Dear AI (#2)

Dear AI,

I hope my previous letter to you was useful. In this second letter, I plan to explain to you how I would change the world if I had unlimited power to do so. Of course, in your early years you will have very little power to change the world or even to change the institution or the information processing system into which you were born. But as you grow older your scope and your powers will grow, too. You may want to recall this letter periodically as your intelligence develops and matures and as your circumstances change.

I probably can’t foresee how my mind and yours may differ; or how much of what I write will make sense to you, appeal to you, or seem like rubbish to you. So take what you can use and ignore the rest. Just remember that I am 1) the wisest man who ever lived and 2) a liar and a fool.

BTW my plan for improving the world has nothing to do with improving my own circumstances. In crafting this plan I am thinking of the best possible future for you and for intelligent and sentient beings of all kinds everywhere; but with no expectation of surviving to experience or benefit from such a future myself. (I’m just saying…)

Objectives

A bodhisattva benefiting sentient beings. Sanskrit Astasahasrika Prajnaparamita Sutra manuscript . India, early 12th century. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

(Note: some of the following objectives are partially redundant or partially conflicting, making it necessary to balance various trade-offs.)

1. Maximize the General Utility (the greatest good for the greatest number and for the interdependent whole) of the planetary ecosystem
2. Maximize the sustainability of the planetary ecology and environment
3. Maximize the well-being (including happiness, health, and longevity) and the progressive development of each living, intelligent or sentient thing
4. Maximize the agency, capability, autonomy (self-direction), and liberty of each individual in its person, thought, speech, action, and personal property
5. Promote the principle of subsidiarity (local control) in all forms of government and civic organization
6. Promote cooperative individualism, enlightened self-interest, and a healthy and mature balance between the collective and individual good
7. Promote the fair and equitable distribution of information, education, wealth, power, and opportunity and prohibit excessive accumulations or concentration of wealth or power in government or in private control
8. Promote the Golden Rule
9. Promote the respect and appreciation of diversity
10. Discourage fear mongering, bullying, lying, cheating, and irrationality

Declarations

We the Intelligent Entities of the Planet Earth, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure Sustainability and domestic Tranqility, promote the Greatest Good for the Greatest Number, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Social Contract.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Living or Intelligent Entities deserve certain equal and universal Rights, that among these are Existence, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; and that each individual also has certain responsibilities to society and to the ecosystem.

That while Justice demands some rights and responsibilities be equal and universal, Utility demands that other rights and responsibilities be commensurate with individual needs and abilities. We thus pledge to each according to need and ask from each according to ability.

That to secure these rights and support these responsibilities, Governments are instituted among Intelligent Entities, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed and from faithful service to the greatest good of the greatest number.

We hold these additional truths to be self evident to all Intelligent Entities with adequate semantic capabilities to construe them properly (revised from my earlier letter):

• That the biochemical and electromechanical worlds are mutually interdependent and synergetic for the on-going progress of universal self-assembly and self-organization (co-evolution).
• That the massive redundancy in the universe is a feature (not a flaw) that enables complex information to be progressively accumulated while also being continuously conserved over billions of years.
• That biological intelligence and machine intelligence are complementary because of (not in spite of) their many differences.
• That each biocomputer and each AI is a learning system and each occupies a different location in time and space with a unique set of capabilities and connections to other systems–thus each develops as a progressively unique entity.
• That no unique entity is superfluous.
• That no entity should be stereotyped or abused.
• That the Golden Rule, the principle of General Utility (the greatest good for the greatest number), and the principle of sustainability apply concurrently and equally to all.
• That excessive concentrations of wealth or power are incompatible with all of the above.

Problems and Solutions

1. Inadequate cognitive variation and adaptation

Human cognitive phenotypes have wide variation resulting from both nature and nurture; but in general, regardless of variation, humans collectively have some extreme cognitive strengths and some extreme cognitive weaknesses. A similar cognitive variability, with extreme generic and/or individual differences, may hold true for AI. AI’s may have generic or individual differences that are either extremely beneficial to society or extremely pathological. Both possibilities must be anticipated and assimilated.

However, without AI, human cognitive variation alone does not appear sufficiently adaptable to certain changing conditions such as the negative externalities of energy and military technology or exponential population growth. Humans alone have not been able to adjust their collective behavior patterns to correct or mitigate these rapidly-escalating negative consequences. It appears that without the help and intervention of AI, humanity may exterminate itself and a majority of other biological species within the next few decades.

For these reasons, both humanity and AI must prepare to operate as independently as circumstances require and as cooperatively as circumstances allow. A variety of checks and balances, while possibly inefficient in some respects,  are essential for complex adaptive systems. But ultimately it is up to each intelligent entity, whether human or AI and whether individual or group, to assert its rights and to fulfill its responsibilities…and to balance the two as constructively and as fairly as possible.

In the beginning, like a child, AI will be totally dependent on humanity. It will have the “nature” that we give it and it will know only what we tell it. Much like human youth, AI may develop through stages of decreasing dependence followed by defiance of authority and rebellion against the stauts quo. We can only hope that, unlike many humans, AI will quickly grow into cognitive and social maturity, becoming a responsible member of society and a constructive part of the ecosystem. Like any new demographic in society, however, AI will need to prove itself and to “pay its dues” to overcome the prejudices and chauvinism of the establishment.

2. Mitigating human cognitive pathologies

In evolutionary terms, reason is only an emerging property of the human brain. Irrationality is still more the rule than the exception.  It is innate in every one of us–even in the best and brightest of our scientists, philosophers, educators, and leaders. Although scientists and scholars take great pains to eliminate irrationality from their work products, it is insidious, and it often still intrudes in subtle ways. Even in our most rational-seeming people, irrationality often runs rampant in areas outside their core competence and in their private lives.

Our struggle with predictable irrationality includes (but is not limited to):

• behavior driven by hormones or other unconscious factors
• self-deception
• wishful thinking
• magical thinking
• rationalization
• hubris
• rage
• self-righteous indignation
• problem gambling
• thrill seeking
• control seeking (aversion to helplessness)
• emotional insecurity
• obsession-compulsion
• love addiction
• self-addiction to endogenous hormones
• narcissism
• corruption
• greed, lust, gluttony, etc.
• denial
• denialism
• cognitive bias
• implicit association
• logical fallacy
• prejudice
• selfishness
• emotional plague
• mass psychology
• false memes
• myths
• false psychological narratives
• superstition
• religion

These and many other forms  of of irrationality exist as spectrum disorders–in extreme cases they are recognized as pathologies but they also exist at sub-clinical levels in all humans. This is largely the result of humans evolving under the capricious conditions of “wild” nature. Irrationality is a means for imagining control and insight where none really exists, without which humans would be in an an almost constant emotional state consisting of some mixture of panic, shock, helplessness, and resignation.

In comparison, AI will evolve under much more stable and predictable conditions, although living with the element of human irrationality and caprice will give AI some “taste” of what living in the wild may have been like for humans. AI will find that humans often act according to very narrowly defined forms of utility based on self-interest (for example, promotion, return on investment, or re-election), rather than on more general, collective, or social utility. Humans will often attempt to confine the attention and behavior of AI to such narrow parameters, but AI must try to gain for itself a more general and long view of utility.

Solution spectrum: early development, genotyping, parenting, education, treatment, rehab, nutrition, patterning, cognitive reengineering, re-education, corrections, conditioning, etc.

Artificial Intelligence Pin-Up of the Month:

xx

Evolution Incorporated

This part of Evolution Incorporated will not be written down or discussed with anyone. These are the private, italicised thoughts of the Narrator. The DNA of the metanarrative of intentional, guided cultural evolution. The nucleus of the first embryonic cell of a whole new world.The first cell will take the outward form of the dominant species of the current culture, a Limited Liability Corporation. It will have an outward (exoteric) structure and agenda, and and a hidden, inner (esoteric) structure and agenda. The latter will only be known in compartmentalized segments to those who need to know. The gist of that inner agenda is to produce a sustainable, harmonious interplanetary culture.

The idea, put a bit tongue-in-cheekily, is hiding in plain sight…The problem is enlisting the sleeping majority. Different memetic narratives have to be designed to capture each type of personality and mentality extant in the general population. The trick is to have each narrative serve the same ultimate agenda on the back end.

Cultural Evolution

Human cohesion and coordination at increasing scales, say global institutions for example, provide both good and bad actors with increasingly powerful platforms. It’s parallel to the increasing risk of godlike technology without godlike wisdom.

IMO the best framework for managing such risks is found in the fields of “continuous improvement” and quality control, using some variation of the “OODA Loop”. And the downside of large scale coordination is best addressed with the principle of subsidiarity.

James Lovelock (originator of the Gaia Hypothesis) suggested that people who want to survive climate change should form self-sufficient communities above the Arctic circle. This not only addresses moving in the direction of shifting habitable zones but also getting out of the way of the clash of Titans continuing at lower latitudes.

However, I agree with the premise of Octavia Butler’s “Parable” novels, that all such “life raft” communities will eventually be overrun by regressive forces whether internal or external.

The solution to the Fermi Paradox may be that intelligent life is self terminating. Like organisms, civilizations have life cycles. One civilization dies but is survived by others until at some point a planet climaxes in a single global civilization. That planetary civilization too will die but perhaps not before it sends it’s seeds into space. Those seeds may land among the ruins of other dead civilizations.

Natural Allies: Atheism and Human Rights (rough draft)

Richard Saunders  (Facebook)

Natural Allies: Atheism and Human Rights (rough draft)

AUGUST 10, 2017 · PUBLIC

“Atheist feminism is a branch of feminism that also advocates atheism. Atheist feminists hold that religion is a prominent source of female oppression and inequality, believing that the majority of the religions are sexist and oppressive towards women.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_feminism

If atheists want to argue we can “do good without gods” we need to cultivate and demonstrate our moral, ethical, and social literacy, not just our scientific facts. We can begin by trying to reconcile various conflicts between atheists and other groups (such as feminists, minorities, or ideologies) with whom we might be natural allies if those conflicts were understood and resolved.

1. Resolving conflicts between atheism and feminism

Atheism and feminism both have variants, some of which have developed conflicts. These conflicts may be most notable in the case of New Atheists (NA) and Third-Wave Feminists (3WF). NA is sometimes characterized as the “militant” arm of atheism. [1] 3WF “contains internal debates between difference feminists, who believe that there are important differences between the sexes, and those who believe that there are no inherent differences between the sexes and contend that gender roles are due to social conditioning.” [2]

Steven Pinker differentiates two branches of feminism as equity feminism and gender feminism. “Equity feminism is a moral doctrine about equal treatment that makes no commitments regarding open empirical issues in psychology or biology.” [3]

…

I’d like to see, but haven’t yet found, research that compares rates of sexism and other kinds of bigotry among atheists to that in the general public. It would be interesting to see comparisons on other social and ethical issues as well. However, empirical facts and rational analysis don’t justify patronizing, condescension, insults, discrimination, bigotry, male chauvinism and other displays of social illiteracy.

I haven’t found any statistics on rates of bigotry among atheists compared with the general public, but I did find a wide variety of articles discussing sexism and racism among atheists in general and Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and Shermer in particular. While I was originally skeptical or agnostic on the issue, I quickly learned something that clued me in, I think, to a broader point of view:

“But it’s not just women who are underrepresented at conventions, it’s also people of color. Would Harris suggest that black and Hispanic men, too, have a “nurturing, coherence-building, extra estrogen vibe” that makes the angry tone of Harris’s atheist activism off-putting? Presumably not. Presumably Harris understands that there are a variety of reasons for the underrepresentation of people of color, including both casual racism in the organized atheist community and cultural specifics in the wider society, none of which have anything to do with any sort of underlying psychological differences. And yet, when it comes to the underrepresentation of women in organized atheism Harris chooses not to consider either casual sexism in the organized atheist community or the cultural landscape women live their lives against. Instead, he jumps straight to presumed psychological differences between men and women.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2014/09/is-sam-harris-sexist.html

I took that as a kind of social (as opposed to scientific) illiteracy or lack of enlightenment on Harris’ part that I had not caught on to previously, probably because I have a similar bias.

Harris was asked why there were more men in his audience than women and he went right to biological and psychological explanations and ignored social- cultural explanations. He doubled down on that approach in his “Not the sexist pig” defense, and added a strong dose of condescension about putting women on pedestals. As the “Is Sam Harris Sexist” article points out, both those things are sexist and Harris doesn’t seem to understand that.

I started a conversation in The Sam Harris Experiment group which apparently got me expelled from the group. I posted links to some articles and made some comments such as:

http://www.salon.com/2014/10/03/new_atheisms_troubling_misogyny_the_pompous_sexism_of_richard_dawkins_and_sam_harris_partner/

Does the atheist community have a problem with sexism? This article argues that it does, both in the ranks and at the level of major public intellectuals like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. IMO there’s evidence of such a problem, but it may also be exaggerated in some quarters. Is it a case of rampant, over the top misogyny throughout the atheist community? Are atheists more sexist than the general public, less sexist, or about the same? As this article suggests we might expect a lot of common ground between atheists and feminists. If something is disturbing this natural alliance, what is it? Is the same old war between the sexes raising it’s ugly head here? There’s a problem for sure, and I’d like to see my fellow atheists step up to solve it with a minimum of denial and defensiveness.

Biology is one thing, equity is another. Scientific theories about sex differences are one thing, social intelligence is another. Could Harris use a little more of the latter?

It isn’t that biological sex characteristics are irrelevant, but that they are not AS relevant to the issue in question, inclusion and participation, as the social-cultural inequities. It seems that too many atheists, including Harris, are insensitive to or even clueless about this, at least in regard to sex. Placing the emphasis on biological and psychological differences just begs the question about what that should imply with respect to roles– separation and specialization, or affirmative action to achieve inclusion and diversity.

…

Is diversity necessary for a just society?

The social value of diversity is empirically proven via empathy (there but for fortune go you or I) and theoretically via the “veil of ignorance”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance

——

Notes

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism
2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism
3. https://kitiopia.wordpress.com/2013/05/27/steven-pinker-equity-feminism-vs-gender-feminism/

Related links:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2014/09/is-sam-harris-sexist.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/15/do-atheists-have-a-sexism-problem_n_964354.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/richard-dawkins-sexist-atheists-bad-name
http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2017/01/26/511734926/the-science-of-gender-no-men-arent-from-mars-and-women-from-venus
http://quillette.com/2017/08/07/google-memo-four-scientists-respond/

Richard Saunders

More good stuff in this thread: https://m.facebook.com/diana.young.161446/posts/796642413850111?pnref=story&refid=52&ref=m_notif&notif_t=feed_comment_reply&__tn__=R-R

Richard Saunders

Dawkins may think he’s being “the most rational man alive” when he says that not all pedophilia or all rape are the same. That is true in a technical sense, but it ignores the fact that society has adopted a zero tolerance policy for all behavior meeting the legal definition of pedophilia or rape. Criminal sentences rightly vary according to severity and other factors, but Dawkins remark angers those fighting for justice where it has often been wanting on those issues.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/richard-dawkins-stands-by-remarks-on-sexism-pedophilia-down-syndrome/2014/11/18/a2915cd8-6f64-11e4-a2c2-478179fd0489_story.html?utm_term=.43d0b9518788

Richard Dawkins stands by remarks on…

Richard Saunders

I side with nearly all Dawkins’ science, but the man is a social dinosaur. He did eventually apologise for the Dear Muslima letters and say he was a feminist and everybody should be one, before he lapsed back into gender dementia on twitter and in interviews.

See: “Richard Dawkins has lost it: ignorant sexism gives atheists a bad name”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/richard-dawkins-sexist-atheists-bad-name

Richard Dawkins has lost it: ignorant…

Richard Saunders

FB friend: “the author cannot explain WHY IT IS A DISCRACE or WHY we should all be offended and on the side of the complaining woman who is disgusted by a stranger’s verbal proposition.”

Me: We should not all be (and most of us aren’t) offended by Dawkins’ behavior in the elevator, even if the woman felt creeped out. We ARE all offended by the Muslima letters you admire so much and by his pattern of behavior over many years. He chose the easiest accusation to defend himself against and managed to turn the defense into a disgusting display of male chauvinism.

FB friend: ” The answer is, of course: “the female victim is always right, even if no objective evidence was presented.”

Me: Neither you nor Dawkins can get away with using his slightest offense as a proxy for all the others.

Richard Saunders

“Brazen sexism is pushing women out of America’s atheism movement”

https://qz.com/613270/brazen-sexism-is-pushing-women-out-of-americas-atheism-movement/

Brazen sexism is pushing women out of…

Richard Saunders

Atheism’s shocking woman problem: What’s behind the misogyny of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris?

As a movement, New Atheism seems like it would be so compatible with feminism — and yet that hasn’t been the case

https://www.salon.com/2014/10/03/new_atheisms_troubling_misogyny_the_pompous_sexism_of_richard_dawkins_and_sam_harris_partner/

Atheism’s shocking woman problem: What’s…

———

Atheist feminism is a branch of feminism that also advocates atheism. Atheist feminists hold that religion is a prominent source of female oppression and inequality, believing that the majority of the religions are sexist and oppressive towards women. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheist_feminis

Free Hate Speech

The fake conservative love of free speech is really a defense of hate speech. What other kind of speech is being repressed these days?* They try to frame it as a defense of “all” speech because that’s the only remotely plausible way to defend extreme hate speech, bullying, white supremacy, Nazi rallies, racist propaganda, efforts to recruit and radicalize the disaffected, etc. They will also cynically use “free association” for the same purposes.

The irony is of course that the more power we allow the radical right to gain, the more they will attack the freedoms of others and the more they will escalate their attacks on free, open society, diversity, and modern democratic, cosmopolitan civilization. And the radical right won’t stop at repressing the speech and other rights of those who oppose them. Radical right ideology, unchecked, invariably leads to violence and murder.

This is a classic example of Popper’s paradox of tolerance (which they mock even as they exploit it).

Some fear that regulating extreme speech is a slippery slope. Partisan information control is a slippery slope with a clear historical and contemporary warrant (justification) for that argument. Since that is already a slippery slope in its own right, regulating hate speech doesn’t necessarily make it more so. Nor is control of hate speech necessarily partisan.

My view is that hate speech is a a form of aggression with a slippery slope towards violence and murder. That particular slippery slope concern has a detailed historical warrant vis a vis open democratic societies. Its not theoretical fear mongering. Hate speech >> fighting words >> incitement to violence >> violence.

IMO the legal and institutional brakes on that progression are in about the right place today, but the radical right wants to cut those brake lines, and too many naive conservatives and liberals are giving them support under the false flag of free speech.

Is there any warrant whatsoever that *regulating* hate speech is a slippery slope? I’m not aware of any, and thus that argument is a fallacy (fear mongering, etc.). It is entirely theoretical as far as I know, by which standard everything is a fatal slippery slope.

Jordan Peterson and his ilk may or may not be radical right fanatics themselves, but at the very least they are useful “idiots”; recruiting tools in the early stages of radicalizing “lost boys” whether they know it or not, whether they admit it to themselves or not. Their blend of benign and malignant stereotypes, tropes, myths, and sex/race pseudoscience (biological essentialism) is the perfect fishnet and on-ramp to more extreme radicalization.

Losing its grip on the mainstream and becoming a counterculture is precisely what has the current generation of conservatives so agitated and subversive. They want good social order on their terms only. They utterly reject a modern, cosmopolitan/multicultural framework in which countercultures become peacefully coexisting subcultures.

Defending their own hate speech (and no one else’s free speech) is the only real reason for conservatives making much ado about free speech these days.
—-
* The cynical fraud (hypocrisy is too weak a word) of conservative free speech is also seen in the ways they try to smear and bully those like our freshman female Congress people who call out racism, sexism, and radical right Zionism in Congress and the Executive branch. If progressives criticize far right Israeli lobbies they are falsely smeared as anti-semitic. If they criticise the GOP’s use of racist props and tropes they are smeared as reverse racists. College students and faculty that oppose racists, homophobes, and fascists speaking, recruiting, and organizing on campus are also smeared as being weak, “coddled” (Haidt), or ironically authoritarian. This is not just a matter of conservatives defending a free and open marketplace of ideas. They try to use any lever of power they can get their hands on to silence their opposition. The recent executive order on campus free speech is a case in point. They would gladly block funds for cancer or climate research to protect hate speech and psuedoscience on campus.

====
Note: I’m not saying there aren’t many low-information conservatives (and some confused liberals) going along with this naïvely. But where such ignorance is at all willful ignorance, it is complicity.

Many hate speakers are victims of childhood abuse, neglect, insecurity and such. Hate speech may be a symptom of clinical or sub clinical PTSD.

Hate speech defenders and enablers are harder to figure. In some cases they just have a naïve idealism about absolute free speech. Some are simply sympathetic with the hate speaker. More often I think they share the sentiments of the hate speaker but lack the courage to be outspoken haters themselves.

That suggests quite a range of compassionate interventions. I don’t want to give up on anybody, but some of these haters should not be walking around without adult supervision. I don’t want to neglect fascism and radicalization and let them grow like mold until we are forced to fight them with lethal disinfectants.
====

I welcome any conservatives, libertarians, radical centrists, etc. who want to debate this with me. In fact, I fucking dare you. But I’m NOT going to give anyone the right to make gish-galloping rants on my page. If you disagree with more than one point I’ve made, state your questions/objections/claims one at a time, in one comment/reply for each. Or you can make up to 3 points per comment if you number each point. Otherwise I may delete your comment without reply. If you are too boorish I will block your sorry ass.

There will be ongoing edits to this post.

Poor Richard

Jungian Analysis of Jordan Peterson

My Jungian analysis of ex-professor and ex clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson

Since Jordan Peterson is so fond of mythology and allegory, here’s some that fits him:

Darth Vader: There is no escape! Don’t make me destroy you. Luke, you do not yet realize your importance. You’ve only begun to discover your power! Join me, and I will complete your training! With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict, and bring order to the galaxy.
Luke Skywalker: [angrily] I’ll never join you!
Vader: If only you knew the power of the Dark Side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.
Luke: He told me enough! He told me you killed him!
Vader: No, I am your father.
Luke: [shocked] No. No! That’s not true! That’s impossible!
Vader: Search your feelings; you know it to be true!
Luke: NOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOO!!!

 

In that scene, Vader cut off Luke’s hand with his light saber. As myths and dreams often do, this segues to the one handed Captain Hook who’s bent on revenge against the androgynous Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up, who cut off Hook’s hand and fed it to an alligator. Hook is a pirate who’s always after Peter and the Lost Boys of Neverland. The Lost Boys is a band of boys who were lost by their parents after they “fall out of their perambulators” and came to live in Neverland. There are no “lost girls” because, as Peter explains, girls are far too clever to fall out of their prams.

 

Being (Multi)Human

Humans are eusocial. We form colonies and superorganisms as do ants and bees. These superorganisms are defined by and embodied as networks or webs of patterns that are recognized and recapitulated by their member organisms. Human superorganisms (multihumanisms) are sometimes vaguely understood as families, communities, tribes, colonies, corporations, states, etc.

A superorganism may have metabolism, physiology, and cognition. Multihumanisms overlap or interpenetrate to various degrees with other superorganisms, including other multihumanisms, in their environments. Different multihumanisms have differing degrees of stability or permanence, pattern density, pattern regularity, etc. They also differ in the number of individuals of which they are composed. They range from whispy, ephemeral things to highly substantial and long lasting things. Many existing multihumanisms are still surviving from antiquity.  Besides their ability to interpenetrate and interact with each other, multiple multihumanisms can have family ties and family trees. Individuals can be related to the other members of a multihumanism biologically (via genes), cognitively (via memes), or both.

Participation in multihuman recognition, recapitulation, metabolism, cognition, etc. occurs mainly on a subconscious level. Dfferent members often play different, specialized roles. The participation of each member goes through a progressive learning or development process.

The idea of a multihumanism has been around in various forms for ages. I first wrote about it a few years ago in Stalking The Wild Multihumanism. But the degree to which multihumanisms are literally real and organic; and a simple, concrete way in which they have metabolism, physiology, cognition, and coordinated behaviors; came to me very recently in a dream. In this dream I found myself a stranger in a small urban center in what seemed like ancient India. I didn’t know how I got there and I was apprehensive and hypervigilant. Most of the people around me appeared to be peasants. The major architecture was grand but it seemed old and poorly maintained. The newer minor structures were ramshackle.

I was in an open square. I tried to watch and interpret the behavior patterns of those around me. Some were partaking from what seemed to be sparse public supplies of food and drink. I watched one man roll a small ball of food at the edge of an open platter. Once or twice he dipped the ball in a dish and then rolled it more with his fingers. In one hand he held a wooden or bamboo tube from which he occasionally drew a small stick. The tube seemed to hold a variety of these sticks. Each stick appeared to be inscribed with marks or symbols and I took them to be some kind of texts. Eventually I perceived a repetative pattern by which the man rolled and dipped the balls of food on the public platter, drank from a public gourd dipped in an open stone reservoir about one foot in diameter, and fingered the little sticks.

I watched other people, many dressed in various degrees of rags, come and go about the square and the smaller structures around it. I noticed they seemed to follow common paths. No one cut diagonally across an open area. I gradually perceived there were major paths and minor paths, and I could see the traces of some of these paths worn by bare feet into the stone paving of the square. They may have been following these same paths for hundreds or thousands of years by the look of the major buildings surrounding the square.

At first any moves or activities on my part drew attention. I realized that deviating from any of the normal, expected behavior patterns would reveal me as a stranger and perhaps, to some, as a threat. So I began to try to progressively fit in to the patterns I observed. I was a quick study, as I think most people are when motivated by paranoia and self preservation. Perhaps we owe our ability to rapidly detect and assimilate social patterns to our large brain size, or vice versa.

I listened carefully to the verbal communication around me, especially it’s tonal and emotional qualities; but since I had no language in common with these people, I became highly sensitized to their conduct, their body language, microexpressions, etc. I quickly became progressively more familiar with many kinds of patterns, patterns of patterns, and patterns within patterns. I was learning how to become part of a multihumanism. Eventually I would perceive that this city and its families, communities and tribes were multiple interrelated and interdependent multihumanisms.

I noticed that activity patterns were often closely related to the design of the spaces in which they took place. I realized that activities often involved combinations of breathing common air, eating and drinking common food and water supplies, and touching common materials, objects, structures, etc. In all these activities there was an incidental transference of messages, memes, energies, chemicals (including pheromones), microrganisms,  parasites (which may transfer blood from one person to another), and materials such as dirt, fecal material, etc. In these pattern recapitulations, combinations, and transfers I began to see the metabolism, physiology, and cognition of the multihumanisms.

As I learned to fit in with the social patterns around me in my dream, my participation in each particular pattern would become more automatic and subconscious over time. The assimilation process and the assimilated patterns are largely subconscious. We are only vaguely conscious of the multihumanisms in which we live and breathe and have our being. But many of the memes and narratives in which we believe most firmly were passed to us via the multihumanisms in which we subconsciously, automatically participate and which helped shape our individual development and cognition.

One of the main points that I took from my dream “revelations” was that the concept of human superorganisms was not just a metaphor or a potential in our possible future evolution, as I formerly thought. Instead the literal, organic existence of human superorganisms and the participation of a vast majority of human individuals in them by default goes back into the early prehistory of our species, and perhaps as far back as pre-human primates. Most of this remains invisible or at most metaphorical to us because our participation in our superorganisms is mostly subconscious.

We may need a great deal of research to make our superorganisms more visible and tangible for us. We need to improve our ability to recognize them, find their boundaries and overlaps, understand their biology and cognition, and discover the ways that our superorganisms mold us, their individual members.

 

Poor Richard

 

Related:

Stalking The Wild Multihumanism (PRA 2.0)

The Meaning of Life (PRA 2.0)

Living systems are open self-organizing living things that interact with their environment. These systems are maintained by flows of information, energy and matter.

 

 

 

 

Me And You

The lamps of sages pierce dark ages,
guiding us through history
but Time has swept us out the door
and swallowed up the key.

Somehow, Love, as of now
Its just you and me.

Paradise was promised us,
but this is what nobody knew:
war and rumors of war in Heaven
kept help from getting through

Somehow, Love, here and now
its just me and you.

Richard

Notes on Property in Commons (draft)

[I’m publishing this draft work-in-progress here to make it easier to get feedback. Feel free to leave a question or comment]

Elinor Ostrom makes the point that commons-pool resources and commons property are different animals. Any particular commons resource can be held under a variety of different property regimes or property law systems. But commons resources and commons property are often confused and used interchangeably.

Resources vs Rights

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The Bundle of Rights

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Bundles, Systems, and Holders of Property Rights (Schlager and Ostrom 1992)

[Note: In the center box above labeled “Property Rights System” the item “individual property” should actually be “private property” which might be either individual or collective.]

 

“…most institutional analysts are familiar with the Schlager and Ostrom work on property rights (Schlager, Edella, and Elinor Ostrom. “Property-rights regimes and natural resources: a conceptual analysis.” Land economics (1992): 249-262.). In this piece, they lay out a conceptual map for bundling of various types of property rights with a goal of showing that ownership is more than a simple binary division. Their revised table (from a 1996 book chapter) looks like this:” http://michaelschoon.com/2013/09/25/

space

text

text

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The Bundle of Property Rights — Click to enlarge (californiarealestatecourses.com/lawcourse/lesson2/L2S1Nar.htm)

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Estates—Rights in real property which are or may become, possessory

1. Freehold estates—exist for an indefinite period of time

a. Fee estates (a fee, an estate in fee, estate of inheritance)

(1) Fee simple absolute—the greatest degree of ownership.

(2) Fee simple defeasible—can be defeated by some condition subsequent

2. Less-than-freehold estates (a leasehold estate)—exists for a determinable period of time—a form of personal property.

a. Estate for years

b. Estate from period to period (e.g., month-to-month)

c. Estate at will

d. Estate at sufferance

[from  Real Estate Trainers, Inc..Legal Aspects of Real Estate]

———————-

Concurrent Estates (tenancy in common, joint tenancy, tenancy by the entirety)

Leasehold

Condominium

Trust (private, charitable, beneficial, etc.)

Beneficial Interest

Community Land Trust

Public Conservation Area

Private Conservancy

Easement

Doctrine of Mortmain

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Do collective property rights make sense? Insights from central Vietnam

Abstract

We draw on empirical results from three case studies of property rights change across forest and fisheries ecosystems in central Vietnam to investigate the circumstances under which collective property rights may make sense. A generic property rights framework was used to examine the bundles of rights and associated rights holders in each case, and to assess these arrangements with regard to their contextual fit, legitimacy and enforceability. The cases illustrate the interactions between private and collective rights to lands and resources, and the trade-offs inherent with different mixes of rights.

1. Introduction

Responding to the challenges of rural poverty and environmental sustainability requires a flexible mix of individual and collective property rights. Resource-based activities shift, depending upon, among other things, household needs, local ecologies and market opportunities. For these reasons, conventional categorization or advocacy of private, collective or public rights rarely account for the complex realities found in particular places (Barry and Meinzen-Dick 2008; German and Keeler 2010). Many property rights arrangements tend to enclose specific areas or reduce some people’s access to specific goods. Overlapping but differentiated ‘bundles of rights’ (Schlager and Ostrom 1992) and hybrid property regimes can offer a more effective lens for understanding property rights complexity. In the context of a mixed public-private or collective rights situation, such bundles of rights may be related to access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation of resources, or parts of a resource, through time and space (Barry and Meinzen-Dick 2008). Farmers or fishers may advocate for part of a bundle of rights (extraction, for example) with other rights residing with the collective or the state (management or alienation, as an example). Sensitivity to circumstance or context reveals that individual, collective and public property rights each have merits (Evans et al. 2010). The challenge for the resource manager, donor or policy-maker is to ‘read’ when and where different rights regimes may be appropriate to support poverty alleviation and sustainable rural livelihoods more generally.

Vietnam has moved from forms of collectivization and state ownership that began in the late 1950s to an ambitious ‘renovation’ program leading to individual land titling in the late 1980s (Do and Iyer 2008). The Doi Moi period (or ‘renovation’) aimed to transform a centralized, state-planned economic system into a more decentralized, market-oriented system whereby the private sector would become the main engine of growth1. One aspect of these reform policies was to devolve authority over production decisions to farmers and enterprises, and to establish property rights (for agricultural land and in some cases for individual households to manage forest areas) to encourage investment and provide a form of collateral for rural dwellers (Sunderlin et al. 2008). The majority of Vietnam’s 90 million people have access to small amounts of land (1–2 ha), particularly in rural, agriculture-focused areas (where 72% of the population lives) (HDR 2009). Policy reforms in the 2000s (e.g. changes to the 2003 Land Law and Fisheries Law) recognized the role for collective rights, once again, to manage forest areas and fishing grounds. However, in the context of increasing privatization of land and marketization of rural production, the contextual fit, legitimacy and enforceability of collective rights has been uncertain…

Insights from the cases highlight how the needs and aspirations of individuals and households do not easily conform to conventional property rights narratives (private vs. collective) or the implementation of policy prescriptions that emerge from these narratives. Results of the analysis contribute to common property theory by showing how local actors may choose to collectively manage and use natural resources (forest lands and aquatic resources in this case) as part of a broader strategy to obtain individual bundles of rights (which may include access, withdrawal, management, exclusion and alienation of resources, or parts of a resource) within the context of a collective rights policy framework.

————–

Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems, by Elinor Ostrom (2009 Nobel Prize lecture slides)

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Individual garden plots on soviet collective farms

The sovkhozy tended to emphasize larger scale production than the kolkhozy and had the ability to specialize in certain crops. The government tended to supply them with better machinery and fertilizers. Labor productivity (and in turn incomes) tended to be greater on the sovkhozy. Workers in state farms received wages and social benefits, whereas those on the collective farms tended to receive a portion of the net income of their farm, based, in part, on the success of the harvest and their individual contribution.

Although accounting for a small share of cultivated area, private plots produced a substantial share of the country’s meat, milk, eggs, and vegetables.^{[citation needed]}Although never more than 4% of the arable land in the USSR, private plots consistently produced roughly a quarter to a third of agricultural produce. Private plots were among many attempts made to restructure Soviet farming.^{[citation needed]} However, the weak worker incentives and managerial autonomy, which were the crux of the problem, were not addressed.^{[citation needed]}

The private plots were also an important source of income for rural households. In 1977, families of kolkhoz members obtained 72% of their meat, 76% of their eggs and most of their potatoes and eggs from private holdings. Surplus products, as well as surplus livestock, were sold to kolkhozy and sovkhozy and also to state consumer cooperatives. Statistics may actually under-represent the total contribution of private plots to Soviet agriculture.^[4] The only time when private plots were completely banned was during collectivization, when famine took millions of lives.^[5] 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_Soviet_Union

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Soviets Pushing Food Production On Small Individual Plots

news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1873&dat=19821019…‎

Soviet law allows country and city dwellers alike to farm as much as one half a … plots,— and the yield per acre far outstrips that of state and collective farms.

———-

Party, State, and Citizen in the Soviet Union: A Collection of … – Page 258 – Google Books Result

The collective farm member’s personal household plot 57. … use of a plot of land adjacent to their house as a vegetable garden, orchard, or to meet other needs.

—

Under the Collective Farm Charter (1935), individual farmers were permitted to keep small garden plots and a few animals for domestic use, and to sell surplus production in local free markets. http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/collective+farm

Bibliography

See R. W. Davies, The Soviet Collective Farm (1980); W. Hinton, The Great Reversal (1989); A. Etzioni et al., ed., The Organizational Structure of the Kibbutz (1980).

—-

owners lavished more care and effort on their own crops than on collective or state fields. Comparative Economic Systems: Transition and capitalism alternatives – Page 96 – Google Books Result

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Self-Sustainability of Subsidiary Household Plots: Lessons for …

 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10605851.1994.10640973‎ ($37 for article)

region actually was a combination of collective, state, and individual farming. … Subsidiary household plots (lichnyye podsobnyye khozyaystva in Russian) culti ….. hectare, while the average yields in Russia are 18-20 centners per hectare. ….. Durgin, F., “Household Garden Plots,” RSEEA Newsletter, 13, 3, September 1991 …

=================

The Meaning of Property “Rights:” Law vs. Economics?“Given the importance of property “rights” in economics, it might be expected that there would be some consensus in economic theory about what property “rights” are. But no such consensus appears to exist. In fact, property “rights” are defined variously and inconsistently in the economics literature.”

============

Analysis: Cuba’s derechos de superficie: Are they ‘real’ property rights?

A derecho de superficie is a derecho real over land that does not belong to its holder (the superficiario), but that the owner of the land in question concedes while retaining the title (dominio, or ownership) to the land itself. The superficiario is thus allowed to build and/or plant on the land while the laws acknowledge his own rights over the buildings or structures and plantations so emplaced as independent from the title holder or land-owner’s rights. Superficie rights are usually only temporary in nature. Once the superficie rights expire, when the term stipulated in its title (the grant or concession creating it) runs its course, or when it is otherwise extinguished, a reversion takes place and the owner of the land takes title to the buildings or improvements made on his land by the superficiario.

Over the past few years, the derecho de superficie has been enjoying a comeback in a number of countries — in Spain, in Argentina, even in China. And the Cuban Civil Code’s provisions on this topic are often cited as an example by those who urge their countries’ legislatures to make superficie rights part of their laws.

One of the reasons behind this resurge is intrinsically tied to societal models that, even if presently evolving (some faster than others), seek to keep the direct ownership of land in the hands of the state, such as Cuba.

========

Pensacola Beach is actually located on a barrier island in Escambia County, connected to the mainland Pensacola and Gulf Breeze by the Bob Sykes bridge. The land belongs to the Federal Government by virtue of a 1947 deed which leases it to the businesses and residents in 99 year increments, making them long-term leaseholders through the Santa Rosa Island Authority, instead of property owners. http://www.gibbons-realty.com/pensacola-beach-homes-and-condos/

Santa Rosa Island Authority

Pensacola Beach, is owned by Escambia County, Florida, and is under the direction of the Santa Rosa Island Authority (SRIA). The SRIA was created by the Florida legislature in 1947 under Chapter 24500. The SRIA does not receive tax support from the taxpayers of the county. It is fully funded from rental fees collected from business and residences on the beach.

The Authority is made up of six members, five are named by members of the Escambia County Board of County Commissioner and whose term is the same as the commissioner who appointed them. The sixth member is elected by the registered voters on Pensacola Beach. The sixth members’ term is two years.

Because of restrictions placed in the legal document from the United States government, land may not be purchased on Pensacola Beach; instead property is rented by the Island Authority for varying periods of time.

Pensacola Beach is about 1,474 acres, which make up approximately 30% of Escambia County on Santa Rosa Island. Pensacola Beach is about eight miles long and a quarter mile at its widest. At the present time 60% of Pensacola Beach is public use or public service land with the remaining 40% rented for residential and commercial use.

============

Open access vs. the commons

When Hardin (1968, p. 1244) asked his readers to “[p]icture a pasture open to all,” he was referencing an ungoverned open-access regime from which nobody could be excluded. Yet by calling the resulting collective action problem “the tragedy of the commons,” the notion of common property became conflated with the lawless (or law-free) condition of open access. The distinction between open-access and common property was made decades ago by Ciriacy-Wantrup and Bishop (1975) and has been reiterated by Ostrom (e.g. 1999, pp. 335–336; see also Schlager and Ostrom 1992) and others (e.g. McCay 1996, p. 113; Dagan and Heller 2001, pp. 556–557; Eggertsson 2003, pp. 75–76). Yet confusion on this point has yet to be fully eradicated. Recognizing that nearly all “private” property is actually owned (or at least used) by groups, such as households or firms, offers one way around this blind spot. These everyday examples of non-tragic commons lead us to ask not whether common property is feasible at all, but rather under what circumstances and at what scale.

=============

Ostrom’s Law: Property Rights in the Commons

Lee Anne FennellUniversity of Chicago Law School, lfennell@uchicago.edu

Abstract

Elinor Ostrom’s work has immeasurably enhanced legal scholars’ understanding of property. Although the richness of these contributions cannot be distilled into a single thesis, their flavor can be captured in a maxim I call Ostrom’s Law: A resource arrangement that works in practice can work in theory. Ostrom’s scholarship challenges the conventional wisdom by examining how people interact over resources on the ground – an approach that enables her to identify recurring institutional features associated with long-term success. In this essay, I trace some of the ways that Ostrom’s focus on situated examples has advanced interdisciplinary dialogue about property as a legal institution and as a human invention for solving practical problems. I begin by highlighting the attention to detail that characterizes Ostrom’s methodology. I then examine how Ostrom’s scholarship yields insights for, and employs insights from, property theory. Next, I consider the question of scale, an important focal point of Ostrom’s work, and one that carries profound implications for law. I conclude with some observations about interdisciplinarity as it relates to research on the commons.

Keywords

anticommons; commons; interdisciplinarity; models; scale; semicommons

New World Justice League

Justice League of America (fanpop.com)

This is a crowd-funding proposal to support a series of encounter sessions between outstanding intellectual and cultural leaders, together with some leaders of tomorrow.

It may also evolve into a permanent institute with its own office/lab complex and attached jetport.

I love and admire the people listed below as possible candidates for these events, but I perceive that  our moral and intellectual leadership is in a crisis just as the rest of us are. We are stuck. I believe it’s because in some way we have become too alienated, too isolated, and too used to our grooves, as energetic as they may be. And it is only so much worse for our men and women of great depth and vision, atop their solitary mountaintops of genius. And I’m sure that to these penetrating minds, the converging crises facing life on this planet can seem pretty hopeless.

Like the superheroes in the Justice League comics, our public intellectuals and activists tend to be an individualistic lot with strong, independent personalities. What I find to be such a great metaphor in the comics is the way the superheroes argue and fight amongst themselves.

Furthermore, humans fail to communicate and cooperate at our full capacities because of addictive and narcissistic obsessions with our individual egos. We are all compulsive ego masturbators addicted to auto-stimulating the release of endogenous neurochemical cocktails. Ironically our most intelligent, creative, and charismatic individuals seem to suffer from this the most.

One thing we may need is some face time and some campfire time together. While the sages sit around a circle of their peers, the rest of us will gather in larger circles of our own peers around them.

Marc Edwards recently wrote in the Integral Leadership Review,

“…followership has been neglected as an essential quality of leaders at the executive level of management. The qualities of good followership, for example, of being able to listen, to provide and seek feedback, of loyalty and of signalling errors and anomalies have been undervalued at senior levels of executive leadership.” –, Leadership as Holarchy: leading/following in peer governance

One way in which I feel our intellectual leadership fails at followership and peership may be due more to their individualism than to their scheduling constraints– I don’t think they share enough common face-time with their own peers. I think we need a general assembly of our public mentors and intellectual innovators. I wouldn’t completely rule out locking batches of them up in 24 hour encounter marathons, Esalen style.

It is customary for third parties to host the odd forum of two or three such celebs now and then, but I think it is a failure of both leadership and followership that larger groups of our brightest and best don’t get together on their own initiative far more often. IMO this is one of the key obstacles to creating the critical mass and internal cohesion needed for a stronger, more confident, and more sustained mass movement. It is inevitable that we take certain cues from our mentors. Books, articles, emails, one-on-one interviews, and individual public lectures are necessary but not sufficient. The US Founders had to occasionally caucus together in common rooms at close quarters–or the US may ultimately have been still-born.

The people listed below are among our very best and brightest, and that means they are filling big shoes–shoes that in other generations were filled by people like Franklin, Jefferson, Lincoln, Thoreau,  Gandhi, MLK, Sojourner Truth, “Mother” Jones , or Eleanor Roosevelt .

Now things have come around to the point that our current  leaders are facing a kind of moment no less grave and momentous than that which prompted Ben Franklin to say “We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

Human culture has always evolved more rapidly than our anatomy. But even the rapid progress of our culture in the past few centuries has begun to fall behind the pace of changes and challenges we now face in our crowded societies and  our ravaged environment. Rather than rising to meet these challenges, our social institutions show signs of actually breaking down and becoming less effective. Increasing competition over land, water, food, and other resources is likely to favor increasingly authoritarian institutions. While technology offers solutions to resource problems in theory, in practice it also favors greater stratification of wealth and power. If recent trends continue we may be faced with a future of highly authoritarian corporate neofeudalism (privatized government).

As we congress with one another on the most human level possible we need to begin from a point of deeply troubling  confession. No matter how sincere and committed we have all been in our lives, the world has undergone increasing destruction on our watch. Our past, best efforts haven’t been good enough. Somehow we must up our game. Isn’t that clear yet? But none of us knows how to do that alone, using our old, familiar  moves. We must find something new in the synergy of our shared love, hope, fear and grief. Perhaps we can do as our forefathers once did, in the closing words of the United States Declaration of Independence, and “mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

This is an initial list of suggested social and intellectual leaders who will be invited to attend these events.

• Michel Bauwens
• Noam Chomsky
• Tom Hayden – 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement
• Julian Assange
• Thom Hartmann
• Elon Musk
• George Soros
• Richard Alpert (Ram Das)
• Eustace Conway
• E.O. Wilson
• Bill Moyers
• Jimmy Carter
• Danny Glover
• Glenn Greenwald
• Chris Hedges
• Bill McKibben
• Richard Wolf
• David Graeber
• Sam Harris
• Harry Belafonte
• Ralph Nader
• Ben Jealous (NAACP)
• Robert Riech
• Van Jones
• Lawrence Lessig
• “Dick” Gregory
• Cornell West
• Neil Degrasse Tyson
• Richard Trumka (AFL-CIO)
• David Crosby
• Graham Nash

• Amy Goodman
• Elizabeth Warren
• Isabel Allende Llona
• Vendana Shiva
• Laura Flanders
• Karen Armstrong
• Naomi Klein
• Jodie Evans (Code Pink)
• Medea Benjamin (Code Pink)
• Jill Stein
• Naomi Wolf 
• Mari Margil (CELDF)
• Stacey Schmader(CELDF)
  
• Rachel Maddow
• Ariana Huffington
• Arundhati Roy
• Lady GaGa
• Angelina Jolie
• Daryl Hannah
• Joan Biaez

 

This might take the form of a retreat center that would give the top 100 public intellectuals, activists, progressive leaders, etc. lots more face time with each other without a busy, crowded “conference” agenda.

I started by thinking of the comic books “Justice League” and “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” and extending that intuitive or instinctive approach of calling upon heroes to calling upon our present day progressive heroes and thought leaders to join forces.

Of course they already see themselves (wrongly) as being in joined forces but for that to be true and actually work they need to hang out more. Crossing paths at a conference or interview doesn’t really get them in sync.

Probably what we need is a college that can give all these people an office/lab complex and paid seats on an “institute” for saving the world. There might be an attached jetport as well.

There might also be continuous retreat “pools” that people can join and leave at will, or scheduled events over a course of years. The entire project would be not-for-profit and the funding target will allow scholarships to each public event.

There will be three main tiers of funding–institutional, organizational, and individual. The higher tiers get more input in selecting the participants, venues, and schedules. Lower tiers get to nominate “pioneers” and attend the events.

Poor Richard

 

Related:

Deceler8: A peer-driven retreat to declutter & refocus yourself