Author: jameswharris

Will People Change vs. Can People Change?

by James Wallace Harris, 2/28/24

I just finished listening to The Deluge by Stephen Markley, a book that speculates on what the next sixteen years could be like. The book is almost nine hundred pages in print, and over forty hours on audio. Reading this book feels like it’s compressed the last twenty years of polarized political conflict into a forty-hour long disaster film. It’s intense.

Markley uses a large cast of characters to dramatize how people on the left and right will battle for control over the next five U.S. presidential election cycles. Most of the story involves two groups of characters, those working within the political system, and those who decidedly don’t. Markley portrays an ultrasecret ecoterrorist group that works to force change by violent acts versus a dedicated group of political wonks that labor in Washington to influence both parties. Dynamic women characters lead both groups. (By the way, I disliked both women. The only character I cared about was a drug addict in Ohio, who Markley uses as a kind of everyman.)

To further spice up the story, Markley explores the growing power of computer surveillance, artificial intelligence, privacy, and how everyone can be tracked.

I’m not going to review the details of The Deluge because I want to use my reading experience to talk about a specific response to reading the book. I’ll link major book reviews at the end in case you’re considering reading the book. I can say liberals will be terrified by the conservatives in this story, and conservatives will by horrified by these fictional liberals.

The Deluge is about climate change. We could have solved that problem by now if we had acted promptly twenty years ago. The government could have added a tax on all fossil fuels and then raised it slowly month by month. For example, by adding ten cents to the federal tax on gasoline each month. If we had started this in the year 2000, gasoline would be approaching $30 a gallon today. That would have forced people and corporations to make the changes needed.

That tax revenue could have been used to overhaul the power grid and for developing renewable energy technologies. If we had taxed carbon properly, we wouldn’t be fighting over climate change today. That didn’t happen. It didn’t happen because the people who owned trillions of dollars in fossil fuel reserves made sure it didn’t happen. They built a political and religious coalition to fight with them to protect that wealth.

All that’s beside the point now. What Markley envisions is the breakdown of the United States over the next sixteen years so it’s obvious to all we need to do something. The Deluge includes dramatic scenes of a massive fire that destroys Los Angeles, a massive flood that overwhelms the Midwest, and a massive hurricane that devastates east coast states. These events caused the insurance industry to collapse, leading to economic chaos. Markley doesn’t overplay all this. His fictional disasters are realistic, only somewhat larger than what we’ve already experienced, killing just hundreds or a few thousand people in each event, but having an enormous impact on politics and the economy.

Reading The Deluge makes readers ask themselves: Will American change soon? But I ask: Can people change at all?

Before reading this novel, I had seen two insightful videos about climate change that ask the same questions. The first video makes a careful case saying people don’t change and if there is a solution for avoiding climate change it must work with the psychology of how people act. The second video summarizes the first video with impressive summations of it and this tweet. (I wish I could summarize what I watch and read this well.)

Over the two hundred thousand years that our species have existed on this planet, we haven’t changed. Our societies and technologies change, but not us. Over those two hundred thousand years we have developed four major cognitive tools to understand reality: religion, philosophy, mathematics, and science. Only science using mathematics has consistently proven it can consistently describe reality. If you don’t believe that I wouldn’t fly in an airplane.

Science is not black and white. It’s statistical and hard to understand. But science has overwhelmingly shown that adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is turning up the temperature. The parts per million of CO2 in the air acts like a thermostat. Add more CO2 turns up the temperature. The only way to return to the weather we liked in the past is to return to the CO2 levels of the 1960s, but we keep adding more. The only way to stop adding CO2 is to completely stop using fossil fuels. And if we want to turn down the thermostat, we need to remove CO2, which isn’t easy. That’s why taxing carbon is the only way to force us to change, but we won’t do that, because it’s not in our psychology.

However, The Deluge suggests when things get bad enough, we’ll change. It ends hopefully. People even have hope for their children and grandchildren.

Personally, I don’t think we will change. If you want to know what the next sixteen years could be like, read The Deluge. If you believe people can change, and we’ll do the right thing eventually, read The Deluge. If you don’t believe we’ll change, I wouldn’t bother with the book unless you like looking at train wrecks. And if you suffer from depression, I suggest avoiding reading this novel at all costs. I seldom get even the slightest depressed, but this book bummed me out.

Reviews:

JWH

A Painful Challenge to My Ego

James Wallace Harris, 2/26/24

I’m hitting a new cognitive barrier that stops me cold. It’s making me doubt myself. I’ve been watching several YouTubers report on the latest news in artificial intelligence and I’ve been amazed by their ability to understand and summarize a great amount complex information. I want to understand the same information and summarize it too, but I can’t. Struggling to do so wounds my ego.

This experience is forcing me to contemplate my decaying cognitive abilities. I had a similar shock ten years ago when I retired. I was sixty-two and training a woman in her twenties to take over my job. She blew my mind by absorbing the information I gave her as fast as I could tell her. One reason I chose to retire early is because I couldn’t learn the new programming language, framework, and IDE that our IT department was making standard. That young woman was learning my servers and old programs in a language she didn’t know at a speed that shocked and awed me. My ego figured something was up, even then, when it was obvious this young woman could think several times faster than I could. I realized that’s what getting old meant.

I feel like a little aquarium fish that keeps bumping into an invisible barrier. My Zen realization is I’ve been put in a smaller tank. I need to map the territory and learn how to live with my new limitations. Of course, my ego still wants to maximize what I can do within those limits.

I remember as my mother got older, my sister and I had to decide when and where she could drive because she wouldn’t limit herself for her own safety. Eventually, my sister and I had to take her car away. I’m starting to realize that I can’t write about certain ideas because I can’t comprehend them. Will I always have the self-awareness to know what I can comprehend and what I can’t?

This makes me think of Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Both are older than I am. Does Biden realize what he’s forgotten? Does Trump even understand he can’t possibly know everything he thinks he knows? Neither guy wants to give up because of their egos.

So, what am I not seeing about myself? I’m reminded of Charlie Gordon in the story “Flowers for Algernon,” when Charlie was in his intellectual decline phase.

Are there tools we could use to measure our own decline? Well, that’s a topic for another essay, but I believe blogging might be one such tool.

JWH

I Finally Finished All 271 Episodes of Perry Mason

by James Wallace Harris, 2/18/24

Back in 2018 I wrote “Why Am I Binge Watching Perry Mason?” I started out watching the series on MeTV, but decided I wanted to watch the series from the first to the last episode. After printing a listing of all the episodes to act as a checklist, I then subscribed to CBS All Access to stream the episodes in order. I soon discovered they skipped some episodes. That annoyed me, so I got on eBay and found a bargain on a used copy of the complete series on DVD. I watched Perry Mason at a steady pace through the seventh season, when I completely burned out on the show. This year, I went back and with my wife’s help, finished the series.

Last night we watched season 9, episode 30, “The Case of the Final Fade-Out.” It was a fun way to end the series because that story was about a murder on the set of a television show. That episode used the Perry Mason crew as actors portraying a television crew, plus Erle Stanley Gardner played the judge. And there was one in-joke I particularly loved. We overhear an actress telling someone, “Who wants to be on a show that goes up against Bonanza.” Perry Mason was being canceled partly because it couldn’t compete with that popular western.

Even though I enjoyed watching episode after episode of Perry Mason, I can’t say it’s a great show. My love for the series was mainly due to nostalgia. My favorite aspect of each episode was seeing the guest stars, the sets, cars, and costumes. Perry Mason was filmed in black and white, except for one episode. I love black and white movies and television shows but seeing that one episode of Perry Mason in color made me wish the entire series had been filmed in color. The guest stars, old cars, and sets looked great in that one episode. It shows why color TVs became so popular. I can remember our family getting one in 1965.

I loved the characters Perry Mason (Raymond Burr), Della Street (Barbara Hale), Paul Drake (William Hopper) and Hamilton Burger (William Talman). However, they seldom ventured from their one-dimensional characterizations. In one episode Raymond Burr got to play an old English seadog who looked like Perry Mason. That revealed Burr’s missing acting potential. I’ve read that Burr got a big kick out of playing that crusty old sailor with an accent. It’s a shame that Burr played Perry Mason so woodenly so damn consistently.

We never got to see the private lives of Perry, Della, and Paul. The show followed a rigid formula. I’ve read that in the books that Perry and Della were a couple, but I can’t even say that’s even hinted at in the TV show. It would have been great having Della being involved with both Perry and Paul over the nine seasons. That would have added so many character dimensions and plots to the show.

Another missed potential the show should have added, was having Perry Mason lose a case now and then. Poor old Hamilton Burger must lose all his. Having Perry always win, always right, always infallible, made his character cardboard.

It sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m not. For television shows coming out from 1957 to 1966, Perry Mason‘s formula was on par. I wrote an essay, “Does Merry mason Follow the Rules for Detective Fiction?” that dealt with its mystery plots. When you watch 271 of them, it gets painful that every client of Perry Mason saw the victim just before they were killed. Sometimes, just minutes or seconds from the murder event. You’d think the writers would have been more creative in producing plots.

Yet, even with such a rigid formula, it was hard to guess whodunit. I seldom did. Often the plots were so confusing that even when we’re told what happened, it’s hard to understand what happened. I know HBO has a new Perry Mason that addresses my complaints, and I’ve seen the first season of that series. It’s excellent, but it’s not the same Perry Mason. The HBO series might be closer to the original books, and it’s set when the original books were written, making it more authentic to them, but still, I’d like a better Raymond Burr Perry Mason.

I know this is a bizarre and an impossible wish to grant, but I wish someone would remake the 1957-1966 television series set in the 1950s and 1960s, with actors much like Burr, Hale, Hopper, and Talman, but with 2024 television production values. Like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) recreates 1969.

The old Perry Mason sometimes plotted stories based on current news events. One episode was obviously inspired by the Kitty Genovese case. It’s a shame they bungled that episode. Having one of the bystanders who didn’t want to get involved be the murderer detracts from the moral lesson of the real-life murder.

Another episode was about computer dating. I assume that the 1965 episode was inspired by Operation Match, which was in the news in 1965. Wikipedia has an interesting history of computer dating, and the idea goes back further than I imagined. Again, I thought the writers mangled the inspiration. Because they shoehorned it into their formula, the implications of matching couples by computer was just a novel idea they threw out but didn’t explore.

I’d love to see a new Perry Mason series that explores the reality of Ameria from 1957 through 1966. We changed so much in those years. It’s a shame that an artistic artifact from that period reveals so little about the times, mostly giving a false impression of the past. We humans prefer consuming fantasy over reality.

I know all of this sounds like I’m complaining, but I did enjoy watching the series. It’s just knowing what’s happened to the world in the last sixty years, and knowing the potential of what television can be that makes me fantasize about watching a much better Perry Mason based on the old series. It had so much potential.

Given the times could Perry Mason have been better? I thought Route 66 (1960-1964) proved Perry Mason could have taken more chances and been truer to the times. I must assume that the writers and producers of Perry Mason calculated what American TV watchers wanted to see at the time, and that’s what they gave them.

Could 1950s America have accepted Perry Mason if he lost cases, made mistakes, had personal flaws, was screwing Della, was jealous that sometimes Della might have been screwing Paul, and had to deal with the real years of 1957 through 1966?

I love watching old TV shows, shows from the years I was growing up. That’s mostly because of nostalgia, but it’s also because I like analyzing the past. I can remember the real, edgier, darker, 1950s, even though I was a kid. I wonder why television was so unreal. I often think that back then, we wanted real life to be like television. Now that I’m older, I’m wishing that old television had been more like real life. What does that say about me?

Perry Mason witnessed at least 271 dead bodies, murdered in all kinds of ways. Why didn’t that have a cumulative effect on his psyche? You’d think Perry would have become cynical and bitter as the show progressed over nine years. I think that’s the substantial difference between old television and new. The characters grow and change.

America changed dramatically from 1957 to 1966, but we don’t see that in Perry Mason, except for cars. Watching Perry Mason is escaping into a fantasy we all had a lifetime ago.

But I’ve got to wonder, will people growing up now believe television accurately captures life during their adolescent years when they rewatch their old favorite shows in retirement while looking back over their life?

Even with these complaints, I’m already thinking about starting the series over.

JWH

ChatGPT Isn’t an Artificial Intelligence (AI) But an Artificial Unconsciousness (AU)

by James Wallace Harris, 2/12/24

This essay is for anyone who wants to understand themselves and how creativity works. What I’m about to say will make more sense if you’ve played with ChatGPT or have some understanding of recent AI programs in the news. Those programs appear to be amazingly creative by answering ordinary questions, passing tests that lawyers, mathematicians, and doctors take, generating poems and pictures, and even creating music and videos. They often appear to have human intelligence even though they are criticized for making stupid mistakes — but then so do humans.

We generally think of our unconscious minds as mental processes occurring automatically below the surface of our conscious minds, out of our control. We believe our unconscious minds are neural functions that influence thought, feelings, desires, skills, perceptions, and reactions. Personally, I assume feelings, emotions, and desires come from an even deeper place and are based on hormones and are unrelated to unconscious intelligence.

It occurred to me that ChatGPT and other large language models are analogs for the unconscious mind, and this made me observe my own thoughts more closely. I don’t believe in free will. I don’t even believe I’m writing this essay. The keyword here is “I” and how we use it. If we use “I” to refer to our whole mind and body, then I’m writing the essay. But if we think of the “I” as the observer of reality that comes into being when I’m awake, then probably not. You might object to this strongly because our sense of I-ness feels obviously in full control of the whole shebang.

But what if our unconscious minds are like AI programs, what would that mean? Those AI programs train on billions of pieces of data, taking a long time to learn. But then, don’t children do something similar? The AI programs work by prompting it with a question. If you play a game of Wordle, aren’t you prompting your unconscious mind? Could you write a step-by-step flow chart of how you solve a Wordle game consciously? Don’t your hunches just pop into your mind?

If our unconscious minds are like ChatGPT, then we can improve them by feeding in more data and giving it better prompts. Isn’t that what we do when studying and taking tests? Computer scientists are working hard to improve their AI models. They give their models more data and refine their prompts. If they want their model to write computer programs, they train their models in more computer languages and programs. If we want to become an architect, we train our minds with data related to architecture. (I must wonder about my unconscious mind; it’s been trained on decades of reading science fiction.)

This will also explain why you can’t easily change another person’s mind. Training takes a long time. The unconscious mind doesn’t respond to immediate logic. If you’ve trained your mental model all your life on The Bible or investing money, it won’t be influenced immediately by new facts regarding science or economics.

We live by the illusion that we’re teaching the “I” function of our mind, the observer, the watcher, but what we’re really doing is training our unconscious mind like computer scientists train their AI models. We might even fool ourselves that free will exists because we believe the “I” is choosing the data and prompts. But is that true? What if the unconscious mind tells the “I” what to study? What to create? If the observer exists separate from intelligence, then we don’t have free will. But how could ChatGPT have free will? Humans created it, deciding on the training data, and the prompts. Are our unconscious minds creating artificial unconscious minds? Maybe nothing has free will, and everything is interrelated.

If you’ve ever practiced meditation, you’ll know that you can watch your thoughts. Proof that the observer is separate from thinking. Twice in my life I’ve lost the ability to use words and language, once in 1970 because of a large dose of LSD, and about a decade ago with a TIA. In both events I observed the world around me without words coming to mind. I just looked at things and acted on conditioned reflexes. That let me experience a state of consciousness with low intelligence, one like animals know. I now wonder if I was cut off from my unconscious mind. And if that’s true, it implies language and thoughts come from the unconscious minds, and not from what we call conscious awareness. That the observer and intelligence are separate functions of the mind.

We can get ChatGPT to write an essay for us, and it has no awareness of its actions. We use our senses to create a virtual reality in our head, an umwelt, which gives us a sensation that we’re observing reality and interacting with it, but we’re really interacting with a model of reality. I call this function that observes our model of reality the watcher. But what if our thoughts are separate from this viewer, this watcher?

If we think of large language models as analogs for the unconscious mind, then everything we do in daily life is training for our mental model. Then does the conscious mind stand in for the prompt creator? I’m on the fence about this. Sometimes the unconscious mind generates its own prompts, sometimes prompts are pushed onto us from everyday life, but maybe, just maybe, we occasionally prompt our unconscious mind consciously. Would that be free will?

When I write an essay, I have a brain function that works like ChatGPT. It generates text but as it comes into my conscious mind it feels like I, the viewer, created it. That’s an illusion. The watcher takes credit.

Over the past year or two I’ve noticed that my dreams are acquiring the elements of fiction writing. I think that’s because I’ve been working harder at understanding fiction. Like ChatGPT, we’re always training our mental model.

Last night I dreamed a murder mystery involving killing someone with nitrogen. For years I’ve heard about people committing suicide with nitrogen, and then a few weeks ago Alabama executed a man using nitrogen. My wife and I have been watching two episodes of Perry Mason each evening before bed. I think the ChatGPT feature in my brain took all that in and generated that dream.

I have a condition called aphantasia, that means I don’t consciously create mental pictures. However, I do create imagery in dreams, and sometimes when I’m drowsy, imagery, and even dream fragments float into my conscious mind. It’s like my unconscious mind is leaking into the conscious mind. I know these images and thoughts aren’t part of conscious thinking. But the watcher can observe them.

If you’ve ever played with the AI program Midjourney that creates artistic images, you know that it often creates weirdness, like three-armed people, or hands with seven fingers. Dreams often have such mistakes.

When AIs produce fictional results, the computer scientists say the AI is hallucinating. If you pay close attention to people, you’ll know we all live by many delusions. I believe programs like ChatGPT mimic humans in more ways than we expected.

I don’t think science is anywhere close to explaining how the brain produces the observer, that sense of I-ness, but science is getting much closer to understanding how intelligence works. Computer scientists say they aren’t there yet, and plan for AGI, or artificial general intelligence. They keep moving the goal. What they really want are computers much smarter than humans that don’t make mistakes, which don’t hallucinate. I don’t know if computer scientists care if computers have awareness like our internal watchers, that sense of I-ness. Sentient computers are something different.

I think what they’ve discovered is intelligence isn’t conscious. If you talk to famous artists, writers, and musicians, they will often talk about their muses. They’ve known for centuries their creativity isn’t conscious.

All this makes me think about changing how I train my model. What if I stopped reading science fiction and only read nonfiction? What if I cut out all forms of fiction including television and movies? Would it change my personality? Would I choose different prompts seeking different forms of output? If I do, wouldn’t that be my unconscious mind prompting me to do so?

This makes me ask: If I watched only Fox News would I become a Trump supporter? How long would it take? Back in the Sixties there was a catch phrase, “You are what you eat.” Then I learned a computer acronym, GIGO — “Garbage In, Garbage Out.” Could we say free will exists if we control the data, we use train our unconscious minds?

JWH

Reading Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five at Ages 18, 55, and 72

by James Wallace Harris, 2/8/24

When I first read Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut back in 1970 I thought of it as an antiwar novel. The Vietnam War overshadowed everything back then, and I was old enough to be drafted. 1970 was the year M.A.S.H. and Catch-22 came out in the movie theaters. I went to see Catch-22 and was so blown away that I bought the book, read it in a day, and then went to see the movie version again. I didn’t read the book version of M.A.S.H. for another year but saw the film in 1970 too. Ever since I’ve thought of Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22, and M.A.S.H. as the trilogy of anti-war novels of my generation. The books were all about hating war.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five again, in 2006 when I was 55, I listened it on audio. That time it was a completely different novel. That time it was hilarious. It was over-the-top silly, slapstick, and viciously satirical. At that time I focused on the Tralfamadorians and Kilgore Trout, and Vonnegut’s commentary on science fiction. In 2006 I noticed the antiwar parts, but they didn’t seem to be the primary point of the novel. They were still horrifying, but I found it hard to take Slaughterhouse-Five as a serious novel about WWII. That happened to me last year when I tried to reread Catch-22.

Now in 2024, when I’m 72, I listened to the book again. This time the story was bittersweet, heavy on the bitter, gentle on the sweet, and deeply philosophical. This time Slaughterhouse-Five was a condemnation of humanity. It was dark, very dark, but strangely not depressing. Both Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist, and Vonnegut were accepting that humans do horrible things and there is nothing we could do about it. This time it was obvious that Vonnegut believes we have no free will, and the best we can do in life is enjoy those moments when life is pleasant. This time around Slaughterhouse-Five was incredibly stoic.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five the first time I thought the main goal of the novel was to horrify readers that we bombed Dresden in 1945 and make them outraged. I thought Vonnegut was testifying to an Allied war crime. This time around I realized Vonnegut wasn’t doing that at all. He was completely accepting that we had to bomb Dresden.

I think both times before, I thought Billy Pilgrim was a stand-in for Vonnegut. However, this time it was quite explicit that Billy Pilgrim and Vonnegut were distinctly two different characters in the book. At the end of the audiobook, there was a ten-minute conversation between Vonnegut and another unnamed WWII vet. In that conversation Vonnegut even tells us the name of the man he based Billy Pilgrim on.

The vet Vonnegut was talking to kept trying to praise Vonnegut, and Vonnegut kept deflecting the compliments. But one thing the other guy said stood out. He said that all of Vonnegut’s books were in print because they have multigenerational appeal. Since I have read the book when I was young, middle aged, and old, I can attest to that.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five back in 1970, I thought the book was a protest. It was Vonnegut telling his readers that we need to change. And back then I thought humans could change. When I read it in 2006, I still had hope that humanity could evolve into something better. But in 2024, I didn’t find Vonnegut protesting at all. Vonnegut advised acceptance. Why didn’t I see that at 18?

Slaughterhouse-Five is neither an antiwar novel, nor even a misanthropic novel. In 2024 it seems obvious that Vonnegut was saying we have no choice but to accept the life we’re given, both as an individual and as a species.

Vonnegut was around 42 when Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969. How is it he now seems like a wise old man when I read it at 72 in 2024? Every time I read Slaughterhouse-Five I thought of Kurt Vonnegut as a modern-day Mark Twain. I was very into Twain when I was young, but I pictured him as a bitter old man from his later fiction and autobiography.

I wonder now if Vonnegut eventually turned bitter like Twain. Even though for the 2024 reading many scenes felt bitter, now that I write this, I’m not even sure that’s what Vonnegut intended. Could he have intended a total beatific point of view? I need to rewatch the 2021 documentary about Vonnegut called Unstuck in Time. And I need to read And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life by Charles J. Shields.

This time around I’ve been thinking more about the Tralfamadorians, the alien race who kidnaps Billy Pilgrim in a flying saucer and takes him to their home world where they exhibit him in a zoo. The Tralfamadorians don’t see time like we do. Existence is all of one piece.

These aliens are like Zen Masters. Vonnegut uses them as enlightened teachers. But then, he gives a rather pitiful assessment of science fiction with his portrayal of Kilgore Trout. However, in a later novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, where Kilgore Trout is again featured, its hero, Elliot Rosewater attends a science fiction convention and gives this speech.

Science fiction didn’t come across so positively in Slaughterhouse-Five. Kilgore Trout wrote dozens of books that never sell. He’s a surly old man who makes his living by managing paperboys. Billy Pilgrim finds Kilgore Trout’s books only by accident. One time he finds four of them in a porn bookstore used as window dressing.

Wikipedia has an illuminating entry on Kilgore Trout. It says Vonnegut based Kilgore on Theodore Sturgeon. I’ve always wanted to know more about Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon’s fiction suggests he’s both eccentric and beat.

There are certain writers that haunt me. I think Vonnegut is becoming one of the ghosts that I need to get to know a whole lot better. And I might need to give Catch-22 and M.A.S.H. another read too.

JWH