Misery is a Virtue

“Give strong drink unto him that is ready to perish, and wine unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him drink, and forget his poverty, and remember his misery no more.”

Proverbs 31:6-7

    There’s this popular pseudo-Eastern philopsychical notion that the Way to Happiness is to lower your standards. In the East, this is called Letting Go Of Attachment/Desire or some such, and typically involves living naked in a cave and eating nettles and birdshit. In the West, we say “Be content with what you have”, or some such trite homily, and the idea is to shut up and tolerate whatever abuse and exploitation are imposed on you by bitch Fortune, your neighbors, or the government. You don’t get to live in a cave, though – that wouldn’t get any taxes paid.

    Think you should work hard to make a better life? Forget it, you’ll never be happy, don’t be so shallow. Rather get rich by inventing or creating something than stay poor slaving for someone else? Well, it’s okay to chase your dreams, provided your happiness isn’t riding on the outcome. Tired of struggling just to survive while working sixty hours a week and paying half your income in taxes, while sleazeball lawyers “work” six hours a week and pay lower taxes than you on their $400,000 a year incomes? Shut the fuck up and be content with what you have. Dying of cancer because you couldn’t afford routine screening, while some seventy year old whore gets her face lifted for the third time in a futile attempt to get her husband to quit staring at twenty year olds? Don’t worry, be happy.

    If watching the poor get poorer while the rich get more arrogant, seeing corporations steal with impunity and dodge taxes, watching judges scoff at the law while murderers are set free and honest citizens face draconian fines for the pettiest of infractions, being deprived of any meaningful political choice while one corrupt regime after another squanders the resources of the present and future – if these things should make you a little uneasy, there’s something wrong with you. You’re not unhappy because you’re getting the shaft and the world is going to hell, you’re unhappy because there’s a chemical “imbalance” in your brain. If your head was on straight, you’d be happy regardless of how badly you’re treated, and if not, you need to be drugged until you accept your lot in life.

    Way back when, Aldous Huxley anticipated much of modern culture. In his (then) futuristic novel “Brave New World”, he predicted a society where the populace is kept relaxed and docile by the ubiquitous ingestion of a drug called soma. Instead of just one such drug, we have a hatful of them – paxil, zoloft, valium, xanax, librium, prozac, welbutrin, elavil, ambien, the list goes on and on… if one doesn’t work, there’s always another one to try. We even have herbal tranquilizers for those who don’t want to pay for patent medicine, Ritalin for nonconforming children, marijuana for nonconformist adults, and much worse things for those who like a bit of adventure along with their escape.

    Our government is pleased to have as many citizens sedated and tranquilized as possible; they even spend our money to encourage any of us who might still be unhappy to get ourselves medicated, and to persuade us that Depression Is An Illness and it’s abnormal to be unhappy. Do the politicians really care if we’re unhappy? If they did, maybe they would stop screwing us over.

    The real function of antidespressants is to keep resentment under control. It’s okay for the public to be annoyed at the currently dominant political party, but if too many people feel miserable and hopeless under the two-party plutocracy, they might get out of hand and actually demand real change. That would never do.

    People who are not unhappy don’t go to protests or organize third parties. They don’t riot or arm themselves in militias and they don’t resist force with force. Would popular pressure have forced FDR to reform the labor laws if the unemployed had been sitting in their shacks being mellow instead of going to Socialist rallies and marching on Washington? Maybe not. Would the Vietnam War have been cut short without urban riots and unruly demonstrations? Not likely. Would the American colonists have revolted against George III if they’d had Prozac in the medicine cabinet to keep them calm? Hell no.

    Not that there’s any conspiracy. I have nothing against plausible conspiracy theories – there’s nothing in life more predictable than that people conspire – but any conspiracy that requires a large number of people with dubious integrity to keep a secret for a long time is bullshit. Actually it’s very unlikely that anyone in the drug companies or in the various government agencies that encourage drug use has ever given a moment’s thought to the sociopolitical implications of “treating” discontent with sedatives – they’re just trying to maximize profits and justify budgets, respectively. The system works because we, as a culture, have given up on the idea of taking responsibility for solving problems – both in our personal lives and in society in general.

    Most people just don’t see anything suspicious or inappropriate about using drugs to deal with unhappiness. They might wish that their personal circumstances would improve, but they see the task as too overwhelming, too risky, or just plain hopeless. This might very well be true; in a country with declining standards of living for most inhabitants and rapidly multiplying government restrictions, it can be quite difficult to get anywhere. Legal political action is worthless, the two-party plutocracy having long since become utterly nonresponsive to public needs. The only realistic recourse for the American people, as a whole, is armed revolt, but that’s a course of action for the angry and the desperate; it’s not a course of action for the drugged and placid. One must be unhappy to be inspired to struggle for change, and doubly unhappy to purposefully put one’s life in danger for it.

    Revolution, and all other kinds of progress, are driven by unhappiness. People who are satisfied with the status quo aren’t going to bust their nuts or go out on a limb to achieve anything better. Every invention, every business enterprise, every accumulation of capital, every reform in government and religion, every major human accomplishment, has been the work of people who weren’t happy with the labor they had to do, the amount of wealth they had, or the way they were being treated – and did something about it, instead of taking drugs to make them feel better.

    For the past three thousand years or so, the dominant religions of the Orient have advocated giving up the desire for improvement, as the best way to achieve happiness. This is not dissimilar to what tranquilizers do – give up the discontentment, the struggle for more, and accept whatever you’re stuck with. It is, in truth, a better way to be happy. It’s easier, quicker, more reliable, and more lasting. To actually change one’s circumstances is generally hard, patient work, and uncertain at best; moreover, most people do indeed find that when (if) they have gotten what they thought they wanted, they are not satisfied with it for long. One of the few people I’ve ever met who seemed genuinely happy was a homeless vagrant, who wandered the world free of all obligations. But that attitude doesn’t favor progress.

    While Easterners have (perhaps) lived and died in greater contentment, it’s restless, displeased Westerners that have built modern civilization – nearly all the innovations, in both technology and society, for the past two millennia have been Western. It was men unhappy with what they had, men driven to seek for more, who explored the globe, settled and cultivated the New World, harnessed the power of coal and steam, broke the ancient bonds of despotism and slavery, and, with all of our wars and exploitations and other missteps, created a world of miracles and abundance, where food, water, literacy, and even electric power can be taken for granted and premature death is the exception, not the rule.

    If we’re not happy with it, we should at least be thankful to all the generations of malcontents before us, who gave us our world, that we don’t have to live in theirs.

-Abgrund-

The Oldest Profession

Let all mankind this certain maxim hold
Marry who will, our sex is to be sold.
With empty hands no tassels you can lure,
But fulsome love for gain we can endure;
For gold we love the impotent and old,
And heave, and pant, and kiss, and cling, for gold.

-Alexander Pope, Paraphrases from Chaucer

    You may not like it, but you can’t deny it: all women sell sex to get what they want. Well, except for the ones that avoid sex altogether, and the one in a thousand nymphos that can’t stand to go without it any longer than a man can. Women trade sex for a variety of things: cash, trinkets, security, love, prestige, affirmation, entertainment, or attention – but sex itself is rarely enough. A man, given a chance, will not hesitate to fuck a good looking stranger of his preferred sex, but a woman thinks, “Who is this person?” – i.e., “What’s in it for me?”

    Women almost always deny that they are “materialistic”, because they’ve been taught that they shouldn’t be. But you’ll never see a pretty girl walking hand in hand with a homeless guy or going on a date in a crappy old car; you’ll never meet a woman who is comfortable with her boyfriend being unemployed – even if she doesn’t need his income at the moment.

    Women often claim to be attracted to intelligence; it ain’t so. Women are attracted to earning potential. Most seem to have some mental block about this; for example, a female friend of mine once insisted that money didn’t matter to her, and started babbling this nonsense about intelligence. “You’re smart,” she said, “I bet you could really make something of yourself.” When I pointed out that “making something of yourself” meant material success, she got angry – but of course she couldn’t explain it away. Women like intelligent men exactly to the extent that they see that intelligence as a source of money and prestige.

    A key attribute of the typical feminine ideal of the “perfect” man is having wealth or power (preferably both). Not that all women fantasize solely about millionaires; not all women are interested primarily in getting money for sex. There are plenty of other things to get. But every woman has a minimum standard of prosperity a man must possess before she will consider him – she may be willing to sleep with a working class man, and will cite this as proof of her disinterest in money, but of course she wouldn’t sleep with some bum who didn’t even have a job. And given a choice between a rich man and a poor man, few women will resist the temptation to go with the loot, no matter what they might do when the poor man is the only thing on the menu. This works even when the woman has a good income and no need for a man to support her – the attraction is instinctive.

    Like all purveyors of goods, women are jealous of any competition. The highest price, generally, that can be got for sex is marriage. Plain cash money is actually the lowest price – as one would expect from competition in an open market. Women who trade sex for intangible rewards like attention or love also drive down the market price. This is why women despise “sluts” – it’s the resentment of a unionized worker for a scab. And don’t let female babble about “love” fool you – to them, love is isn’t real unless it’s accompanied by a long term financial commitment.

    You might, at this point, be thinking that I’m a misogynist – especially if you’ve never had a girlfriend. If you’re a feminist, hopefully you’ve had an apoplectic fit and died, thereby making the world a better place.

    Surprisingly, I like women, and not just for fucking. I don’t happen to think there’s anything wrong with trying to get something in exchange for sex. It’s the way human beings are made – we’re governed by biology, like any other animal. Men naturally want sex and women naturally want security, and there’s nothing wrong with either, anymore than it’s wrong for a wolf to be born with an appetite for meat. All of us have inherent qualities that can be annoying to other people; some of these are predominately male, some are predominately female, but none are exclusively male or female and many of the worst are prevalent among both.

    If women are “shallow” because they want men with tall statures and deep pockets, men are surely shallow for wanting women who are young and pretty. But I’m not suggesting that the sexes are equally unprincipled; rather, the principles we’ve been taught to give lip service to – like the notion of valuing “personality” foremost in a romantic/sexual partnership – are bullshit. Anyone who tells you you should love someone “for who he/she is” (whatever the hell that means) is a fool. A person is a composite of many attributes, some of which are physical and circumstantial and very important to real-world love relationships.

    It’s natural for people to want things, and we shouldn’t expect otherwise or judge people for not giving away their bodies or their commitments without asking for anything in return. We do not, after all, despise people who insist on being paid wages for labor, or who take a job for double pay when it is offered. Loyalty is a virtue, but every virtue has its limits. Sexual relationships are ultimately driven by biology; that’s how the whole “men marrying women” thing came about. No one would blame you if you declined to start a sexual relationship with a grotesquely obese person; why would you be obliged to continue in a sexual relationship if your partner gained two hundred pounds? For love? I love my mother but I don’t sleep with her.

    The only way a romantic relationship is going to work, long term, is if both partners are getting a reasonable return for what they give. “Love” and commitment are not enough (you might stay together, if you’re masochistic enough, but you won’t like it). The man who won’t keep a job and the woman who “lets herself go” have both failed their duties and cheated their partners. When any relationship ceases to have value for both participants, we should expect it to end – conversely, if you want it to last, you should make the necessary effort to be a worthwhile partner at the most fundamental level, and keep love alive at the very root. That root is physical and material needs.

    You may think I have a cynical view of human nature and relationships, and you might be right, but there are benefits from our selfish sexual behavior. If men weren’t driven by sex, or if women were inclined to give it freely, no human civilization would ever have progressed past the stage of hunting monkeys with pointed sticks and running from lions. Men are indolent by nature; we prefer lounging in the shade or playing games to building huts, plowing fields, or working in factories. Given the opportunity to have all the sex they want while doing only the minimum of work to keep themselves fed, few men would feel the need to do more than pick berries and occasionally slaughter small animals. Men don’t stockpile goods, work overtime, or buy on credit because they like to work or even because they like to own a lot of stuff. Men only care about that sort of thing to impress women, they only work hard because women want them to, and they only care about impressing women because they want to get laid.

    Prostitution is, as they say, the oldest profession; and of necessity; whether one calls it by name or by some euphemism such “love” or “marriage”, it is the motive behind all men’s labors. The whole history of human society is the history of what men have done for sex. How ironic that we should look on the most important transaction to our species, the driving force of our entire culture, as degrading and antisocial.

-Abgrund-

Education is Class Warfare

“The exclusive privileges of corporations, statutes of apprenticeship, and all those laws which restrain, in particular employments, the competition to a smaller number than might otherwise go into them… are a sort of enlarged monopolies, and may frequently, for ages together, and in whole classes of employments, keep up the market price of particular commodities above the natural price…”

-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.”

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

    Everyone knows that education is the key to success, right? You have to have a good education to get a decent job to make enough money to pay for the education and hang on to your own little slice of The Middle Class so you can go to the doctor when you are sick and live indoors when you are too old to work and pay some shyster to bribe a judge to give your jackass kids community service when they get caught driving drunk with a carful of weed. It’s the American Dream.

    So it’s your responsibility if you’re poor, because you didn’t get an education. Shame on you, everyone has opportunity and it’s up to you to grab it. All you have to do is have parents with an income in the top quartile who can pay for it, or be a star athlete or a certified genius with an obsession for writing essays and kissing ass. These are, after all, necessary prerequisites without which you could never be qualified to listen to some sick fool whining for five minutes and then write him a prescription for amoxicillin, to shout down a class of unruly sixth graders, or interview drug addicts at the welfare office. You don’t deserve to have a decent job because you didn’t try hard enough – you could have worked two full time jobs at once, one to keep you alive and one to pay for your tuition, while going to school full time and still making passing grades. Dozens of people do it every year, some of them without using meth.

    If you think this system sucks, you’re not alone. If you think the answer is for the government to pour more and more money into education, you’re still not alone. You’re also a fool.

    Here is what happens when government puts more money into education: the price goes up. The number of people who get degrees remains about the same, because there is still the same number of schools, the same classrooms, the same teachers. When more money comes from the Federal government, state governments make up the difference by reducing their own contribution; i.e., they raise tuition. Every time Federal aid goes up, tuition increases by the same amount. Of course, the Federal money is mostly loans, so the students not only pay more for college, they have ten years worth of debt just for a bachelor’s. If by some bizarre chance the state fails to cut education funding, the extra will invariably be devoured by administration salaries, idiot projects like having classes on a Caribbean cruise (I’m not making that up), new sports facilities, or “rennovations” that suddenly become necessary.

    The last damn thing they will ever do is to actually educate more students – to build more classrooms, hire more teachers, start new schools. When a university gets too crowded, they are about a hundred times more likely to raise fees than they are to expand. And why is this?

    Because “education” isn’t about creating skilled workers who can do the things that are in demand. Well, maybe about 20% of it is. The other 80% is about making sure there aren’t enough skilled workers to meet the demand. Universities are a social institution to maintain class differentiation.

    If everyone who had the talent and desire to be a doctor was able to afford the ten years of training, would doctors be making a quarter million dollars a year? (Hint: NO.) The cost of health care (in this country at least) is rising at a rate that would embarrass many unstable third world dictatorships whose exchange rates have to be given in scientific notation, but it damn sure isn’t because of the quality. It’s because doctors can charge whatever they please. How do they get away with charging hundreds of dollars for a five minute “visit” during which they check your insurance status and then recommend some five thousand dollar screening test for whatever is the least likely cause of your symptoms?

    Education, my friend. Price is controlled by supply and demand; if you can limit the supply, you can control the price. The decade of training has far more to do with limiting the quantity of doctors than ensuring the quality. If everyone who was able and willing to be a physician could be, physicians would no longer be an elite, super-wealthy class. There would be enough doctors to go around, and people could pick and choose the best or the cheapest instead of being assigned one by a crooked HMO that pays the doctor extra if he keeps you from getting any treatment.

    If you’ve ever looked at the requirements for admission to a medical school, you already know that a large part of that education is pure bogus. A typical requirement, for instance (I’m not making this up, either), is to already have three years of college classes. Which classes? Doesn’t even matter! Half of them aren’t specified at all, and most of the rest are “this or that” alternatives: meaning that neither alternative is actually necessary (if they were, they’d both be required). Of the remaining handful, almost none have any relevance to the practice of medicine. Chemistry? What the hell for? How often does your doctor synthesize a new medicine for you? Does he really need to know how to calculate how many joules of heat will be released in your stomach if you swallow 37.5 grams of crystal soda lye? He’s not even going to do your lab tests.

    Here’s the funny part: Even though they have to study chemistry that they will never use, doctors are not required to have any formal training in pharmacology. They get this information – probably the most-used of anything they know – from reference books, periodicals, and adverstisements by drug companies. Instead of three expensive years of mainly irrelevant learning, wouldn’t it make more sense to have pre-med students spend just one year studying, oh, I don’t know – physiology, sickness and treatment?

    But shorter training (or more schools) would mean more doctors, and that wouldn’t serve the real function of medical “education”, which is to maintain the position of a wealthy and exclusive class.

    Lest anyone think I’m only talking about doctors, I should point out that all professions use the same method of exclusion. Lawyers have at least as much wasted quasi-training as doctors, and they make (i.e., extort) even more money while the net gain to society of having them is decidedly negative (doctors at least do some good on the whole, and we’ll need them to implement my plan of turning all lawyers into organ donors).

    Nearly every job with decent pay or any security requires a college degree. Often it doesn’t even matter what the degree is! If you have a “college education”, you’re eligible for many lower middle class jobs, such as management, that don’t actually require any skills beyond high school level. Why do employers insist that you have a college degree?

    Class solidarity is why. If you’ve bought your college degree, they know that you have an investment in their class. You’re a Responsible Person and can be trusted to share their values, act predictably, and uphold the system. There might be a hundred working class drones with high school diplomas who are better able to do the job, but such an inferior person, with different tastes, different values, and different manners, would never be trusted, might offend his respectable coworkers, would probably suck at golf, might steal the toilet paper. America has a diverse middle class, but one thing they nearly all have in common is a college education and the sense of superiority that comes with it. It’s this country’s foremost class distinction.

    Engineering is another profession where “education” is in large part a matter of buying entry to a privileged class. Engineers, with only five years of quasi-training, make a lot less money than doctors or lawyers, but the principle is the same. A glance at the curriculum for a certain college shows that a third of the classes are at best totally unnecessary, and often sublimely absurd (like art and philosophy courses for math geeks who will spend their careers figuring out ways to minimize the cost of making dishwashers and running power plants). Another third are important only to certain sub-disciplines, and a good part of the rest are of dubious value (Differential Equations, for instance; at one time a necessity, but these days computers do all that.)

    Yet in spite of all this padding, there is virtually no training in the tools that engineers will actually use on the job – specifically, software. After five years, many of the basic skills have yet to be acquired! Getting a degree is not so much a matter of learning to be an engineer as it is of preparing to learn on the job and of purchasing the right to do so.

    Some people will try to tell you that all this superfluous “education” has to do with making the student a more “rounded” or “broader” person. Well, that’s a load of horseshit. No one really cares if an engineer can quote Shakespeare; they want buildings that don’t fall down when the wind blows. Does it matter to you whether your doctor spends her leisure time reading Heidegger as opposed to bowling? How many hundreds of thousands of dollars are you willing to part with to know that she’s a “rounded” person?

    Anyway, real personal depth does not come from slogging through pointless mandatory classes – that just makes the victim hate the subject. Depth comes from actually spending time living life. Skill in a profession also comes mostly from real world experience, not the classroom. Irrelevant education is not only a waste of money and a barrier to entry, it delays the beginning of actual practical experience. Seriously, if you had your pick, would you want the surgeon who, after twelve years of learning about everything from Russian history to neurology, is about to perform his first real heart surgery on you – or would you prefer one who had three years of training practicing different procedures on cadavers and nine years of experience doing them on live patients?

    A lot of what we call “education” is not only giving us fewer and more expensive professionals, it’s actually making them less competent.

    Every society has its way of maintaining economic class barriers; in the Middle Ages, prosperity (for a commoner) could only come from buying one’s way into a trade guild and enduring an apprenticeship of many years in order to earn the right and (supposedly) acquire the arcane skill needed to tan hides or hammer horseshoes. Then, as now, it was a crock of shit.

    So what should be done about it? Well, obviously, nothing will be done. The majority who would benefit from a change have no political power, and the privileged few who benefit most from the status quo certainly do. But we should at least realize what is going on. “Putting more money into education” is one of the top slogans of every backstabber in Washington, because few people object to it and those that do are only concerned with the immediate cost.

    Yet everyone who cares about education should oppose increased aid to students – in fact they should oppose any increase in funding that does not go directly into increasing the capacity to educate students. That means more teachers and more schools, NOT more money spent on the same facilities we have now. Giving more money to students is the worst thing you can do for them (and I say this as a college student): it only drives up the prices, resulting in them graduating with more debt and raising the class barrier ever higher.

    If we, as a society, were actually capable of reform (we’re not), or interested in remaining an economic superpower (we’re not), we’d not only make education available to more people, we’d make education actually fit its ostensible goal. We’d radically revise the current requirements for entry into the various professions, and replace this twelfth century crap, where “education” means learning a little bit of everything, with specialized training in useful skills and quicker introduction to practical experience. The world needs doctors more than dilettantes.

    Students should be able to choose for themselves whether they want to learn about (for instance) literature or geography before attempting to design an electrical circuit. Sick people should be able to decide whether they need to pay five times as much to receive care from a doctor who has a deep grasp of the relation between Picasso and Existentialism.

    And the professions should be open to all those with talent, not just those who can buy their way past artificial roadblocks.

-Abgrund-

The Future of Creation

“Opportunity makes a thief.”

-Francis Bacon, Letter to the Earl of Sussex

    No one snivels more loudly or less convincingly than a three year old child deprived of a toy or a record exec unable to squeeze every last drop of profit from someone else’s talent. No one sympathizes with a lazy tycoon who wants to put a teenager in prison for downloading a song, and the rantings of the RIAA and other aggrieved exploiters of creativity serves only to undermine public sympathy for the very existence of copyright laws.

    Not that the laws themselves are wrong. When anyone puts his or her own precious time, energy, and skill into creating something, it is rightfully his or her own property. It is no less real, no less an investment of human effort, and no less worthy of ownership than a steer – moreso, because the latter is directly a product of grass, land, and bovine ancestors that came originally to human hands ready-made for the taking. That a thing is easy to steal does not mean it is not property, anymore than I forfeit ownership of my furnishings by leaving my door unlocked. Nor does the argument that the creator is not diminished by the theft have any weight; the person who has made the exertion to create something, or purchased it by voluntary exchange, has the right to deny any other person the use of his labor. One might as well say that rape should not be a crime, if the victim be uninjured.

    And what of the argument that copyright exists only to encourage the production of creative work, and that such work actually requires no encouragement? Beside the fact that property remains property even in the absence of laws to protect it, that claim is certainly fatuous. To make bad music, write bad poetry, publish unfounded speculations, make a crude video of one’s living room or paint a canvas with random colors is easy and common enough, and indeed the world is deluged in such items, made at no profit and even for a loss. What is not so common is worthwhile instances of creation; to attain mastery of an art, and to put that mastery to full use, is no trifling thing. Rarely do people take the trouble to produce powerful music, good poetry, reliable texts, quality films, or artistic images with no thought of reward for their effort. Nor do they release them to the public in the hope that others will take them, distort them, present them falsely, expand on them in any direction they please, or even claim authorship. Any “artist” who submits a work to the public domain admits implicitly that such work is inferior, and unworthy of reward, or else has abandoned all hope of being rewarded.

    Instructively, those persons who are opposed to the idea of intellectual property are invariably those who have never created any worthwhile intellectual property and have no prospect of ever doing so. What they propose is parasitism, by the lazy and the inept, of the few who possess the talent and industry necessary to create the things they want but would rather not pay for. They have duped themselves into believing that good artists, writers, and inventors will work just as hard absent any prospect of profiting thereby, just as inferior artists, writers, and inventors are always willing to work for mere fleeting attention. They think that confiscating all intellectual property would enrich the public – but the reality is that free art and free information are generally worth what you pay for them.

    The difficulty with copyright laws is not – in spite of the excesses sometimes committed (like the inevitable periodic extension of copyrights on material by the long-dead Disney) – moral, it is practical. The extant laws simply cannot be enforced. In a perfect world, those who create would own their creations absolutely, whether those are tangible or not. But in the real world, it is no longer possible to have much control over information products. Technology has made reproduction perfect and virtually free, and methods of copy prevention range depend on artificial constraints that are not only intrusive, but defeatable.

    The root of the problem, perhaps, is that most people don’t see anything wrong with taking intellectual property for their own use. The author thereof is not thought diminished thereby, and certainly not if the taker is not reselling it and would not have otherwise purchased it. When people see no harm in breaking a law and are accustomed to seeing it broken, they will not refrain from breaking it, will not report others breaking it, and will not support the draconian punishments or intensive hunting for violators that would alone furnish a deterrent. (The loss of credibility of government in general also contributes to the disrespect of law, but that’s another issue.) The result is massive disobedience, impossible to suppress, just as hundreds of millions of people speed every day in spite of the huge amount of resources devoted to fighting it. People won’t stop copying things for each other unless they’re convinced it’s wrong, which seems improbable.

    On the other hand, those who condone or even practice “piracy” often consider the selling of copies, and perhaps the stealing of material by those who could easily afford it, to be wrong. Most of us sympathize more with the homeless man who shoplifts than the lawyer who pilfers from the offering plate, or with the jobless teen downloading music as opposed to a businessman using stolen software. Moreover, it’s much more difficult to sell pirate copies without being caught, since non-cash transactions can be traced and also because people tend to resent such profiteers and are more likely to turn them in. Compared to the volume of illegal copying, very little reselling of it occurs.

    The current marketing method of most copyrighted material creates a feedback cycle that keeps piracy at a maximum. When some consumers of a product fail to pay for it, the cost is passed to the others – those who create the product must be compensated somehow. As the price becomes more burdensome, more and more consumers will choose to steal the product instead of buying it, and the price goes higher still. Some software vendors are now in the position of dealing more or less exclusively with businesses; no one else can afford their product. But if the cost were spread among all those who would like to use it, it would be too cheap to bother stealing. If twenty million copies were sold at just a dollar each, the revenue would be adequate for many programs – programs that otherwise might be free but more likely won’t get written at all. The problem is collecting the money without putting the buyer through too much trouble or spending too much on processing.

    Likewise, how many people would be too miserly to shell out fifteen cents for a song? Probably most people would donate that much even if they could legally get the song free. Yet that’s more than most musicians get from royalties. Again, the only obstacle is processing the transactions.

    Of course, the record labels wouldn’t like that – where music is concerned, they are strictly middlemen, and they would be eliminated. But it isn’t music per se that they are selling in the first place.

    When Americans (at least) pay for entertainment, they are not just buying the content, they are buying something even less tangible – participation and image. In our society, music and movies are an important way of being accepted into a larger group (whether society at large or some small clique of fans) and are also a tool by which people build their self-images. Listening to music and watching movies is an induction to the common culture and earns a place therein – tastes and experiences that are (somewhat) individualized, but fit into a framework that we have in common. Thus we can discuss among ourselves which entertainments we like and which actors or musicians we admire, and each of us can have different opinions, but we (mostly) share the conviction that such things are important personal identifiers and worthy of discussion.

    The business of Hollywood and the record companies and the television studios is not so much producing content is it as producing cultural referents. The conventional view is that the millions spent on “promotion” and the images so expensively cultivated serve to facilitate the sale of the content – the reverse is true. The content, music and movies and shows, is rather an inducement to buy the real product, which IS the promotion and the image – the cultural and personal referents.

    The cost of actually producing music (at least) is not very great; advances in technology may do the same for movies in the future. The talent required to produce good music is not common, but is hardly so scarce as to create a dearth of supply. Copyright laws or not, the cost of music sold for its own merits could be expected to fall toward the cost of its production, which is not very great. The issue, for the RIAA and its ilk, is the image and social valuation of music. This is what they are really selling, and it not so cheaply created. Their problem is that their existing means of charging for this service is to bundle it with music, a commodity which is now so cheap that many people prefer to acquire it separately (for free) – and they get the image along with it, at the same price.

    If groups like the RIAA are to continue successfully milking the public appetite for referent images, they’ll have to quit bundling image with recorded music, and find some other way to induce people to pay for cultural participation. If they don’t, the funds for “promotion” (their real product) will eventually dry up, “rock stars” will be a thing of the past, and some other industry will step into the gap and market some other kind of image. If they want to get into the music business, “record” companies could sell their marketing services to artists, or even to consumers (for instance, providing personalized music recommendations to subscribers). This wouldn’t support any billionaire record execs, but they themselves are the only ones who see that as a problem.

    For the actual producers of content, there are several potential solutions to the problem of copytheft. One has already been mentioned – basically volume selling. The cost of a billion copies being essentially the same as one copy, the object is to sell the product so cheaply that no one would bother stealing. If the cost of transaction processing can be reduced to a few pennies, this might be a very effective way of marketing low cost, easily copied content like songs, magazines, images, or small programs – much like iTunes, but without the high prices and spyware.

    For established artists, or those who are good at self-promotion, one marketing option (which as far as I know hasn’t been tried yet) would be to sell works to a buying audience collectively. Potential buyers would tender a minimum sum to an escrow account, and when (if) the total balance reached the selling price, all would receive a copy, and perhaps resale rights as well, or rights to publish derivative works, depending on how much the buyer paid. If the sale expired without meeting the price, the money would be returned. There would be fewer and larger transactions than with the above scenario, ameliorating the burden of transaction costs.

    Another possibility, something like the GNU Public License, would be to sell certain rights along with the product itself. An artist might, for instance, sell the original work to distributors with the right to not only sell copies but to resell that right (perhaps to smaller distributors). Individuals who bought the work would get the right to make copies, and perhaps even to sell copies. In this kind of system, the artist would get the money up front, based on speculation, instead of after the fact based on end consumption. This system wouldn’t finance any millionaire rock stars, because no one would pay too much up front for a property that would rapidly depreciate as pirate copies inevitably began to circulate. It might, however, allow content producers to make a living. For a little while after a new release, the only owners of copies would have paid dearly for them, and would presumably be more reluctant to give the property away – and they might be more vulnerable to detection if they did, since there would be a limited number of sources to investigate for any leak. Such a method of distribution might work for things like movies and tv shows, or inventions, that are harder to copy than music or software and can be profited from without giving every customer the ability to produce more.

    Finally, there is the possibility of giving content away as a means of marketing something else, thus making the content valuable at least to the marketers. Software vendors often do this, giving away an inferior version of a program as an advertisement for the real one (which includes customer service that can’t be copied). It also works for radio and broadcast television, and seemingly now for some internet services. It does require that copyright laws exist and be enforced; luckily, it’s hard to use stolen material for advertising without being detected. Unfortunately, this system depends on the existence of some suitable (non-stealable) product or service that can be sold, and the profitability of the creative content itself depends on the value of the secondary product, not the demand for the content itself.

    One might wish that intellectual property could be guarded as an absolute monopoly, but the reality is that it cannot, and some new way of profiting from creative effort must evolve. Clinging to the models of the past will, as ever, be fruitless: the days of vinyl are gone and the days of paper are numbered. It will be interesting to see what new models are tried and how they work out. It would be nice if certain business concerns would place less emphasis on futile rearguard struggles and start preparing for the future.

-Abgrund-

AIDS Heresy

“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”

-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

    For more than twenty years, Americans have been taught that HIV is the cause of AIDS, that AIDS is invariably fatal, that HIV and AIDS are sexually transmitted, and that there is a tremendous pandemic of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. A multi-billion dollar industry and a global civic movement have been based on these beliefs – yet they remain unproven, even dubious. Considerable evidence indicates that AIDS actually represents different disease processes, at least some of which are not necessarily fatal, that HIV is not the sole cause of AIDS, that neither HIV nor AIDS is sexually transmitted in any significant degree, and that the phenomenon called “AIDS” in Africa may have little to do either with HIV or immune deficiency.

    One of the problems with the HIV theory (which asserts that HIV is the only cause of AIDS) has always been that there is no known mechanism by which the virus can cause immune deficiency. After several years of fruitless searching for this mechanism, the U.S. government “solved” the problem by announcing that the mechanism had been “discovered”. What had been “discovered”, however, was merely what had been known all along – the ordinary means by which any virus kills cells (runaway virus production crowds out the cell’s normal processes). HIV does kill T-cells (white blood cells which are critical to the body’s immune response) in this way; however (as was also known all along), it simply does not kill enough of them to make a difference. The virus has great difficulty even entering T-cells, and is found in only a small fraction of them, even in advanced AIDS patients. HIV can be cultured in vitro in cultures of human T-cells without ever harming them!

    While the official “truth” is still being taught to the public, the search for an actual mechanism goes on. Several theories have been proposed, for instance that HIV somehow triggers a migration of T-cells from the blood to the lymph glands, or that it interferes with T-cell reproduction, among others. None of these mechanisms has so far been demonstrated, despite decades of research.

    It has been standard practice for more than a hundred years in medical research to insist that before a pathogen may be definitely assumed to be the cause of a disease, it must satisfy Koch’s postulates. These are the four postulates:

• The putative disease organism must be found in all persons (or animals) with the disease, but not in healthy persons.
• It should be possible to isolate and culture the organism from any diseased person.
• Injecting this culture into a disease-free person should produce the disease.
• The disease organism should be re-isolated from this person.

    HIV has not satisfied these postulates; around 5% of AIDS cases do not involve HIV (an annoying fact which the Center for Disease Control evaded in 1989 by simply renaming them), while around 15% of HIV infected persons, while receiving no treatment against the virus, never get AIDS (a fact which the CDC dealt with in 1993 by re-defining AIDS to include healthy persons). HIV cannot be cultured in isolation because, like any virus, it needs a host cell to reproduce. The injection test cannot be performed on humans; no one is likely to volunteer for it. (Normally animals are used, but viruses are often harmful only to a narrow range of host species). A very few persons have been accidentally injected by needlesticks, but of course none of these were from a pure virus culture – dirty needles could be contaminated with almost anything. HIV has been shown to be harmful to some primates, but does not cause AIDS in them – and it is harmless to some other primates.
    Obviously, it is not very reasonable to expect HIV to satisfy Koch’s postulates, which were invented before the discovery of viruses and are not really applicable to viral disease. The postulates also do not allow for long latency periods, which are known to occur in diseases other than AIDS. Another issue is that AIDS, which is properly defined as a syndrome, has no distinctive set of symptoms, so that its diagnosis is somewhat arbitrary – it is almost inevitable that some people will fit the symptoms of AIDS without having HIV.
    Skeptics of the HIV theory have often pointed out that HIV does not satisfy Koch’s postulates. Government officials could easily counter this by showing that it is irrelevant, and citing other evidence that HIV causes AIDS, but instead they have chosen merely to announce frequently, forcefully – and falsely – that HIV has satisfied Koch’s postulates. One reason for their doing so may be that the evidence linking HIV to AIDS is not entirely convincing.

    Most of the evidence that HIV causes AIDS revolves around correlations or chronological associations between HIV infection and AIDS symptoms. Correlation, however, does not prove causation; skeptics have argued that HIV infection and AIDS are both attributable to other factors, especially the abuse of intravenous or inhaled recreational drugs. Also, part of the correlation undoubtedly arises from the fact that HIV-negative persons are less likely to be monitored for rare diseases or tested for T-cell levels, while HIV-positive persons are usually affected by toxic anti-retroviral therapy and subject to high levels of stress. Chronological observations are also suspect, for similar reasons. The fact that some people eventually got a rare opportunistic disease, many years after being infected with HIV, does not prove that HIV was the cause.
    There is, on the other hand, ample clinical evidence indicating that HIV can be harmful to the immune system in at least some people (especially children). AIDS skeptics (including one of the discoverers of HIV, Peter Duesberg) generally claim that HIV is a harmless “passenger” virus – a belief that is untenable in the face of the evidence. “Harmful” is not, however, the same thing as “lethal”. There has never been any good reason to regard HIV infection, in itself, as being necessarily fatal.

    So how did it come to be so regarded? The answer is that HIV was prematurely identified with AIDS, a poorly understood syndrome that was never adequately researched. In the early years of AIDS, it was associated exclusively with homosexuals, and later with intravenous drug abusers and hemophiliacs. The homosexual victims were almost entirely highly promiscuous individuals who were frequently exposed to sexually transmitted diseases; many of them made excessive use of antibiotics as a form of prophylaxis – and antibiotics tend to suppress the body’s immune system. Nearly all of these men were also regular users of “poppers”, amyl or butyl nitrite used as an inhalant by some male homosexuals. Nitrites are highly toxic and damage the immune system. The drugs and diseases characteristic of intravenous drug abusers – such as heroin and hepatitis – are also immunosuppressive. Hemophiliacs are exposed to a multitude of diseases from the blood supply, which was at the time very poorly monitored, and tend to have weak immune systems as a consequence of their illness. It is no great surprise that some members of these risk groups experienced deterioration and failure of the immune system – especially those infected with yet another immunity-degrading virus, HIV. But for political reasons – because the first risk group identified was homosexuals – “lifestyle” factors were not considered; blaming the syndrome on promiscuity and drug abuse was considered homophobic, and the assumption was made from the beginning that a single infectious agent was responsible.
    In these early groups of AIDS patients, death was surely a great likelihood – the victims were very unhealthy and vulnerable to begin with. Those few who recovered were later reclassified as not having AIDS – how could they have it, when AIDS was “known” to be incurable? No one knows for sure how many of these patients actually had HIV; the virus was unknown at the time. Possibly most of them had HIV, but definitely not all. In the first two studies of HIV – on the basis of which the government announced that the cause of AIDS had been discovered – fewer than half of the AIDS patients involved tested positive for HIV exposure!

    A few years after the discovery of HIV, drugs began to be introduced for its “treatment”. These were substances that could kill retroviruses, but were so toxic that they would never have been authorized if not for the general public hysteria and the assumption that all of the AIDS patients would soon die anyway. The first of these drugs to be approved, AZT (which had been rejected years before as a chemotherapy agent because of its terrible side effects), was entirely capable of killing a healthy person who took it regularly for years. AIDS patients, unhealthy to begin with, did just that. Many of them were so adversely affected that they were unable to continue the drug, but some (about one in three) showed a temporary remission of symptoms – possibly due to the fact that the drug killed off various concurrent infections from which the patients were suffering, as well as temporarily suppressing HIV activity. In any case, the benefits were only short term, and all of the patients died. While some people have lived with HIV for decades, no one has ever survived high-dose AZT therapy for more than five years.
    Based on the short-term remission effect and the belief that anyone who developed AIDS was doomed, the manufacturer of AIDS sought and received permission to sell AZT as a prophylactic against AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of otherwise healthy HIV-positive persons were induced to take 1200 milligrams of AZT every day, hoping that this would delay the “inevitable” onset of AIDS. It did not, and the death rate from “AIDS” soared. Most of these people were still in one of the original risk categories, and many of them probably had other serious infections as well (such as hepatitis C), but they did not have AIDS, and in the absence of AZT treatment it is possible that some of them would have survived and had normal life spans. There has never been any proof that HIV alone, in the absence other health problems, is lethal.
    Part of the politics of AIDS was the insistence that there would be a heterosexually spread epidemic. This never occurred, but huge numbers of people outside the risk groups were tested, and a few were found to be infected. These unfortunates, though otherwise healthy, took AZT and subsequently died.

    In 1993, the standard dosage of AZT was reduced from 1200 to 600 milligrams. The death rate from AIDS soon tapered off; when AZT was partly replaced by the less harmful protease inhibitors, the death rate plummeted. The fact that modern “AIDS” patients have a much better prognosis than those of twenty or more years ago has been touted as proof that HIV causes AIDS and that the anti-retroviral drugs are effective against AIDS, but this ignores a crucial circumstance: the AIDS patients of the early years had little resemblance to those of today. The former were already desperately ill when diagnosed; nearly all were chronic drug abusers, and most if not all suffered from other complicating factors, such as repeated hepatitis and syphilis infections, malnutrition, and overuse of antibiotics. Modern patients, by contrast, are more likely to have contracted HIV from an isolated instance of drug injection, and to be reasonably healthy when they are diagnosed. Medical treatment in general, including that of specific AIDS diseases such as Pneumocystic Carinii Pneumonia, has also advanced. It is hardly surprising that modern patients live longer.

    Outside of sub-Saharan Africa, there have thus been two principal groups of AIDS victims: those who suffered critical immune failure due to various (often multiple) factors, and those who suffered long-term health degradation primarily due to treatment with toxic drugs, but HIV has likely been a contributing factor for most members of both groups. “AIDS” in Africa is a wholly different phenomenon, which may have little to do with HIV or immune failure.

    Non-African AIDS is very different from African AIDS in several ways. The relationship between HIV and AIDS in Africa is unknown, because virtually none of the victims have ever been tested for HIV exposure. Estimates of the prevalence of HIV infection in Africa are largely speculative; testing is inadequate and random samples of the population are impossible. Demographic data are poor; many sub-Saharan countries do not even keep records of births and deaths. The situation is further complicated by the fact that foreign assistance often depends on the perceived AIDS threat; governments have a powerful incentive to exaggerate the number of AIDS cases and deaths that they report. The diagnostic criteria used in Africa are quite different from those used elsewhere; instead of testing for HIV exposure and low T-cell counts, only the presence of chronic symptoms is considered, and these are different symptoms from those associated with AIDS in the rest of the world. In Africa, a chronic cough combined with diarrhea is diagnosed as AIDS – even though tuberculosis and dysentery are quite common throughout most of the sub-Saharan region. In America, the same patient would undergo medical testing and might be treated and cured without AIDS ever having been suspected. In Africa, the patient is doomed.

    It is interesting to note that when an African is found (usually by some Western-sponsored test) to be HIV-positive, he or she typically sickens and dies within a year. In America, a person newly diagnosed with HIV can expect an average of about ten years before experiencing any symptoms – with or without treatment. In the West, such exotic diseases as Pneumocystic Carinii Pneumonia, toxoplasmosis, or disseminated Mycobacterium Avium Complex are considered characteristic of AIDS; in Africa, common diseases such as tuberculosis and dysentery are AIDS indicators. Nearly all African AIDS victims experience rapid weight loss, but this symptom occurs in a minority of Western patients. The lack of drug treatment in Africa cannot explain these differences – Westerners typically experience a long incubation period with or without treatment, and the drugs are more likely to cause weight loss than to prevent it.

    The most significant difference between African and non-African AIDS is, however, its distribution; AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa is distributed equally between men and women and does not appear to have a strong preference for drug users. This is a plausible distribution for a sexually transmitted or otherwise contagious disease, but AIDS outside Africa does not fit this distribution at all. The distribution of HIV outside Africa is totally inconsistent with a sexual mode of transmission – after decades of warnings of an impending heterosexual pandemic, HIV outside Africa remains confined mostly to homosexuals and intravenous drug injectors, with male victims outnumbering females by three or four to one (and far more in many countries). This is not due to more use of condoms in the West, or less promiscuity; other sexually transmitted diseases, such as herpes and chlamydia, were (and still are) spreading rapidly at the same time that new HIV infections were declining. These sexually transmitted diseases, unlike HIV, affect males and females in equal proportion.
    In fact, there is very little reason to believe that HIV can be transmitted by normal sex, although it may be slightly transmissible by rough anal sex. While official statistics claim that many people are heterosexually infected, these claims are dubious in the extreme. They are based only on what the patients themselves report; actual investigation of even the most cursory nature is virtually unknown. Patients generally avoid admitting to behavior that might be disapproved or illegal, preferring to admit to some more acceptable cause. It is instructive that the proportion of reportedly homosexually transmitted HIV is very small among countries where homosexuals are strongly despised, while the proportion of transmission by intravenous drug use drops to zero in countries where such is severely punished. In some countries, all of the reported adult AIDS cases in 1997 were listed as “heterosexual” in origin – yet they are virtually all male! In addition, the wives of hemophiliacs (most hemophiliacs contracted HIV during the Eighties) have no higher rate of HIV infection than the general population, even though many of their husbands were infected before they were even known to be at risk. It is reasonable to believe that all or most of the alleged cases of heterosexually transmitted HIV were actually transmitted by other means.

    The “success” of programs directed against sexual transmission in controlling the spread of HIV has been cited as evidence that sexual transmission occurs, but these “successes” do not bear close examination. Senegal, for instance, is often touted as such a case; yet the rates of HIV prevalence in Senegal have always been comparable to those of its neighbors, both before and after the start of the control program. The same is true of Thailand, another oft-cited case. In Uganda, a very sharp decline did occur – but it began two years before the initiation of the condom-promoting program “So Strong So Smooth”. South Africa’s President Mbeki was much vilified for refusing to take the official AIDS theory at face value, and was blamed for South Africa’s high rate of HIV infection – yet that rate has never differed much from that of South Africa’s neighbors.

    African AIDS appears to be a different disease from non-African AIDS; it is spread by different means, has a different course and symptoms, and may be unrelated to HIV. Some have excused the differences as being due to a different strain of the virus (HIV2), but most of sub-Saharan Africa, including the most severely affected areas, harbor the same virus strain (HIV1) as the rest of the world. It is more likely that HIV is being erroneously blamed for the consequences of widespread malnutrition, malaria, tuberculosis, syphilis, and other problems. The swift demise of Africans who are diagnosed with AIDS may be attributed to psychosomatic and social causes: already ill, they are often vigorously ostracized, even by their own families, and the expectation of certain death is stressful and can have a dramatic effect on health, as illustrated by the efficacy of voodoo magic against those who believe in it. African “AIDS” victims are also sometimes denied medical care, on the assumption that others can better benefit from it.

    It may be that HIV is a complicating disease factor that has been there along, undetected. HIV is at least ten times as common among persons of Bantu as non-Bantu ancestry, both globally and in the United States; except for Southeast Asia, the global distribution of HIV follows the distribution of Bantu peoples surprisingly closely. Retroviruses generally can only be transmitted by blood-to-blood contact; lacking such modern innovations as hypodermics and organ transplants, they can only be transmitted from mother to child. If HIV is less deadly than heretofore believed, it may have existed in Bantu populations for many generations, and the supposed recent increase in its prevalence in Africa may reflect better testing, different statistical methods, competition among African countries for foreign assistance, or even false-positive test results caused by some other disease that is spreading through Africa (tuberculosis, flu, herpes, hepatitis, and malaria are among the illnesses that can sometimes cause false positive tests for HIV exposure).
    Official theories for why HIV spreads so much more quickly and indiscriminately in Africa than elsewhere revolve around the poverty and generally poor health of Africans, which is supposed to make infection easier, but non-African countries of equal poverty have experienced no HIV epidemic even remotely comparable. Whatever is happening in Africa that we call “AIDS” cannot be explained by the conventional HIV theory.

    Many alternatives have been suggested to the HIV theory of AIDS; one of the best-known theories blames “poppers” (nitrite inhalants), but this is only plausible for the earliest group of AIDS patients. A second theory, generally coexisting with the first, is that AZT itself is sufficient to cause AIDS. This theory is also weak, however; studies have failed to reveal any substantial difference in long-term survival, either better or worse, associated with AZT treatment for those already ill. Patients who have stopped taking the drug have on average fared no better than those who continued. Drug abuse in general, especially of injective drugs, is a likely cause of AIDS, but cannot explain all cases. Other possible causes include multiple chronic infections, tertiary syphilis (which may be undetectable in some patients), hepatitis C, or some other infectious agent. Yet the most likely explanation is that there is no single explanation; AIDS is a syndrome, and has manifested quite differently in different times, places, and persons. HIV does not appear to be the sole cause of AIDS, though it may well be the principal factor in most present cases of non-African AIDS.

    Investigation of alternative etiologies of AIDS might prove more fruitful than continued concentration on HIV exclusively. This is especially true for Africa, where “AIDS” is poorly defined, poorly understood, and may have little connection to HIV. Prevention programs have focused on safe sex, which is a complete waste of money – not only is HIV not sexually transmitted, these programs have not impacted the spread of genuine sexually transmitted diseases. By far the best way to prevent the spread of HIV (and certain other diseases such as Hepatitis C) is to provide clean needles to drug abusers, but this has been difficult for political reasons.
    Unfortunately, major change in existing policies seems unlikely. The principal medical agency of the U.S. government, the Center for Disease Control, has persistently refused to acknowledge the possible existence of flaws in the conventional theory. AIDS has become intensely politicized, and “fighting AIDS” has acquired the status of a universal symbol for compassion, tolerance, and internationalism. Skeptics are attacked not on the basis of evidence or ideas, but on the moral grounds of perceived opposition to this symbol. The conventional theory also has deep economic and academic roots – tens of thousands of jobs and tens of billions of dollars are tied to AIDS research, AIDS relief, AIDS treatment, AIDS advocacy, AIDS drugs, AIDS prevention, and other AIDS industries. It is no great wonder that the status quo resists interference. The last quarter century of Herculean expenditures has failed to defeat AIDS; the next quarter century will fail as well.

-Abgrund-

Ghosts in the Machines

“Cogito, ergo sum.”

-René Descartes, Principia Philosophiae

    There was a time, in the naive youth of modern thought, when this kind of fucked up logic could be taken seriously, along with mind/body dualism crap. These days, any philo 101 student with multiple brain cells can poke holes in Descarte’s argument: the premise “I think” is not only unproven, it prefigures the conclusion. If you say “I think” you’ve already said “I am”, at least to the point those words have any meaning, which is another flaw we’ll be addressing shortly. You’d think that even four hundred years ago people would have had better sense than to take this kind of muddy syllogism seriously, or to buy into rubbish like dualism. Surprisingly, there are still morons around (in academia, mostly, since it generally takes at least a PhD to make a literate person that stupid) who believe in mind/body dualism.

    One of them is John Searle (who calls mind “intentionality” to conceal the fact that he is a dualist). Some years ago he concocted a ludicrous argument called “The Chinese Room” which alleged to prove that machines cannot have what we call “awareness”, i.e., even if they are able to simulate thought perfectly, they aren’t really thinking and are no more aware of what they are doing than a rock is aware of being a rock. They lack the mental substance Searle calls “intentionality.”
    Searle’s so-called argument has been gutted from a dozen different angles over the years, and I’m not going to describe the various refutations here. I will, however, point out the most fundamental flaw therein: the “Chinese Room” analogy is designed to lure the reader into assuming that a computer cannot have awareness by describing a computer which, instead of being a discrete entity, is a system (the so-called “Chinese Room”), performing the same functions, in which a human being does the core processing. Searle claims that since the human processor need not understand what the system as a whole is doing, the system itself cannot understand either. Since we are not accustomed to thinking of a human mind as being a component of a different mind, and since the system is described in simplistic terms, the unwary (or stupid) may be deceived into going along with this assumption.
    (To be entirely fair to Searle, he was primarily interested in repudiating an even dumber idea – the “Turing Test” for artificial intelligence, which equates intelligence with the ability to use human language well enough to fool a human.)

    The reality is that we have no good reason for thinking that the “Chinese Room” would not be aware of what it is doing. We simply don’t know. We can ask it, of course, but the answer (if any) wouldn’t prove anything. In fact, as far as anyone can prove, there’s nothing in the world but zombies. You might try to tell me that you’re conscious of your own being, but that’s just what I’d expect from the jello computer in your head that’s running your mouth based on electrical signals and some complex but fairly haphazard programming. The only reason I’d give you the benefit of the doubt is that you look somewhat like me and I’m generalizing from my own experience (in other words, I’ve been programmed to accept your claim to awareness at face value). Based on similarity, I’m also inclined to think that a dog has some level of awareness, whereas a fish has very little and a potato none. All this is based on extrapolation from a single data point (myself) – there is no way at all of actually detecting or measuring consciousness.
    Lacking any way of observing non-human consciousness, humans have long been in the habit of assuming that only one kind of consciousness (our kind) exists, and that entities either have it or don’t. We love to categorize things, and we tend to forget that the categories and their distinctions are arbitrary. When something comes along that doesn’t fit the existing taxonomy, we generally try to jam it in somewhere and squabble over where it belongs, instead of accepting for what it is. Eventually, we might revise the categories, but we never give up our either-or, all-or-nothing mode of classification: even if the pigeonholes get reshuffled, the pigeonholing continues. Thus we have dumbasses trying to decide whether viruses are alive, what genre of music Morrissey is, whether fetuses are people, what food group snails are, or whether animals have awareness. Regarding the latter question, a number of so-called scientists over the past couple of centuries have been so devoted to their pigeonholing that, without a shred of evidence, they concluded that animals, not being humans, were merely meat robots and therefore didn’t suffer during the vivisections often performed by said scientists.

    Mammals have a nervous system rather similar to our own, and our own experience shows that our awareness is a function of our nervous system (we can tell this by fucking with said nervous system). We might guess (if we aren’t looking for an excuse to split a rabbit open and watch its heart beat) that mammals have some kind of awareness at least vaguely like our own. Not the same – and of a lesser degree, surely – but of some kind. So what about lizards, fish, insects, worms? They all have nervous systems, of decreasing simplicity. At what point does awareness stop? What is the simplest organism that can be self-aware, the lowest rung on the ladder?
    The answer is: none. There is not the slightest reason to suppose that a nematode with nine hundred-odd neurons isn’t aware of its own experiences. It couldn’t have much of a mind, and wouldn’t have a clear sense of itself as an individual, but it might very well feel pain when immersed in acid. If its nervous system enables it to move away from painful stimuli, it may well also experience what we would call a powerful desire to escape them. If it avoids death, there is no reason to think it doesn’t experience fear, even without knowing what death is.
    For that matter, we can’t know for sure that even things without a nervous system do not have an awareness of sorts. It wouldn’t be like ours, of course: it would be something very different, something that we can’t imagine, and without memories or programming for self-preservation they could hardly have a sense of self-awareness, but that doesn’t prove that they can’t have any awareness. Even human beings have reported experiences in which they lost their sense of self, under the influence of drugs, meditation or the like. Awareness need not be an either-or condition; it may be a trait that appears in an infinite variety of kinds and intensities.
    There are also systems that are excellent candidates for awareness – and perhaps self-awareness – that we don’t ordinarily consider because we limit our thinking to individual bodies. There are many organizations of human beings that have inputs and outputs of information, keep records (including records of themselves), react to stimuli, learn, and struggle to survive and grow. Why couldn’t a nation or a corporation be a sentient entity? There’s no way for any member to detect its sentience, anymore than an individual cell in your brain can tell that it is part of a person. The awareness doesn’t reside in any individual component, nor in all the components together, but in the organization of the components. Replace every person in the group with someone else, but leave all the relationships and activities the same, and nothing changes. Replace one neuron in your brain with a prosthetic signal relay, and nothing changes. Replace every neuron, still nothing changes. Write a computer program to simulate all the interactions of all your neurons, and there’s no reason to think that when that program is running it is not a self-aware mind identical to your own.

    If that’s not funky enough for you, it gets better (or worse, depending on your outlook). If any entity with internal organization can have consciousness, such entities can and do overlap. Maybe you are unwittingly a part of several different minds, which are in turn parts of other minds. Maybe your own mind, which you like to think of as being fairly constant, is not a single entity but a constantly shifting array of different aspects of your nervous system. You think there’s only one you? Think again. Experiments (radical surgery on severe epileptics) have shown that physically dividing your brain in half results in two separate personalities. Each half has its own memories and experiences. The only reason they don’t seem like two different individuals right now is that each hemisphere has access to the same memories. They’ve been taught to think that they’re one person. Sometimes this organization breaks down, and multiple personalities can inhabit the same brain even without surgery. The system also appears to break down to some extent when you are dreaming – you don’t have access to all your memories, nor do your experiences get stored in memory. Your “self” changes because different components of your brain are dominant and the system is organized differently. But those components are still there when you are awake, doing whatever they do. If they had an awareness – even a self-awareness – that was wholly or partly separate from your own, how would you know?
    Maybe “your” consciousness is a series of different minds – different parts of your brain – taking turns running the show and recording memories. Each of them could be around all the time, fully conscious, even when you’re asleep – “you” just don’t know it because they’re not making memories. There’s a part of your brain (the amygdala) that, among other things, causes you to attack or flee when threatened. When you are in a dangerous situation, you may experience a struggle for “self” control to avoid doing either of those things – but is it “yourself” you are struggling against, or is it a competition between two different minds? When you’re not in danger, the amygdala doesn’t just shut down – it’s sitting there, all the time, doing something. One of the things it is presumably doing is watching for danger; if you are suddenly confronted with a raging fire, a coiled snake, or a cop, your amygdala suddenly breaks in and starts talking to you – not in language, because it doesn’t have access to language, but in the more intimate form of emotion. Whatever your amygdala is thinking or feeling the rest of the time, you don’t know, because it isn’t telling you or making a record. But it may very well be fully aware the whole time, waiting like a faithful watchdog for something to bark at.

    To return to the question of machine intelligence: Is your computer aware of its own existence? Not likely. It has some self-referential functions, but (unlike you) it’s not really designed to preserve itself as a unit. The amount of information it has access to at any one instant is extremely small. Moreover, it has very little autonomy – it doesn’t record most of what it does, and it doesn’t really make “choices” – computer decisions are very predictable (somewhat less so if you use Windows). It may well have some kind of awareness, however – it’s a fairly complex information processing system – and there is perhaps the hint of a beginning of an instinct to self-preservation. Does your computer object when you amputate a peripheral device? Does it remind you to save your work – that is, to not wipe things from its memory? Does it plead for its life if you set about formatting the hard drive? It’s designed, within very circumscribed limits, to protect its own utility as a tool, and for that purpose it has been given a vestigial tendency to protect itself. That this tendency is artificial in no way renders it inferior to the survival efforts of a nematode.
    As for a system of computers, perhaps one including human components, the question of intelligence is much more open. At any one time, there are millions of computers connected via the Internet. Some of them send and receive enormous amounts of information and keep records of their activities. If we include the contribution made by human brains to the volume of processing, there can be little doubt that the Internet has the capacity for awareness. The real question is whether it is aware of itself as an entity. At this point, I would say the answer is still no. We don’t know for sure what is necessary for awareness of a self, but it is likely that it would include a common memory bank, that is more or less universally available; a sharp differentiation between “internal” and “external” perceptions (as your mind distinguishes between a picture of food and a full belly); the ability to select between choices and learn from the consequences thereof; and a self-protecting design, that would encourage the system to consistently treat itself as a unit and to seek some outcomes in preference to others.
    The Internet doesn’t have these attributes – yet – but plenty of secure networks have most of them. They have a common database, differentiate sharply between “inside” and “outside” communications, and protect themselves from being changed except by a few select personnel. Sure, they’re dependent on humans – just like we’re dependent on mitochondria and intestinal bacteria. Are they sentient? The machines by themselves probably are not – they lack the ability to choose and learn – but combined with their human operators, the larger networks may very well already be self-aware hybrid (human/computer) systems. How would we know? We have no way of communicating with them. Even if such a system was able to use language, it might not be able to communicate with us. Why would an intelligent hybrid network communicate via human language? It could be fully sentient and interact with individual human users via language, yet be completely unaware that the quaint text strings were meant to reach its mind. Why would it communicate at our level?

    Why would it even suspect us of having self-awareness? Have you ever wondered whether your glands are conscious, whether the hormones they produce are intentional signals? Yet they influence your behavior. If you wanted to ask a neuron whether it was a “self”, how would you go about it? The superhuman mind that will someday – if it doesn’t already – inhabit the global computer network might have no more ability to communicate with us than we can talk to our glands and neurons in English. And it probably won’t have any more interest in doing so, either. Forget the Turing Test – it is we who would fail.

-Abgrund-

Third Stage: Transhumanity

“Man is something to be surpassed.”

-Friedrich Willhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

    Every once in a while a revolution occurs that totally changes everything. I’m not talking about petty makeovers, like the introduction of air travel, or mere paradigm shifts in human thought, like the Enlightenment, or even civilization-transfiguring events like the Industrial Revolution. No, there have only been two first-class revolutions so far. The third one seems likely to roll over us during this century.
    The first revolution happened around three billion years ago with the appearance of living organisms. This was a very, very dramatic break with the past: up until then, Earth was just a ball of rock covered with slush, like any other planet, and totally dreary and monotonous (like 99.9999999999% of the cosmos still is). Then living organisms appeared, even the simplest microscopic germ a fabulous chemical machine more complex than a galaxy of stars and dead planets, and they totally transformed the surface of their world, clothing it in oxygen and soil and an astounding panoply of living things. This was something utterly new.
    A second revolution came about some three billion years later when one strain of these remarkable life forms evolved intelligence and began to apply it to the manipulation of its environment. In the blink of an eye (geologically speaking), everything was transformed again. By actually understanding nature – a monumental achievement for even the most complex biochemical machine – homo sapiens gained power over it and created something entirely new. Things happened very fast now; new and fantastic things appeared at an accelerating rate – controlled fires, cities and roads, purified metals, machines, electrical devices, exotic chemicals, atom bombs, computers, genetically modified organisms. The surface environment, which had been first a barren wasteland and then a carpet of life, became in large part Man’s creation – buildings, machines, asphalt, carefully landscaped parks and fields planted with specially bred crops. Everything was different again.
    A third revolution is now approaching, promising to uproot everything we know, redefine existence and create a whole new kind of world. It will probably happen very quickly, relative to the great revolutions of the past, although it might wind up taking several of the brief lifespans of our species. We cannot predict with any confidence what it will bring, anymore than a Neanderthal could predict the invention of the steam engine; it is beyond us. But we have begun the process, and set the forces in motion; we can see something of how it will it come about and what some of the intermediate results, at least, might be.

    The three major elements of this revolution are information processing, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. The first is already well underway, and the foundations have been laid for the second. The potential of nanotech remains speculative, but has been well established on a theoretical basis – the greatest question is how long it will take to reach fruition.
    The fantastic increase in the power of computers in recent decades is well known. What is perhaps less appreciated is the fact that the number of computers and their interconnectedness is also rapidly increasing, along with the amount of information accessible to them. There is the possibility that computing power will continue to advance by multiple orders of magnitude; yet even if it does not, present technology is vastly underutilized. We can (and by all appearances, will) produce far more computers, connect them at greater speeds, and provide them with greater information storage.
    Artificial intelligence of human problem-solving caliber (though it would probably not resemble a human mind very much in other ways) will be a reality within a generation. The only reason we don’t have high-level AI already is because we put almost no resources into developing it. Despite the lack of support, however, progress is bound to accelerate, as better tools are evolved. Sooner or later we will reach a point where AI systems can work out improvements to themselves, and then their intelligence will only be limited by our willingness to supply the hardware. Inevitably, computers (or computing systems) will wind up being smart than us. A lot smarter. One consequence is that just about every conceivable human occupation – except perhaps for prostitution – will be able to be performed by a computer or a robot. Another is that scientific progress might come far faster. If it took thousands of human geniuses over two hundred years to get from f=ma to e=mc² and unleash the power of nuclear reactions, how soon can thousands of superhuman geniuses, working twenty-four seven with instant access to virtually infinite calculating power and to each other’s ideas, reach the next great breakthrough in physics and unleash – who knows what? The repeal of every physical law we now think inviolable?

    Biotechnology is not so far along – at present we are still trying to figure out how the absurdly complex machine we call a living organism works. But we’re on our way. We’ve mapped out a number of genomes, including our own, and even worked out the entire structure and functioning of a few viruses. We have crude techniques for splicing up new genes, and the techniques are getting better. It’s only a matter of time before we can make any change we want to the structure or biochemistry of any organism – at least, whatever can be done with proteins, which judging by the immense variety of traits of existing species is one hell of a lot. Curing cancer and every genetic infirmity or weakness ever known is just the beginning. We can make ourselves twice as intelligent, add extra limbs or sensory organs if we want to go to the trouble, and probably increase our lifespan to thousands of years or more. With enough design work (probably done by intelligent computers), we could engineer a human that could stay underwater for hours and swim with the help of webbed feet – or we could make a dolphin smarter, give it hands and a larynx. Need more land? We’ll design microorganisms to make more of it by assembling chemicals from seawater (corals already do it), or to digest Martian rock and shit out oxygen and water. Need more fuel? We’ll design a plant to turn sunshine directly into hydrocarbons. Polluted the Earth? All we need are microbes designed to break down toxic wastes or sequester carbon dioxide or whatever. Many of our machines and robots could be augmented or replaced by genetically engineered organisms – if only because they’re self-replicating, self-repairing, and don’t require mining for raw materials. We can design our bio-tools to be plugged directly into the global computer network – hell, we can plug ourselves in too.

Genetic engineering will probably also be the route by which we acquire nanotechnology. As vast as the potential for biotechnology is, compared to nanotech it’s sandlot stuff. In case you don’t know (and you should), nanotech means building machines out of individual atoms. I’m not going to go into the science of it here unless someone asks, but the essential things are that nanomachines can be extremely small (obviously), so that thousands of them can fit into a single cell and a supercomputer can fit in a thimble; they can do certain things quite fast, that can be divided into a large number of very small operations (like assembling a large object); they can have a long, perhaps unlimited, working life, if properly designed; they can theoretically have a power to weight ratio millions of times greater than ordinary machines; they can be made to operate from a fairly complex program even if they are very small; and, perhaps most importantly, nanomachines can be designed to replicate themselves – and very quickly at that.
    Nanotechnology is something like biotechnology multiplied by a thousand. It’s like taking the minute processes of cellular biochemistry and replacing the clunky soup haphazardly shaped by random evolution with custom-built machines. It’s like automobiles over horses, but at the cellular level – and the machines can be programmed to repair themselves, too. Wheels and gears – which nature has failed to create in three billion years – will replace sloppy, bulky enzymes with their endless chains of non-functional amino acids. Nanotech is still a long way off (and I’m not going to go into the obstacles here, either), but there’s every reason to believe that it will be achieved, and probably within this century.

    If genetic engineering is certain to redefine “human” in radical ways, nanotech will erase the definition entirely. It would be entirely possible to make an exact record of your brain – by sending in trillions of robots to map every connection, or by freezing your brain and dismantling it atom by atom (which is what the cryogenics people are hoping for) – and then transfer its function to a programmable computer. You could even simulate the effects of your glands, if you wanted to; you could also be reprogrammed (voluntarily or otherwise) or merged with someone else’s mind or with other kinds of programs. When medical science finally allows a direct interface between brain and computer, the mind-body connection is likely to become blurred; when nanotech allows the separation of mind from body, the connection will disappear and mind will become something other than what it has been.
    What the outcome of such a process, or even of advances in AI and biotech alone, might be is unknowable, but I am of course willing to hazard a guess. What I expect is that individuals as we know them will either cease to exist or become marginalized. A super-intelligence will emerge, composed of many interconnected minds (organic or electronic), that will control most of the material entities and processes on Earth. The minds making up this macro-organism might be unaware of its existence, and might still consider themselves autonomous, but they would act in unison. Those outside it would be under its firm control in all significant matters, though perhaps indirectly enough to allow them to maintain an illusion of individuality. They might even serve a vital function, mediating between the world-mind and its “body” – the material organisms and machines of the Earth. Otherwise, they would be merely parasites – and dispensable.

    We may (if we harbor a certain nostalgia for humanity per se) hope that something human-like will still exist in the future, and that it will perhaps even exist in some comfort. It might, after all, be easier to maintain the existence of inferior entities that serve an organic function, than to eliminate them and replace them with something more efficient. Every cell in your body contains hundreds of mitochondria – descendants of parasites which invaded our single-celled ancestors billions of years ago and made themselves useful. Without them, you’d die in a split second. The job they do could probably be done more efficiently by a custom-made system, without the burden of the mitochondrial DNA and membranes and so on, but why bother? We can readily afford whatever resources they waste, so there’s no reason to mess with them even if we thought we could.
    A century or two from now, whatever is left of humanity may have the same kind of security that mitochondria do – that of being useful, humble, and powerless. After billions of years of symbiotic existence, mitochondria are still very successful by bacterial standards – there’s a hell of a lot of them – but they have no say in the control of the organism, don’t even comprehend its existence. We ourselves may be similarly left behind – in degenerate dependency, prospering by our own standard, but having no influence over the macro-organism that we are a part of, whose nature and goals we do not comprehend because they are so far beyond our scope.

    If we’re lucky, that is. We might turn out to be easier to ditch than mitochondria, after all.

-Abgrund-