Quantum Consciousness: Orch-OR Is Better Supported Experimentally Than Any Other Theory Of Consciousness

oxford |  The Penrose-Hameroff ‘Orchestrated objective reduction’ (‘Orch OR’) theory suggests consciousness arises from ‘orchestrated’ quantum superpositioned oscillations in microtubules inside brain neurons. These evolve to reach threshold for Penrose ‘objective reduction’ (‘OR’) by E=h/t (E is the gravitational self-energy of the superposition/separation, h is the Planck-Dirac constant, and at the time at which Orch OR occurs) to give moments of conscious experience. Sequences, interference and resonance of entangled moments govern neurophysiology and provide our ‘stream’ of consciousness. Anesthetic gases selectively block consciousness, sparing non-conscious brain activities, binding by quantum coupling with aromatic amino acid rings inside brain proteins. Genomic, proteomic and optogenetic evidence indicate the microtubule protein tubulin as the site of anesthetic action. We (Craddock et al, Scientific Reports 7,9877, 2017) modelled couplings among all 86 aromatic amino acid rings in tubulin, and found a spectrum of terahertz (‘THz’) quantum oscillations including a common mode peak at 613 THz. Simulated presence of 8 different anesthetics each abolished the peak, and dampened the spectrum proportional to anesthetic potency. Non-anesthetic gases which bind in the same regions, but do not cause anesthesia, did not abolish or dampen the THz activity. Orch OR is better supported experimentally than any other theory of consciousness.

Human Supremacy Alert : Urgently Repeating Myself for Slow Cats...,

PNAS |  Most technologies are made from steel, concrete, chemicals, and plastics, which degrade over time and can produce harmful ecological and health side effects. It would thus be useful to build technologies using self-renewing and biocompatible materials, of which the ideal candidates are living systems themselves. Thus, we here present a method that designs completely biological machines from the ground up: computers automatically design new machines in simulation, and the best designs are then built by combining together different biological tissues. This suggests others may use this approach to design a variety of living machines to safely deliver drugs inside the human body, help with environmental remediation, or further broaden our understanding of the diverse forms and functions life may adopt.  

ABSTRACT

Living systems are more robust, diverse, complex, and supportive of human life than any technology yet created. However, our ability to create novel lifeforms is currently limited to varying existing organisms or bioengineering organoids in vitro. Here we show a scalable pipeline for creating functional novel lifeforms: AI methods automatically design diverse candidate lifeforms in silico to perform some desired function, and transferable designs are then created using a cell-based construction toolkit to realize living systems with the predicted behaviors. Although some steps in this pipeline still require manual intervention, complete automation in future would pave the way to designing and deploying unique, bespoke living systems for a wide range of functions.

Most modern technologies are constructed from synthetic rather than living materials because the former have proved easier to design, manufacture, and maintain; living systems exhibit robustness of structure and function and thus tend to resist adopting the new behaviors imposed on them. However, if living systems could be continuously and rapidly designed ab initio and deployed to serve novel functions, their innate ability to resist entropy might enable them to far surpass the useful lifetimes of our strongest yet static technologies. As examples of this resistance, embryonic development and regeneration reveal remarkable plasticity, enabling cells or whole organ systems to self-organize adaptive functionality despite drastic deformation (1, 2). Exploiting the computational capacity of cells to function in novel configurations suggests the possibility of creating synthetic morphology that achieves complex novel anatomies via the benefits of both emergence and guided self-assembly (3).

Currently, there are several methods underway to design and build bespoke living systems. Single-cell organisms have been modified by refactored genomes, but such methods are not yet scalable to rational control of multicellular shape or behavior (4). Synthetic organoids can be made by exposing cells to specific culture conditions but very limited control is available over their structure (and thus function) because the outcome is largely emergent and not under the experimenter’s control (5). Conversely, bioengineering efforts with 3D scaffolds provide improved control (6⇓–8), but the inability to predict behavioral impacts of arbitrary biological construction has restricted assembly to biological machines that resemble existing organisms, rather than discovering novel forms through automatic design.

Meanwhile, advances in computational search and 3D printing have yielded scalable methods for designing and training machines in silico (9, 10) and then manufacturing physical instances of them (11⇓–13). Most of these approaches employ an evolutionary search method (14) that, unlike learning methods, enables the design of the machine’s physical structure along with its behavior. These evolutionary design methods continually generate diverse solutions to a given problem, which proves useful as some designs can be instantiated physically better than others. Moreover, they are agnostic to the kind of artifact being designed and the function it should provide: the same evolutionary algorithm can be reconfigured to design drugs (15), autonomous machines (11, 13), metamaterials (16), or architecture (17).

Here, we demonstrate a scalable approach for designing living systems in silico using an evolutionary algorithm, and we show how the evolved designs can be rapidly manufactured using a cell-based construction toolkit. The approach is organized as a linear pipeline that takes as input a description of the biological building blocks to be used and the desired behavior the manufactured system should exhibit (Fig. 1). The pipeline continuously outputs performant living systems that embody that behavior in different ways. The resulting living systems are novel aggregates of cells that yield novel functions: above the cellular level, they bear little resemblance to existing organs or organisms.

Do We REALLY Have a Long Way to Go and a Short Time to Get There?

bbc |  At the start of the 2010s, one of the world leaders in AI, DeepMind, often referred to something called AGI, or "artificial general intelligence" being developed at some point in the future. 

Machines that possess AGI - widely thought of as the holy grail in AI - would be just as smart as humans across the board, it promised. 

DeepMind's lofty AGI ambitions caught the attention of Google, who paid around £400m for the London-based AI lab in 2014 when it had the following mission statement splashed across its website: "Solve intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else."

Several others started to talk about AGI becoming a reality, including Elon Musk's $1bn AI lab, OpenAI, and academics like MIT professor Max Tegmark. 

In 2014, Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, went one step further with his book Superintelligence. It predicts a world where machines are firmly in control.

But those conversations were taken less and less seriously as the decade went on. At the end of 2019, the smartest computers could still only excel at a "narrow" selection of tasks. 

Gary Marcus, an AI researcher at New York University, said: "By the end of the decade there was a growing realisation that current techniques can only carry us so far."

He thinks the industry needs some "real innovation" to go further.

"There is a general feeling of plateau," said Verena Rieser, a professor in conversational AI at Edinburgh's Herriot Watt University. 

One AI researcher who wishes to remain anonymous said we're entering a period where we are especially sceptical about AGI. 

"The public perception of AI is increasingly dark: the public believes AI is a sinister technology," they said. 

For its part, DeepMind has a more optimistic view of AI's potential, suggesting that as yet "we're only just scratching the surface of what might be possible".

"As the community solves and discovers more, further challenging problems open up," explained Koray Kavukcuoglu, its vice president of research.

"This is why AI is a long-term scientific research journey.

"We believe AI will be one of the most powerful enabling technologies ever created - a single invention that could unlock solutions to thousands of problems. The next decade will see renewed efforts to generalise the capabilities of AI systems to help achieve that potential - both building on methods that have already been successful and researching how to build general-purpose AI that can tackle a wide range of tasks."

Human Supremacy - A New Political Axis of Man's Possible Development?

jacobin |  Populism involves the exclusion of elements from society not considered a part of the “people,” usually cultural “others” and the ambiguously defined “elites” or “anti-nationals.” A nationalist populist discourse, as in the Indian case, differentiates between who belongs to the nation and who does not. Hindutva’s “people” is imagined as a religious and ethno-cultural Hindu community which excludes Muslims and liberal elites.

In addition to delimiting the authentic “people,” this form of populism typically relies on a leader who claims to be the sole representative of the people and the embodiment and authority of the popular will. Modi is a paradigmatic example of such a leader.

At an event hosted by the Indian diaspora in Houston, the “Howdy Modi?” rally, Modi’s answer to the rhetorical question was revealing: “Modi is nothing by himself. I am only a common man working on the orders of 1.3 billion people. So, when you ask, ‘Howdy Modi?’ I can only answer, ‘everything in Bharat is good.’” Despite the pretensions of humility, Modi understands the populist logic well: to ask the question how is Modi is precisely to ask how is the nation.

Additionally, this form of populism is a political style which involves a whole repertoire of staged, mediatized performances by the leader that are transmitted to wider audiences through media. Part of the performative rhetoric of such populist leaders centers around some kind of a pervasive crisis or threat. With Modi and the BJP, there is ever present specter of “Urban-Naxals,” “terrorists,” “anti-nationals,” “Tukde-Tukde Gang,” and “Khan Market Gang,” all of whom are portrayed as trying to undermine the integrity of the nation, and in effect polluting the purity of the people.

Does the Symbolism at Gobekli Tepe Correlate with Asterisms?

phys.org |  A team of researchers with the University of Edinburgh has found what they describe as evidence of a comet striking the Earth at approximately the same time as the onset of the Younger Dryas in carvings on an ancient stone pillar in southern Turkey. The group has published their findings in the journal Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry. 

Prior evidence based on ice cores taken from Greenland has suggested that a strike by a comet may have led to the onset of the Younger Dryas—a period of Earth cooling that lasted for approximately 1000 years. Other evidence also suggests that the cooling period caused groups of people to band together to cultivate crops, leading to the development of agriculture, which in turn led to huge leaps in technological innovations and societal developments, i.e. Neolithic civilization. In this new effort, the researchers describe evidence they found on a stone pillar at Gobekli Tepe (the oldest known temple site) that aligns with the ice core findings—that a comet struck the Earth in approximately 10,950BC.

The pillar was created by the people of Gobekli Tepe and now appears to have served as a means of commemorating a devastating event—perhaps a comet breaking up and its remnants crashing into the Earth, causing an immediate environmental impact around the globe and possible loss of life (one of the characters on the pillar was of a headless human.) The team fed likenesses of the images carved onto the pillar (known as the vulture stone) into a computer to determine if they might be linked with constellations. Doing so revealed associations between characters on the pillar and astronomical symbols in the sky for the year 10,950 BC. The fact that the people took the time and considerable effort to create the characters on the pillar suggests something very important must have happened during the same time period that the Greenland ice core suggests a comet struck, approximately 10,890BC.

We have interpreted much of the symbolism of Göbekli Tepe in terms of astronomical events. By matching low-relief carvings on some of the pillars at Göbekli Tepe to star asterisms we find compelling evidence that the famous 'Vulture Stone' is a date stamp for 10950 BC ± 250 yrs, which corresponds closely to the proposed Younger Dryas event, estimated at 10890 BC. We also find evidence that a key function of Göbekli Tepe was to observe meteor showers and record cometary encounters. Indeed, the people of Göbekli Tepe appear to have had a special interest in the Taurid meteor stream, the same meteor stream that is proposed as responsible for the Younger-Dryas event. Is Göbekli Tepe the 'smoking gun' for the Younger-Dryas cometary encounter, and hence for coherent catastrophism? 

Juxtaposition and Superimposition Show What Became of the Original Americans...,

Not a repeat - it starts at a specific part of the video - so just click it.

nautil.us |  What’s more, a flickering flame in the cave may have conjured impressions of motion like a strobe light in a dark club. In low light, human vision degrades, and that can lead to the perception of movement even when all is still, says Susana Martinez-Conde, the director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Ariz. The trick may occur at two levels; one when the eye processes a dimly lit scene, and the second when the brain makes sense of that limited, flickering information. 

Physiologically, our eyes undergo a switch when we slip into darkness. In bright light, eyes primarily rely on the color-sensitive cells in our retinas called cones, but in low light the cones don’t have enough photons to work with and cells that sense black and white gradients, called rods, take over. That’s why in low light, colors fade, shadows become harder to distinguish from actual objects, and the soft boundaries between things disappear. Images straight ahead of us look out of focus, as if they were seen in our peripheral vision. The end result for early humans who viewed cave paintings by firelight might have been that a deer with multiple heads, for example, resembled a single, animated beast. A few rather sophisticated artistic techniques enhance that impression. One is found beyond the Hall of Bulls, where the cave narrows into a long passage called the Nave.

High on the Nave’s right wall, an early artist had used charcoal to draw a row of five deer heads. The images are almost identical, but each is positioned at a slightly different angle. Viewed one at a time with a small circle of light moving right to left, the images seem to illustrate a single deer raising and lowering its head as in a short flipbook animation. 

Marc Azéma, a Paleolithic researcher and filmmaker at the University of Toulouse in France, has studied dozens of examples of ancient images that were meant to imply motion and has found two primary techniques that Paleolithic artists used to do this. The first is juxtaposition of successive images—the technique used for the deer head—and the second is called superimposition. Rather than appearing in sequence, variations of an image pile on top of one another in superimposition to lend a sense of motion. Superimposition can be seen in caves across France and Spain, but some of the oldest examples come from Chauvet cave in France’s Ardèche region. Burned wood and charcoal streaks along Chauvet’s walls indicate that campfires and pine torches lit the cave.

How Old is Original Human Civilization?

holdmyark |  Located in south-western Arnhem land Australia is a stone monument that was created by the aboriginal Australians 50,000 years ago. A part of Jawoyn country, Nawarla Gabarnmung is an incredible example of engineering a rock shelter not seen elsewhere at this period of time in ancient history. Meaning, “hole in the rock”, “passageway”, or “valley open from the centre” by the Jawoyn people, Nawarla Gabarnmung is a sacred and protected site. Jawoyn Elder, Margaret Katherine, has the responsibility of safe guarding this very special place today. The Jawoyn people have only allowed ‘Gabarnmung’ to be studied in recent years. Margaret explains how sharing knowledge with blackfullas, and whitefullas is important.

The work completed at Gabarnmung by these ancient engineers may not have required the precise mathematics to build a great pyramid, but still valued math and the intelligent knowledge of working with stone for a great length of time. The shelter was constructed by tunneling into a naturally eroded cliff face. The roof is 1.75m to 2.45m above floor level, supported by 50 pillars created by the natural erosion of fissure lines in the bedrock. 36 pillars were painted. Some pre-existing pillars were removed, some were reshaped and some moved to new positions. In some areas ceiling slabs were removed and repainted by the ancient Jawoyn people who used the shelter.

This [hole in the wall] ‘monument’ contains a historical gallery of rock art and some of the oldest full paintings in the world. Also a historical recording of human history like many other sites in the Arnhem Land area of Australia. The Artwork at Gabarnmung rivals the paintings found in France and Spain. Noting that most dates for Rock Art are questionable, so are those greater dates now suggested for France and Spain[65,000 years]

The significance of the Gabarnmung rock art is in the amazing detail. These mystifying and intriguing images demonstrate the experience of the Jawoyn Artists. The people and culture still being here today to help tell the story is what makes the works of art much more alive. The many examples found in rock painting across Australia over the past 200 years explains how the Original people have been painting since the earliest times in human History. A few years ago Smithsonian wrote an article making these comparisons of Gabarnmung:

If science can offer something to the Jawoyn, the Jawoyn have something to offer science. “We don’t have anyone to explain Chauvet Cave to us. In France, these are sites with no memory, no life. With Gabarnmung, we are lucky. There is the living culture, the memories. The Jawoyn can help us build a new knowledge.” Jean-Michel Geneste

“ Like the Sistine Chapel, the ceiling of the expansive rock shelter was a mural of breathtakingly vivid and bold works of art – hundreds of them. And the paintings extended up and down 36 remarkable sandstone columns that, like the pillars of a temple, appeared to support the cave”

DNC True Knot Cannot Devour Tulsi's Shining

Politico |  “She sort of seems to be filling a pretty strange lane. Is there a part of the party that hates the party?” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “It’s a little hard to figure out what itch she’s trying to scratch in the Democratic Party right now.” 

The Hawaii congresswoman’s presence on the debate stage is becoming a headache for the party as she uses the platform to appeal to isolationists, dissatisfied liberals and even conservatives. She has managed to secure a spot on the debate stage as more mainstream candidates like Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) and Gov. Steve Bullock (D-Mont.) failed to meet polling and donor thresholds to participate. 

Gabbard met with Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2017 and has repeatedly attacked Clinton’s foreign policy views, grating on Democrats who’ve broadly supported the center-left international platform of Democrats in recent decades. 

“She has views on foreign policy that are so outside the mainstream as to be a real liability to the Democratic Party,” said another Democratic senator, who requested anonymity to candidly discuss the party’s issue with Gabbard. “It is corrosive to have folks on that stage who represent views that are clearly not right.” 

Gabbard’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

While Gabbard isn’t exactly gaining traction in the polls, she does appear to have a loyal following. The vast majority of her support comes from male voters, according to FiveThirtyEight. She’s also more likely to attract support from Democratic primary voters who supported President Donald Trump in 2016, according to a November poll from The Economist/YouGov. 

 

When It Comes, Tulsi Won't Even Notice...,

washingtonexaminer |  The Democratic establishment despises the insurgent candidacy of Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. From her decision to buck party orthodoxy and endorse Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016 over Democratic National Committee favorite Hillary Clinton, to her constant criticisms of Democratic foreign policy mistakes, Gabbard has made herself no friends with the party elite. She's perfectly fine with that if it's required to put the people first. 

Still, this means establishment Democrats and their allies regularly smear and attack the Democratic congresswoman. But, as if we need more proof of how deranged the establishment’s hatred for Gabbard has become, the New York Times style section is now criticizing her… wardrobe? 

In a piece titled “Tulsi Gabbard’s white pantsuit isn’t winning,” Times style writer Vanessa Friedman savages the congresswoman for her choice of wardrobe. Friedman correctly notes that Gabbard has made the white pantsuit her defining campaign look, wearing the iconic outfit in most of the debates and much of her prominent campaign promotional material. 

Yet where Friedman goes seriously, sinisterly wrong is arguing that the look isn’t working, and sinking into deranged, hypocritical attacks on the congresswoman. Friedman argues that when Hillary Clinton wore white pantsuits, it was feminist and iconic, but when Gabbard does it, she is “using her white suits to tap into another tradition, latent in the public memory: the mythical white knight, riding in to save us all from yet another ‘regime change war.’” 

It gets worse. Friedman continues that Gabbard’s white pantsuits are “the white of avenging angels and flaming swords, of somewhat combative righteousness,” and the white of “cult leaders.” Friedman writes that Gabbard’s wardrobe “has connotations of the fringe, rather than the center.”

Very Interested in These Lost Red-Headed Stepchildren....,

ineteconomics |  Under the shadow of a future darkened by climate crises, political instability, inequality, and super-human machines, how to best proceed? For some, the answer is more technology and scientific advancement; for others, better policies and political arrangements. Or some combination of these. 

Not enough, warns Jeremy Lent, author of The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning. First we’ll need to confront something deep in our psyches that prods us toward destruction. 

To get at that something, Lent traces a “cognitive history” of the human species in a book delivering big, sweeping ideas and a discipline-hopping approach drawing from neuroscience, archaeology, linguistics, and systems theory, the study of complex living systems. 

Lent argues that how we view the world arises out of language, specifically core metaphors that shape our values and culture, which in turn mold history in a reciprocal feedback loop. Cultural templates are often long lasting, but can also shift dramatically, sometimes in a generation or two. The process of cultural evolution, Lent observes, determines how well humans fare as much as the genes we inherit (there’s a feedback loop between culture and genes, too). 

As Lent sees it, you and I are in the midst one of history’s great transitions — a process which could lead to conditions far less hospitable for most, or even a total collapse of global civilization. To avoid these dire fates, we can train our brains to adopt alternative metaphors that allow us to live less destructively. 

So which metaphors are causing the trouble? For one, Lent faults a tendency to conceive a dualistic universe of binary categories, like mind and matter, reason and emotion, self and other. This framework, as the postmoderns observed, drives us to favor one category over the other and to build societies based on hierarchy and separation. 

The pattern is not universal: Lent presents evidence that early hunter-gatherers emphasized connectivity rather than separation, a mindset that engendered a more egalitarian social structure. (Unfortunately, they also lived by a metaphor of nature as an endlessly giving parent, resulting in problems like overhunting, which illustrates that even seemingly harmless metaphors can eventually lead to catastrophe).

To What Extent is Color a Physical Thing in the Physical World?

bbc | Depending on what language you speak, your eye perceives colours – and the world – differently than someone else. The human eye can physically perceive millions of colours. But we don’t all recognise these colours in the same way. 

Some people can’t see differences in colours – so called colour blindness – due to a defect or absence of the cells in the retina that are sensitive to high levels of light: the cones. But the distribution and density of these cells also varies across people with ‘normal vision’, causing us all to experience the same colour in slightly different ways. 

Besides our individual biological make up, colour perception is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colours to create something meaningful. The perception of colour mainly occurs inside our heads and so is subjective – and prone to personal experience.

Take for instance people with synaesthesia, who are able to experience the perception of colour with letters and numbers. Synaesthesia is often described as a joining of the senses – where a person can see sounds or hear colours. But the colours they hear also differ from case to case.

Another example is the classic Adelson’s checker-shadow illusion. Here, although two marked squares are exactly the same colour, our brains don’t perceive them this way.

Since the day we were born we have learnt to categorise objects, colours, emotions, and pretty much everything meaningful using language. And although our eyes can perceive thousands of colours, the way we communicate about colour – and the way we use colour in our everyday lives – means we have to carve this huge variety up into identifiable, meaningful categories.

Painters and fashion experts, for example, use colour terminology to refer to and discriminate hues and shades that to all intents and purposes may all be described with one term by a non-expert.

Optimizing the Human Supply Chain

nakedcapitalism |  No, though this is about as good — and as neoliberal — as it gets (even though the phrase “human supply chain” is not used). I don’t agree that “The key to any market correctly operating is information.” For one thing, “correctly” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. For another, the key to the way markets operate is not information, but power. I mean, does Prepscius really believe that “reputational enhancement…, risk mitigation[,] and workforce retention” pose “significant business value” when put beside profit?

All of which brings me to the single, solitary on-point source I was able to find: Fordham’s Jennifer Gordon’s “Regulating the Human Supply Chain,” 446 Iowa Law Review, Vol. 102:445-503 (pdf)[5]. I highly recommend that anybody who has read this far give Gordon a look. From the abstract:

In 2015, the number of migrant workers entering the United States on visas was nearly double that of undocumented arrivals—almost the inverse of just 10 years earlier. Yet notice of this dramatic shift, and examination of its implications for U.S. law and the regulation of employment in particular, has been absent from legal scholarship.

This Article fills that gap, arguing that employers’ recruitment of would-be migrants from other countries, unlike their use of undocumented workers already in the United States, creates
a transnational network of labor intermediaries—the “human supply chain”—whose operation undermines the rule of law in the workplace, benefitting U.S. companies by reducing labor costs while creating distributional harms for U.S. workers, and placing temporary migrant workers in situations of severe subordination. It identifies the human supply chain as a key structure of the global economy, a close analog to the more familiar product supply chains through which U.S. companies manufacture products abroad. The Article highlights a stark governance deficit with regard to human supply chains, analyzing the causes and harmful effects of an effectively unregulated world market for human labor.

That’s the stuff to give the troops! And here is a worked example, from page 472 et seq. I apologize for the length, but it’s lovely because all of the links in the chain are displayed:

B. WHERE HUMAN AND PRODUCT SUPPLY CHAINS MEET: AN EXAMPLE
B. WHERE HUMAN AND PRODUCT SUPPLY CHAINS MEET: AN EXAMPLE
Apple Fresh is a (fictitious) apple cider maker in Washington State…. Like all employers, Apple Fresh is responsible for ensuring that its employees’ wages, benefits, and working conditions comport with legal and contractual minimums. It must also pay social-security premiums on its employees’ behalf and cover their unemployment and workers’ compensation insurance. … As part of its effort to meet those demands, Apple Fresh decides to outsource its apple pressing to one of several food processors in the market, Presser Inc., which can produce the cider more cheaply and efficiently. Once it signs a contract with Presser, Apple Fresh is released from responsibility for the social insurance and many of the working conditions of the workers who press its apples, because it is no longer their employer. Presser now bears those obligations. …
In year two of the contract, Presser decides to try to decrease turnover and increase its profit margin by using temporary migrant workers to staff its plant. Its owner had been contacted not long before by the U.S. agent of a labor-recruitment firm in Mexico City…

Oooh, lookie. Rent-seeking intermediaries!

MindSmash Pipes Up Into The Digital Catheter...,

endgadget |  The new replay tools offered in PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds are so much more than standard video-capture technology. In fact, it isn't video capture at all -- it's data capture. The 3D replay tools allow players to zoom around the map after a match, tracking their own character, following enemies' movements, slowing down time and setting up cinematic shots of their favorite kills, all within a 1-kilometer radius of their avatar. It's filled with statistics, fresh perspectives and infinite data points to dissect. This isn't just a visual replay; it's a slice of the actual game, perfectly preserved, inviting combatants to play God.

PUBG is an ideal test case. It's a massively popular online game where up to 100 players parachute onto a map, scavenge for supplies, upgrade weapons and attempt to be the last person standing. Even though it technically came out in December, PUBG has been available in early access since March and it's picked up a considerable number of accolades -- and players -- in the process. Just last week, SteamDB reported PUBG hit 3 million concurrent players on PC, vastly outstripping its closest competitor, Dota 2, which has a record of 1.29 million simultaneous players.

Part of PUBG's success stems from developers' relentless focus on making the game fun to watch. Live streaming is now a major part of the video-game world, with sites like Twitch and YouTube Gaming growing in prominence and eSports bursting into the mainstream.

Kim says PUBG creator Brendan Greene and CEO Chang Han Kim built the idea of data-capture into the game from the beginning, and Minkonet's tech is a natural evolution of this focus. Minkonet and PUBG developers connected in late 2016 and started working together on the actual software earlier this year.

"One of their first visions was to have PUBG as not just a great game to play, but a great game to watch," Kim says. "So they were already from the very beginning focused on having PUBG as a great live streaming game; esports was also one of their sort of long-term visions."

Hating These Humans Is The Easiest Thing To Do...,

nautil.us |  Considerable evidence suggests that dividing the world into Us and Them is deeply hard-wired in our brains, with an ancient evolutionary legacy. For starters, we detect Us/Them differences with stunning speed. Stick someone in a “functional MRI”—a brain scanner that indicates activity in various brain regions under particular circumstances. Flash up pictures of faces for 50 milliseconds—a 20th of a second—barely at the level of detection. And remarkably, with even such minimal exposure, the brain processes faces of Thems differently than Us-es.

This has been studied extensively with the inflammatory Us/Them of race. Briefly flash up the face of someone of a different race (compared with a same-race face) and, on average, there is preferential activation of the amygdala, a brain region associated with fear, anxiety, and aggression. Moreover, other-race faces cause less activation than do same-race faces in the fusiform cortex, a region specializing in facial recognition; along with that comes less accuracy at remembering other-race faces. Watching a film of a hand being poked with a needle causes an “isomorphic reflex,” where the part of the motor cortex corresponding to your own hand activates, and your hand clenches—unless the hand is of another race, in which case less of this effect is produced.

The brain’s fault lines dividing Us from Them are also shown with the hormone oxytocin. It’s famed for its pro-social effects—oxytocin prompts people to be more trusting, cooperative, and generous. But, crucially, this is how oxytocin influences behavior toward members of your own group. When it comes to outgroup members, it does the opposite.

The automatic, unconscious nature of Us/Them-ing attests to its depth. This can be demonstrated with the fiendishly clever Implicit Association Test. Suppose you’re deeply prejudiced against trolls, consider them inferior to humans. To simplify, this can be revealed with the Implicit Association Test, where subjects look at pictures of humans or trolls, coupled with words with positive or negative connotations. The couplings can support the direction of your biases (e.g., a human face and the word “honest,” a troll face and the word “deceitful”), or can run counter to your biases. And people take slightly longer, a fraction of a second, to process discordant pairings. It’s automatic—you’re not fuming about clannish troll business practices or troll brutality in the Battle of Somewhere in 1523. You’re processing words and pictures, and your anti-troll bias makes you unconsciously pause, stopped by the dissonance linking troll with “lovely,” or human with “malodorous.”

We’re not alone in Us/Them-ing. It’s no news that other primates can make violent Us/Them distinctions; after all, chimps band together and systematically kill the males in a neighboring group. Recent work, adapting the Implicit Association Test to another species, suggests that even other primates have implicit negative associations with Others. Rhesus monkeys would look at pictures either of members of their own group or strangers, coupled with pictures of things with positive or negative connotations. And monkeys would look longer at pairings discordant with their biases (e.g., pictures of members of their own group with pictures of spiders). These monkeys don’t just fight neighbors over resources. They have negative associations about them—“Those guys are like yucky spiders, but us, us, we’re like luscious fruit.”

Thus, the strength of Us/Them-ing is shown by the: speed and minimal sensory stimuli required for the brain to process group differences; tendency to group according to arbitrary differences, and then imbue those differences with supposedly rational power; unconscious automaticity of such processes; and rudiments of it in other primates. As we’ll see now, we tend to think of Us, but not Thems, fairly straightforwardly.

Cruelty Is The American Way

Counterpunch |  With the Senate and House all but assured to pass the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for businesses, investors, and the wealthiest 1% households by the end of this week, phases two and three of the Trump-Republican fiscal strategy have begun quickly to take shape.

Phase two is to maneuver the inept Democrats in Congress into passing a temporary budget deficit-debt extension in order to allow the tax cuts to be implemented quickly. That’s already a ‘done deal’.

Phase three is the drumbeat growing to attack social security, medicare, food stamps, medicaid, and other ‘safety net’ laws, in order to pay for the deficit created by cutting taxes on the rich. A whole new set of lies are resurrected and being peddled by the media and pro-business pundits and politicians.

Counterpunch |  Pay no attention to the ongoing palace intrigue. Mueller’s investigation will at most act as a speed bump of sorts. Don’t mistake symptoms for the disease. Should the President or one of his minions be dismissed they will almost certainly be replaced by another donor class proxy. There’s no shortage of political mercenaries (in either party) willing to ply us with carefully crafted distortion.

Despite internecine squabbles the majority of lawmakers in congress can all agree on more military spending, more surveillance, more money for corporate executives… and less for everyone else. And so a parade of talking heads trot out the usual pleasant fiction about trickle-down economics. And it is fiction. Corporate leaders have openly conceded they have no intention of creating jobs or raising wages with money attained through tax cuts. They’re simply going to take it and pass it on to their shareholders.

This is what happens when business interests call the shots. Society ends up in a place where three oligarchs own as much as the bottom half of society and allegations of Russian “interference” somehow overshadow the reality of a billion dollar presidential race which is funded heavily by concentrated sources of private power.

Counterpunch |  By associating success (e.g. physical, emotional, financial, etc.) with evolutionary value, this ideology ignores historical structures of power and inequality and distorts the public’s understanding of their true conditions.

When people come to believe individuals’ conditions are determined solely by their genetics, or by how hard they fight to survive, impoverished people are seen as lacking the abilities or motivation to reach a privileged place in society, while privileged people are seen as having the abilities which brought them their success.

The origin and history of this phrase, which understandably misleads people, explains why there is this deep-seeded psychological inclination to equate “fittest” to the best.

The phrase is often and incorrectly attributed to the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, and though Darwin did use this language later in his life, the phrase was actually coined by Herbert Spencer — an English philosopher, sociologist, and social Darwinism’s most enthusiastic proponent.

Spencer believed that Darwin’s biologic theory of evolution could be applied to society, arguing that social transformation was a progressive process leading to more perfect human beings and social formations. He claimed that if people should struggle or die because of their conditions, it was because they were not biologically fit enough to achieve a better position in life.

“The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better … If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die” [10]. He used this system of thought to theorize about the evolutionary benefits of warfare and to justify a laissez faire approach to the economy as well.

Prominent American philosophers, theologians, scientists, and politicians espoused and popularized Spencer’s ideas. Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was the richest man in America, and Edward Youmans, the founder of the magazine Popular Science, were among his American admirers. “Successful business entrepreneurs apparently accepted almost by instinct the Darwinian terminology which seemed to portray the conditions of their existence.” [6]

Countless instances of social Darwinist messaging can still be observed in our media. Publications like The Economist (where Spencer was once an editor), The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, provide examples of this.

Subrealist Theology of a Red Door

So..., having meditated for quite a long time on degeneracy this year, I was more primed and ready to explode on the #MeToo trope than little Rocket Man's spanking new MIRV.  Not that I sincerely give a rat's nasty little flea-ridden patootty about the foolishness and phuckery of peasants - or even middle and upper class strivers peasants with a couple of nickels to rub together for that matter - I don't.

Above the gossipy fray, I don't care about the underlying gender/power disparities, or, virtue-signalling intersectional alliance with the oppressed either.  It's simply not part of my psychic constitution to care about the high-minded retelling of what amount to high-school style antics. The nekkid goings-on of chronologically grown-folk whose psychological development can best be described as de-evolutionary arrested, is of little interest to me.

Simple critter that I am, at the reptile-brain level of engagement, it all comes down to my very weakly resisted inclination to wallow in schadenfreude. I am a glutton for the vicarious enjoyment of watching other despicable apes get ripped to shreds on the plains of the popular-cultural serengeti by various and sundry wildly enflamed letgo beasts. I've been needing to go to confession six times a day for the past couple of months because of the obsessive and compulsive nature of my abiding and overarching enjoyment of this spectacle.

On the meta-level, i.e., philosophically above the sticky fray, what I care most deeply about is individual sovereignty and the associated requisite science and methodology of asymmetrical violation of the established order. If you haven't figured this out about me yet, if you haven't identified my "chief-feature" as it were, let me spell it out for you. I have a profound, all-consuming, and irrational problem with authoriteh.

This has not only been my career-limiting professional modus operandi, pared of all guise and dissimulation, it is truly my religion. It has been this way for me since about the age of eleven, when a phenomenal sunday school teacher encouraged me to question any and everything. This encouragement was permanently crystallized and violentized in my psyche at twelve when I first rebelled against peer authoriteh and beat the literal shit out of an arrogant neighborhood bully. (I would link to this buffoon, but I see he's still alive and never made it out of Wichita)

Anyway, as best I can gather, this current, energetic eruption of rule-breaking in polite society all started when the late Si Newhouse decided to go laughing to his grave by profoundly deviating  from the established behavioral norms of the Trans-American Protectorate (now archived) - by publishing Ronan Farrow's expose on the disgusting degenerate rape-pig Harvey Weinstein. Publication of that story in The New Yorker amounted to detonation of a nuclear grenade of asymmetric, unintended consequences. 

Said grenade has cracked an American cultural dam. Not only did it unleash the pent-up gender-flood from the oppressed and long-offended feminine-striver masses in entertainment/media/politics - it also unexpectedly unleashed the genuinely oppressed rage of the deplorables still rightfully and righteously angered over the cultural and moral pass given to serial rapist William Jefferson Clinton. 

Now, which camp will keep the very hot fires of this cultural moment burning - remains to be seen.  Whether the fires rise up to the Impyrian heights of the multi-billionaire TAP elites who are earnestly warring among themselves remains to be seen. That it's forced its way onto teevees all across America and is the hot potato that will determine the outcome of the Alabama senatorial special election - does not yet give us a clear indication of whether this moment will engulf, scorch, and shred all the really big killer-apeswho fundamentally have no game and need to get righteously burned. Meanwhile, I'll continue wallowing in schadenfreude and enjoying every single instance of yet another despicable ape getting shredded and scorched out'chere on these fields of dystopian sorrow....,

Matthew 20:16

wearyourvoicemag  |  My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thing-ification.” – Aimé Césaire 

The use of social media as a powerful tool for free education on various topics continually rises, with definitions, experiential narratives, and resources being shared through Twitter threads, short videos, Facebook statuses, and even memes. And while this is a mostly positive phenomena, there seems to be a trend of words, and thus words’ associated theories, being used misguidedly. 

Often, this is a simple case of fighting character limits and the loss of nuance that occurs through online mediums, and other times it seems a phenomena of genuine miseducation and confusion. Words like intersectionality, decolonize, imperialism, socialism, and other loaded terms that come with decades of jargon are at times applied to everything, and their actual meaning is lost. 

Observing this pattern is what lead me to the idea of an article series titled “Words Mean Things,” wherein each month I choose a different word and discuss the theories, uses, theorists, examples, applications, and praxis surrounding it. The goal is to do this as concisely as possible and, understanding these will never be wholly conclusive of all definitions, applications, and examples of certain words, to deliver small primers that exist as resources to lead readers to study deeper. I often say that words mean everything, and then anything, just before meaning nothing.

Colonialism

Colonialism is a system of land occupation and theft, labor exploitation, and/or resource dependency that is to blame for much of our modern concepts of racialization. It is an act of dominance in which a forceful state overtakes a “weaker” state; this means that colonization is the act of forcefully stripping sovereignty of a country through acquisition of land, resources, raw material, and governmental structures. Systems of colonialism are based in notions of racial inferiority, as they as they perpetuate white/European domination over non-white colonial subjects. 

The most obvious (and broad) example of colonialism is the expansion of Europe into Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the subsequent creation of colonies. Through violence and manipulation, a relationship of control and influence was exerted economically, socially, politically, religiously, and culturally. In Jamaica, for example, the British empire invaded and colonized the island in the mid-17th Century, and subsequently established British colonial school systems, laws and regulations creating dependency on Britain, and pushed European gender, religious, and wardrobe norms onto the society.

There are various forms of colonialism and colonial projects, but all involve some form of domination, control, and/or influence on an indigenous population through violence and/or manipulation. It is also important to note that these various forms of colonialism often intersect and overlap, too. In his 1972 essay “Discourse On Colonialism,” one of the most important pieces of writing I have ever read, writer Aimé Césaire states:

“Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a class-room monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.”

Unintended Consequences of #MeToo Viral Weaponization

medium  |  Human civilization is made of rape. For millennia, all over the world, women have been commodified and kept as property for the purpose of receiving male reproductive fluids and raising their progeny, regardless of our will. During this time we were kept at home while men invented religion, money, economics, war, government, hierarchy, class, culture, rules, laws and traditions, including the laws of the marital bed. Civilization has been arranged so that each man receives a woman to own, with whom he may have sex whenever he wishes, between building, fighting, destroying and conquering in accordance with the will of whatever ruler happened to be running the show at the time.

This is only just now beginning to change. A woman’s will for her own sexuality is only just now becoming culturally relevant, a blink of an eye from a historical perspective.

Spousal rape was not considered a crime in all 50 states until 1993, and there are still seven states where there is a marital exception to certain sex crimes. The full anatomy of the clitoris wasn’t recognized by western science until 1998. The G-spot was given its name in the 1980s after a male gynecologist, Ernst Gräfenberg, who spent time in the 1940s studying the stimulation of the urethra. Birth control pills kill sexual desire. A third of women reported pain in their last sexual experience. There is a little-known, virtually unresearched and untreatable condition called vulvodynia that causes such intense nerve pain that some women consider suicide, and it is more common than breast cancer.

Just sit with that. A third of women reported pain in their last sexual experience. They didn’t just not enjoy it, they gritted their teeth through it. Why? Because for a myriad of reasons, we don’t feel like we have a choice. That’s rape culture.

Given that interest in a woman’s will for her own sexuality is just barely beginning to enter social consciousness on a large scale, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that it is only just now in 2017 that sharing our experiences with rape culture is beginning to go mainstream.

Rape dynamics are woven into the fabric of society far more pervasively than anyone realizes, and by pulling this thread, the whole mad tapestry will necessarily unravel. This can only be a good thing.

Our species is at a crossroads. It’s become self-evident that we’re about to either collectively experience some kind of enormous transformation, or go the way of the dinosaur. Parallel to our unprecedented ability to network and share information and ideas with our fellow humans all around the globe is a death march toward either ecosystemic disaster or nuclear holocaust which so far shows no signs of slowing down, and one of these two factors will necessarily win out at some point in the near future. Thus far our attempts to shift trajectories have failed spectacularly. If something is going to save us, it’s going to come from way out of left field.

Women everywhere feel the significance of the #MeToo phenomenon. A lot of us are scared to say anything about it for fear of hurting the feelings of the men we love, fear of retribution, and fear of being eaten alive by the intimidating, debate-culture defenders of patriarchy, but there’s a widespread sense that this thing is much bigger than it seems. Some leaders of conventional feminist thought have been speculating about some kind of progressive political upheaval, but in my opinion this is infinitely more revolutionary than that. We are about to experience a plunge into completely unknown and uncharted territory.

Only Baptism By Cleansing Blue Fire...,

countercurrents |  Gandhi was a so called "high caste". High castes represent a small minority in India, some 10-15% of the population, yet dominate Indian society in much the same way whites ruled South Africa during the official period of Apartheid. Dalits often use the phrase Apartheid in India when speaking about their problems.

 

The Indian Constitution was authored by Gandhi's main critic and political opponent, Dr.Ambedkar, for whom our journal is named and the first Dalit in history to receive an education (if you have never heard of Dr. Ambedkar I would urge you to try and keep an open mind about what I am saying for it is a bit like me talking to you about the founding of the USA when you have never heard of Thomas Jefferson).

Most readers are familiar with Gandhi's great hunger strike against the so called Poona Pact in 1933. The matter which Gandhi was protesting, nearly unto death at that, was the inclusion in the draft Indian Constitution, proposed by the British, that reserved the right of Dalits to elect their own leaders. Dr. Ambedkar, with his degree in Law from Cambridge, had been choosen by the British to write the new constitution for India. Having spent his life overcoming caste based discrimination, Dr. Ambedkar had come to the conclusion that the only way Dalits could improve their lives is if they had the exclusive right to vote for their leaders, that a portion or reserved section of all elected positions were only for Dalits and only Dalits could vote for these reserved positions.

Gandhi was determined to prevent this and went on hunger strike to change this article in the draft constitution. After many communal riots, where tens of thousands of Dalits were slaughtered, and with a leap in such violence predicted if Gandhi died, Dr. Ambedkar agreed, with Gandhi on his death bed, to give up the Dalits right to exclusively elect their own leaders and Gandhi ended his hunger strike.Later, on his own death bed, Dr. Ambedkar would say this was the biggest mistake in his life, that if he had to do it all over again, he would have refused to give up Dalit only representation, even if it meant Gandhi's death. 

As history has shown, life for the overwhelming majority of Dalits in India has changed little since the arrival of Indian independence over 50 years ago. The laws written into the Indian Constitution by Dr. Ambedkar, many patterned after the laws introduced into the former Confederate or slave states in the USA during reconstruction after the Civil War to protect the freed black Americans, have never been enforced by the high caste dominated Indian court system and legislatures. A tiny fraction of the "quotas" or reservations for Dalits in education and government jobs have been filled. Dalits are still discriminated against in all aspect of life in India's 650,000 villages despite laws specifically outlawing such acts. Dalits are the victims of economic embargos, denial of basic human rights such as access to drinking water, use of public facilities and education and even entry to Hindu temples.

To this day, most Indians still believe, and this includes a majority of Dalits, that Dalits are being punished by God for sins in a previous life. Under the religious codes of Hinduism, a Dalits only hope is to be a good servant of the high castes and upon death and rebirth they will be reincarnated a high caste. This is called varna in Sanskrit, the language of the original Aryans who imposed Hinduism on India beginning some 3,500 years ago. Interestingly, the word "varna" translates literally into the word "color" from Sanskrit.

This is one of the golden rules of Dalit liberation, that varna means color, and that Hinduism is a form of racially based oppression and as such is the equivalent of Apartheid in India. Dalits feel that if they had the right to elect their own leaders they would have been able to start challenging the domination of the high castes in Indian society and would have begun the long walk to freedom so to speak. They blame Gandhi and his hunger strike for preventing this. So there it is, in as few words as possible, why in todays India the leaders of India's Dalits hate M.K. Gandhi.

Dutertism: Imperial Economics Collide With Post-Imperial Politics

Counterpunch |  History may have come to an embarrassing end in the centres of the Empire but not in it’s remote regions. As the great Egyptian analyst Samir Amin points out in a recent Monthly Review essay: it is in the periphery of the global system where the great political and social storms occur.

Why? Because history is still fluid there. The battle for and against the transformation of the system still resonates there. Whereas the stagnant centres of the system are dealing with the pathetic aftermath of modernity – on the edges: modernity is still being born and still being strangled.

In other words, the weakest links in the global chain of capitalism best reveal what the hell is going on. And what’s going to happen next. Therefore if you want to gauge the system forget about New York or London or Paris and head to places like the Philippines.

Before Rodrigo Duterte was elected Filipino President last year no one gave a damn about the country. It was just assumed to be an American puppet. Another one that is full of poverty. But overnight this perception changed. A significant political storm emerged from within the Filipino archipelago that forced the world to adjust its vision.

Within days of Duterte’s election the Empire was forced on the back foot, as he insisted on Filipino sovereignty. Ironically he did this by acknowledging China’s position in the South China Sea. Refusing to take the American bait (war on China) the new President of the Philippines quickly defused one of the world’s most dangerous confrontations.

For this diplomacy alone, Duterte deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. However the Empire and even some Filipino progressives, like Walden Bello, were frustrated by this outbreak of peace in the South China Sea.

For committing “the crime of peace” on the international stage Duterte became a figure of hate for liberal imperialists everywhere. And on cue, liberals suddenly cared about life in the Philippines. From being an ignored entity before the advent of Duterte – Filipino life became front page news in New York, London and Paris. Liberal cynicism went into overdrive and felt the need, for geopolitical reasons, to demonise yet another Third World leader.