Then there was a moment, or perhaps a period of my life, when I lost this. I shed the mysticism I had been raised in; I raged at its flaws and threw it out entirely. It bound me too much and I had to get rid of it. I no longer believed that I could will the world into existence. I realized that I had no idea how often streetlights mysteriously went out when I was not standing under them.

I remember a night shivering in my apartment like the newly sober.

Later, I sat across a wooden table in Arambul, Goa, with a slightly younger man. Arambol is an unreal place to begin with, a tropical fool’s paradise where everything is cheap if you’re white, including the ubiquitous hash we’d both been smoking. It was a warm, wavering sort of night in the tourist café on the beach.

The kid was telling me about how you can change the world with your mind. About how we don’t actually know what is and isn’t possible. He said sometimes feels this enormous, crazy power deep within himself, and if he could just tap that…

Look, I said, and I screwed up my face trying to get the phrasing right. He continued rolling a joint. Look— just because you feel something doesn’t mean it’s real, ok? What you feel deep within yourself and what’s actually going on, in reality, are two very different things.

He looked at me sideways for a moment, then exhaled a cloud of smoke. That’s a strong statement, he said.

Yeah, I guess it is. It’s more than a statement, it’s metaphysics. It’s my best take on how the universe is put together. I’m saying that there’s an external universe, and we don’t have direct access to it. In fact, I think our access to it is rather limited. Eyes. Hands. Books full of secondhand experiences. We can’t really know so we make up stories to describe the patterns in the kaleidoscope.

But there’s a catch. The world is not entirely outside of our heads.

Marriage. Capitalism. “Tradition” and a “university.” Or even “culture,” which is nothing but ideas. You can tear the factory down, but until you change their minds, they’ll just build another factory. And of course, there was a time when I believed I could do anything. I believe that again, even though I know now it’s not true. I believe it because it brings my personal mythologies back into the world, and maybe that’s all I’m made of.

I’m happy being a contradiction, because none of us really make sense anyway. I’m an empiricist who can shape the world with his mind, and I will whisper to lovers that I can do anything.

The only trick is understanding what parts of the universe are and are not ideas. Buildings versus norms. Bullets versus treaties. Sexual oppression is just an idea until you get raped, but it’s ideas that need to be changed to prevent this. Meanwhile gravity really does work, and there’s nothing at all about DNA that doesn’t follow from Schrodinger’s equation. The trick, when solving a human problem, is to understand which parts of it are inside our heads, and which parts of it are outside.

I think this is a fundamental confusion of our age. I think those who would meditate on the abundance of the universe might find it more helpful to send out resumes. I think those who would smash the windows of Walmart might first want to ponder why Walmart even exists. I think this is the confusion of postmodernists who see everything as a narrative, who deride science as merely one version of an ever-shifting truth. And I think this is the error of scientists who can’t understand why a citizen votes for the man who tells the best story.

All of us live within a maze of stories about a solid world. Both are real.

In truth, automated systems already rule the world, because there’s simply too much data for humans to do it on their own. Instant online loan applications necessarily employ software which embodies the policies of the lender. In 2002 there were estimated to be 500,000 surveillance cameras on private property in London, and those screens aren’t watched by humans. It is thought that in the next few years machine-to-machine internet traffic (such as automatic inventory control systems placing orders) will exceed all human generated traffic, and nobody crawls the web by hand. This is not even counting the current generation of “botnets“, dumb but virulent programs that attempt to silently steal CPU cycles on as many computers as possible, in order to do things like send spam or take specific machines off the internet via Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Such criminal behavior is worrying, but the situation would be intractably complex even if everyone on the internet was trying to play nice.

If you take a step back and apply the right metaphors, what you get is an ecosystem of self-directed software agents, which Suarez generically and broadly terms “bots”. These software agents are evolving, not because we’re anywhere near the type of self-replicating self-modifying programs that might be subject to bona-fide survival selection pressure — that’s a lot to ask from a little Perl script written by a day-job programmer at a bank — but because there’s often a strong incentive for us to make them just a little more efficient. Every fraction of a percent pattern that Google can tease out of our click-through habits translates into millions of dollars of revenue; thus, the bots are getting smarter, and there are already far too many of them out there for any one person to understand all their possible interactions.

The point isn’t that software runs the world. Post Y2K-bug, that should be obvious. Rather, Suarez wants us to think seriously about all the traditional machine-intelligence doomsday scenarios, because all of them are entirely possible without that cinematic “I’m sorry Dave” moment. It may be the concept of an alien mind that scares us, but Very Bad Things can happen within an enormous system of stupid but autonomous agents, most of them privately run and completely unknown and uninvestigated. “Consciousness” really isn’t the issue. Rather, we need to recognize that the digital environment has already become every bit as complex, fragile, and necessary as the biological and physical environment.

Suarez suggests the creation of a parallel “dark intenet” which is encrypted, authenticated, and humans only. The idea is that all bots allowed onto this network would have to be open-source and properly vetted. I like the idea, but I’m not sure it will work: individual programs can be vetted, but nobody can predict the behavior of the entire interacting system. I do support better security protocols for the internet, but I think humans are doomed to give up control to software on any new network for exactly the same reason we’ve already given it up on the internet: millions of tiny automated efficiencies end up enormously amplifying our power. What began as merely convenient must inevitably end as world-changing.

For what makes Futurology (capitalization mine) really, actually different than a belief that something momentous will happen in 2012, when the Mayan calendar wraps around? Not a lot, as far as I can tell. And now it turns out that two religious scholars have concluded exactly the same thing, in a 2008 paper in the Journal of Contemporary Religion:

Futurology-as-religion has charismatic leaders, authoritative texts, mystique, and a fairly complete vision of salvation. Futurology is, in effect, a new religious movement (NRM).

Let’s break this down a little further. How will we recognize when the “singularity” occurs? Some accounts speak of a period of “unprecedented technological progress” or an exponential growth in computing power, but we’ve been seeing that for 50 years. Or it is described as a point beyond which change is so rapid that prediction is impossible, but prediction more than a few years into the future is impossible anyway, if for no other reason than the butterfly effect. It’s not that I dispute the core argument that technology will continue to alter humanity in nearly unrecognizable ways. In fact, I find many of the future technologies discussed by the Singularists to be quite plausible, including nanotechnology, better AI, and greatly extended human life — there’s lots of serious research going on in all these fields. And I also suspect that we will continue to live through a period of accelerating technological capability, because it is the nature of technology to build upon itself. But why must there necessarily exist some special point? And why must all of these technological transformation necessarily be, well, good?

Even quantitative exponential growth in computing power (or other measurable human capacities) doesn’t imply a singularity. Exponential growth accelerates endlessly, but not infinitely fast; it has no special points or infinite asymptotes.

The only claim that seems at all concrete, the only thing that might give a definite date to the singularity, is the moment when a machine becomes smarter than a human. Such a machine, it is claimed, could improve on itself in a recursive and accelerating fashion, rapidly exploding up to incomprehensible intelligence levels and coming to rule the universe. Surely, this would change history in Godlike ways.

Except that nobody knows what machine intelligence is. Or how we’d recognize one if we met it. The word “intelligence” suggests that one day the computer would wake up and talk to us (presumably, through IM) but this is mere metaphor. (Kurzweil et al. also speak of replacing neurons with hardware or software to produce a synthetic human brain, but that would be a re-implemented human intelligence.) The phrase “machine consciousness” is even less useful, because we can’t even define the word “consciousness” for humans.

Nobody knows what the words use to describe the singularity actually mean.

If no one can specify criteria for noticing when this singularity has actually occurred, I argue that it doesn’t exist even in a theoretical, conceptual sense. In a practical sense it’s therefore no better than Nostradamus, or 2012, or tea leaves. What’s left in the concept is merely belief: belief that somehow, somewhen, something big and important is going to happen. The End of The World (as we know it.) The Ascent to Paradise. Living forever in the consciousness of the machine. Apocalypse. Salvation.

All hail the prophet Kurzweil.

The experiments were done ages ago, and the research is still going, continuing to tease apart actual cause and psychological effect. We know now that what people tell us about their own mental processes is quite thoroughly inaccurate. We all believe that we have this magic thing called “introspection” that lets us see what is going on in our own minds, but in reality we don’t. It’s a fictional superpower.

The research on this point is really quite good. It’s not even a new finding, having been understood for at least the last fifty years. And yet this simple but important fact has never quite managed to make it into popular culture.

Perhaps no one wants to believe it.

For example, the simple act of writing an essay expounding against what you actually believe changes your mind somewhat; if you’re anti-abortion and you have to write an essay arguing for reproductive rights, you’ll be somewhat more pro-choice at the end of it (and vice versa.) It seems that merely making the right mental connections changes your beliefs. This is surprising, but the truly weird part is this: if you ask people if they’ve changed their opinion, they’ll tell you no. Even weirder, if you ask them a week later what their original belief was, they’ll tell you they’ve always been pro-choice. (This paper is the classic study.) The effect is repeatable with those who are convinced by verbal arguments, who, sure enough, will swear to experimenters that they have always held their new position.

And yet we think we know what we’re thinking.

It goes on. Most of us have heard of the halo effect where we unjustifiably infer one positive trait (such as intelligence) from another (such as attractiveness), but how many of us are conscious of doing it — and will admit to that fact? If you give insomniacs a sugar pill and tell them it will increase their heart rate and anxiety, they actually get to sleep earlier, because they falsely attribute their spinning minds to the pill and not to their insomnia. Even such basic perceptions as taste are not immune, as recent experiments show: given identical food, people (Americans anyway) will tell you that the meals labeled “full-fat” are tastier than their “low-fat” counterparts, and give adamant nonsense reasons for their preference.

It gets absurd. If you ask people to choose their favorite scent from four identical-smelling objects, they’ll mostly choose the rightmost one. No one believes this; suggesting that position was a factor produces the most thoroughly alarming looks…

When asked what goes on in our own minds, we mostly make it up. We find plausible explanations, and mistake them for an interior causality that, evidence shows, we can’t actually perceive.

The classic in this field is the 29-page review paper by Nisbett and Wilson, Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes, which combs the previous 50 years of psychological research and discusses many of these examples. The authors write,

When subjects were asked about their cognitive processes, therefore, they did something that may have felt like introspection but which in fact may have been only a simple judgement of the extent to which input was a representative or plausible cause of output. It seems likely, in fact, that the subjects in the present studies, and ordinary people in their daily lives, do not even attempt to interrogate their memories about their cognitive processes when they are asked questions about them.

An important question remains. If we’re mostly telling stories about the workings of our own minds, then why do we believe them? There are many possibilities. Perhaps because we do have access to an enormous amount of introspective state — memories, emotions, sensations, goals — we mistakenly believe that we know about all of our minds, when in reality our conscious access is partial and fragmented. Perhaps we experience snippets of our reasoning processes, the fleeting words and images of deep thought, and mistake these symptoms for deeper causes. But I perfer Nisbett and Wilson’s closing comment:

It is naturally preferable, from the standpoint of prediction and subjective feelings of control, to believe that we have such access. It is frightening to believe that one has no more certain knowledge of the workings of one’s own mind than would an outsider with intimate knowledge of one’s history and the stimuli present at the time.

No one said the truth would be easy.

At the present time there are basically two technologies that can give us some idea of the activity of a working brain: positron-emission topography (PET) and functional magnetic-resonance imaging (fMRI). They both have important limitations in terms of resolution, what they actually measure, and many other things besides, but they’re also pretty amazing technologies. They produce detailed 3D maps of the “activity” of a whole brain, which are often represented like this:

This is a 2D cross section of a living brain, where more “active” regions relative to a baseline scan are represented in red, while less “active” regions are blue. For fMRI, “active” means greater oxygen consumption, which is a measure of… well, neurons doing something. We don’t really know precisely what oxygen consumption means, and this is part of the problem with fMRI. Resolution is also a serious issue. A single fMRI pixel is represents a cube of tissue a few millimeters across, containing perhaps five million neurons, and the maximum imaging rate of one frame every few seconds is far too slow to investigate anything that happens quickly. There is a recent paper in the journal Nature which discusses all of this in painful depth, but one might imaginatively compare an fMRI image to an aerial photograph of a city: you can see some broad patterns, but basically no details. Actually, it’s worse that that: you may be able to make a traffic map, but you have no idea why the people are driving. Even so, it’s an extremely interesting technology, because it allows the first ever 3D “movies” of what parts of the brain might be involved in whatever that brain is doing at the time.

Actually, it’s a little too sexy. In the paper Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning, David P. McCabe and Alan D. Castel describe an experiment performed on 156 undergraduates at Colorado State University (everyone tests their theory first on the undergraduates; psychologically speaking, we now know a truly shocking amount about them.) First they wrote three bogus scientific articles, of the kind you might find in an online news report. These were titled “Meditation Enhances Creative Thought”, “Playing Video Games Benefits Attention”, and “Watching TV is Related to Math Ability”. Each claimed that neural imaging data showed a link between two different activities.

How can this be argued from fMRI results? The general form goes something like this:

1. Put volunteers in an fMRI machine and have them do some activity, like meditating.
2. Scan them and watch what regions of the brain show increased blood flow when they start meditating. Neural anatomy is complex, so there’s almost always a cool-sounding name for the region in question, such as the “right temporal lobe.”
3. Take some other people and put them in the fMRI machine and have them do something else, like solving logic puzzles or composing a sonnet.
4. See which bits of the brain seem to be using more oxygen this time around.
5. If some of the same bits of the brain are involved in both activities, suggest that there is some relationship between them.

The critical bit of reasoning of reasoning is step 5. Sure, meditation and creative thought may both use e.g. the right temporal lobe, but what have we actually learned in terms of cause and effect? We don’t get to decide upon the casual relationships of the universe; they’re already there, and the job of a scientist — or any sort of truth-seeker, really — is to try to figure out what reality has already laid down. (I’m going to ignore the solipsistic school of thought that says we create reality with our minds. I mean, I create reality with my mind too, but somewhere in between I use my hands, and those are physical objects.)

The (better) neuroscientists are aware of this, and in the (better) literature, you will only find statements of the sort “the right temporal lobe is associated with creative activity.” That’s it. Associated. If mediation is also “associated” with the right temporal lobe, does this mean meditation is “associated” with creative activity in the brain? Well, no. That’s like saying that cleaning your windshield and filling a test-tube are similar activities because both involve something made of glass.

And yet, these types of arguments are often convincing, when it comes to the study of the mind. Accordingly, the reasoning in all three of the bogus articles used in McCabe and Castel’s research was in fact wrong. Nonetheless, they asked each of their 156 subjects to read the articles and rate how much they agreed with the statement “the scientific reasoning in the article made sense.” They used a four four-point scale: “strongly disagree”, “disagree”, “agree”, and “strongly agree”, which gives numbers from 1-4.

They found that those who read articles with brain images gave an average rating of 2.90, approximately “agree,” and those who read articles without gave an average rating of 2.73, somewhat less. This was statistically significant to p<0.05, meaning that there was thought to be a 95% chance that this wasn’t simply a random fluke of measurement, like throwing down ten dice and having them all come up six. They also got all their control group and randomization procedures right. In a later article I’ll explain exactly what p values mean and why one has controls and randomizations at all, but for the moment the point is that, unlike the faulty reasoning far too common in discussions of fMRI results, this particular piece of psychology research might actually have teased apart a real casual relationship that exists inside people’s minds: adding an image of a brain scan to an article makes otherwise intelligent people far more likely to accept its fallacious reasoning.

Here’s a graph to convince you:

Why are people so easily mislead? Figuring out what is true turns out to be sort of difficult, of course, but there’s more too this whole question, reasons not simply academic. In a similar piece of research which tested the effect of neuroscience language on perceived credibility, Weisberg and colleagues write

Research on nonneural cognitive psychology does not seem to pique the public’s
interest in the same way [as nueroscience research], even though the two fields are concerned with similar questions.
…

Because articles in both the popular press and scientific journals often focus on how neuroscientific findings can help to explain human behavior, people’s fascination with cognitive neuroscience can be redescribed as people’s fascination with explanations involving a neuropsychological component.

In other words ultimately we all just want that feeling of understanding why. But feelings are not the same thing as reality, and that’s an important lesson about the mind too.

It is a difficult and ancient fact that we as conscious beings don’t live in the real world. There are boundaries to what we know and what we can know. I am right now sitting on a couch in my house in Oakland, California. Across the ocean, there is a woman sitting on the floor of her Tokyo apartment. I have never met her, but she is just as much a part of the world as I am. Not my world though. There seem to be boundaries to the things I perceive. Figuring out those boundaries and how things get into and out of them is the process of figuring out me, and everyone else too.

And inside those limits, what is this phantom world I live in? How did I come to believe the things that I believe, and how do others believe other things? Why do I support reproductive rights, while some are staunchly anti-abortion? How come everyone in Morocco wanted me to believe in Allah? What makes me happy, and what makes other happy? Life is full of choices, and I don’t really know how anyone makes them. Not only is understanding the mind linked with the process of understanding what is real, it might just tell us some useful things about the human race.

In a sweating hotel room in Bamako my friend Matthew once made an extraordinary remark: “I don’t know what human nature is,” he said, “and neither do you.” We were talking about tribal rivalries. I had said it was evolutionary, something deep in our species. He retorted, correctly, that no one really knows. These myths we create about ourselves: they can hold us back. They’re dangerous. Better to figure out the truth, if the truth can be known.

And so we come to something that was traditionally the domain of religion, but then, all things were traditionally the domain of religion, because religion was once the organizing principle of entire societies (societies very much simpler than our modern chaoses.) I don’t buy the supernatural explanations anymore. I find them lazy. Are we really unknowable spirits, or can we just look into brains and behaviour to see if we can see what is actually going on? I may not necessarily be a materialist, but I am definitely a naturalist. I believe in looking.

So what’s left? Who purports to be studying the mind? Basically we have psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive linguistics. Those are the direct approaches, anyway. Sociology models the group, ethnology and anthropology look at human cultures in general, and economics and politics both postulate a psychology, but the three subjects I’ve mentioned are pretty much the main scientific disciplines claiming to say something about internal mental processes. (Computer Science sometimes thinks it has something to say, but I’m with Dijkstra in noting that the question of whether computers can think is much like the equally pressing question of whether submarines can swim.)

Each field starts in a different place, and their models don’t always connect. Psychology divides us into things like attention, cognition, emotion, decision-making, and memory and tries to build models of how these things interact inside of us. Cognitive Linguistics says that the way we use language and the way we think are somehow related. Neuroscience starts from the ground up, a little like understanding a machine by beginning with the study of its gears. All of them are suspect; all of them face different methodological and philosophical issues.

The truth seems to be that no one really knows what the right way is to study the mind. That’s why it’s an interesting problem, and that’s why it’s an area of human study so prone to bullshit. In subsequent articles, I am going to try to describe the basic approach of each of these fields, and what kinds of things can and cannot be learned with each methodology. Along the way, maybe we’ll learn something about what is actually known. We do know some things, it turns out, and some of them are alarmingly cool.