The Middle Ages; A Revision

Alternatively to the Middle Ages, we know this period as the Dark Ages and even more to the point of the modern ethos, the Age of Faith. A great age of Faith it was, as advertised, but not dark like the Twentieth century. Peasants and their associations, the village council and guilds, replaced slaves. The Byzantine ethos, Greek and Roman culture conserved under Christian administration, became the common culture. Feudalism was itself arguably Byzantine and like Byzantium, not quite civilized.
There were books, a Byzantine invention, and libraries, private and monastic but above all there was trade. Bismarck's famous observation that war was diplomacy by other means easily extends to trade being war by other means and business was discouraged as injurious to Christian values as there is little room for those values in war.
The grand triumph of economics as the centerpiece of the modern ethos comes obviously at the expense of an extraordinary Byzantine exercise in civilizing barbarians. As the United States, singularly well suited to it, has repeatedly had the role of modernist Byzantium thrust upon it, it is interesting that that description, while encompassing a thousand years of the history of civilization, won't quite fly. It describes the role but omits the philosophical differences.
Just some thoughts marking a personal intellectual journey. I am become revisionist.
Do Well and Be Well.

Information, Ideation, Productivity, and Civilization

Civilization is no more than the attempt to remove humankind from the dismal swamp of Nature and its pathological vagaries in order to induce a common condition of sane cognition. Access to information drives civilization. Ideation drives and is driven by information. Productivity increases are driven by ideation and productivity drives material existence, the limit of the possible of civilization. They are all linked.
The quest of the intellectual exercise which is the central element of civilization is perfect information. Game performance and market performance, a related phenomenon, both improve with better information. Assuming perfect information makes Game Theory analysis possible and that describes the motivation for the evolution of civilization, iterative attempts to achieve perfect information in order to improve performance.
This has resulted in digitization of information. Today, we have digital platforms, Google, Amazon, providing access to digital libraries of databases and paradigms in the attempt to create an easily accessed Library of Civilization, all extant written works. In addition to this Database, there are online attempts to make paradigms accessible, MOOC's, a sort of University of Civilization. The net result of this is to realize the limits of the plasticity of the human brain and that is a driving factor in developing artificial intelligence analysis.
Central to the central element of civilization, the intellectual exercise, is ideation, the creation of ideas. There are three aspects to ideation: intellect, the talent of integrating new information into a coherent body of knowledge; intellectual curiosity, an appetite for information, a hunger for the next fact, the next insight; and access to information, as covered above. These aspects describe the process by which ideas are generated, the ideas which define our possibilities.
Productivity, which is the measure of the efficiency of Labor, describes the process, in Western Civilization, under the tenets of Classical Liberal economics, by which ideas are reified into product and process to the end of the greatest good for the greatest number by which we mean Utility.
By simple logic, the greater the productivity of Labor, the greater the Utility of that economy, to which end we have engaged in a vast program of Research and Development and entrepreneurship. We are are now in a position to judge the consequences of such an exercise. They are:
1. The marginalization of Labor as a production input.
2. As Labor becomes more and more inconsequential to the cost of production, markets, which primarily set the price of Labor in Classical Liberal economics, move into focus as bazaars of arbitrage, a significantly different role.
3. Money, which value is tied to the cost of Labor in Classical Liberal economics, becomes of indeterminate value in such conditions and must seek definition elsewhere.
As this exercise in productivity proceeds we are approaching the point of self-reproducing automata, the mathematical model of which was developed by John von Neumann, which undercuts the assumptions of Classical Liberal economics by making the productivity of Labor approach infinity.
I do not know what economic analysis will replace Classical Liberal economics but I suspect it will include AI as an essential element.
Do Well and Be Well.

Brain Pain: Definition, Mechanisms, and Address

What is this phenomenon that I am calling 'brain pain'? It is the patterns of aberrant behavior which indicate some sort of neurological deficit. That is to say, dislocations, decay, and destruction of neural structures from various causes including but not limited to, acquisition and integration of new information, pathological conditions, substance abuse, and environmental factors as they are exhibited in generally considered aberrant behavior but not felt as actual pain.
Substance abuse and nerve toxins are generally conceded to destroy neural tissue, actual trauma which is largely painless, brain pain. Acquisition and integration of new information causes the dislocation of synapses and dendrites, unfelt trauma, brain pain. It is important to note that the dislocation of neural structure due to acquiring and integrating new information, information overload, is as traumatic as a brain injury in its behavioral effects.
Any superficial neural trauma, not destroying the actual neuron, can be dealt with by creating new neural structure by thinking and hypothesizing. The process of integrating new information should be carried through to a logical end, to the degree possible, to diminish brain pain. Similarly, any microtrauma due to nerve antagonists can be dealt with by reading, thinking, and hypothesizing.
The point of the exercise is to characterize specific behavior patterns as the result of brain pain in order to personally better understand ourselves.
Do Well and Be Well.

Personality and the Coherent Volition Regimen: A Summary

This blog ends my eight year experiment in writing a blog and promoting it on social media. Although I have at times managed a significant readership, the social media companies don't particularly like what I'm doing. Apparently it doesn't translate into the kind of data that can be monetized.
A niche does exist today for a serious site dedicated to discovery with an interactive interface. It would, however, run counter to the massive data harvesting that characterizes social media. It would not be well understood.
Now to the summary of the previous four blogs. First, humans, animals, and smart machines all possess a coherent volition regimen (CVR), a consistent idiosyncratic manner of perception, cognition, volition, and action with feedback describing reliable patterns of cultivated behavior. This cultivated behavior, together with a priori elements, we call personality, that which makes a human a person. Dogs and robots do not, by definition, have a personality. They cannot be a person. They do have a CVR.
Essential to human social existence is the concept, the role, of moral agent, the ability to estimate and codify a successful value system and behave to it. This is beyond the capabilities of dogs and, at this point, artificial intelligence. Humans as persons are moral agents. They are alone in creation in that.
Structurally, the whole of human social existence revolves around humans as legal persons. While groups of persons, a corporation, may be treated as a legal person, no animal, no algorithm can be so considered. No robot, however capable, can be anything but a mechanical working animal, kept or owned and very likely licensed.
What dogs, humans, and smart machines are, as a common classification, are players. They game as a metaphor for social existence. They can all play games to a set of rules. They are players.
While the thought developed and expressed in these five blogs and the previous two on volition is not particularly rigorous, it has been a difficult logical puzzle to solve in a reasonable fashion. I think that I have done that and derived a common reference that differentiates among humans, animals, and robots adequately. It may prove to be valuable.
Do Well and Be Well

Personality, Player, and the Coherent Volition Regimen

'Game' occurs significantly in human descriptions and even analysis of human affairs. As described earlier in this blog series, 'game' appears to be a Kantian a priori, an unknowable thing in itself. It is here, in gameplay, that anthropomorphic errors happen frequently with respect to animals and even machines. Clever beasts can play simple games to a set of rules. Smart machines can play complex games to a set of rules. Mistakes are easy.
The focus of these mistakes is the nature of 'player', a participant in a game who, or which, is proficient in gameplay, an adept. Given the a priori nature of 'game' and the significant use of the game metaphor in human society, it is very easy to mistake player for person. Persons are human beings. Players have a capable coherent volition regimen but are not necessarily persons.
Dogs are players. Observe a clever dog playing frisbee. They are proficient at simple game play. I once kept a clever Labrador which I taught to play a rudimentary game of football (Labradors' jaws are so hinged that they can grip a football) The dog became a proficient player, an adept at the game, and even attempted to teach the game to other dogs. That is a player. That is not a person.
Smart machines are players. Observe the amazing success they have achieved in board games against expert human opponents. They are players. They are not persons.
However much animals and machines are players, however skilled their coherent volition regimen, they are not persons. They cannot estimate and codify the rules of the rules of 'game'. Therefore they cannot possibly be moral or legal persons or any person at all. They are limited to the society of dogs, a dog pack, or the society of smart machines, a scaled-out network. Human society is reserved for persons who may, in fact, keep machines and animals, both of which having roughly the same moral and legal status.
Next blog: Personality and the Coherent Volition Regimen; A Summary
Do Well and Be Well

Personality, Legal Person, and the Coherent Volition Regimen

Legal Person:
An individual or group that is allowed by law to take legal action, as plaintiff or defendant. It may include natural persons as well as fictitious persons (such as corporations)

So, the derivation is personality defining person and person being eligible to be a legal person, subject to a body of law, expected to behave to those laws, and participatory in the process of the law. The body of law itself is rooted theoretically in a social contract, a negotiated quid pro quo of what I can do and can't do and what you can and can't do. The social contract, a baseline reference for rational social behavior, is only a useful fiction. The law is a living thing having many contributing factors including the possible.
Artificial intelligence, having a functional coherent volition regimen (CVR), and the machines it drives have no personality and therefore cannot be any person and definitely not a legal person. Like a dog, which also has a CVR but not a personality, it is subject to the regulation of law, especially in terms of liability, but not participatory in that process. It must be in the 'keeping' of a legal person, or owned as commonly construed, in order to rationalize liability and dangerous behavior and bring smart machines into social and legal accountability, very much as the law treats working animals.
It becomes essential on the force of this argument that we, as persons, agree on the logic that machines, as much as is economically possible, adapt to humans and not vice versa in order to empower humane social existence. We need to negotiate, as a social contract, the role of owner as that of empowered keeper, a steward of a specified domain, usually an object or enterprise, but including smart machines and real property.
On that basis, smart  machines must then, logically and legally, be in the keeping of a legal person, licensed to such a bonded person, in order to effect the redress of liabilities for wrongful action. They may be subject to licensing fees for redress of the social cost of their employment, which is to say, just as a runaway horse's keeper is liable for consequent damage, so a robot's keeper is liable for consequent socioeconomic damage. A smart machine is not a simple drill press. It is closer to a mechanical draft horse.
Next blog: Personality, Player, and the Coherent Volition Regimen
Do Well and Be Well

Personality, Moral Agency, and the Coherent Volition Regimen

I am here involved in the search for differences and equivalents in human, animal, and machine psychology, to use the word loosely, in an effort to adequately place smart machines in a large context socioeconomic system. Being oriented in one's context is an essential starting point for the building of a sane mind and we cannot be sane in our employment of such machines until we can adequately place them in our context.
The topic of the first blog was personality as a special case of coherent volition regimen (CVR). Today's subject is moral agency as essentially human. What is moral agency? It is the deployment of personality into the world as directed by a codified value system, rational and irrational. A value system is the rules of the rules of a game of existence, material and social existence. However, not even humans can abstract the rules of the rules of a game from experience. According to Ludwig Wittgenstein, the logician, we can only estimate them. It appears that 'game', the rules of the rules, is a Kantian a priori.
Animals notoriously play games. They can figure out the rules of  some games. They apparently have 'game' a priori also. However, they cannot estimate the rules of the rules of a game, much less approximately codify them into a somewhat rational value system. That is what makes moral agency an essentially human role.
Artificial intelligence can also figure out the rules of a game. It can, to certain and increasing extent, explain itself. We will have to wait and see whether it can codify the rules of the rules without an a priori construct. I am betting that it can't. I am betting on human exceptionalism. However, with estimates of 1000 IQ for neural networks currently in development, the odds are close to even.
Moral agency, like language, like the opposable thumb, like the large complex brain, like the penchant for technology, is an important component of the argument for human exceptionalism. Dogs have a CVR but they cannot codify a value system. An AI robot has a CVR but it probably cannot codify a value system. We are very likely alone in that.
Next blog: Personality, Legal Persons, and the Coherent Volition Regimen
Do Well and Be Well