Toys R Us is dead and gone, and I always could relate a little bit to its ditty, "I don't wanna grow up, I'm a Toys R Us kid..." I once had that thought in a Toys R Us as grade school wore on, not the words of the song, which I don't think existed, but knowing I never wanted to get so old in mind and heart that I had no interest in toys. My dad had seconds before admitted that he wasn't really interested in toys, and when you grow up, you tend not to be. That seemed such a loss and so sad, I resolved never to forget. But I did.

I must say, ruefully or not, that I'm not very interested in toys at all. I am, however, interested in play, very much so, and just having a sense of humor and imagination, and I've never quite lost my interest in games. Even there, and this I find regrettable, I have lost most of my enthusiasm. Sometimes it's there - maybe in full - also evolved. If I hadn't been trying so hard not to lose the last vestiges, I probably would have. But I was trying so hard, at least some of the time, and so I have kept what I think is more than reasonable to keep.

It's less that I'm a Toys R Us kid than that I'm a Pinocchio kid. "If you wish upon a star..."

Immunity

There's a relationship between cancer and delusion. Cancer is basically never one mutation. A cell typically has to be damaged in a bunch of ways. One of the most common involves contact inhibition - normally, cells will grow (keep dividing) until they bump into other cells. When they make contact, that inhibits their growth. This way functional tissues form. They don't turn into knots of tumors trying to outcompete each other for blood and other supplies. Knocking out the genetic machinery of contact inhibition is one step on the path to cancer.

Another common step is putting a protein on the cell's surface that is a special self-destruct signal for immune cells. Normally this protects against autoimmune disease: if immune cells learn to attack the self, then this signal on the surface of healthy cells gets the corrupted immune cells to self-destruct (and stop producing even more immune cells that act like racist law enforcement). It's a way to unlearn stray allergies that form against the body's own tissues. Meanwhile, the immune system also wipes out cancer cells. It has evolved to recognize cells that are breaking contact inhibition, and destroy them.

As you might imagine, if cancer cells have mutated to always express that self-destruct signal, now they are free to grow like crazy without much disruption from the immune system. Any immune cells that cotton on get triggered to self-destruct.

Those are just two genetic "fractures" if you will. The first is to my knowledge present in all cancer, while the second is very common. A typical malignant (cancer) cell will have a dozen broken gaskets like this. It's eerie, but cancer actually evolves in place from a healthy cell to a lethally rogue cell, step by step.

The same has been found for people who commit suicide: where evidence can be gathered, the tragedy developed step by step through little changes in what would be normal. Many little things are usually there - internal and external - to support self-preservation. So it's interesting that science now has knowledge of what those damage steps are, or can be. Four examples are being a victim of abuse, chronic pain, cutting, and failed suicide attempts, which act a bit like training wheels. Self-harm gradually gets normalized in the person's mind, or even gets associated with "solving" problems.

These are examples of evolution - not the kind we like, but the kind we don't like.

While a person is in chemotherapy or radiation therapy for cancer, the mutation steps and therefore the evolution comes even faster, which is why doctors consider it critical to use fast-acting and potent methods. If they don't, the cancer develops resistance to the drugs in much the same way bacteria do, and in a matter of weeks. Most cancer treatment actually breeds more lethal cancer cells, so it has to act fast.

However, it would be fatal to believe the stories that you can drink some kind of tea or eat brown rice or hold crystals and that'll work. People have been known to spontaneously get better, but this has been researched now, and it's around 1 in 10,000 cases. You don't like those odds, or shouldn't, however mystical you're feeling. But if you come down with cancer, everyone will tell you about this stuff. Everyone wants you to cheer up, and it's great to have them rooting for you. Everyone has heard of somebody who's heard of somebody who has the cure, or just got better through a good attitude. If I hadn't gone to the doctor and done what the pros said, I would definitely not be here. Survival rate for that kind of cancer without treatment is 0%. With treatment, I was fortunately one of the 70% who make it.

Which reminds me of conspiracy theories and just general delusionality. Delusions evolve into place. It's remarkably similar to what I've described above (which is the point of this post and the setup so far). There are many ways mentally healthy people are protected against inaccurate ideas:

- Other people will tell you if you're sounding too crazy

- The news is mostly factual

- There are many books

- If you know how to use the internet well, you can fact-check almost anything

- Crazy beliefs lead to crazy expectations, and when those don't come to pass, that gives correction

And so on and so forth. The "cancerous" mutations in these checks and balances can include things like these:

- Calling news fake in general

- Asserting without proof that scientists have a hidden agenda

- Saying all sources are biased and implying this means equally biased

- Claiming that anyone who is paid for their work is an unreliable source of information

- Claiming that any money link however lengthy to a disreputable group proves collusion

- Attacking the character of anyone who disagrees

- Using ridicule in place of an argument

- Stirring up guilt, fear, pride, or anger as if merely feeling any of these establishes fact or responsibility

- Casting blame elsewhere for what goes wrong and could have been predicted

- Altering data to fit a narrative

- Cherry-picking data to paint a narrative

- Ignoring dissenting arguments and making no effort to uncover and examine more of them

- The primally persuasive quality of self-confidence or unswayable belief

- Portraying belief itself as a fundamental good and doubt itself as a fundamental evil

- Threats of physical harm

- Disregarding what a person says in anger as clearly not factual or important, when actually angry people usually tell you over and over and over and over why they're angry

- Failing to recognize that anger makes you one-sided by its nature, and everyone who feels angry feels justified

- Accusing the person who says something that ends up making you feel uncomfortable or bad of being a jerk who is merely trying to insult you

- Focusing on whether someone sounds condescending rather than on what they're saying

- Confusing reading a book with being right

- Thinking that because you once held view A and now hold view B, you must have changed from an incorrect view to a correct one

- Thinking that experts are untrustworthy because you aren't smart, trained, or informed enough to follow their professional data and reasoning

- Accepting popularity as strong evidence

- Assuming that when you can poke holes in an argument, the person must not know what they're talking about, the holes are automatically major, the argument is invalid, the conclusion is wrong, and you're so very clever, whereas in truth it's difficult to present a complete argument without making everyone impatient, few people are trained for that, and many flaws are superficial or easily filled in on reflection

And so on. The more of these kinds of tendencies a person has, the more they will tend to suffer from delusions... because these bypass the reality checks that, like the immune system with cancer cells, should be finding and knocking out false beliefs.

Life Skill

Something I've often contended with is logic in the context of everyday life. In my experience, being really good at logic and applying it really well in ordinary situations are quite different skills. They are not unrelated: kind of like running/throwing versus baseball. If you really suck at running or throwing, you're going to suck at baseball. But if you're great at running and throwing, you won't be good at baseball without additional skills. You might still be terrible at baseball.

Having a keen eye for how to apply simple logic accurately in the complexity of human situations is very useful, much more useful than people who like to insult or dismiss logic believe. We live in a world of physics transforming information in regular patterns. It isn't that human concerns sidestep logic. It's that logic is more difficult and error-prone when it encounters this kind of complexity.

Possibly the best response to that is to keep your logic as simple, factually based, and open-minded as possible.

When you do that, you will find that logic rarely fails you, even when it's failing everyone else.

I've given you pretty much the whole secret! But I'll go into a little more detail.

Learn about IF-THEN and how it isn't reversible. IF the sun is shining outside, THEN it must be daytime. Great. But IF-THEN isn't reversible. (The reverse might be true, but that would be its own surprise.) IF it's daytime, that doesn't mean that THEN the sun is shining outside.

It seems ridiculous and people love to dismiss the usefulness of these basic logical constructs. But if you make sure you aren't intuitively reversing IF-THEN (seems easy to avoid here, but as soon as people get into things less familiar than sun and clouds, they go totally off the rails with THEN-IFs), you'll avoid a large chunk of the irrationality you see in the world. It's crazy how much craziness comes from reversing IF-THEN and thinking what you just did there must make sense. No, it doesn't.

That doesn't mean it must be wrong. There's a whole study of this called Bayesian statistics. Our brains, in fact, are very much Bayesian statistical machines. No joke. Absolutely true. But this also is a cause of enormous amounts of prejudice in every area, so we have to be careful. Bayesian statistics/intuition gives us some clues about when IF-THEN might be reversible. But it's highly fallible.

An excellent way to think about this: your brain knows how to make bets and present them as realities. But you need to know they are bets. You need to know your brain is a deeply evolved gambler, and the world you think you are seeing is its gamble. Never forget that, and the IF-THEN issue dissolves.

Get the very, very basics right. Understand that logic in the real world is quickly meaningless if it's based on facts that are even slightly inaccurate. Even slightly. You have to stay open to evidence and subtleties you've overlooked and assumptions you might be making (you are making assumptions, always, so stay open to looking into them).

The simplest logic you can use on the most bulletproof facts. And keep your eyes peeled and your ears tingling for the slightest defect in that logic or those facts. Thank me later. Happy holidays!

NIIAI: No Island Is An Island

When we say "free will," I think by default we might think we mean "dependent on nothing." But nothing we care about is dependent on nothing. So on second thought, we might mean "it's entirely up to us." So it isn't "dependent on nothing," but, rather, on us. We define the action. It depends only on what's within us.

But now we get to another crossroads of interpretation: dependent on what's within us - our consciousness, now? - or our set of memories and deeper biology, the vast majority of which is not part of our awareness, some of it just now not, but most of it not ever. We are far more information-dense than we know. But let's take the responsible approach and own up to whatever is inside our skin and moved by it, whether we feel we called that forth consciously or not.

So "free will" now is constrained - dependent on - whatever is in us, conscious or not. In both aspects, it is not quite "free." The very fact of "free will" becoming determined by a conscious "me" or "I" - even without the unconscious influences - begins to hint at its lack of liberty. After all, if I have power over it, doesn't that make it subjugated, rather than free? Am I separate from that will, or am I the will itself? If I am the will itself, maybe that begins to untangle the knot. Then again, maybe it ties a tighter one.

"Free" will is subject to me, the conscious I, but we might suppose, at least for the sake of argument, that these are identical, the freedom of my will and the conscious I.

But then "free" will is certainly less than free when it meets the unconscious influences.

Surprisingly, also, we have not considered by far the biggest factor in will, whether free or not: the situation. Without context, a choice has no meaning whatsoever. Options can only be evaluated in a given context, preferably with a measurable purpose in mind. Until we look out at the rest of the world, will might be free, but it is meaningless. One choice is exactly as good and bad as the next, and as much and as little of everything else, as well. It's all a wash.

See, we only care about "free will" because it is not itself. We only care about it because it has meaning in context: by definition, a reduction in degrees of freedom. Or... is it? I suppose if there is no context, then everything is the same, which ultimately isn't very free. Perfect randomness out of context is maximally free - in a symbolic sense, it carries maximum entropy - but although the surprise of each new outcome would be at its greatest if you cared, the amount you care is absolutely minimal, if not zero itself. Absolutely free will is meaningless because it has not even the dependency to be noticed, to matter, to make a difference. 

The oxygen molecules inside a scuba tank at a fixed temperature are something like this free, but most of the time, even none of the other oxygen molecules in the tank care or are affected by any particular molecule we focus on. Besides, this all unfolds according to deterministic laws of mechanics. Informationally, given ignorance of all the positions, the molecular arrangements resemble free will. The trouble is that the universe is watching, and the laws of physics seem to have a plan for where each molecule is at each time. The freedom mentioned is illusory: it's actually the freedom of an ignorant observer from knowing what they don't know, ie, the positions and velocities of the oxygen molecules. None of that freedom resides in the molecules themselves, which simply follow the contours of spacetime and particle interactions.

Freedom that has no meaning is no freedom at all, or only a very technical informational freedom divorced from any application, as the information by definition cannot affect anything else. As soon as information can affect something else, it begins to have meaning.

One might feel tempted to separate "freedom" and "meaning" and be done with it, but I think if you try that, you'll quickly run into a wall. The trouble is, if you are informationally free - high entropy, true randomness in all relevant degrees of freedom - then you cannot respond to a situation, anticipate the outcomes of options. At the extreme, there would be no such influence in either direction. We might call this "insular freedom." In the traditional interpretation of Schrodinger's Cat, there is insular freedom for the cat to be alive or dead, since no observer can know the difference (until some unarrived moment of truth). As long as the box remains closed, that insular freedom, in a theoretical sense, remains. Inside the box, at least as far as the "deciding" particle mechanism behind the poison dispenser is concerned (and that particle mechanism would be entangled with the entire cat as one system), there is full "insular freedom." But this freedom by its nature depends not at all on the outside world (we haven't opened the box, and we've specified it's not to be disturbed in the experiment). And likewise it has no meaning for the outside world, which cannot know what's happening one way or another and quite possibly doesn't know anything about the box, its contents, or the experiment at all.

What I'm getting at here is that full "insular freedom" is a restriction of "meaning." In that sense, we could consider them opposites, and maybe it would make sense for one to stand as the other falls. But when we talk about "free will," we do not mean "insular freedom." Insular freedom would be a greater freedom, perhaps, if it could know the outside world, respond to it, and by responding, affect it. Yet this would automatically constrain the possibility space, wouldn't it? So "free will" would be less free than "insular freedom," but also more free in another sense. It would have the freedom of meaning.

You see why it's a problem to separate "freedom" and "meaning" and be done with it. They are too intertwined for so simple a solution.

We could say that "intention" is an interplay between "insular freedom" and "meaning" (ie, anticipation, understanding, and influence, all via physics in the inside and outside world). Intention requires some thaw in the crystal of outer and inner constraint, yet also some causality and apprehension of its immediate parameters.

Shoegazing with Spectacles

For all that I make a big effort to expand and refine my perspective, and try to keep ego at bay as a conflict of interest, in the end I don't know whether I overvalue or undervalue my own observations. It feels like both. And ultimately, value tends to be subjective, so both answers could be valid.

Accuracy isn't everything: I could spend my whole life accurately copying out the 1s and 0s of a reality TV episode by hand. Even with perfect accuracy, that would be a waste of a life (in my opinion, but come on). Accuracy isn't everything, and a big chunk of value is subjective. But lots of value is transferable.

This is probably too much navel-gazing for most people. And it's exactly where I think, "Is there a point to the thought? Could it lead anywhere useful, actionable?" It feels like an unsolvable maze. A dead end.

You can ask other people, listen to feedback. You have to. But other people are in the same quandary. Accuracy can be very costly, difficult to attain and difficult to verify after that. Value is certainly subjective but there's enough overlap that we can start to believe some value is real, isn't just in our heads. So we make some effort at accuracy where we perceive it's valuable, through our own instincts and reasons and the feedback we hear and the money and other material rewards available. It's all a patchwork.

But because it's complicated, there are many places we can go wrong. We often won't even know it. When the problem is difficult enough, you don't even know whether you're solving it or not. You're in the dark and in the silence, not only for your shot, but also for most or all the time after.

I told you this was getting too omphaloskeptic (a fun word for "navel-gazing") for most people. Sometimes the worst answer in the world is "It's complicated, it depends," even though that's the best answer we can give.

I'm talking about what the Serenity Prayer talks about, "and the wisdom to know the difference." We do wisdom a disservice, and ourselves and our fellows, when we portray wisdom as easier and simpler than it really is. Wisdom is not equally available to all at all times. False identicality is a misuse of equality. If we conclude that political equality implies we all have the same strengths and weaknesses, the same a priori capacities exactly, then we run logic backwards into that brick wall at high speed. We cannot ordain that every individual is in wisdom identical. We cannot treat everyone as if they begin at the same beginning and only deviate by their own fully informed choices, or else by the malicious and unfair incursions of others. That is inaccurate and its "value" is a slow-acting poison, a loose thread unravelling the fabric.

We do not begin the same, we are not the same in the middle, and we do not end the same. We are only the same, apparently, before conception and after death. Never while we experience are we the same as anyone else.

We have enormous amounts in common. And I don't mean to try to isolate anyone from our senses of unity and shared humanity. But I hope you already knew I wasn't dismissing any of that. I was simply pointing out the obvious, because it's relevant.

We are often similar but never the same. The pieces that are identical - individual highly conserved genes for example - diverge enormously, still, once in context. The same string of nucleotides means something else in a different cell, or in a cell that's in a different mood. Multiply that by tens of thousands, millions, billions of pieces, or trillions or more, depending on what building blocks you use and how close two need to be to be called "same."

The best we can do is apply all our senses and improve them as well as we can.

> 2

I've always been a huge fan of the idea of dialectic - two opposites that can't agree, but there's some deeper truth neither is quite getting that explains the confusion. The yin-yang is one representation. It's also called thesis + antithesis = synthesis.

We live in a field day for dialectic.

It's important to recognize that dialectic doesn't mean that in every opposition, the synthesis lies directly in the middle. That would be called the middle-ground fallacy, bothsidesism, or false balance.

One way I remind myself of this is, I say, "There are MORE THAN two sides to every story." When you recognize that, and keep it in mind, you're less likely to fall for either pole or some mythical happy land where all claims are equally true and false.

In the US political spectrum, I avoided identifying as a Democrat specifically until I really felt I had no choice. But I've never called myself an Independent. Independents seem to fall for the middle-ground fallacy a lot. I'll never forget those well-meaning, respectable people on the eve of the 2016 election, in town halls, responsibly asking questions at the mic, reading from their note cards. They couldn't decide who would be better for our country, and they were going to ask just the right questions to find out.

They were all massively deluded, I'm afraid. They had fallen for bothsidesism.

But anyway. People make mistakes. They weren't trying to be confused. They just were.

It's my natural inclination to gently pull people, including myself, away from poles - not all extremes under the supposition that all extremes are wrong, but just in general by pointing out what hasn't been said, yet is surely relevant. The simpler the better. Often this takes the form of a "maybe." Maybes are very important, because if you are closed to maybes, you become inflexible.

I've learned to choose my timing better, and I've learned that if it doesn't feel natural to say something, it probably won't feel natural to hear it. Sometimes you still press on, sometimes you wait. Sometimes you find better words. Sometimes you only have one chance to affect someone, but if they feel you yanking them around, they will become resistant, or even more resistant than before. Often a person hears you better if you say something once and they know where you stand, but you don't lecture or chide. These are my personal findings, anyway, mixed with research I've read and the opinions of people who know about this stuff.

After all, at work it's my job to affect people. I'm supposed to change people's minds. But it isn't an agenda. They're supposed to walk out knowing and understanding more, and feeling less stuck.

My philosophy here clashes with progressive notions about ostracizing what we don't like, in an effort to fight it or control it. And my stance on that is actually very simple. Each person can choose who or what to ostracize or boycott. Personally, I like to remember that if I refuse to talk to someone, that person goes right on existing no less than before. It rarely sends much of a message. We think it does. But still, there are times when that message can work.

In my opinion, silence says nothing. All it does is amplify what's around it. So if you go silent, you amplify whatever you said most recently, and whatever you might say after the silence. The silence itself, however much we might like to believe in its eloquence, says nothing on its own. To believe silence speaks volumes is otherwise known as passive aggression. To believe silence is consent is, at the extreme, rape.

We need to fight for justice. It doesn't establish itself. It doesn't just grow in the soil with sunlight and water. But let's not forget the importance of sunlight and water and soil and growth. We spend too much time refusing to understand people who cause problems, because we believe that understanding, compassion, empathy - in short, humanization - ends up promoting evil. This is not actually true. If we stand around and watch evil happen and do nothing, then we are implicitly promoting it, in a sense. That would be condoning. At the same time, all of us are limited. We can't help but condone most of the world's problems, if we are honest with ourselves. We know there are a great many problems, and we are not solving all of them, or even most of them.

What I would like to see is more of a focus on science. What does science say about what will help the problems we face? In the area of social justice, I usually see very little in the way of citing research. And I'm sure that's partly because a lot more research needs to be done. But more research will be done if we take more interest in it. Then there will be more demand for research, and, eventually, by various routes, less demand for prisons. We all believe that loudly condemning what we don't like shakes the baddies down and shows them we mean business. Policing basic, necessary standards is critical. But this symbolic show of force that everyone believes in, this moral fire and brimstone, only goes so far, and can even backfire. It does not actually solve the problems we believe that, if we are only loud and insistent enough, it will solve.

Solving a problem without understanding it is called "luck."

Fully understand a problem and it melts.

That's dialectic.

A Balloon of Gaskets

Republicans these days have a simple, common-sense view of regulation. For Republicans, regulations mean "do" or "do not," and like any sensible person who loves freedom, they infer that too many of those means too little freedom and prosperity.

But there are many kinds of regulation. Your brain, for example, is a regulator.

"Do" and "do not" may appear to restrict freedom while increasing it. Forbidding smoking on airplanes increases net freedom. And if the cravings become unpleasant enough that some smokers quit smoking, then this has lengthened lives and healthspans, which increases freedom. Of course, you are free to smoke, addict yourself, and limit your own freedom as you see fit. But you are not free to limit other people's freedom while limiting your own. When you smoke on an airplane, you make a choice for everyone on the plane without asking them. And so forbidding smoking "for" other people on an airplane (people who did not choose to smoke, nor would they) increases net freedom, without any doubt in the matter.

At the most basic level, once you get past "do" and "do not," the simplest kind of regulation is actually a thermostat. The principle of the thermostat is what allows your body and mind to operate so beautifully. Our genes are, yes, often "do" or "do not" signals, but also often thermostats. Homeostasis, a fundamental principle of life, is another way of talking about the thermostat - albeit many, interconnected. And so it's both sensible and revealing to look at every brain as a large, highly evolved tangle of electrochemical thermostats embodying regulations. Without those regulations, you would not exist to call yourself free.

So draw your own conclusions about how much you want to remove regulations and treat them as automatically a problem.

The drive to keep legal regulations concise and intuitive is a solid one (people cannot intentionally follow rules they do not know, remember, or understand), but it should really attend to individuals before it attends to businesses. Businesses can fail and reform without loss of individual life. No individual comes back from the grave. Protect individuals well, and you also protect business. Protect businesses in a way that seems well at first, and you may end up undermining individuals and businesses both.