From: jdr@starflight.Corp.Sun.COM (Jon Roland)
Newsgroups: alt.society.futures
Subject: Re: Overcoming Human Limits
Date: 30 Jul 1992 03:57:39 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Distribution: world
Reply-To: jdr@starflight.Corp.Sun.COM
NNTP-Posting-Host: starflight.corp.sun.com

This is to make a few points in response to other postings on this thread:

1) Emotion vs. reason. Emotion can influence decision-making in three main
ways: (a) the choice of an objective; (b) the perception of the situation;
and (c) the choice of actions to achieve an objective. Reason cannot guide
the choice of an objective, unless it is a subobjective pursuant to a larger
objective. Only emotion can do that. However, such emotion is ultimately
grounded in survival of the line of descent the decider represents, and so
it has a rational basis in selection of optimal survival strategies.

What we call rationality is not the avoidance of all emotion, but only the
avoidance of emotional influence on decisions concerning perception and
means. The ideal rational person uses emotion to choose a goal, then turns
it off while he analyzes the situation and selects a strategy for seeking 
that goal. The only other situation in which he might turn emotion on would
be a situation in which emotion is part of a move in the game, as is the
appropriate choice of emotion for situations involved in dealing with other
human beings at a emotional level.

Most of the difficulties humans have with emotion concerns allowing emotion
to influence perception or means to a goal. This includes the ways emotion
affects our attention. We may define social intelligence as the capacity
to make decisions for the long term good of our line of descent guided by
abstract understanding of the situation, the strategies available, and the
relative merits of each such strategy. Most humans are unable to sustain,
if they even manage to achieve, abstract understandings of this kind that
guide their daily decisions and allocation of attention and other resources.

Thus, people are broadly aware of impending ecological disaster and what
needs to be done to avoid it, but most do not keep such awareness in the
forefront of their attention so that it guides daily decisions. Much of the
effort of environmentalists to get people to conserve and avoid polluting
is not so much because such individual efforts will have much effect on the
overall problem as that it will contribute to changing the ways people make
daily decisions in ways that may ultimately lay the foundation for them to
make the real decisions that may actually be effective.

This technique can be found in other walks of life, as in the military,
where senior ranks compel lower ranks to do things like shine their shoes
and attend to other grooming details, because in doing do they develop an
attention to detail and a diligence that hopefully carries over to other
areas of the performance of their duties.

To get humanity to act more collectively intelligent, the trick is to get
almost every one of them to do at least a few things each day that are
enlightened by a common, abstract understanding of the common situation
and what needs to be done to cope with it. Eventually, those small acts
can become internalized as habits of thought, and then build until they
reach a kind of critical mass, at which time a kind of "paradigm shift"
occurs in the general direction of human affairs.

It is not enough to say that "love is the answer". That implies that the
means to express and realize feelings of love are somehow obvious. They 
are not obvious. That is the problem. Without a common, abstract understanding,
everyone means something different by love and has a different approach 
to dealing with the feeling.

2) Limits on collective intelligence.  It may not be enough to make
marginal improvements in individual human intelligence or education. It
can be shown that there are limits to the decision throughput of any
logic system based on the limits of its principal operating units. Thus
one can derive the performance limits of a computer knowing the performance
limits of its component integrated circuits, and those limits cannot be
overcome no matter how they are organized (although of course poor
organization can cause the system to fall far short of its potential).

Thus, for some complex logic operation, such as the Apollo 11 project to
land men on the moon, it can be shown that during critical phases of the
operation decisions had to be made at a faster rate than is possible for
any system in which human beings comprise the principal operating units.
Leaving aside the limits of human cognitive capacity, they are severely
limited by the throughput of their sensory organs. The operation would
not have been possible without artificial computers.

What we are doing as we progress technologically is creating a
situation in which more and more operations are beyond human decision
throughput, but it is by no means assured that artificial systems will
be able to keep up and fill in the breach, or that they will be used
appropriately.  Humanity is on a treadmill of decision system
condensation which has a pace of its own and even if the process runs
successfully to completion, it has no assurance that at the end there
will be any place for human involvement in critical choices.

---

jdr@starflight.corp.sun.com, starflt@uunet.uu.net
Jon Roland
Starflight Corporation, 1755 E Bayshore Rd #9A,
Redwood City, CA 94063-4142, 415/361-8141

Newsgroups: alt.society.futures