You start to study neuroscience, and you announce, “Too much to keep track of, I would think. One hundred billion neurons, every one of which has about 10,000 connections. Isn’t that, like a quadrillion?”
 
“That’s one reason we don’t completely know ourselves; that’s a reason for saying, ‘I want to find myself.’ It really doesn’t matter how much searching we do, however, we can’t contemplate fully all our own connections—both inside our heads and outside our bodies. In a way, that’s something that’s a bit uplifting. I can say I’m not a simple being. Goodness! If we can’t even understand all the connections of a flatworm like C. elegans, whose neuron count pales by comparison with ours, how are we going to fully understand ourselves? I’m my own undiscovered land; I’m a geography so wide and fast, so diverse, I can’t even travel much of it within myself during my lifetime. We all end up as strangers to ourselves.”
 
“And you don’t find that discouraging?” you ask.
 
“No. It’s also a reason for being excited about life. I have all those connections I made outside my head on top of all those connections I made inside my head. Exploration is our destiny; we live without knowing, so we have the best of reasons to be inquisitive, to be curious. And we’ll never run out of connections to explore and understand because in exploring, we make new connections inside and out.
 
“If you ever think, ‘I’m bored,’ you don’t recognize one key essence of your existence. If you ever think, ‘I’m bored,’ you can break the feeling of boredom simply by asking yourself about the day’s connections, or yesterday’s, or tomorrow’s potential connections. And in asking yourself, remember to note that even in exploring those connections, you’ll miss parallel and corollary connections you made, are making, and will make.
 
“Think of today as Connection Appreciation Day.”

Because his words have been repeated so often, Charles Dickens might be mocked by some for his opening lines to A  Tale  of  Two  Cities: 
 
            “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
 
But what’s to mock? Aren’t those thoughts both insightful and applicable to all “times,” including our own? The applicability? In our Age of Shouting, it’s the noisiest authorities that speak “in the superlative degree of comparison only.” Certainly, we hear much from pundits and politicians on both sides that this is the worst of times and that this is the best of times. In reality, no age has escaped the duality of the human social condition, and no civilization has ever been solely “best” or “worst.” From natural disasters and Man’s inhumanity to Man to achievements and heroism, every age “sees it all.” And much of the "seeing" is simply a matter of perspective. 
 
I have to thank Joseph J. Ellis, author of Founding  Brothers  for additional evidence that this duality of the human condition wasn't just a nineteenth century phenomenon discovered by Dickens.* No one in American colonial times, during the Revolution, and in the first years of the Republic had higher standing than George Washington. He was an example of the "best" during the "worst." During Washington’s presidency, however, the country suffered a reversal of feeling. As President, he sent John Jay to negotiate a treaty with England that infuriated many Americans who had fought with the aid of the French against England. Washington, Jay, and Hamilton could see the benefit of Jay’s Treaty of 1795 because through it the country avoided war with England. Others saw the treaty as “a repudiation of the Franco-American alliance of 1778, which had been so instrumental in gaining French military assistance for the winning of the American revolution” (p. 136). People were—if you want the down-to-Earth term—pissed off, so much so that someone in a protesting mob hit Hamilton in the head with a rock while he tried to explain and defend the treaty. And, as Ellis writes, “Jay claimed that the entire eastern seaboard was illuminated each evening by protesters burning him in effigy.” Maybe the biggest revelation about the turmoil of the mid 1790s lay Ellis’s statement that “John Adams recalled that Washington’s house in Philadelphia was ‘surrounded by an innumerable multitude, from day to day buzzing, demanding war against England, cursing Washington…” (p. 137). 
 
Imagine! Cursing Washington! Washington, who was universally considered the country’s “father”! Sixty-four years before Dickens wrote, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”  
 
Go back about 500 years, actually 339 years before the novel. Montezuma II’s kingdom received some guys in shining armor, guys with horses and military technology whose conquistador leader was initially mistaken for some visiting deity. For the Aztecs it was the best of times; it was the worst of times. And you can, as I said above, find in every civilization the juxtaposition of best and worst.  
 
Another example from farther back: Go back about two millennia. Jesus mounted an ass to ride into Jerusalem during the week of Passover. The crowds, according to the Gospel, greeted him with palms and cheers. Within a week crowds were shouting, “Crucify him!” “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.”
 
Yet farther back. Socrates fostered the rise of philosophy that occurred during the rise of one of the world’s great civilizations 2,400 years ago. It was the best of times. Socrates was forced to commit suicide. It was the worst of times.
 
And into ancient myths: Odysseus, having defeated the Trojans, returning home on his ship, steering between death by Scylla and death by Charybdis, losing loyal warriors with whom he had brought down the famous walled city. It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. 
 
We don’t have an exclusive right to this duality, do we? It’s a human thing, a social condition. It’s always both the best and the worst of times. And that means today, too. And tomorrow.
 
We would all be hard pressed to name a time that didn’t have its own kind of duality. So, when you turn on your TV or open your newspaper or online news and see from your perspective the “decidedly” good juxtaposed against the “decidedly” bad, don’t fret. Like all times before ours and all times after ours, this is the best of times and the worst of times.
 
It’s easy to get discouraged by all the shouting, all the arguing, all the innuendoes. It’s easy to be depressed by loss of property and life during tsunamis and storms. Keep your chin up. It’s your choice to focus on the best or the worst. AND TO DO THE BEST DURING THE WORST. Here’s what Washington predicted during the turmoil of 1795: “After a few months of contemplation, ‘when passion shall have yield [sic.] to sober reason, the current may possibly turn’” (p. 137). In the meantime, as he noted and as we should note by comparison, “this government, in relation to France and England, may be compared to a ship; between the rocks of Scylla and Charybdis” (p 137). The key words: “sober reason.”
 
That’s where we are, folks. Just like George and company back in the 1790s, like Montezuma II in the 1500s, and like Jesus in the tens, Socrates in the fourth century B.C. and mythical Odysseus about three millennia ago, we’re always going to be between a Scylla and Charybdis making our way in a narrow gap of good, always simultaneously experiencing as a civilization the best of times bordered by the worst of times. We can take Washington’s advice and wait until “passion shall have yield to sober reason,” or we can take action to steer toward the best of times in the waters between extremes. 

*Ellis, Joseph J. Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. New York. Vintage Books, 2000.

“He was a bit of an iconoclast, this Andreski guy. You could see that just by the title of his 1972 book Social  Sciences  as  Sorcery. I remember reading at the time his comment that in looking at the literature in his field, he could see platitudes magnified into ‘scientific statements’ enveloped in ‘scientific language.’ For example, he said that after wading through page after page of social science research, one finds out that humans are gregarious. Didn’t Grandma say that?”
 
“What brings Stanislav Andreski to mind?”
 
“An article online under Medicalxpress.com. The October 12, 2018, article out of the University of Illinois at Chicago is ‘How To Avoid Raising a Materialistic Child.’”*
 
“Let me guess. We already know, and Grandma told us.”
 
“Yes, my point. After noting that materialism ‘has been linked to a variety of mental health problems’ the author writes, ‘But now there’s some good news. A new…study…suggests that some parenting tactics can curb kids’ materialistic tendencies.’ And you’ll never guess the high-minded answer: Foster feelings of gratitude. Whoa! Radical stuff. Who woulda thunk it? How, you’re probably wondering, could parents foster gratitude? Well, the researchers suggest having the child keep a ‘gratitude journal.’ Or, having the child keep a ‘gratitude jar’ or discussing ‘something they are grateful for’ around the dinner table; such actions can decrease materialism.”
 
“Okay, it makes sense that people who are thankful for what others are, do, and give are also people who are people-centered and not objects-centered. What about Andreski? How does he play a role in this?”
 
“In his iconoclastic book, Andreski writes, 
 
          'Every human society which has endured long enough to leave records has had elaborate customs and institutions which were effective in instilling into the young the sentiments necessary for its perpetuation. Now for the first time in recorded history Western capitalism offers us a spectacle of a system which not only has given up altogether the task of moral education, but actually employs vast resources and the means of persuasion of unprecedented power to destroy the customs, norms and ideals indispensable for its survival; and to implant fundamentally anti-social attitudes which are incompatible with any reasonable social order.'
 
“Materialism is one of those anti-social attitudes engendered by our affluence. I don’t blame our economic system that has led to greater wealth for greater numbers of people and greater physical comfort for more than ever before, but I agree that having material wealth can be a context for abdicating basic human instruction in and modeling of social behaviors. Andreski wrote his book decades before the Texting Generation and before the notion of a welfare state took hold of the West, and long before 55% of US households average three TVs and two cars. Let me ask: How many do you know who don’t own a cellphone? A microwave? More shoes than can be retired because of wear? More clothes than can be stored in available closet space? And more jewelry than pebbles in a stream? 
 
“He does advise us not to despair:

          ' [The] reason why human understanding has been able to advance in the past, and may do so in the future, is that true insights are cumulative and retain their value regardless of what happens to their discoverers; while fads and stunts may bring an immediate profit to the impresarios, but lead nowhere in the long run, cancel each other out, and are dropped as soon as their promoters are no longer there (or have lost the power) to direct the show. Anyway, let us not despair.'
​
“Basically, the lesson here is to ask what Grandma would say and do. I don’t mean some flighty wild cougar on the hunt to recapture youthful indiscretions, but ‘Grandma’ as in the common, ‘I had to work when I was little, and we had very little.’ I mean the grandmother who has endured through bad and good times and who has remained a loving person imbued with care for others. The grandma (or parent or friend or whoever) that has carried on the ‘true insights’ that culture has accumulated, the grandma free of fads. She’s the one grateful for our presence, and, though she might slip up at times and foist stuff on us for birthdays and holidays, is the one who stands as a model of gratitude: For life itself, for the people around her, and for whatever material possessions she has or can give.”
 
 
*U. of Illinois at Chicago. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2018-10-materialistic-child.html
Lan Nguyen Chaplin, Deborah Roedder John, Aric Rindfleisch & Jeffrey J. Froh (2018) The impact of gratitude on adolescent materialism and generosity, The  Journal  of  Positive Psychology , DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2018.1497688

“I’m sorry, but I just don’t see any practical use for Riemann’s mapping theorem. I know you’ll say something about homeomorphism and about a coffee cup’s just being another form of a donut, but, come on, really? How many of us ever turn our coffee cup into a torus or our sugared torus into a ceramic drinking mug? Haven’t you noticed the effect of coffee on a dipped donut? I guess I’d have to say that although a donut can hold some coffee, any donut that morphs into a mug will fail to hold an amount of coffee similar to what a mug of equivalent mass holds. It will drip, dripping is not what someone wants in a mug. Anyway, I don’t see much use for his mapping theorem, but, then, I’m not a mathematician or topologist, so, those in-the-know might be inclined to dismiss me with ‘Ignorance is bliss.’
 
“But my inability to find practicality in the theorem is just one drop in the mug of mind. There’s much in our intellectual world that never seems to play out in everyday life of practicality. Not that everyday life is the ultimate ground for judgment and not that utilitarianism is the ultimate philosophy. Certainly, however, we see value in whatever we deem useful. That is probably why we differ so much on the value and quality of the Arts: Music, literature, painting and sculpture.
 
“So, I thought upon sitting to write this that I should go to YouTube to put 'Music for Brain Power: Mozart Effect' on as background. Makes sense, doesn’t it. If I play the music and somehow acquire greater brain power, then at least Mozart’s music demonstrates the practicality of one of the Arts. But maybe my approach is all wrong. The usefulness of music might lie in uselessness. Isn’t that the nature of ‘elevator music’? Surely, the music casinos and stores play is specifically designed to entice me to spend; that’s practical, at least it is for them. 
 
“But that simply shows that impracticality can coincide with practicality when it comes to the Arts. Like to read mysteries? What about romances? Both? Neither, in favor of westerns? Allegorical tales? Can’t agree with a friend or professor on what makes a good book good? Disagree like me when my wife argues that The  Scarlet Letter is a great book? (Can’t keep thinking of the torturous time I spent as a teenage boy doing an assignment on Hawthorne)
 
“Is there any way to reach an agreement on what makes a work worth the listening, reading, or viewing? (For adults, not teenage boys)
 
“Take aesthetics. We can argue incessantly about them. We can philosophize about art—or the Arts. Let’s think of an example. We could adopt the Indian principle Vakyam  rasatmakam  kavyam (‘Art is expression informed by ideal reality’)?* That puts us inside some mug of Platonic meaning. Does that Indian principle help us value paintings like those of Matisse that seem to be dominated by color on nonrepresentational shapes—or at least on barely identifiable shapes? Matisse said, ‘The use of expressive colors is felt to be one of the basic elements of the modern mentality, an historical necessity, beyond choice’? And he also said, ‘The chief function of color should be to serve expression.’ Does the Indian principle help us understand nonrepresentational art? If Matisse were alive, I would ask him what he means by ‘is felt.’ Why didn’t he write the idea in the active voice? He’s the one who painted nonrepresentational colored images--to some, seemingly impractical and nonsensical, brightly colored images. Why didn’t he just say, ‘I like to express my feelings in colors’? Wouldn’t that be an honest statement? Or, ‘I think I express ideal reality through colors.’ 
 
“Yeah, sure, Henri. Your ‘ideal reality,’ not mine. If it were ‘ideal,’ wouldn’t we all hold it as such? 
 
“Even if we can never imagine an ‘ideal form,’ we can imagine what we believe are its manifestations in specific forms. Is it the same for some ‘ideal’ color? How would we know what the ‘ideal reality’ is in color? An ideal form, such as Tree, is unimaginable. Oaks are imaginable. We picture the specific and not the ideal. Go ahead; try as hard as you can to picture Tree without picturing a specific genus or species identifiable by a characteristic shape. Now, identify the ‘ideal color.’ Is it white, the combination of all frequencies of visible light? Then I guess Kazimir Malevich’s famous White  on  White would be, in Matisse’s view, the greatest painting ever (even though there are three different ‘whites’ on the canvas).
 
“Isn’t nonrepresentational art a supposed ‘representation’ or expression of feelings or of randomness?  Where’s the ideal? Is it chaos? Disorder? Entropy? I’ll start with an assumption: All art is an expression of some kind. It cannot be guaranteed to convey the artist’s personal sense or knowledge of ‘ideal reality.’ There isn't any guarantee that any art is a manifestation of an ideal reality since any ‘ideal’ in the Platonic sense can’t be imagined (Can’t think of ‘Tree’ without thinking specific tree or combination of specific trees).  
 
“Plato aside, I can’t see how any ‘ideal’ form can be mutually understood except in the most general sense. Abstract art, which some claim to be ‘concrete,’ is colors and shapes, sometimes laid in repetitive patterns, sometimes not. If repetitive, then call it fractal art. But even fractal art can’t reveal some ideal that exists in the mind of the artist. And certainly, all of us might have some problem with Martin Heidegger’s view that a great artwork brings out the ‘true nature’ of whatever is portrayed. Who’s to say what ‘true nature’ means beyond the viewer’s inferences? We can’t even agree on the ‘true nature’ of human beings. Goodness! Think portrait art, for example. Think George Washington. Napoleon. Bust of Caesar. Maybe the sculpture gives us an idea of the ideal, but it doesn’t reveal what we might understand if we knew him personally, and even then we might not come close to knowing him ‘truly’. 
 
“Let me give you an example that might bring the idea of the ideal home. You pose for a picture. You ask the picture-taker to see the result. You say, ‘I don’t like that one; take another.’ And that might be what you say for several pictures. Then, you acquiesce, and say, ‘All right, we’ll go with that one.’ Yet, the picture-taker might disagree on which one ‘captures’ you.”
 
“So,” you ask, finally getting a chance to interject, “you’re saying that there’s no such thing as an ideal on which we can agree because there is no ultimately useful mechanism for deciding on its nature short of personal preference and perspective?”
 
“Yes. Does that bug you?”
 
Now involved in the discussion, you offer, “If what you are saying is true, then we’re destined never to get along perfectly because we’ll always find some nuance to the ideal that we individually see—if seeing is what we do with ideals. How can we agree on the value of anything except in a common culture? Gold, for example, is rare, shiny, and doesn’t rust. Its ductile and malleable. It can be alloyed for strength. Isn’t it a practical basis or ideal of wealth? Doesn’t it make good art?”
 
“But in a pre-European North American culture that used mollusk shells for money, what good was gold? And didn’t some of the medieval Central American cultures use labor as a form of payment even though they were rich in gold?”
 
“Hold on. You began this by referring to Riemann’s mapping theorem, and now you’re talking about wampum and labor as elements in trade and about art as a manifestation of an ‘ideal.’ Talk about a mapping problem: You’re all over the map,” you complain. “I don’t think listening to Mozart while you write has done anything to improve your brain power.”
 
“Yep. And that’s because we’re all over the map with regard to intellectual constructs, art appreciation, and value. With regard to the constructs, we can describe mathematically a world for which we have no use or a world that we cannot even picture, such as a ten-dimensional multiverse or spacetime, or a wave that is simultaneously a particle. I have to give credit to Riemann, however, as one of the founders of modern math, specifically geometry, and physics. Without him there might not have been ‘an Einstein.’ I just think that his mapping theorem points to what we have become intellectually: People in search of Plato’s ideals who express ideals with no practical use in daily life; people who stand in front of nonrepresentational art and comment to a dolt like me, ‘Oh! Look how he uses texture (or color, or stroke, or distorted shape) to capture the ideal’ to which I respond, ‘I’m sorry; I’m just not seeing it,’ as I stand there dipping my glazed torus in my cup of coffee.”
 
 
*Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. “The Theory of Art in Asia,” quoted in Philipson, Morris, Ed. Aestehtics Today, Cleveland, The World Publish Company, a Meridian Book, 1961, p. 57 and reprinted from The  Transformation  of Nature  in Art, Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1934.

Probably the title “Dancing with Steers” strikes you as nonsensical. “What’s this about?” you ask. “A contest at the country fair in which children from the 4H Club dance the tango with their prize heifers or cowgirls dance with steers?” 
 
The image might seem like a cartoon from Gary Larson, one reminiscent of his panel with three cows grazing and one cow commenting, “Hey, wait a minute! This is grass! We’ve been eating grass!” Yes, strange, but now I’m having difficulty getting the image of children dancing with cows out of my head; the image is a brain-worm analogous to an ear-worm song one might sing repeatedly. But that’s the point of the title: “Dancing with the Steers” is, however silly, a representation that you can imagine even though no such contest exists and cows would be hard-pressed to learn the foxtrot, the waltz, or some innovative modern dance moves. And yet, you have no problem envisioning the strange contest with those and other dance moves, with children or adults, with the handicapped or the alien, with Casper the Ghost or Mickey and Minnie. 
 
That’s where we are as conscious beings, capable of what we might term awareness of the strange, the unlikely, even the so-called impossible. That’s what separates us from Artificial Intelligence, and in a contradiction to what I just said about our ability to think the unthinkable, I find it hard to imagine that AI will achieve a human level of existence regardless of new developments in computer sciences and processing methodologies based on the human brain. Brains have had billions of years to develop minds, and much in minds isn’t even real. 
 
In an attempt to circumvent the problems associated with von Neumann computing systems, IBM researchers have designed a new computing architecture, one supposedly imitative of your brain.* Based on how three rare metals undergo phase changes from solid to liquid, the system works about 200 times faster than a traditional design. That’s good, but not good enough. It might be promising as a new way of computing, but it’s a long way from those superior humanoids of science fiction, such as those in RoboCop, Blade  Runner, Universal  Soldier, A. I. ,Star  Trek , and, well, you can probably think of others.
 
There is the famous Alan Turing Test, of course. If the computer can fool me, it has supposedly achieved the level of development human brains have achieved. Of course, I have been fooled by robocalls as evidenced by my responding to such a caller asking if I want a new home security system (“No,” by the way). So, maybe you should be the participant in the Turing Test. Then there’s the famous Chinese Room test of John R. Searle. As Searle has said, “In my view, the greatest single failure—or class of failures, I should say—in traditional Artificial Intelligence is the failure to come to terms with the nonrepresentational character of the background.”** It’s that background stuff that causes the problem. A computer might be able to write a message in Chinese, but how do we prove that the computer actually understands Chinese. Your smart phone does some pretty amazing things, but you would have difficulty proving that Siri does little more than offer a set of probable responses with a syntax and grammar built idiosyncratically into the system. Siri isn’t a demonstrably provable being with a mind. Searle’s background includes “commonsense knowledge, practices, behavior, ways of doing things, know-how, and such preintentional capacities, both cultural and biological. There is a theoretical obstacle to programming the background capacities: they are not themselves representational. So, there is no way that their essential features can be captured in representations, but by definition, traditional Artificial Intelligence uses representations” (Baumgartner, 206, 207).
 
Searle and others have written extensively on the Chinese Room experiment. It’s been the subject of philosophy, psychology, and computing classes in universities and in professional journals. It centers on the problem of mind-and-body, and that’s where we get stuck eating the same grass and occasionally, like Larson’s cow, lifting our heads in realization that we keep asking the same question without realizing that the very asking isn’t something artificial intelligence would do. 
 
I don’t know how you intend to spend the rest of your day, but I’m going to an imaginary county fair to watch some children dance with heifers or cowgirls dance with steers.
 
 
*Hiroto Kase, Ryota Negishi, Michiharu Arifuku, Noriko Kiyoyanagi, Yoshihiro Kobayashi. Biosensor response from target molecules with inhomogeneous charge localization. Journal of  Applied  Physics , 2018; 124 (6): 064502 DOI: 10.1063/1.5036538
 
** Baumgartner, Peter and Sabine Payr, Eds. Speaking  Minds :  Interviews  with  Twenty  Eminent  Cognitive  Scientists , Princeton University Press, 1995. “John R. Searle, Ontology Is the Question,” p. 207. 

The president of NNAISENSE, a “robot,” or AI, company, believes that robots, or “humanoids,” will do more than just imitate people; they will solve problems through experimentation in the absence of a human teacher.* That’s a bit of a concern for me. It was obviously a concern of Stephen Hawking’s, also. He told the BBC, “The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."** This from a guy whose speech came with the aid of AI. Go figure. Well, maybe the late Hawking, though a much smarter guy than I, your humble servant, might have been thinking along lines similar to mine. 
 
When I look throughout Nature to see consequences of social life without “teachers,” I see rogue teenage elephants wantonly destroying or harming, actions that would be minimalized by the presence of a family unit or by a dominant adult elephant now absent because of poachers seeking ivory. When I look at the sometimes rampantly running gangs of inner city youths where family structure and modeling is minimal, I see analogs of parentless rogue elephant teenagers wantonly destroying or harming. Now, are we going to have robots teaching themselves?   
 
That’s a scary sci-fi life I don’t wish on humanity. A world in which Artificial Intelligence determines ethics might not lead to more crimes against humanity, but there’s no guarantee that it won’t. All those scary sci-fi scenarios might play out. Of course, one could argue from the “junk-in-junk-out” perspective, that it’s ultimately a human behind any robot’s makeup, that people will dictate how and when robots will learn through experimentation, that people program. But it’s not beyond the realm of potential reality for robots to design robots or that programs create ever more sophisticated programs. We certainly have many imaginative models in a vast library of science fiction.
 
Dangers that Artificial Intelligence might foist on mankind might be my fault. Well, not me personally, but me in general, that is humanity.  What if we lack the wisdom necessary to keep humans safe in a world of robots? It’s not just death by Uber self-driving car that concerns me. Military robots are already on the threshold of posing a threat.  
 
“But you are a parent, and you were a professor. Certainly, in those roles you did some programming, some setting up for future decisions. There had to be some ‘wisdom’ because your kids and your students seemed to have turned out all right—whatever that means.”
 
I did, in a sense, do my share of programming, but with limited knowledge, some from what I experienced, some from what my elders said, and some from what I read and thought about. All rather limited in the big scheme of things. Also, the programming went into human brains, all of them capable of tweaking whatever I “programmed” or of rejecting it outright. All were capable of nuanced learning, and all were free to weigh models of thinking and behavior not just through comparisons but also through combinations, often unexpected combinations they derived creatively. Elephants don’t show elephants how to deal with all baobab trees, just with baobab trees in general.  
 
Those I “programmed” had billions of neurons with trillions of connections operating on billions of years of evolution, sometimes deriving what others might term “unlikely” solutions and often acting out unexpected behaviors, and most, if not all, of them guided by some moral compass that is a combination of learning and experience and of cognitive and limbic parts of the brain. 
 
So, the problem of Artificial Intelligence is, at its root, a question of what we put into the system at the outset to avoid getting those wild teen elephants or humans that might learn on their own. The question we might all ask ourselves centers on whether or not we can determine an ethics of decision and action that we might all accept in a population of robots. And the question isn’t easy to answer because of differences in culture. Take members of ISIS, for example. In their destruction of Palmyra, they acted like teens without parents, but they did worse than vandalizing in their torturing, enslaving, and killing other humans. What if they are the model for AI that learns by experimentation? Isn’t that one of those standard sci-fi models? What if the “programmer” is one who believes that a certain group of humans should be eliminated? Or, what if, as in 2001 : A  Space Odyssey , a HAL of some kind decides through experimentation that people aren’t necessary? Many sci-fi authors and some ethics philosophers have suggested that such a scenario is possible.
 
Anyway, consider the following conversation:
 
“Even if you are an atheist, you probably operate in some manner reminiscent of a fundamental belief held by a number of religions, that is the belief that you are the “image of God” or “made in the image of God,” or even “Godlike.” Your Ego seems to demand such a belief from you, and your inner brain holds onto whatever you perceive to be acceptable attitudes and perspectives that align themselves with that Ego.
 
“Not so,” you declare humbly. “I’m just an ordinary denizen of Earth, no more and no less important than the other denizens.”
 
“Wow! Nobly said, but somewhat incredible. So, let me see…hmmnn…Oh! Yes. What about animal rights?”
 
“Guaranteed. Life on Earth is equal.”
 
“Bacteria, too?”
 
“Yes.”
 
“Really. Sure you just don’t want to limit equality to multicellular life?”
 
“Okay, I’ll yield on that. Yes. I can see that ‘bad’ bacteria might not fit in my ‘equality’ scheme.”
 
“So, you’re for ‘rights’ of multicellular animals, right?”
 
“Well, I’m against hunting, and I don’t eat anything that has a face.” 
 
“Nothing wrong in that, I suppose. So, you’ve already made a decision against the equality of multicellular organisms of some kind, the plants. But let’s say that you place yourself in a home on the boundary of the Everglades and an eight-foot-long alligator emerges and decides you look tasty. Who survives? You or the alligator?”
 
“Not fair. All life wants to survive. I would run away.”
 
“No, it’s my hypothetical, not yours. You can’t run in my scenario. I’m giving you a gun.”
 
“I would do what I had to do to survive. That has nothing to do with rights. I would not allow myself to be eaten. I’ll accede that in such a ‘hypothetical’ I would choose me over the alligator, even if it meant harming or killing the alligator. I might even choose to shoot a human who threatens me under a similar hypothetical scenario.”
 
“So, it’s a matter of what’s convenient for you. Then, animal rights—and apparently, human rights, also—are negotiable in your view. At least, negotiable in my hypothetical scenario. Rights are a matter of words for you, words of convenience. Would you apply the same argument for rights if you were given the opportunity to program AI? 
 
“But let me go back to animal life, human life in particular, and back to equality in organisms and their right to survive in the context of their evolution and current ecology. Do organisms have a right of history?”
 
“What’s that?”
 
“Do I have the right of maintaining a cultural past, such as Palmyra?”
 
“I guess so.”
 
“But isn’t this the problem we face when a development company comes in to an established neighborhood and replaces the ‘old’ with the ‘new’? What if AI decides that ‘Newness’ is the value? And what if AI decides that you, as the science fiction stories about the subject sometimes suggest, are an old and chronic infection, an unnecessary blight on an otherwise gleaming ‘Newness’? What if AI decides that all ethics have only one fundamental principle, such as Newness or Efficiency? Then no history is safe, not the individual’s and not the group’s.”
 
“?”
 
“Here we are in the twenty-first century and you (the Collective You) are the creating God whose creation is AI. Do you create in your image? If so, is what you understand as your own image also the image of other life, particularly other human life? This problem of being made in the image of God is not just a religious one. It seems to have practical consequences in an age when humanoids (robots, androids, AI) are currently under development and increasing use. The sci-fi writers have been insightful in running out the gamut of possible futures, including the HALs that might lie in our future, or the wild robots that learn from their own experimentation and turn out to be the next generation of undisciplined, un-tutored teenagers with no adult supervision?
 
“People might have dismissed Stephen Hawking’s warning about AI, thinking he was a hypocrite since AI enabled him to talk. But as ‘they’ say, “Out of the mouth of AI….” ***
 
 
*AFP report on Conference on Intelligent Robots held in Madrid, October 6, 2018 online at https://www.france24.com/en/20181006-increasingly-human-like-robots-spark-fascination-fear
 
**Cellan-Jones, Rory, Tech correspondent, Stephen Hawking warns artificial intelligence could end mankind, BBC Technology, December 2, 2014. Online at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30290540
 
***There have been books published this and related subjects. Speaking  Minds, Interviews  with  Twenty  Eminent  Cognitive  Scientists , a collection of essays, is worth a perusal. (Baumgartner, Peter and Sabine Payr, Eds. Princeton University Press, 1995) I will comment on some of those eminent cognitive scientists’ thoughts in some future postings.  

Jason T. Wright of Penn State, with colleagues S. Kanodia and E. Lubar, tells us why we seem to be alone in the universe: We just haven’t searched far and wide enough to find other life. SETI, according to Wright, et al., has looked at such a small segment of the universe that the group compares the search to looking at 7,700 liters of ocean water for evidence of fish. Yeah, not much if you consider Earth’s oceans’ 1.335 billion trillion liters of water.* Think, also, that unlike the oceans, the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, so their analogy fails.
 
I suppose we’ll keep on looking on the odd chance that we’ll stumble across E.T. It’s what we do as a curious bunch always looking for the exotic. But for now—and maybe forever—we are alone. And alone doesn’t mean there isn’t some microbial life on Mars. Alone means without finding another consciousness, another kind of thinker, another self-awareness.
 
Want that “E.T.” experience? Look no farther than the person next door. Maybe even than the person within your doors. What are you going to do with the consciousness from another world, anyway? What will you be able to understand, to see from the alien’s perspective? Aren’t you finding the perspectives of those on this world difficult enough to interpret? Do fish comprehend your consciousness? Does someone down the street understand you?
 
All of us are alone together. All of us have explored very little of the consciousness that surrounds us. All of us have only tiny fractions of understanding short of our stereotypical labeling. We see a little on our own world, and we take that as a whole. We extrapolate. We classify with bias and dismiss with impatience.
 
What are we going to do with the consciousness of an alien? We have a universe of consciousness to explore on our native world, but we prefer to generalize. You can see the generalizing at work around you in social and political contexts. You can see it in pop psych labels. You can see it in print or hear it in a bar. 
 
If we are too impatient to study in depth the consciousness of others around us, aren’t we like those who would look for fish in a mere 7,700 liters of water in a container with over a billion trillion liters? Think of what our generalizing has done to us (probably always has done to humans). It makes us lazy and falsely secure in our knowledge. It makes us dismissive of nuances that pop up now and then in a neighbor’s consciousness.
 
Are we alone in the universe of Earth? Both not by choice and by choice. 
 
*Grossman, Lisa. We may not have found aliens yet because we’ve barely begun looking. ScienceNews, September 30, 2018. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/only-small-fraction-space-searched-aliensWright, J. T., S. Kanodia, and E. Lubar. How much SETI has been done? Finding needles in the n-dimensional cosmic haystack. arXIv: 1809.07252v1. Posted 19, 2018.

The cartoonist Gary Larson had many insights, and among them was his cartoon of two fellows standing beside the base of an enormous tree they felled. A tree saw lies on the ground behind them, and one points to the tree rings in explanation: “And see this ring right here, Jimmy?...That’s another time when the old fellow miraculously survived some big forest fire.”*
 
It’s true, isn’t it? We can see a tree’s history in its rings, but without a harmless tree corer at our disposal, the only way to see those rings is by cutting down the tree, learning, so to speak, by destruction. And it’s not just trees. Lots of white mice have been the “trees” in biolabs. We have the medicines because we studied their “rings.” Now, there’s a new kind of destructive learning, one that occurs on scales that are many orders of magnitude smaller than trees and mice.
 
But before I mention the method, let me remind you that you, like so many others, have taken apart something to see its insides, its structure, its inner workings. Maybe you did that mostly in your early childhood, but somewhere along the line of life, you destroyed to learn. Cracked an egg? Opened a box? Ripped wrapping paper? 
 
That new method? It’s firing a pulsed X-ray laser at some tiny biomolecule, in the process destroying the molecule while learning about its structure. In the first instance, an enzyme. A group of scientists really cracked an egg, revealing the structure of the enzyme lysozyme of egg white. A stream of biomolecules was fed into the path of the pulsed X-rays. Each biomolecule was destroyed in the process, but a stream of them produced collectively the X-ray diffraction image of the enzyme’s basic structure.*
 
The next time you see a child take something apart out of curiosity, recognize that even as adults, we sometimes destroy to learn. Unfortunately, for trees and eggs, our gain is their loss. 
 
*https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=gary+larson+cartoon+about+the+felled+tree&fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&hspart=Lkry&hsimp=yhs-SF01&imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fjennafeld.files.wordpress.com%2F2014%2F08%2Ftree.jpeg#id=0&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fjennafeld.files.wordpress.com%2F2014%2F08%2Ftree.jpeg&action=click
 
**Wiedorn, Max O., et al., Megahertz serial crystallography, Nature Communications . (2018). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-06156-7. Online at Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2018-10-x-ray-laser-reveal-unknown-antibiotics.html The experiment was run at the Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron at the European XFEL. The system called the Adaptive Gain Integrating Pixel Detector records in each second the information equivalent to a data stream that would fill two DVDs.

“Yes! that’s it.”
 
“What? What’s ‘it’?”
 
“I think I figured out why people have such a hard time with Einstein’s work on relativity.”
 
“Oh! That’s easy; it’s the maths, as people say in England.”
 
“No, that’s not it, though the ‘maths’ are a bit challenging.”
 
“I’m sure it’s the maths. Every time I think of Einstein, I think of a picture of him, turning as though to look at a class, a blackboard full of chalked numbers and symbols in the background. Bunch of formulae, I think.”
 
“True, the mathematics can be challenging, but there is a concept hidden among them that is the heart of my newfound understanding.”
 
“What’s that?”
 
“It’s the Principle of No Privileged Perspective. It applies to the speed of light. For all observers in all contexts, the speed of light is 300,000 kilometers per second. It doesn’t matter whether one is traveling in a spaceship or riding a tortoise, the speed of light is the same; it’s a constant. Space and time change, not the speed of light. That’s how that works. Travel very fast, almost as fast as light, and you’ll shorten in the direction of travel. Travel very fast, almost as fast as light, and you’ll age more slowly. In other words and as Einstein told us, for the speed of light to be a constant, space and time can’t be constant. In all this, regardless of the position or motion of an observer, light is constant. Take two observers; put one on a planet and the other on a spaceship, and both will perceive light as a constant. Again, there’s no privileged perspective. I suppose it’s the answer to Stephen Wright, the comedian’s question that goes something like, ‘If you drive the speed of light and turn on your headlights, will anything happen?’”

“So, what’s this have to do with understanding Einstein.?”
 
“Well, we’re accustomed to privileged vantage points. We believe we have one, that is, individuals believe they have one. Think of two people in conflict. Neither acknowledges the perspective of the other during the conflict. That’s the way we operate. We think our perspective is THE perspective, that we hold a privileged place. That’s our mindset. And that’s the reason that we struggle with a theory that rests on the Principle of No Privileged Perspective.
 
“We’ve trained our brains to isolate our perspectives from other perspectives and to stamp our perspectives as special. We act out this principle daily, but particularly so when we run up against a different religious, social, economic, or political perspective. It’s in that training that regardless of the maths involved, we struggle to understand a theory that assumes no privileged perspective. Come on; admit it. Don’t you see your perspective as THE perspective? Going back to relativity, I’d say that most people have that one stumbling block, that is, trying to break free from a perspective that they believe to be unique.”
 
“So…”
 
“So, all our arguments, all our conflicts derive from our belief in a Principle of Privileged Perspective, whereas relativity requires its antithesis. We just don’t make the switch. We just don’t relinquish. From that privileged perspective, we believe all else can be seen in unlimited variety, but not in absolute terms, the terms of our perspective. We believe that we are the constant. We say to ourselves, ‘I am the Constant; my perspective is the Constant.’”