I have been writing a book for my grandchildren over the past decade or so. It is finally somewhat ready for "publication," and I have shared a link to it with all of them. I have no idea whether any of them have read it.
This is from the last chapter.
This is from the last chapter.
In the midst of all of this, reading and writing and paying attention - it sometimes seems overwhelming. As of the date I write this, 2024 06 11, we are facing the possibility of a nuclear winter over Ukraine and Russia, and the loss of our democracy with the “carrot topped” Republican narcissist being supported by his Republican toadies. I can understand that large portions of the populace are swept up in his tidal persuasiveness and fear of the “others.” But I cannot stand that the elected officials who should be above that are still bowing to his pressure to kill things like the border and immigration bill which would have funded enough border guards and judges to help FIX the problem. They are doing it to spite the Democrats, even if it means that a couple of million people are held in some terrible limbo. I CANNOT forgive them.
That said, I need a ray of hope, somewhere, from something. That is the purpose of this bit.
How we got here.
That said, I need a ray of hope, somewhere, from something. That is the purpose of this bit.
How we got here.
Let’s say it - LIFE is amazing. That there is any life at all in this vast universe of fire and stars and rocks and gas is just amazing. And that WE are here - living, sentient, intelligent beings that can grasp this, and can even attempt to move it forward - that is astounding.
AND YOU and I are here - alive. Thinking, breathing, loving - what a glorious privilege. Sheer chance, sheer luck. Thanks. Enjoy every minute of it. Make it last as long as you can. Live it as well as you can.
Genetics and Evolution
AND YOU and I are here - alive. Thinking, breathing, loving - what a glorious privilege. Sheer chance, sheer luck. Thanks. Enjoy every minute of it. Make it last as long as you can. Live it as well as you can.
Genetics and Evolution
The gradual evolution of our genetics got us here. It continues to try to improve us, but the pace is very slow. And the goal of our genes is not very uplifting - they just want more of us, more, more, more. The improvements that happen are purely accidental. The ones that survive support us generating more of our kind and keeping them around long enough to generate some more of us. Nothing rational about that - but it does work.
BUT we are not slaves to our genes. They accidentally made us intelligent enough to be able to STOP and THINK about it - but that is NOT what we are tuned for - so we have to take a conscious effort to actually THINK. Our brain can process 10 million bits a second to keep us up and running, to hold on to information that will help us, etc. That is all purely automatic and unconscious. Those life and death decisions are ALL from our gut, our emotions, our endocrine, our hormones. NO thinking required. The thinking part of our brain has about a fifty bit bandwidth. And it uses up a lot of energy that the genes would rather have us save up for emergencies.
So, thinking is something we have to learn, and work at, and improve. Mindfulness is a good first step as I have tried to point out in all of this ream of paper.
So, the emotions of having a child, the emotions of being a grandparent are all wonderful. They are geared to have us procreate and populate.
But the emotions from poetry, and music, and fiction, and science - those are things we acquire and learn. No one is born reading and writing. No one is born THINKING and holding good values. We have to create those. See next section.
Social Evolution
Evolution is a hit and miss and a bunch of gradual steps forward, and lots of failures. When we hit on something, like writing, it helps propagate us and move us forward. But it took us many thousands of years to get the writing thing from the elite priests and scribes down to the common person. And on occasion, we seem to forget that we need to TEACH our kids these things
Social values are the same. They do not arise naturally, any more than writing did. We stumble about and formulate some ideas using our fifty bits. We slowly learn that one approach is better than others - we formulate that as a moral principle, we encapsulate it in laws, and we try to enforce them. Slavery is a fine example. In ALL of human history prior to 1800, slavery was taken as a given. You lost the war, you were invaded, you are now our slave. We only know of a very few societies where slavery was considered unacceptable prior to 1850 or so. There were a few indigenous tribes in the Americas that held to that principle, despite the resistance of their neighbors. And this has nothing to do with race, and Africa and the Civil War. This was all of humankind.
The simple “right to life” is still debated in many parts of the planet. Prior to the British philosophers such as Locke and Hume, the lord, the master, the king could take anyone’s life for any pretext. Many countries still have that heuristic in place.
Personal property and ownership was another huge breakthrough for values. Freedom of speech is still being argued around the world. Freedom of assembly the same. The right to vote is still up for debate in most of our modern world. Ask anyone living in a developing country, a dictatorship, or even a RED state here in the grand old U.S.A. Belief in that basic principle is not that common.
The good news is that evolution at the social level will continue - provided we do not destroy the planet and ourselves in the process. Give us enough time, enough creative people, we will eventually figure out how this works. I am pretty sure that there are many books and treatises already published that have the exact steps and the exact details required to solve world hunger, poverty, injustice, and even global warming. We just need to figure out how to persuade the vast majority who are not really using their fifty bits.
AI Evolution
AND, lastly, this one. We have succeeded in making machines that are FASTER than we are in the fifty bits department for things like math, and reading, and writing, and research. We can use them to supplement our SLOW brains. I don’t know that we will ever get to the point that they can actually be creative and inventive, and hold to moral principles. Those things seem to require emotions and gut response - which seem almost impossible to replicate in silicon.
But they will assist our 50 bits to get some things done more quickly. There are problems that we can put them to which will help enormously. Weather is one. It is a complex mathematical puzzle, but there are identifiable PATTERNS in there that a really smart AI can identify better than we ever could.
I fearlessly predict that we will one day have the following scenario happen for every child entering preschool. AND, EVERY child will enter preschool. We really cannot wait until they are 5 years old to start teaching them to THINK. That is simply crazy. Every research study shows that early intervention and socializing and learning leads to much better outcomes for health and wellbeing and earning for all of life.
Preschool Scenario:
BUT we are not slaves to our genes. They accidentally made us intelligent enough to be able to STOP and THINK about it - but that is NOT what we are tuned for - so we have to take a conscious effort to actually THINK. Our brain can process 10 million bits a second to keep us up and running, to hold on to information that will help us, etc. That is all purely automatic and unconscious. Those life and death decisions are ALL from our gut, our emotions, our endocrine, our hormones. NO thinking required. The thinking part of our brain has about a fifty bit bandwidth. And it uses up a lot of energy that the genes would rather have us save up for emergencies.
So, thinking is something we have to learn, and work at, and improve. Mindfulness is a good first step as I have tried to point out in all of this ream of paper.
So, the emotions of having a child, the emotions of being a grandparent are all wonderful. They are geared to have us procreate and populate.
But the emotions from poetry, and music, and fiction, and science - those are things we acquire and learn. No one is born reading and writing. No one is born THINKING and holding good values. We have to create those. See next section.
Social Evolution
Evolution is a hit and miss and a bunch of gradual steps forward, and lots of failures. When we hit on something, like writing, it helps propagate us and move us forward. But it took us many thousands of years to get the writing thing from the elite priests and scribes down to the common person. And on occasion, we seem to forget that we need to TEACH our kids these things
Social values are the same. They do not arise naturally, any more than writing did. We stumble about and formulate some ideas using our fifty bits. We slowly learn that one approach is better than others - we formulate that as a moral principle, we encapsulate it in laws, and we try to enforce them. Slavery is a fine example. In ALL of human history prior to 1800, slavery was taken as a given. You lost the war, you were invaded, you are now our slave. We only know of a very few societies where slavery was considered unacceptable prior to 1850 or so. There were a few indigenous tribes in the Americas that held to that principle, despite the resistance of their neighbors. And this has nothing to do with race, and Africa and the Civil War. This was all of humankind.
The simple “right to life” is still debated in many parts of the planet. Prior to the British philosophers such as Locke and Hume, the lord, the master, the king could take anyone’s life for any pretext. Many countries still have that heuristic in place.
Personal property and ownership was another huge breakthrough for values. Freedom of speech is still being argued around the world. Freedom of assembly the same. The right to vote is still up for debate in most of our modern world. Ask anyone living in a developing country, a dictatorship, or even a RED state here in the grand old U.S.A. Belief in that basic principle is not that common.
The good news is that evolution at the social level will continue - provided we do not destroy the planet and ourselves in the process. Give us enough time, enough creative people, we will eventually figure out how this works. I am pretty sure that there are many books and treatises already published that have the exact steps and the exact details required to solve world hunger, poverty, injustice, and even global warming. We just need to figure out how to persuade the vast majority who are not really using their fifty bits.
AI Evolution
AND, lastly, this one. We have succeeded in making machines that are FASTER than we are in the fifty bits department for things like math, and reading, and writing, and research. We can use them to supplement our SLOW brains. I don’t know that we will ever get to the point that they can actually be creative and inventive, and hold to moral principles. Those things seem to require emotions and gut response - which seem almost impossible to replicate in silicon.
But they will assist our 50 bits to get some things done more quickly. There are problems that we can put them to which will help enormously. Weather is one. It is a complex mathematical puzzle, but there are identifiable PATTERNS in there that a really smart AI can identify better than we ever could.
I fearlessly predict that we will one day have the following scenario happen for every child entering preschool. AND, EVERY child will enter preschool. We really cannot wait until they are 5 years old to start teaching them to THINK. That is simply crazy. Every research study shows that early intervention and socializing and learning leads to much better outcomes for health and wellbeing and earning for all of life.
Preschool Scenario:
Every child is accompanied to a testing center at a really early age. This is some point after they have mastered the basic skill of understanding at least one language. You should be aware of the fact that most people outside of the Americas master 2 or more languages by age 2. They cannot avoid it when their town or tribe speaks one tongue, and their nation has adopted another one.
Before the test starts, the clinician takes a tiny drop of blood from a finger, and puts it into the DNA analysis port. The child is fitted with a set of goggles, much like the Apple Glass or VisionPro. They are shown some interesting and fun videos. As they are watching the videos, the device is carefully tracking and calibrating their eye movements. I am going to bet that the process may take an hour or two when we start, but that we will get it down to something like ten minutes after some practice. They will also have a sensor placed on their finger or wrist which also tracks things like heart rate, skin resistance, temperature, etc.
This may be coupled to an MRI scanner as we start doing these things, but that eventually will be replaced by the simple eye scan device.
The headset is removed, and the machine sends to the parents an electronic report in the form of various graphs or spectrums. We know that humans are all very different. Our brains, our genes, our history, our experiences are all different. When we look at things, videos, pictures, words, each of us actually see those things slightly differently. Our taste or smell is very different as well. Some of us love cilantro or kale, and others find it bitter or soap like.
Our emotional reaction to things is also very different. Each of these traits has a kind of bell curve. The majority of people for almost any trait fall in the broad middle range. A few fall out on both ends, lower and higher. The graphs will show about where this child falls in each of these realms. We can measure some things today, and we will rapidly learn to measure others - especially using our DNA as well as our eyesight response.
Of course our brains are also very plastic. With the right intention and assistance, we can move our point on that graph or spectrum in either direction. Normally, without some biological intervention, most of our measurable traits cannot be moved a great distance in either direction - but they can be moved. We are not forever stuck with the genetic propensity we were born with - just kind of constrained.
This gives us a starting point for this one person. Some skills rank higher or lower. Others are just different. For example, we have a fairly robust way of measuring the skill that people have in taking written tests - we call it IQ. It can be high or low, but most of us are in the middle. It is somewhat helpful to have a grasp of where we fall on the spectrum. Where you stand on any spectrum is useful information.
Our DNA spectrum is also helpful. If you have a clear propensity for heart disease, knowing that will provide you with additional courage to take the steps required to offset that fact. I do in fact have this propensity, and I am working on it. The risk of some other diseases like cancer and Alzheimers also seems to have a genetic basis. It is very helpful to know that early on.
We need a way to measure the other abilities and propensities that are part of us, from our DNA as well as our environment. I am thinking of a starter list of this type:
Thanks! Love you all! I hold you all in my heart - forever!
Before the test starts, the clinician takes a tiny drop of blood from a finger, and puts it into the DNA analysis port. The child is fitted with a set of goggles, much like the Apple Glass or VisionPro. They are shown some interesting and fun videos. As they are watching the videos, the device is carefully tracking and calibrating their eye movements. I am going to bet that the process may take an hour or two when we start, but that we will get it down to something like ten minutes after some practice. They will also have a sensor placed on their finger or wrist which also tracks things like heart rate, skin resistance, temperature, etc.
This may be coupled to an MRI scanner as we start doing these things, but that eventually will be replaced by the simple eye scan device.
The headset is removed, and the machine sends to the parents an electronic report in the form of various graphs or spectrums. We know that humans are all very different. Our brains, our genes, our history, our experiences are all different. When we look at things, videos, pictures, words, each of us actually see those things slightly differently. Our taste or smell is very different as well. Some of us love cilantro or kale, and others find it bitter or soap like.
Our emotional reaction to things is also very different. Each of these traits has a kind of bell curve. The majority of people for almost any trait fall in the broad middle range. A few fall out on both ends, lower and higher. The graphs will show about where this child falls in each of these realms. We can measure some things today, and we will rapidly learn to measure others - especially using our DNA as well as our eyesight response.
Of course our brains are also very plastic. With the right intention and assistance, we can move our point on that graph or spectrum in either direction. Normally, without some biological intervention, most of our measurable traits cannot be moved a great distance in either direction - but they can be moved. We are not forever stuck with the genetic propensity we were born with - just kind of constrained.
This gives us a starting point for this one person. Some skills rank higher or lower. Others are just different. For example, we have a fairly robust way of measuring the skill that people have in taking written tests - we call it IQ. It can be high or low, but most of us are in the middle. It is somewhat helpful to have a grasp of where we fall on the spectrum. Where you stand on any spectrum is useful information.
Our DNA spectrum is also helpful. If you have a clear propensity for heart disease, knowing that will provide you with additional courage to take the steps required to offset that fact. I do in fact have this propensity, and I am working on it. The risk of some other diseases like cancer and Alzheimers also seems to have a genetic basis. It is very helpful to know that early on.
We need a way to measure the other abilities and propensities that are part of us, from our DNA as well as our environment. I am thinking of a starter list of this type:
- IQ.
We tend to treat the upper end of this spectrum as a positive thing, not an illness. But nothing about it tells us something good or bad about the individual - it just gives us a map of their propensity in this one narrow ability. It seems to measure the ability to take written tests or "logical" reasoning. - Emotional Intelligence.
We need a better spectrum for this rather than just up and down. This is a complex set of stuff, and different people have different strengths or weaknesses in it. Sometimes we use it to refer to “common sense.” Other times we are talking about control over our emotional state. Those are very different attributes. - Mathematics / Dyscalculia.
I have always maintained that I have “mathaphobia.” I just can’t get it. I can work around it, but there is nothing in me that does math. I also know that there is at least one other disability called Dyscalculia because I spent several weeks trying to help a third grader who clearly was suffering from this. His problem was much worse than mine. One of my grandsons seems to excel at this. It might have been helpful if he had been aware of that at a younger age. - Autism vs empathy.
We tend to think of just the one end of this scale, where we treat it as a problem. But it is a broad spectrum, and the other end might also be a problem - we just do not have a name for it. Some people are highly tuned by their physiology to recognize the empathic signals that we all send all the time. The most amazing thing I have learned of late is that there are methods for moving people on this spectrum toward the norm - for good or ill. Someone with Asperger’s may be a brilliant mathematician, but unable to detect that their partner has a concern or problem. There are exercises, and apparently brain stimulations that can “correct” this, but it may also remove the exceptional skill as well. - Psychopathy vs Super Feeling.
Today we treat psychopathy as some sort of problem. It is a spectrum of skill or ability. There are very “normal” people who are psychopaths. They do not share the empathic vibrations that the majority of us have. I trust that there are people on the other end of that spectrum that have them in spades - even to the point that they find it to be a problem. A psychopath who is raised in a supportive, caring environment can be a very productive member of our society. There is a reason that evolution included them in the mix. They tend to be more risk taking, adventurous and the like. We need a few of them to help us over that next ridge. See James Fallon, the Neuroscientist who discovered he was a psychopath.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscientist-who-discovered-he-was-a-psychopath-180947814/
We need a better name for this - “path” is from the Greek for suffering. Maybe PsychoLess / PsychoFull. AND in this one, I would put the LESS one to the left - just saying. - Learning Style.
This is not a left and right one - but a multiple choice. Some of us learn best by listening / auditory, some by visual / reading, some by talking / conversing, or physical / writing. There may be other styles as well. - Conservative / Progressive.
There is some genetic propensity in each of us on this spectrum. Scientists have already developed eye scans which can detect this. Watching a video, people tend to pay more attention to different parts of it depending on their propensity to be conservative or progressive. Let me be clear, both tendencies are in all of us - they are not good or bad - they just ARE. And they are not predictors - just propensities. - Independent / hierarchical.
We also differ on how much we need oversight and a strong leadership structure, or how much we favor independence or “freedom.” There is a fairly strong genetic component to this, which can be moved about by training and experience. We are still pretty plastic. - Analytical.
I am not clear on the two ends of this spectrum, but I know I am one of the analytical ones. I cannot see a problem or even a clock without wanting seriously to see how it works. My lovely wife could care less about how it does stuff inside. The same is true for most parts of our world. She is simply IN it, and I am trying to dismantle it. - Tribal / Individual.
We ARE tribal - some more than others. I seem to have less of this propensity than anyone I know - but that has not been formally measured as yet. - Individual / Collective.
I think there is some genetic proclivity to this, but there is a lot of social conditioning as well, as it changes radically in different cultures. - Gender.
This one clearly seems to be a much broader spectrum than we ever imagined. I am pretty sure it is mostly in the genes, and I do not think we actually have any way to measure it yet, but I am confident we will eventually figure that out. - Artistic / Spatial.
I KNOW this is a measurable skill or ability. One of my sons has it in spades. My wife has one that is totally different, and I seem bereft of the thing. - Conflict.
I am on the extreme spectrum of this one, and I do not think it is genetic. In my case, this is from my childhood conditioning. But one or my brothers seemed to end up on the other end of the same scale. - Critical Thinking.
I am pretty sure that NO ONE is born with great skill at this, and that it simply must be acquired through learning. We might be able to come up with a test to measure how good one is at it - but it is a learned skill - not an inborn talent. And it is indeed critical. Most of us make decisions from our uncritical gut, most of the time. We have to ramp this up to really make some progress. - OTHERS.
I am sure we will come up with a whole panoply of these. We will have to narrow it down to the ones that are really useful - meaning the ones where we can tailor the learning and education to best assist the individual.
Thanks! Love you all! I hold you all in my heart - forever!
© Copyright 2024 Carl Scheider
