Dear George Gantz,

Thank you for reminding me of human empathic values of trust, humility, mutual respect and shared commitment: love, in its most universal form.

This might be what Alfred Nobel called ideal direction. Don't humility and shared commitment include answering taboo questions how to substitute war and hunger and how many people will the earth need in future? When I followed Nobel's attitude, I was not always understood correctly. I see four of his prizes devoted to the tip of the speer.

Cheers,

Eckard

Eckard - Thanks for the comment. Although I know little about Alfred Nobel beyond the obvious facts of his invention and the fortune it brought and the prizes which bear his name, perhaps you are correct and his attitude is something we should emulate. It is ironic and significant that his wealth was accumulated on the basis of a technology that has both productive and destructive uses, with perhaps an emphasis on destruction. Yet his prizes - notably including the Peace Prize - have become a significant global, non-governmental influence for good. Can we all turn our worldy achievements towards the long term betterment of humanity in an attitude of humility and dedication to all fellow humans?

I do not know whether Nobel had specific motives for excluding mathematics - I personally do not see that mathematics has any negative or undermining influences on human thought or behavior. Indeed, mathematics itself has no value as a weapon - it is the abstraction of cognition with no power except when deployed as a tool in the empirical scientific disciplines. Those disciplines is where the impacts on the world, for good or for ill, are manifest.

Math, science and technology (the power behind the spear of progress) are all amoral. But the powers they confer tempt the human will (or soul). Arrogance, hubris, self-gratification and the intention to dominate can result. Thankfully, our evolutionary path (and the revelation of our great religions if we hold to their true principles) has given us countervailing empathic influences. These are more important than ever.

Thanks so much for your acknowledgement of this issue! - George

    Hi George,

    Thanks for your essay calling on the development of systems, institutions, and tools to foster empathic progress. I couldn't agree more.

    I think you might find some connections with my essay on computationally intelligent personal dialogic agents. I have a prototype (developed as part of a National Science Foundation CAREER award) that I have used to deliver training in Marshall Rosenberg's "nonviolent communication" as part of a study.

    I'd appreciate a rating, if you can do that, since I am a bit short on ratings.

    Also, I'm interested in finding collaborators. If you are interested, I'd appreciate a contact. My gmail username is my first name, then a period, then my last name.

    Best wishes,

    Ray Luechtefeld, PhD

    Ray - Yes I remember your essay - one of the very few with a practical implementation suggestion. I did score it already - in fact I read and scored all of them (a Sisyphian task that absorbed a couple of weeks). I do have a website where you can see some of my work (and if you subscribe I will be able to followup by email.

    I just read the scoring deadline was extended - hopefully your essay will get a bit more attention, as it should.

    Cheers - George

    Hi George,

    I like your essay. It is well written and captures important themes. I have two comments. First, you write:

    One key revelation is that our universe, including life itself, has evolved through a series of successive states, from low entropic, homogeneous conditions at the Big Bang, through increasingly complex states of higher entropy. The transition to each subsequent state involves a loss of symmetry, an increase in complexity and the emergence of novel structures and behaviors.

    I think you might appreciate the work of the ecologist Robert Ulanowicz, who has some very interesting and precise thinking along these lines. E.g.:

    http://people.biology.ufl.edu/ulan/pubs/Bateson.pdf

    My question for you is what sense of 'complexity' you are employing here. My intuitions are that "novel structures" and "higher entropy" are actually opposed, not correlated. A high entropy state like a spread of gaseous particles is much less structured than a low entropy state like a crystal, yes?

    Ulanowicz provides a solution to this problem that I quite like that is also consistent with your major themes.

    My second question is about how you are defining cooperation. I worry that you use this term to do a lot of work in the essay without defining it. You mention Prisoner's Dilemma. What are payoffs, in your framework? Is it utility? Or is it, as an evolutionist, mere probability of survival?

    I love the idea of universal cooperation but I wonder how to accomplish that when there are questions of resource scarcity.

    Thank you for the enlightening essay.

    Sebastian - Thanks for the excellent comments. I am not familiar with the work of Ulanowicz but will check out the reference. Yes, there is an odd relationship between higher entropy and the complex systems that seem to be going in reverse - effectively borrowing order from a universe that is moving the other way. This is a key feature of emergent systems that is not well understood. There is room here, I believe, for an ordering principle - something that explains why complex systems behave this way. There is a lot of talk about epiphenomenon or supervenience - none of which adequately address the question in my mind.

    Admittedly, the concept of cooperation as I use it in my essay is very broad and necessarily fuzzy (only so many words!). To be consistent with my thesis, cooperation would be any behavior between humans that is motivated by the human empathic qualities as enumerated. In the Prisoner's dilemma, loyalty ranks higher than self-interest. Purely quid-pro-quo behaviors are transactional and would not be cooperation in the sense I have used it. The payoff from cooperation is both utility for the group in the economic sense, as well as personal satisfaction from fulfilling one's empathic impulses - a purely internal, subjective payoff, unless one believes in eternal salvation in which case the payoff is an eternity in heaven

    Does not cooperation become even more important in the face of resource scarcity? Yes, we have dystopic visions of humans descending into selfish competitive depravity in the fight for resources, but history offers a quite different perspective. See, for example Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel. Humanity has proven it can transcend hardship. Can it transcend material superfluity?

    Cheers - George

    Mike - I appreciate your formal approach to the review and comment process and very much respect the commitment you are making to openness and to fairness. This is my first time participating in an FQXi essay contest and the community rating process has seemed a little bit weird - and as you say it has some flaws in it. I recognized the struggle in myself to keep my essay scores from influencing how I rated other essays. This was particularly difficult when I got my first community score of 1.0! I think I have been generally fair - but I am also quite familiar with the nature of ex-post rationalization and cognitive bias, so I'm sure there was some of that in my review process.

    At this point I have read and scored all of the essays, including yours. I commented on essays where I had a thoughtful question to offer or noted some similarities to my own thesis. I did not comment on your essay as I was cognizant of your policy. As you have invited me to comment, I will now go back and give you my feedback. I would also welcome your feedback and score.

    Cheers - George

    George,

    Nobel didn't choose his prizes by chance. He had no chance but to consider religion in his fourth and fifth one because he understood that one must not prefer any particular belief. What about mathematics, he reportedly said let be no prize on mathematics. Most likely he was aware of the importance of mathematics. I think I understand him well: He didn't deny the importance of mathematics. He just rejected the speculative modern mathematics, in particular set theory, represented by Georg Cantor and Goesta Mittag-Leffler.

    Those who don`t understand Nobel's seemingly crazy reasoning are either speaking of science as a two-edged sword, something for good or for ill, or they are cornucopians (boomers). When I looked for support for my (and Nobel's] perspective, I found allies mainly in the first mentioned group among fellows of great religions; I met fiercest opponents in the second one among free market enthusiasts, those who are teaching speculative models, and naive patriots.

    Eckard

    I still hope you'll comment, George. My policy was only meant to dissuade anodyne comments and veiled offers of vote trading. In any case, I promise to rate all my reviews by D-Day.

    Your historical introduction is a good frame; it puts the steering question in perspective. Your prose is pleasant and effortless to read. I think you fail, however, to come to grips with your thesis. We should "create fitness landscapes that select for cooperative ... behaviors", but this you avoid stating till page 4. Then immediately you plunge us back into history (where you move confidently) to circle the thesis for the remaining pages. I'm a sympathetic reader who agrees we need some kind of unifying counterbalance to modern society's tendency to fragmentation, but, like Robert de Neufville who "would have liked to hear more about how [society] could change to foster mutual empathy" (May 23), and John Hodge ("The question is how?", Apr 15), I'm ultimately left unsatisfied. Your answer to Hodge that "that's a question for the next century... [and] will be difficult" misses the point. We don't necessarily need a blueprint that we can execute immediately, but rather a vision of the goal that convinces us that a blueprint will someday be possible.

    Mike

    Mike - Fair enough critique. To be honest: I feel confident in how I frame the problem and draw out the lessons of history (and pre-history), but not at all confident about how to implement a universal solution. At the personal level, I am very comfortable with a theistic worldview (one that embraces science) and confident in the guidance that provides - it is a solution for me and for others that share my faith. But faith is not something one can impose - on oneself or anyone else.

    One thesis that I did not address directly in the essay does impose a constraint on the nature of a solution to humanity's problems and the prescription for their solution - and that is that empirical science has ineluctable limits that will never be resolved empirically. The solution to correctly steering the future of humanity will thus require a spiritual integration that reaches beyond the physical. My essay points in that direction by placing love at the tip of the spear, but I did not attempt to tackle that issue directly in my essay. I also felt that a direct attack on the limits of empirical science and proselytizing on the need for a spiritual integration would have fared badly in an FQXi contest. I'm still puzzled as to why the first person to score my essay gave it a 1.0, but suspect it had something to do with the nature of my message.....

    Much obliged for the excellent critique. I hope my response is helpful.

    -George

    Dear George,

    It was an opportunity using the time of extension to go through your coherent essay. Probably work load of other commitment prevented me from reading it earlier. I scored you high to further boost your visible article.

    Your idea of steering the future is a job well done. I observed some unique similarities in our essays which I will want you to explore before this contest is over. STRIKING A BALANCE BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND ECOSYSTEM is the title of my article and can be directly assessed here http://fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/2020

    I will anticipate your comments and rating after reading.

    Thanks and wishing a bumper reward for your labour.

    Regards

    Gbenga

      Hi George,

      Thanks for your comment on my essay.

      I enjoyed reading your entry. You've made good points about the importance of empathy and cooperation in trying to overcome our challenges. Recommending that scientific advancement continue is unlikely to be challenged by this audience either.

      Is there any particular ideas you would like to discuss or get feedback on?

      Cheers,

      Toby

        Hi George,

        I thought your essay was beautifully and persuasively written.

        We tend to forget, but you reminded us that "cooperative enterprise" "trust, honesty, mutual respect and shared commitment" and humility are "the qualities that propelled humanity and its institutions forward".

        But "Competitive or conflicting responses create frictions that can undermine or destroy". And, in a similar sentiment to that in my essay: "Science does not always serve in an empathic capacity... in fostering particular ideologies such as determinism and materialism...Has science as an institution contributed to existential alienation, the rise of unfettered commercialism or declines in social capital and shared moral frameworks " ?

        So I must agree that we must "design the fitness landscape for humanity's future in ways that reward cooperation and collaboration and discipline cheating, dishonesty and other moral defections".

        Re "the theory of evolution through natural selection has a strong consensus in the scientific community, but debates continue on some of the specifics":

        I recently read 2 reviews of a new book "Mutation-Driven Evolution" by Masatoshi Nei , Evan Pugh Professor of Biology at Pennsylvania State University and Director of the Institute of Molecular Evolutionary Genetics since 1990. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3814208/pdf/evt150.pdf and http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ede.12062/pdf ).

        According to the reviews, and if I understand correctly, Masatoshi Nei is saying that there is no actual evidence that a selection component drives evolution: there is only evidence for a mutation component driving evolution. One of the reviews says:

        "To suggest that selection "shapes" new genes out of the "raw material"...of new genes - is an absurdity...Because we now know that the role of generative processes in evolution is not limited to supplying raw materials, we now know that evolutionary theory is incomplete without a theory of form and variation. Incorporating such a theory will require us to rethink how we invoke causation and explanation, and to reject the false metaphor of selection as a creative agent that builds from passive raw materials."

        My interpretation is that, seemingly, organisms are the creative agents shaping their own fates rather than "selection" (which is anything but the organisms themselves) shaping their fates.

        Cheers,

        Lorraine

          Toby - The big question is how to develop a shared culture / morality that will keep "love at the tip of the spear." Historically, building and sustaining a shared morality across many generations is a role that religions have played. In our post-modern, secular, increasingly digitized world, what does that look like? There seems to be a little work going on in this area ( see: Big Questions Online series, or the RSA project on the Social Brain) but the chasm in language and sensibilities between science and religion seems to be incredibly wide..... We need better bridges. (See my website at www.swedenborgcenterconcord.org - The ISAS Forum - for some early efforts in this regard.

          Thanks for asking! - George

          Lorraine - Thanks for the comment and the citation to Nei's book - which I will have to look up! Yes, I think evolution is often cast in very simplistic terms - random mutation / competitive selection / survival and procreation. It sounds like Nei is focussed on the "random" question. Clearly, mutations or innovations in any complex system are constrained (in terms of potential forms and range of variations), and some have argued that there must be a causative or "intentional" factor involved at the generative level. This is something I alluded to in my essay - "Debates continue on the degree to which such cooperative behavior exists in some, or all, emergent processes, and the extent to which it is consistent with reductionism or requires some form of top-down causation...."

          For a very interesting and provocative discussion of the issue, I'd suggest tackling Ian Thompson's - Starting Science from God. Ian's work is quite technical (he is a physicist), and his theistic approach is hardly "mainstream", but his presentation is thorough and consistent. He goes quite deep into that nature of top-dopwn causation from multiple generative levels across all of creation - cosmology - quantum physics - biology and consciousness.

          Cheers - George