Victoria N. Alexander's Blog, page 4
May 3, 2023
Technosemiotics
May 8 @ 18:00 – 19:30 EEST
The second seminar in the Technosemiotics discussion series will explore the conceptual apparatus offered by biosemiotics and its cybernetics-inspired analytical models.
Relying on a recently published joint paper,* Victoria Alexander, Josh Bacigalupi and Òscar Castro discuss the qualitative or interpretive aspects of biological semiosis. The slime mold as a minimal cognitive organism is compared to the quantitative deep learning algorithms and their generations. The paper in question also proposes a concept of Turing systems as better artificial models for biological processes.
The session will be recorded and published. More info.
* Alexander, V.N., J. Augustus Bacigalupi, and Òscar Castro Garcia. 2021. “Living Systems Are Smarter Bots: Slime Mold Semiosis versus AI Symbol Manipulation.” Biosystems 206 (August): 104430. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.....
May 2, 2023
My new novel, “C0VlD-1984, The Musical”
About a year ago, I announced that I was starting to write a new novel, COVlD-1984 The Musical, a dark comedy about the 2020 lockdown and the 2021 vaccine roll out. As the title suggests, I have tried to rewrite Orwell’s story of totalitarian oppression so that it ends happily. I want to break the spell of Nineteen-Eighty-Four, which starts low and descends even lower, with the hero Winston giving in to Doublethink. Orwell didn’t have any faith in the “proles”. I do. I want to inspire readers to stand up.
My first inspiration to write this story came in 2020 with the Danser Encore protests in the Paris train stations, where people took off their masks, forgot about social distancing rules, and starting singing and dancing. That defiantly joyful display presented a stark contrast to dance videos of the medical professionals that were so popular then, showing those automatons doing their absurd clockwork dances, so symbolic of the mass formation psychosis erupting around the globe.
Although the plot follows the lead of Orwell’s novel, the tone of C0VlD-1984, The Musical is inspired by the gallows humor of Kurt Vonnegut’s, Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death. Readers of E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime will hear echoes of his descriptions of J. P. Morgan and Henry Ford in my descriptions of our modern day equivalents.
This novel is a sequel to my last novel, Locus Amoenus, which retells the story of Hamlet as a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. Ben Jorgensen narrated the audiobook. He was suicided by the lockdowns. C0VlD-1984, The Musical is dedicated to him.
I’m looking for a publisher.
A short synopsis (contains spoilers)
The story opens as Winston arrives at the hospital too late to save his mother, who has been falsely diagnosed with severe CoVid-19, put on remdesivir and intubated. He is beaten and tasered by security guards for not wearing a mask and is passed out on a gurney when his mother dies.
Weeks later, amid the BLM protests in NYC, whose building are plastered over with “Big Pharma is Watching You” posters, Winston goes to work at the Public Library digitizing Percy Shelley’s manuscripts for Octopus, my name for Google. Shelley is known for the line, “Ye are many; they are few” that inspired Gandhi and MLK. Winston works with Syme whose job it is to use AI to reduce all poetic literature to mono-vocal summaries, fixing their meanings once and for all. Winston starts a romance with Julia, a feminist curator and transhumanist literature specialist at the library. Julia is an expert on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and she is tapped by Koenig Schmidt (author of The Great Reboot) to help him co-author his latest book on his transhumanist agenda called Eusocial Capitalism, which is an update of Orwell’s book within the novel, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. Julia is also invited to become a Global Economic Club “Young Leader” and she accepts, planning to sabotage the organization from within.
Winston, Julia and her five-year-old daughter Honoré move to Winston’s farm in upstate NY. Winston joins a socially awkward local group of medical freedom fighters, called the Lawn Chairs, who organize protests at PTA meetings and set up a fake vaccine card service. Winston meets billionaire Fedir O’Brien, who owns a wind energy company called Quixote, as well as the social media company Teleport, and is also developing technology and resources to colonize the moon. O’Brien convinces Winston that he is secretly working against the Global Economic Club. Winston enlists his aid to create an alternative currency system in the rural area of the Harlem Valley, so that they won’t be enslaved by a Central Bank Digital Currency system.
Julia’s ex-husband sues to force Julia to vaccinate Honoré and Winston gets caught breaking the law to get Honoré fake papers. Winston is brought to the site of the infamous eugenics prison/school in Harlem Valley, called The Wassaic School for Feeble-Minded Children, where he is tortured by O’Brien and learns of O’Brien’s horrifying NeuralPlant experiments using foster children. By a twist of fate, when O’Brien tries to prey on Honoré through Teleport, she turns the tables and provides the evidence that the Lawn Chairs need to get the Sheriff to raid the Wassaic School and to save Winston, the other prisoners and the children who are being tortured. Back home Winston learns that Julia has betrayed him.
The final scene takes place, as in Orwell’s novel, in a café where Winston mulls over all that has happened. It is March 2022, the mandates have been lifted, but everyone’s hysteria has merely been displaced from C0VlD to the Russians. But Winston is not depressed by this. He has been inspired by the Canadians who had gathered in Ottawa to make a festive protest for freedom. The story ends with a ragtime funeral parade coming down the street. Winston’s Lawn Chair friends are celebrating the death of our corrupt institutions. They recognize that the Great Reboot has already failed, the people are waking up and are ready to assume the responsibility of ensuring their own health and freedoms.
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December 30, 2022
Corona Investigative Committee
Live from Berlin, Viviane Fischer and our Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg in conversation with V. N. Alexander about Transhumanism.
December 13, 2022
Transhumanists Believe “Humans are Hackable Animals”; Therefore, Democracy is Impossible.
“Liberalism tells us that the voter knows best, that the customer is always right, and that we should think for ourselves and follow our hearts. Unfortunately, ‘free will’ isn’t a scientific reality. It is a myth inherited from Christian theology. Theologians developed the idea of ‘free will’ to explain why God is right to punish sinners for their bad choices and reward saints for their good choices.” – Yuval Noah Harari
Although World Economic Forum (WEF) transhumanists may not have a unified ideology per se, we may look to Yuval Noah Harari, a WEF member who is a prolific writer and voluble frontman, to get a general sense of the assumptions held by that coterie of financial elites who think they can alter the course of human civilization, human evolution, and re-codify human rights. While their grandiose narcissism verges on the cartoonish-ness of the comic book villain seeking world domination, we must, nevertheless, take their words and their plans seriously because their claims to ownership and/or control of monetary systems, communication infrastructure and natural resources do, unfortunately, lend them quite a bit of power over us—at the moment.
Yuval Noah Harari What is the WEF Transhumanist movement? Although their stated objectives are cloaked in tones of benevolent concern, they are more or less open about the fact that they want to trade our self-governed and representative democracies in for AI-managed surveillance systems that will ration resources and keep tabs on individual performances. The proposed tools for this include, Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), Social Impact Investing, and gamified software for education, health monitoring, welfare recipient monitoring, and job skills training. As Harari argues in an essay in The Guardian, liberal democracy and the belief in free will are “dangerous,” because governments and corporations that have access to everyone’s digital histories will soon “know you better than you know yourself” and they will be able to “hack” you, put ideas in your head, get you to buy bad things and vote for bad people. Without supplying a rationale, he adds, “the easiest people to manipulate will be those who believe in free will.” In contrast, the ones who know they can’t think for themselves, Harari further argues, will be saved by their personalized AI babysitters. In Harari’s future world, there will be no God dangling the carrot or brandishing the stick, but there will be an all-seeing AI that does. What “we need,” he goes on, is “an antivirus for the brain. Your AI sidekick will learn by experience that you have a particular weakness…and would block [it] on your behalf.” The obvious alternative solution, fully protecting privacy and making data collection by governments and corporations illegal without full informed consent, seems not to have occurred to Professor Harari.
From the various promotional videos and speeches made by the WEF, we can gather that an Internet of Things and of Bodies is slated to replace the functions of community and social and political structures. In the future, researchers will develop Brain-Machine-Interfaces (BMI) that will monitor, and eventually help cause, our thoughts and actions as well as diagnose and treat any mental health conditions. We will be ushered into Smart Cities (think luxury Borg condos). While the countryside is left to re-wild (for the pleasure of oligarchs on safari), agriculture will move into laboratories, and we will be fed synthetic chicken, wormburgers and LED-grown medicated lettuce in exchange for doing some kind of work that will probably involve operating mining robots or drones using Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. I wish I were exaggerating for comic effect, but these are the kinds of programs being promoted by the WEF and in Klaus Schwab’s book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Despite the Transhumanists’ claim that they strive to augment human abilities with new technologies, the kinds of hacks they’ve offered so far are mostly negative. It’s relatively easy to maim, disable, block, traumatize, propagandize; it will be a little difficult to figure out how to use a BMI to make us smarter or to read our thoughts so we don’t have to type or speak. As Neuralink’s recent “show and tell” revealed, the company’s progress is so far underwhelming. As human trials near, the infection risk associated with implanting a device into a paraplegic’s brain to help him operate a smart phone does not seem justified to me. Why go through all the trouble (and brain surgery!) to detect brain activity of motor control (e.g. moving the eyes), then to use AI to pick out the signal from the noise, and then turn the signal into clicks on a screen, when the person could more easily operate a computer interface with voice commands?
It may be that the architects of the Transhumanist revolution actually believe that AI-augmented and AI-managed society will be a big improvement, more efficient, more objective, equitable and inclusive, free from the biases and prejudices that plague the human species. But it’s worth noting that these kinds of plans have never turned out well in any of our culture’s science fiction explorations. Perhaps none of the WEF members have ever read Mary Shelley or Orwell and have never seen a Black Mirror episode.
An Historical Perspective on the Idea of Free Will
Harari promotes himself as an innovative and modern thinker, working to free us from medieval superstitions.
It’s 2022.
Medieval theology was revised with the de-centering discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo and that theology was adapted to fit Newton’s findings and that was adapted even to Darwinism (in New England Transcendentalism) and that to the Big Bang theory (Fiat lux!), and so forth, on down to the Vatican Observatory exploring the idea of divine quantum cosmology and etc., etc. Theologies are quite capable of adapting to every new scientific conception of determinism and chance that comes along. I am not religious, but I have respect for the many scholars who have grappled valiantly over the millennia with the difficult question of how we do seem to have free will even in a universe that is determined by either fate, God, physics, natural selection, or quantum foam.
Because Harari is still trying to debunk medieval theology, the closest conceptual relative to his notion of free will is found among 18th century Enlightenment philosophes, who critiqued the medieval church and thought that free will is an illusion. I note that Harari rejects the liberalism birthed by the Enlightenment, mainly because he thinks technology has made their approach to safe-guarding individual rights (e.g., elections, free markets) obsolete.
One of the most exemplary figures of that period is mathematician Pierre Laplace, who famously said that (I’m paraphrasing here), if we knew the position and velocity of every atom at the beginning of time, we could predict every event that follows, even human actions, which are just the outcomes of chemical interactions ruled by the laws of physics.
Echoing Denis Diderot’s fictional hero, Jacques the Fatalist, Harari tells us,
“Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc.”
Harari seems to be saying that a human body is like an instrument through which forces pass without being transformed by the organizational structure of the body. Input = output, and nothing is interpreted by the “machinery” that is you. Harari seems to assume that living organisms are like computers and can be manipulated (“hacked”) in predictable ways. Repeatedly in talks, articles and books, he suggests that a person’s cognitive program can be altered—by external forces, information, or chemistry—because there is nothing “inside” the person to counter or alter those forces. There is no ghost in the machine. Instead there is an algorithm in the machine that can be decrypted and reprogrammed.
While Laplace lamented that a human consciousness did not exist that could calculate the mind-boggling number of interactions that would be necessary to predict human actions, today’s Transhumanists are hopeful that super computers—equipped with AI that is fed with mountains of Big Data on every digital move we’ve ever made—are now close to possessing the processing power to predict outcomes precisely. If those with access to such computers can predict what people will do, they can control them. (Cue the maniacal laughter sound effect.)
Maybe not.
In 1961, Edward Lorenz was using a computer to make predictions about the weather, and he found that if he made a tiny “insignificant” change to the input, the output changed drastically, all out of proportion to the small change. To model the weather is to try to model a complex system, whose dynamics are non-linear; your ability to predict such a system’s outcome does not improve in proportion to the amount of data you input. So Bigger and Bigger Data and faster and faster processing isn’t going to improve prediction and control as much as the Transhumanists hope. Biological systems are infinitely more complex than weather systems, so with Lorenz’s discovery of “deterministic chaos,” any hope that one would ever be able to accurately predict and thereby precisely control a human being’s actions had to be abandoned. In 1986, non-linear dynamic systems researchers, Crutchfield, et al. published a watershed article entitled, “Chaos,” in Scientific American, in which they expanded on Lorenz’s findings, arguing that, even if the universe were entirely deterministic (and it most likely is not), complex biological processes are inherently unpredictable—due to the way they internally process information—and thus, ultimately, they are uncontrollable, except in trivial ways.
In the article, Crutchfield et al., like theologians before them, also grapple with the question of free will and how it relates to determinism and chance. They conclude,
“Innate creativity may have an underlying chaotic process that selectively amplifies small fluctuations and molds them into macroscopic coherent mental states that are experienced as thoughts. In some cases the thoughts may be decisions, or what are perceived to be the exercise of will. In this light, chaos provides a mechanism that allows for free will within a world governed by deterministic laws.”
There followed many decades of research investigating free will in the terms of self-organization and complex systems science. As I have noted elsewhere, many neuroscience researchers describe how chaotic attractors and/or emergent traveling waves provide the differentiation in spatial patterns that underlie working memory and attention. Such findings by no means settle the question of free will. Science is never settled. Arguments about the nature of free will will continue as long as humans are around.
Even as I claim that human beings very likely do have some kind of capacity for making their own idiosyncratic choices, I also note that it is painfully obvious that people can be manipulated. In the last couple of years, with horror, we vaccine apostates have witnessed people lose the ability to think for themselves. At a chemical level, what has probably happened to these traumatized people is that the vagus nerve, which was activated in a state of fear, triggered the release of norepinephrine, which flooded the amygdala and locked in memories. Whatever kinds of associative memories are formed in such a situation, for example, the repeated claim that an experimental “vaccination is the only solution” to a virus with a relatively low fatality rate, will be a strong persistent memory, even if irrational. This process of strengthening memories associated with dangerous situations is a very useful tool of our evolved biology that has been hijacked (hacked) by those applying false information under a kind of torture. But the fact that people can be manipulated with something immaterial like false information just shows how people’s thoughts are not wholly determined by material reality. We can be deceived. We can also be physically forced into doing things we don’t want to do; we can be coerced, bribed or drugged. Our mental capacities can be damaged by illness. We can become addicted to our own habits. There are many ways in which our ability to think and act reasonably and for our own good can be compromised. This in no way means that free will has no scientific reality. It just means that we are part of the world we live in and we are affected by it.
Freewill is not about not having any constraints. Free will is more about being responsible for your actions. Being free is not an all or nothing property. It’s a constant negotiation. The term we want is really agency not free will. Not thinking can even be part of how we exercise agency. Most of the time, during our daily activities we’re on autopilot. We can drive our cars without really thinking, even react intelligently in a split second by putting on the breaks when we see red lights ahead. Subconscious auto-thinking can also switch off when we encounter a new situation that we don’t have a mental habit for, which allows us to learn something new. Maybe the tragedy that we are currently suffering through is due to the fact that too many people put themselves on autopilot, outsourcing the responsibility of making decisions for themselves and their children to trusted authorities. Unfortunately, thinking for yourself requires a lot of work. And no one else can do it but you.
Whenever I find myself in a crowd of protesters who are all yelling, “freedom, freedom, freedom!” I yell, “responsibility!” My cry doesn’t work as well as a chant, but IMHO, it does work better as a description of what we probably all want. We don’t want the freedom to do whateverthehell we like, selfishly. We want the personal responsibility that comes with being free to question, research, discuss, decide and act. Likewise, we don’t have the right to do with our children whatever we want; we have the responsibility to protect their health and wellbeing. In a word, the phenomenon of free will is today understood as emergent from biological constraints, relations, and, what I would call, self-made luck.* Harari claims that the concept of free will has only ever been based on the notion of a pre-existing essentialist nature that is “independent of all physical and biological constraints.” Although Professor Harari is an historian, he has apparently only read the CliffsNotes for Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, and even less of complex systems science.
Conclusions
The objective of this essay is not to win a philosophical debate against Harari. In fact, it’s better for us if all the WEF members continue in their simplistic views of, not only human nature, but also of ecosystems and societies. Their ignorance is their Achilles’ Heel. It allows them to believe it is possible to achieve top-down control over a complex system like the planet and all its inhabitants. They are certain to fail. The danger is, of course, that they will take us down with them. Catastrophic change is already underway with regard to our food supply and health systems. We have limited time to position ourselves to save as many people as possible. But we do have a chance.
A complex system like human society, interconnected in so many ways, maintains itself to a great degree automatically by self-organization (and to a lesser degree by conspirators). The role of habit in maintaining the system and suppressing change cannot be overstated. To implement technocratic totalitarian rule, the Fourth Industrial Revolutionists won’t be able to just fine-tune the present system; they will have to take down the system that they have corrupted and abused to get to their positions of power. That will leave them vulnerable. If they want us to become dependent on their lab-grown food rations, they will have to sink shipping, lose food processing plants to suspicious fires, outlaw fossil fuel agriculture and slaughter the herds in factory farms. So many aspects of the economy and society hinge upon the present system that when it is disassembled, it will be a devastating shock. We can expect chaos. The outcome will be impossible for them to control, even with all their economic powers. During that time of chaos, we will have as much of an opportunity as the WEF, if not more because there are so many more of us, to pivot to local food production, regenerative grazing and permaculture farming.
Many of us have already switched to local foods, decentralized education (like homeschool for kids and IPAK-EDU for adults) and have left the industrial-pharmaceutical-medical complex. The people’s revolution has already begun. Don’t look for any leaders to think for us or to tell us what to do.
*I’ve gone on long enough, and you have work to do, so I am cutting short without providing and analysis of the role of “chance” in theories of self-directed action. It’s a big topic. Throughout history, it has been claimed that the existence of chance provides the escape mechanism from determinism. But people, quite rightly, don’t like to think of their “free” will as “randomly generated” will. It’s not. There are many different scientific definitions of “chance,” besides randomness, and the one preferred today among philosophers like myself turns on the notion that living systems have the capacity for internal interpretive behaviors that can only be described in semiotic terms.
October 26, 2022
The Perils of Coding Humans: A Response to Transhumanism
15 week live online course
Mondays at 12PM EST starting Jan 9, 2023
$180
Instructor: Dr. V. N. Alexander
IPAK-EDU
The September 12, 2022 White House Executive Order* pledges R&D funds to the biotech industry to enable it “to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way [emphasis added] in which we write software and program computers.” We may be glad of this implied admission that the biotech industry currently cannot “predictably program biology” nor effectively “write circuitry for cells,” as demonstrated by the failure of the COVlD-19 synthetic mRNA injections. But we may also be concerned that technocrats—who believe that such advances will be possible once they “unlock the power of biological data, including through computing tools and artificial intelligence”—will continue to use us as lab monkeys as they pursue impossible goals.
Some see the issue as a battle between the ideologies of pure mechanism and spiritualism. As long as we see the problem this way, it might remain irreconcilable. In this course, we will use lessons learned from science—complex systems science, the philosophy of creativity, and biosemiotics—to push back against the impoverished reductionism that sees biology in terms of digital computing. We will look at the myriad kinds of physical interactions that can make organisms impossible to precisely control without risking unforeseeable side effects. Medicine is said to be an Art for good reason.
Students will explore the way biological cells use chemical “signals,” genetic “codes,” and “programs” in ways that are significantly different from digital computing processes. Even very simple organisms like slime mold can make creative and adaptive use of error, by, for example, over-generalizing similar signs (as with molecular mimicry) and by associating two signs that are arbitrarily linked in space/time (similar to Pavlovian conditioning). Such learning processes follow a kind of poetic logic and are more complex than the selectionist/connectionist learning approaches of AI. Throughout the course, readings in science will be supplemented by literary works by authors who have insight into creative processes and the complexity of nature.
About the instructor
V. N. Alexander’s honors in art-science work include a Fulbright Scholar grant (ITMO University, StP, Russia), a Rockefeller Foundation Residency (Bellagio, Italy), a public scholar position with the NY Council for the Humanities, a visiting researcher position at the Santa Fe Institute, a Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women Fellowship, an Art & Science Lab Residency (Santa Fe, NM), and the Alfred Kazin award for best dissertation at the Graduate Center, City University NY, which was published in 2011 as The Biologist’s Mistress: Rethinking Self-Organization in Art, Literature and Nature. Alexander is a member of the distinguished group of researchers, the Third Way of Evolution. Her work on novelist Vladimir Nabokov’s contributions to the theory of insect mimicry has been widely recognized, and her award-winning literary fiction novels include, Smoking Hopes (1996), Naked Singularity (2003), and Locus Amœnus (2015). She is currently writing a political satire novel, C0VlD-1984, THE MUSICAL.
* Section 1. Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe, and Secure American Bioeconomy. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-r...
Syllabus (subject to change)
Register (click and scroll down) for 15 online classes starting January 9, 2023
Here’s more info about the course.
Recordings will be available if you miss a class
Week 1 Mechanism and Chance
Week 2 Code Biology
Week 3 What is Biosemiotics?
Week 4 Propaganda and Art
Week 5 Alan Turing on Machine Learning
Week 6 Cybernetics
Week 7 Artificial Evolution
Week 8 Slime Mold versus OpenAI Video Games
Week 9 Reaction-Diffusion and Self-Organized Patterns
Week 10 Saltational versus Gradual Evolution
Week 11 Conspiracy or Self-Organization?
Week 12 Various Origins of Novelty
Week 13 Genetic Determinism
Week 14 Novelty and Emergence
Week 15 Review
