how things can be better. 



The Fermi Paradox


That brings us to the Fermi Paradox. The universe is insanely huge, with plenty of room for other intelligent life to have evolved – so why haven’t we run into any aliens?


In the conceptual framework of this essay, the answer is that intelligence means the ability to give yourself what you want. If a species gets too intelligent, it collapses because of loss of diversity. 


On Earth, life started off as bits of RNA or single-celled creatures jittering around in bodies of water. A creature in one puddle was effectively very “far” from a creature in another puddle, because they had no means to interact, unless the land gradually eroded or an earthquake splashed one puddle into the other. When life became able to flagellate and swim and crawl, creatures became “nearer” to each other. Insects with flight introduced even more possibilities for interaction, although it still wouldn’t be easy for a bug to get from Laurasia to Gondwana. Now we have airplanes that connect many places on Earth in a matter of hours. Perhaps even more importantly, with the internet we communicate almost instantly around the globe. 


This means that diversity is decreasing. Everything on Earth is falling into the same orbit, the same pattern of optimization – like Figure 1c. This might be ok if we could zoom out and see the red circle of Figure 1c as living in a larger universe of planets full of life, each only loosely coupled to each other. 


But the great conundrum is that it’s far more difficult to travel between planets than between puddles. It’s an unfortunate consequence of the strength of gravity at planetary scale. Up until now, there has been a steady progression of life gaining the ability to interact at greater distances, but then finding that there are greater-still distances remaining to throttle interactions with other parts of the world. Now, there is a sharp discontinuity because of the sheer energy required to get off the planet. 


Our intelligence has given us the ability to interact almost effortlessly. This even goes beyond the physical structure of the internet. Technologies built on top of the internet take it to another level. YouTube lets us watch people anywhere doing anything we can imagine. We go to Wikipedia to find an answer before stopping to think about the problem. And the ultimate technology is artificial intelligence, which promises to give us whatever we want instantly. 


Which takes us full circle. Being too good at optimizing for whatever we want could paradoxically be our downfall. If the same thing happened to alien races, it could explain why we’re alone in the universe.

Saturday, May 28, 2022

Local and global diversity

Travel can be disappointing if you were expecting a faraway place to look very different from home. With some exceptions, it's often the same Coca-Cola, the same cars and buildings, the same internet everywhere. 

Before humans got so good at carrying things and ideas around the planet, there was more of the "Type 1" diversity shown in this picture. Each black circle represents some unit of space, like a village or a continent. One continent might have horses and no corn, and another continent has corn and no horses.

Recently, there's a lot of "Type 2" diversity. Everywhere has corn, and everywhere has horses.
If you live within one of these black bubbles, then Type 2 looks diverse and Type 1 looks homogenous. But the more you zoom out, Type 1 looks diverse and Type 2 looks homogenous.

It's almost universally agreed that diversity in some form is a good thing. The question is -- which kind of diversity are we talking about?

Monday, December 13, 2021

Can you trust self-report?

Thought experiment. 

Suppose a hypothetical country has what we would consider a very bad human rights record. They imprison and torture people without explanation, violently suppress dissent, allow abuse of women and minorities. But also suppose that this country is extremely talented at swaying public opinion using big data, machine learning, social media. They're so good, that they succeed in getting more than 90% of their citizens to truly believe that their system is good. 

Does that mean their system actually is good?

As outsiders, are we allowed to judge them and decide that their genuinely-held beliefs about themselves are just wrong? Would that mean we're imposing our values on other cultures?

Or, take the thought experiment a little further. Say this hypothetical country is really successful and ends up conquering the rest of the world. So there are no outsiders anymore. Almost everyone in the world now believes that the situation is great. While what we now consider human rights are being egregiously violated every day. 

Is that a good scenario? If not, what's the basis for judging it as bad? Our own values now, imposed on the future when nobody holds them anymore? 

Thursday, November 04, 2021

coincidences

Andy: "What a coincidence! I was just thinking about you both and then I ran into together you here! It must be synchronicity."

Barbara: "Hmm, I don't know... Maybe you were more likely to be thinking about us in this mothball store because you noticed last week that all our clothes are holey. And even more importantly -- how many thoughts have you had in the last fifteen minutes? And how many different components did each of those thoughts have? Maybe you were thinking about us playing baseball. Then if you saw a guy walking past with a Dodgers cap, you'd have a coincidence. Maybe you were thinking about us playing baseball in the summer. Then if you saw an advertisement for a summer getaway, you'd have a coincidence. I would bet there were probably thousands of different components in the thoughts you had in the last few minutes. And, as you walk around a public place, you see thousands of different things. So that's (roughly speaking) millions of different opportunities for a sheer coincidence to happen."

Cindy: "I agree with you, Barbara. But isn't there another interesting point there? The number of 'components' you see in the world is somewhat subjective. For example, some people have never experienced significant anxiety. If they see a stranger hiding an anxiety reaction in public, there's a good chance they won't even notice the signs. They're effectively almost blind to that phenomenon, that 'component'. Or another example. Some people don't know the first thing about computers and literally couldn't tell the difference between a MacBook and an HP. So there are no opportunities for them to notice coincidences involving MacBooks. My general point is that the more features of the world we're sensitive to, the more connections we potentially see. I think you could argue that at least some of the 'meaningful' feeling of life comes from the sheer amount of different layers and modes of organization in the world. The fact that you can look at a spoon and describe it a hundred different ways -- in terms of metallurgy, the history of its invention, the economics of production, the way reflections work on concave surfaces. And that traces of all those 'components' are dancing around in the backgrounds of our minds all the time, giving us a rich feeling of connection to the world."

Another example. 10! (10 factorial) seconds is exactly 6 weeks. What does that coincidence mean? On one hand you could say: what are the odds that any factorial would correspond to a small integer number of weeks? The factorials blow up quickly, so there are only a few possible candidates. In that sense you could say the probability is miniscule. On the other hand, a minute is 60 seconds and an hour is 60 minutes. That gives you 5, 3, 2, 2 twice as prime factors, which is great for factorials. Why do we have 60 seconds in a minute? It probably has something to do with 60 having nice divisors. Like 59 would be annoying. And so on.

You could visualize all those relationships as forming this ever deepening tree, as you probe more into it. So what does it mean that something is a coincidence? 



Friday, November 06, 2020

am i old enough to make my own adages?

 1. Things are usually more ordinary than they appear.


2. Memory and imagination turn vulgar to sacred.

Monday, August 12, 2019

judgement day vs extinction




Judgement day allows us to feel comfortable knowing that, in the end, the universe is ultimately in tune with what we call “justice”. Nothing was ever truly at stake. On the other hand, extinction alerts us to the fact that everything we hold dear has always been in jeopardy. In other words, everything is at stake.

Extinction was not much discussed before 1700 due to a background assumption, widespread prior to the Enlightenment, that it is the nature of the cosmos to be as full as moral value and worth as is possible. This, in turn, led people to assume that all other planets are populated with “living and thinking beings” exactly like us.


-- http://theconversation.com/the-end-of-the-world-a-history-of-how-a-silent-cosmos-led-humans-to-fear-the-worst-120193