I excitedly read the lively responses to my previous post soliciting input around clips pulled from the Philoctetes Center’s 2007 panel discussion on the field of neuroeconomics. Thank you everyone and please keep them coming. The comments definitely opened up new, related avenues of inquiry; so if you haven’t popped over to have a look, please do here. Cliff Gomes and I continue to explore the D-Cent map, which features moral economies, artificial intelligence, programmable community tokens, the commons, and yes – neuroeconomics. If you want to explore this “labyrinth” here’s the link. It continues to evolve as I fold in new stories based on material I find. I really appreciate all you commenters who have pointed me in interesting directions.
Cliff and I posted an initial discussion on part of the map a few days ago. We began by revisiting our first “labyrinth talk” that centered the “outside-in” robot where AI learns us and nudges us towards “good behavior.” You can watch that installment here. Our second conversation focused on how the stories we listen to, get entangled with, and choose to inhabit affect our lives in significant ways. Once we have this awareness it becomes easier to notice how outside influences, including sophisticated mathematical models, are being used to try and shape our inner dialogue. We consider how the “outside-in” robot might work with digital education systems to condition young children to accept a manufactured “reality” suited to anti-life machines. What role will mental health professionals play in prescribing the “evidence-based” social adjustments that will be required to get people to acquiesce?
These are the remaining clips that I had pulled from the panel discussion. You can listen to the full talk here or my 45-minute highlight compilation here. Remember that Bernie Madoff was in the audience. This was pre-Ponzi scheme implosion. Again, I invite you to listen to a couple of these short (2-4 minute) excerpts. I picked comments that should elicit reflection / reaction.
Consider how vastly expanded data flows and supercomputing will be used to create extremely granular prediction models – adding rationality – for all sorts of purposes.
What might a use case be for a “generalized neural theory of human behavior”?
What might a fitness landscape for post-humanism look like? Will there be agency if we land in a future where AI plays Moriarty to our Sherlock Holmes? What would it feel like to inhabit a world where all the important decisions we make are essentially reduced to a series of coin tosses? This clip is longer – 7 minutes.
Can you imagine with DNA sequencing and managed group behavior what “cultural transmission” or contagion might look like in the future? Will DNA analysis be relevant for avatar life? Could it be used to “tune” the heterodyned transmissions we receive through our material bodies?
Consider the implications of the fact that the pioneering researcher in neuroeconomics holds E.O. Wilson, sociobiologist, as his hero.
Back in 2007 people were already positing the utility of behavioral data to inform financial markets. That’s Madoff in the black shirt on the left side of the image.
Others were pointing out that data could be used for totalitarian control.
In our next talk Cliff and I hope to explore utility function, fitness landscapes, convergence, slime mold, space colonization, derivatives trading while continuing to consider how stories told to children influence how they navigate the world. That’s probably why we shouldn’t let the Reasoning Mind Genie be their learning companions, eh?
The more I learn about the agendas of the predator globalist technocrats, the more repelled and disgusted I get and the more furious and rebellious I feel.
I would rather die than be a robotized slave of megalomaniac control freak psychopath overlords.
Clip 1: Our human nature is basically IRRATIONAL and our thoughts and actions are colored by emotions and subconscious tremors. We could say that rationality is a byproduct emerging from that inner chaos. We still remain unpredictable and that they don’t like. How they’re going to add rationality to our behavior and even our thoughts? Beyond behavior change techniques (NLP, Nudging, Gamification, etc), they are working on more invasive technologies to makes conform to what has been established as a model of perfect cyborg behavior grounded on mathematical purity, and I talk about cyborg because the unseen part of the consciousness iceberg is what makes us HUMAN.
Agreed. I’m working on a new part of the map that centers the Templeton Foundation and Fetzer Institute’s funding of research into the “neuroscience of free will.” They’ve also been backing the development of “spiritual capital,” as in the free market kind, for the past 15 or so years through the Metanexus Institute here in Philadelphia. Very disturbing.
https://www.metanexus.net/archive/spiritualcapitalresearchprogram/award_release.asp.html
https://metanexus.net/history/
The deployment of Digital Twins of the Costumer (DToC) and Digital Twins in general requires a generalized neural theory of human behavior if the objective is accurate predictions in the digital simulations.
https://ttecdigital.com/articles/how-a-digital-twin-of-a-customer-can-inform-stronger-customer-experiences-in-retail
I just re-watched and edited down the Google Selfish Ledger “leak” from 2016. I think the idea of an AI using a digital twin to create and price a bespoke data extraction device is pretty much what they are saying in your link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oe2nZzCakhw
The ‘Totalitarian Tool’ clip indicates to me the importance of always speaking our Truth.
The round-table participants started to look very uneasy & weak during this exchange, they wither when confronted by anything out of their Overton Window.
Definitely. At the end of the day we are still human. Removing plausible deniability is sometimes the best we can do.
Clip 5:
It doesn’t surprise me at all since both E. O. Wilson and David Sloan Wilson (Human Energy) are members of team “group natural selection” and that’s the position embraced by the people who are pursuing the acceleration (ephimeralization) of the technological trends that lead to the emergence of the global brain. The political/philosophical stance underlying the worldview that relegates “individual natural selection” is one rooted in iuspositivism, i. e. the law theory that dismiss the idea of inalienable rights inherent to our human nature and gives the State the faculty of grant only temporary prerogatives to the citizens. Iuspositivism is pure social engineering and brings to my mind the efforts that are being carried to elaborate and put into practice a new science of guided self-organization. Ultimately I think that these people think they can artificially direct cultural evolution by creating swarms with “covert leaders” (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261091900_Modeling_and_Analyzing_Large_Swarms_with_Covert_Leaders) that would seed the “collective consciousness” grounded in PROSOCIAL behavior as proposed by David Sloan Wilson and his team (https://www.prosocial.world/) using “the most recent developments in evolutionary biology, complex systems, and contextual behavioral science.”
I think these quote from “The Global Superorganism:
an evolutionary-cybernetic model of the emerging network society” by Francis Heylighen is relevant in this context: “To explain the emergence of human society, for me the most compelling mechanism seems to be cultural conformism or “meme selfishness” (Campbell, 1982; Heylighen, 1992b; Heylighen & Campbell, 1995): if a cultural norm (“meme”) prescribing altruism manages to spread over a group, conformist pressures will make it very difficult for would-be “free riders” to deviate from that norm. Since different groups in general follow different norms, there will be a cultural group selection promoting the more altruist norms, which have the strongest benefit to the group as a whole. Stewart (1997) has proposed a more general mechanism, where a “manager” (which may be a dominant individual, a subgroup, or a cultural norm) takes control of a group for selfish purposes, to appropriate part of the group’s production, but undergoes selection for promoting altruistic behavior within the group: groups whose manager does not efficiently suppress cheating and free riding will be less productive, and thus their manager will be less fit.”
It seems that Memetics is the weapon of choice to install the “collective consciousness” in multiple swarms globally distributed, ranging from little groups on Twitter to “Network States.”
«I feel there’s a hurry to deploy all these technologies and methodologies because they want to trigger ASAP the HUMAN METASYSTEM TRANSITION from what they see as a very defective management of the Commons by nation-states to an optimized state of governance by a Global Brain Regime. «Qualitatively, Internet experience itself is likely to change dramatically, as advances in artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and semantic web technologies will likely alter the way humans interact with each other, and with computers (Goertzel 2002). These quantitative and qualitative developments combined could result in an Internet at full maturity that acts as a self-organizing ‘planetary nervous system’ (Giannotti et al. 2012)or ‘global brain’ (Heylighen 2014), facilitating all intelligent agent interaction all the time (Goertzel 2002; Heylighen 2008). Such a communication medium would emerge from increasing Internet use, increasing access to the Internet, and the development of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) (Atzori et al. 2010; Kopetz 2011; Kortuem et al. 2010; Rifkin 2014; Sahel and Simmons 2011).»
(Quoted from the book Global Brain Singularity by Cadell Last).
As a SUPERORGANISM this METASYSTEM needs a self-healing system and that means one of the next steps in this project of guided self-organization is the emergence of a planetary INMUNE SYSTEM for GAIA. And this is what scares me the most: how would function such a system to get rid of “viruses, mold or bacteria” that could endanger the integrity of this global monster? Of course we who do not consent will be the “pathogens.”
Totalitarian tool:
Indeed neuroeconomics as wrench in the toolbox of WORLDBUILDERS of culture is a totalitarian tool.
“The increasing complexity of interactions and instability of certain processes caused by reduced friction necessitate a strengthening of society’s capacity for information processing and control, i.e. its nervous system. This is realized by the creation of an intelligent global computer network, capable of sensing, interpreting, learning, thinking, deciding and initiating actions: the “global brain”. Individuals are being integrated ever more tightly into this collective intelligence. Although this image may raise worries about a totalitarian system that restricts individual initiative, the superorganism model points in the opposite direction, towards increasing freedom and diversity.”
Francis Heylighen
But how the hell could flourish “individual initiative” or “freedom and diversity” in a Metasystem that’s being engineered bottom-up through guided self-organization?
The idea of a society as an autopoietic system is TOTALITARIAN in itself because we human individuals are seen only as “components” of a larger whole, not as unique and irrepetible manifestations in this world. If individuals have no intrinsic value aside of mere disposable parts of a giant Superorganism then a CULL is always around the corner… For the “common good.”
Makes me reflect again on Orson Scott Card’s book “Xenocide” and the language of a virus that keeps life on the plant simple with few species allowed to live and it being needed for the life cycle of those few inhabitants – a protein-based homeostatic tool. Very concerning in light of re-reading Julian Huxley’s framing of the UNESCO charter, which laid out the Global Brain / Omega Point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenocide
https://wrenchinthegears.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/UNESCO_-its-purpose-and-its-philosophy-UNESCO-Digital-Library.pdf
I am excited to be going to Tucson later this month. Found again Hameroff’s book on quantum consciousness and nano-tech from 1987. Need to sit with this more. https://web.archive.org/web/20150522054651/https://www.quantumconsciousness.org/sites/default/files/Ultimate%20Computing.pdf
I didn’t know “How the Bleep?” Stuart Hameroff had a book about nanotech. Thanks for the link. By the way, all of this stuff about Noosphere, Global Brain and Transhumanism has its roots on Occult Science, Magick and Hermeticism; David Livingstone and Joseph Farrell make a compelling case about in their books on that topic. But for me, the smoking gun of this ascendancy can be clearly seen on a book written by Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson titled “The Game of Life.” In this books the authors present a “map” of human evolution based on the Tarot and Leary’s Eight Circuit Model of the Brain. F. M. Esfandiary (FM-2030) had a great influence on these group of Chaotes and Thelemites gathered around C. S. Hyatt.
https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=A1B23B5B51D638998685AC00B9A1DB6A
Clip 3:
The fitness landscape for post-humanism would probably look like this:
https://global.frost.com/story/transhumanism/page/7/1