Morality, Religion & Philosophy: May 2009 Archives

Goliath beats David almost every time, unless David breaks the rules and defies convention.

David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.

In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”

Lots of anecdotes at the link, including an AI angle!

(HT: RB.)

Chiense human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng has been missing for more than 100 days, probably having been kidnapped again by Chinese authorities.

On September 12, 2007, Christian human rights attorney Gao Zhisheng wrote an open letter to the U.S. Congress exposing the brutality of the Communist Party, including the persecution of house church Christians.

Soon after, Gao was kidnapped by Chinese government authorities and tortured for 58 days. Officials threatened to kill him if he ever exposed the details of his torture. Gao Zhisheng refused to be intimidated into silence -- he continued to speak out about human rights abuses by China's ruling Party. Determined to silence him, government officials kidnapped him again on February 4, 2009.

Gao Zhisheng has now been missing for more than 100 days. He was last seen being hauled away by Chinese officials.

Gao and other Chinese Christians who are facing brutal persecution every day. Pray for their safety and perseverance, and that their suffering would magnify Christ as the gospel.

Rodney Brooks is a giant in the field of artificial intelligence. I think he's an atheist and he may not like the direction I'll take his thoughts about human culture and chimpanzees, but oh well.

The child is never as good as the human mother thinks it is. The mother keeps doing things with the kid, that the kid isn't quite capable of. She's using whatever little pieces of dynamics are there, getting them into this more complex behavior, and then the kid learns from that experience, and learns those behaviors. We found that humans can't help themselves; that's what they do with these systems such as kids and robots. The adults unconsciously put pieces of the kid's or robot's dynamics together without thinking. That was a surprise to us - that we didn't have to have a trained teacher for the robot. Humans just do that. So it seems to me that what makes us human, besides our genetic makeup, is this cultural transferral that keeps making us human, again and again, generation to generation.

Of course it's involved with genetics somehow, but it's missing from the great apes. Naturally raised chimpanzees are very different from chimpanzees that have been raised in human households. My hypothesis here is that the humans engage in this activity, and drag the chimpanzee up beyond the fixed point solution in chimpanzee space of chimpanzee to chimpanzee transfer of culture. They transfer a bit of human culture into that chimpanzee and pull him/her along to a slightly different level. The chimpanzees almost have the stuff there, but they don't quite have enough. But they have enough that humans can pull them along a bit further. And humans have enough of this stuff that now a self-satisfying set of equations gets transferred from generation to generation. Perhaps with better nurturing humans could be dragged a little further too.

The idea here is aesthetically pleasing: humans can pull chimps a little further into intelligence by teaching them some human culture that the chimps couldn't develop or transfer on their own. The final sentence (emphasis mine) is striking to me because it's an elegant elucidation of the essence of revelatory religion.

Christianity believes that humans can only get "so far" left to our own devices, but that by transferring some of God's "culture" to ourselves we can get a lot farther. We can't come up with it on our own, but we're capable of learning a bit of what God reveals to us and improving ourselves thereby.

I've been toying around with the idea of discrete and objective categorizations of intelligence levels, and here's what I've come up with. The criteria for each level is essentially defined by a capability to comprehend various concepts. Let's jump in and you'll see what I mean.

Level 0: Unintelligent -- Just about everything falls into this category. Rocks, trees, fungi, stars, virii, and most animals. Unintelligent objects may be living or non-living, but are essentially bundles of blind natural processes that progress without any intentionality or agency.

Level 1: Self-aware -- A few animals seem to be self-aware, and many humans fit into this category. Self-aware objects are implicitly "alive" almost by definition: if a non-living object (e.g., a computer) were to exhibit self-awareness it would be considered to be "alive" by a significant proportion of undisputedly living beings. Self-aware beings understand the general nature of their own existence, consider themselves (and other intelligent beings) as distinct individuals set apart from the unintelligent objects that make up most of the universe, and are capable of intentional behavior and agency.

Level 2: Ignorance-aware -- Ignorance-aware beings are capable of comprehending the enormity of the gulf between their own intelligence and the level 3 intelligence of universe-aware beings. Although some humans are exclusively level 1 beings, most have rare "flashes of brilliance" and exhibit transient level 2 intelligence. Ignorance-aware beings understand how much about the universe remains unknown and unknowable to them regardless of the time and study they devote to the pursuit of knowledge.

Level 3: Universe-aware -- Universe-aware beings are capable of comprehending every aspect of the universe, given enough time and study. Implicitly then, a universe-aware intelligence is the most complex object in the universe, able to know and understand everything that exists (including itself). For the sake of the theory, let's set aside the question of whether it is possible for the universe to contain more than one level 3 intelligence (i.e., if there were two, could they understand each other?).

I've interjected my own opinion of how humans fit into these categories: generally level 1, with transience into level 2. Others would probably argue that humans are level 3 intelligences and capable of understanding everything, given enough time. A weaker form of this belief is that human civilization as a whole is a level 3 intelligence: even if no single human can understand everything, groups of humans working together can eventually comprehend the universe and ourselves. (Let's say, then, this weaker belief puts humans in a new category we shall call level 2.5.)

It's possible that the weaker belief is true and that humans are level 2.5; this is a classic halting problem that can never be satisfied. Who's to say that when we think we "know it all" that something new won't pop up in 1000 years? Or worse, what if we think we "know it all" but aren't even smart enough to recognize that there's still something about which we remain in ignorance? That would bump us all the way back down to level 1 without us even realizing it!

I see no reason to believe that the level of intelligence of the human brain is high enough to comprehend every aspect of the universe. Call the level of intelligence of a dog A, the level of intelligence of a human B, and the level 2.5 intelligence X. Few people would argue that A > X. Therefore, those who believe that B > X need to provide some explanation for why X just happens to fall between A and B:

B > X > A

Since we won't ever be able to prove or demonstrate that B > X, it would at least be nice to hear an argument for why anyone would believe such a thing. I personally believe that B < X, but I'm not sure why yet.