Effects of human behavior on life of our planet

[From David Sussman, posted by Ira with his permission and based on his 12 November 2010 presentation to the Philosophy Club, The Villages, Fl, Click here to Download the Powerpoint presentation.]


The structure of the analysis contains essentially three components:

(1) The human condition,

(2) behavioral consequences deleterious to the future of life on Earth, and

(3) a view of the future.

The human condition derives essentially from our evolutionary history, all of us products of an unbroken string of survivors stretching back to the first glimmers of life from self-replicating molecules 3.5 billion years ago. As humans are one of countless species, extant and extinct, created by natural processes, there is no reason to believe that we, or any other, are endowed with freedom of choice. This is regarded as an illusion stemming from other features of the strategy honed for us by nature, e.g. consciousness and speech. Our strategy is enshrouded in myth, explained by Reg Morrison (Spirit in the Gene) as a necessity predicated on the need for emotional response to immediate threat rather than logical analysis. Another dimension of our ‘condition’, and linked inevitably to the others, is our propensity to expand our numbers much beyond what our rational faculties would inform us is sustainable and compatible with an extended tenure for us and other life forms on Earth.

Behavioral consequences - Of the wide array of possibilities that arise from our condition, essentially coalesced into our particular operational strategy, I have selected a few salient behavioral characteristics that I believe bear most strongly on prospects for the future of life:

• our failure to nurture so as to maintain natural identity and physical and mental health of every child on Earth, or to inculcate an appreciation of the tenets of democracy;
• stressing rights rather than responsibilities in social organization, leading to excesses as best described by Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”;
• sex exploitation in its many manifestations – for the purposes of dominance, manipulation and economic advantage;
• the unholy alliance of religion and politics, each employing similar strategies for securing operatives’ aggrandizement;
• the divorce of science from philosophy, leaving its practitioners devoid of a framework that could more productively guide the nature and applications of their inquiries;
• our propensity to take confrontation beyond the brink to violence and mayhem;
• the practice of concentrating capital and other forces leading to inordinate disparity in the distribution of wealth and other life amenities.

What of the future? Is humanity at an evolutionary dead end? Certainly survival in civilized society is different from what would be dictated by nature “red in tooth and claw”. And although evolution proceeds at a snails pace, culture sweeps through like a zephyr. The absence of choice leaves it up to nature, the overseer of both evolution and culture, as well as conditions that we will confront in the future. Are we capable of predicting the future? Inherent uncertainty in physical processes that underlie all that we think and do, precludes prognostication. Societies, as any other complex system, are either fundamentally too complex for our “poor power” or subject to both subatomic (with macroscopic manifestations) and chaotic uncertainty.

David Sussman

NOTE: See earlier discussion related to David Sussman's presentation in a topic posted by Joel last week.

Great NOVA Video - CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA

You've probably run into squiggly words like the "terrapin" in the figure. It is a kind of reverse "Turing Test" that allows a computer to distinguish a real human from a computer pretending to be a human.

We are great at reading characters that have been distorted to the point they baffle computers. When you sign up for a new email account they make you interpret those characters to be sure you are not a computer program signing up for multiple accounts to be used for sending spam. The technique is called "CAPTCHA" and was invented by Luis von Ahn, see this great NOVA Video about his ingenious work.

Ahn, then a grad student at Carnegie-Mellon and now a professor there, solved another tough problem using a variation of CAPTCHA. Google and others are scanning old books and digitizing the text. The problem is words in old books with obsolete typefaces may be misaligned or smudged or otherwise distorted to the point they can't be reliably read by computers. That is where what Ahn calls "reCAPTCHA" comes in!

The word "legume" in the above figure is from some old book and can't be reliably read by the computer. So, as part of the CAPTCHA process of signing up for an email account, reCAPTCHA presents two words. One is the distorted CAPTCHA word that the computer knows and the other is a word copied from some old book. If the human can correctly interpret the distorted word, they figure he or she can interpret the word from the old book correctly as well. Since millions of people sign up for various computer accounts every day, Ahn has put us all to work helping computers digitize the text of old books!

Ira Glickstein

PS: Thanks to my son-in-law David for putting my wife Vi and me on to this NOVA video!

PPS: In the video, a talking computer is asked: "What is a perfect date?" The answer is "June 23, 1912". I know why. Do you?

Super Ethics

[From John] Ira previously wrote the following, “All animals, including we humans, are wired with an emotional system that has been "designed" (by evolution and natural selection) to serve as an ombudsman for the long term survival and reproduction of the society we have been socialized in. Absent a properly socialized emotional system, we would focus on our own short-term and short-sighted interests and our society would fail.”

I accept Ira proposition as far as he takes it. The problem as I see it is that his expression, “for the long term survival and reproduction of the society we have been socialized in” does not provide for the long term survival of humankind as a whole, rather it provides for the midterm survival of the strong, who, ultimately are overthrown and fade into history. There seems to be no inherent evolutionary (natural selection) process that assures the long-term survival of mankind as a whole. History bears this out, dynasties have continually risen and fallen since cities and nations were formed. Towns, cities and nations were sacked, men were enslaved if not killed outright, man warred against man. Today is no improvement, in the last century we have had the two most destructive wars in history. It also included the largest mass genocides in history – the Holocaust Stalin’s purges and the murders of the Pol Pot. Today we are confronted with terrorism and the constant wars in Africa. Nuclear war threatens us. There seems to be no end.

With the rise of the world economy man may find in his own individual selfish interest the need for stability throughout the world; this may lead to a form of super-ethics applicable to all mankind. Mini steps have been made with the Geneva Convention and the United Nations but they are very weak. While there is a general consensus amongst the developed nations that such super-ethical standards are necessary, national interests often over ride this consensus.
We have a long way to go.