Foreword

 

I've been sick from here to beyond and back.  Call it manic depression, mental illness if you will.  But in my case at the very least, I don’t believe that the cause is some gross chemical imbalance, something remedied with lithium, sodium valproate, or any of the other drugs that doctors push from time to time.  I know now that the causes are much too specific to be ablated by drugs that cannot select individual thoughts.  Psychotherapy has been useful although I have been very resistant because all practitioners have projections of their own, and the cost and the difficulty of communicating my experience clearly and concisely.  Very rarely did the therapy address the behaviors that gave rise to manic-depressive diagnosis and examination of the beliefs that lead to those behaviors. 

 

Psychiatrists spread a great deal of misinformation.  They are not especially evil in this regard; it is hard to name a vendor that does not exploit information asymmetry to increase profits.  But few professions are as capable of mass self-deception.  Mania can best be defined as a state in which beliefs overpower reason.  It has very little to do with genetics.  It can overtake entire populations as in the famous tulip mania and countless other market bubbles.  While useful for calming an overactive ego relentlessly feeding on itself, drugs seem to be effective in eliminating mood swings by squashing most initiative including learning.  Damage awards and even prison would probably be much more effective when it come to arresting manic behavior and instilling mindfulness.

I have been preoccupied with the future of technologies for communication and control of knowledge, the creation of digital representations of our selves representing hopes, fears, morals, laws, needs.  When George Orwell made some guesses when he supposed that personal video broadcasting could be widespread by 1984, he was off on the date by about 30 or 40 years.  Orwell imagined that there would be a cadre of apparatchiks watching over the citizenry, an extrapolation from the behavior of totalitarian régimes that he sought to expose.

         

We can now see glimmers now of what Information Technology (IT) will do.  Though Stalinist and Maoist communism is dying out and Orwell didn't include computers in his fiction, IT could make Orwell's vision of the masses controlled by a self-selected and self-perpetuating elite more horrific than ever.  With IT, Orwell's Ministry of Truth or Mintrue, wouldn't need that many bureaucrats.  It could be run with network of computers connected to devices observing and interacting with people at almost every moment of their lives. 

 

There will certainly be more opportunities for control of the many by the few.  The good news is that the designs are starting to come from groups like corporations rather than totalitarian states, the bad news is there will be continue to be opportunities to exploit unfair advantages.  So what will be the new news, the source of my preoccupation?  As usual, the new news is just the old news recycled.

 

When Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, he is said to have reported that they came from God.  There is no doubt that he delivered a set of rules that served to minimize some of the most severe conflicts within his tribe, that set the stage for rule by law.  Given the immense power of this single idea, can there be much doubt that in sizing up the implications Moses' mind entered a state of such rapture that he imagined the Commandments coming from an external voice, a higher power?  I too have even imagined external voices but I know that it was really my own voice amplified out of normal proportion by deprivations and a sense of mission.  Moses was a man with a physiology much like mind and your.  After the deprivations of wandering in the desert for forty years, a profound realization could have brought on the imagination of an external voice quite easily.

 

The deprivation mostly of sleep led me to to states of rapture and wandering rather than work and conventional success that my degrees and ambition would normally have ensured.  I have deluded myself.  Yet this does not necessarily discount all of my memories and some simply won't leave me in peace to simply pursue normal goals like becoming a financial success for the sake of having a family.  Manias are inextricably tied up with rapture, the state of being transported by a lofty emotion.  Mine has been created by the feeling of receiving the attentions not of God in the heavens but of willful men who stood in for my deceased father, many of whom would have been given to a bit of experimentation by their professions and probably also some hopes of their own.

 

When Moses came down from the Mt. Sinai with codes of law, he linked the Ten Commandments to a judgment day that has since caused Judeo-Christians to connect their behavior with personal consequences.  Fundamentalists will commonly report that living according to the "word of God" leads them to receive daily blessings directly from the unseen hand of God.  Not only does this give them confidence in their morals and values, it also provides them with a sense of belonging to a world that has a design and an ultimate purpose.  With IT providing the ability to be accompanied in our daily lives by designer guardian angels that are able to connect behaviors with consequences such as personal joy and also terror, the designers will have the profound power to do both godly and devilish work.  Engineers of such an IT would have a need to experiment, to run simulations and discover some of the consequences of their designs.

 

But any such designer/experimenter in a university has a practical problem.  Required committees on the use of humans as experimental subjects require that the subjects be informed and willing to consent.    IF the engineers' prototypes are to act like the unseen hand of God at unexpected times with unexpected suggestions in surprising ways, if the goal is to recreate a good religious training in which subjects create an image of God in themselves and act goodly, if the goal is to see whether the subject develops inner guidance THEN the subject should not be informed when the experiment is operating.  Universities are therefore limited in terms of the amount of experimentation they can do. 

 

In the real world, the rules are are different and the experience almost always complex and ambiguous.  Although guidance may be omnipresent, free will must never be compromised.