transcript
keevin bybee 0:00
Welcome to the one school podcast. My name is keevin Bybee. I’m a family physician who wants to make local schools a 24-7-365 day safe space, think school /Community Center/medical and emotional triage /community outreach, all co-located and robustly resourced. Normally, I speak with experts in the multitude of domains that will contribute to this project. Today, I’m going to attempt to integrate a lot of my philosophies that helped influence this project. I think that this is important because we all need to be able to speak the same language and have a shared purpose in order for such a large endeavor together. The disclaimer is that I’m just one person. And this is the best that I’ve been able to put together, but am eagerly seeking feedback, criticism and input so that we can dynamically and adaptively update this model, and hopefully make it better. One of the biggest challenges is making sure we’re all on the same page. And the way we try to figure out if we’re on the same page is the language that we use.
So let’s begin there. language, a way of talking about things, a socially constructed set of semantic verbal or vocal symbols that we use to mentally manipulate concepts. To be a little bit more abstract: When I say words are symbols, they are just that the words are not the things themselves. In one way, we should not confuse the map with the territory. And every word that you know, you had to be taught, which was originally derived by somebody else who more or less just made it up. Now, I don’t want this to seem that I think all words are arbitrary, but more that they are approximations. Again, words are not the things themselves. Words can also be used to represent things that may not have a physical world correlate ideas, emotions, for example. And the reason I bring this up at all, is because we take a lot of our language meanings to be implicit. But sometimes, people can end up talking past each other by using Word that does not have an emotional resonance with the person we’re trying to communicate with. So sometimes we need to make our definitions explicit. And through that, I think we could eliminate a lot of confusion and suffering by recognizing that we may not share the same assumptions. But then we can mutually construct a new common ground.
All Common Ground starts, however, from the fact that we have a subjective experience, consciousness if you will, through which, or within which all of our experiences of the external world or of our bodies, or our emotions come to be known. Let’s not confuse intelligence with consciousness. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems or the ability to make models, whereas consciousness is the subjective experience, the fact that it feels like anything at all the fact that you have an experience, starting from there, we only really ever know the world through our subjective experience mediated through nerve endings connected to our sense organs. So we have to be very humble about what we say we know. Because all memories that we have, were ultimately stored through the filter of our current emotional experience and are recalled under emotional states as well. But we have to trust something in our memories, the best thing that we have to trust. And it seems like there are regular patterns that emerge, and that we experience. And a lot of those patterns seem to be external to our bodies. So, rather than devolve into solipsistic nihilism, I think it implores us, at least from a survival standpoint, to assume that there is a real world out there, and that this real world somehow evolved the body, which contains a brain, which does pattern recognition and computation contains a self model that is responsible for regulating the needs the physiologic needs of the organism that contains the brain.
We can get into sticky waters pretty quick. So I’ll just lay out my best understanding and would invite any comments offline. But as far as we’re aware, the fact that you have subjective experience is different than the part of you that is making the decisions. Studies have shown that we can detect nerve impulses in the brain that will predict your actions before you’re subjectively aware that you’ve already made a decision and many people have the experience of operating completely on instinct and not having to think about their actions.
As far as I can tell, consciousness or subjective experience serves somewhat like a barometer or a thermometer, the state of well being or not of the organism, which can influence and prime the subconscious decision makers and subconscious pattern recognizers. The reason I bring this up at all is because a lot of our social and moral rules seek to hold an individual conscious being responsible as if it was the consciousness itself that has an essential quality of goodness, badness, evilness, etc. So then we use reinforcement mechanisms that are largely unproductive. And we can get into that later. But this is just setting the stage to say that our brain is a biological computer, it sits in the bath of our physiology, and all of our thoughts and actions are constrained by our biology, before we decide that somebody is evil, or they did something and should be held responsible, if we actually care about coming up with a better outcome, we really need to understand these constraints and contexts.
So if we’re just a brain in the vat of our body, and all we know, is their subjective experience, and we don’t have access to the physical reality. How do we know that there is even one out there or that there’s one that we share versus 7 billion of them that are unique to themselves? My response to that is we communicate, I tell somebody that it seems to me that these things are true. And here’s my evidence for it, and they share their reasons and feelings. And we socially construct a reality that seems to be consistent within the frames that we share. So if we can socially construct a transparent library of data that is repeatable and accessible, and makes reasonably good predictions, and that we update these models with new evidence to make better predictions in the future, then that comes pretty darn close to a reality. And I would argue that agreeing to the same shared reality is key to optimum social functioning, the better we have a shared understanding of the universe, and how we fit in it, the better we can navigate it together.
A big part of the reality we care about is human behavior, which is biologically driven. Nature is nurture, and vice versa. quarks beget atoms beget molecules beget cells beget organisms, they beget society and history, We are a patchwork of evolved sufficiently adaptive survival functions. There was no teleology in place that got us here. We are not the peak of evolution, we are just one branch of evolution. We have survival functions that exist at the level of enzymatic metabolism, spinal reflexes, midbrain regulation systems, cognitive faculties and social instincts. These survival instincts were not necessarily selected for universal internal consistency. For example, we are wired to find sweetness very salient and attracting but we are also cognitively aware that it may not serve us well over the long term to eat exclusively sweet foods that some of our survival instincts have a very real chance of leading us to an addictive behavior pattern. When our dopamine based learning and reward systems get short circuited. Because we don’t have enough of another instinctual balancing mechanism, cognitive immune system, or social safety network to help us thus we are complex beings, we can have what appears to be a mind body conflict. A catchy shorthand to represent the fact that a survival function may have opposing drives to another function. The reason this is important, because if we’re going to come up with a moral system or a social code, we really need to understand our own biology and how our behavior is constrained by it. This applies to our social evolution as well. We’re social primates that evolved on the African savanna to cursorily hunt and tribes of about 150 people, sometimes called the Dunbar’s number, we have the same biological hardware that we did a million years ago. And yet, we now live in a post industrial society network together on a scale that our innate social instincts are not well adapted to. But thankfully, we are a technology using and creating species. social technologies are among the most important.
Probably the biggest reason why there’s only one form of hominid left on the earth and not an ecosystem of Neanderthals, Homo habilis or Homer Erectus is that Homo sapiens sapiens evolved the ability to cohere into larger groups. You Usually through social signaling mechanisms, and most part, religions for the vast majority of our history. So if we consider religion to be just one of a type of social technology that we can use to cohere and share a narrative, then we can construct new ones. We can construct a social narrative based on science, a social narrative based on the best empirical evidence that we have for human behavior as it’s constrained by our biologies. We can create incentives, things like rewards and punishments, in such a way that we actually get the behavior that we’re looking to do. Oftentimes, it’s going to seem counterintuitive, because we’re not going to be holding people responsible. We’re going to be looking at the context that brought somebody to make an anti social decision. My favorite psychiatrist Dan Siegel, talks about how all misbehavior in children is really just an unmet need on some level. And if we extrapolate that to adults, a lot of anti social behavior is coping mechanisms that were developed during a childhood with many unmet needs. So if we can reverse engineer that, we can begin to meet needs in a way that keep people pro social. This is not to say that unsafe people should not be held sometimes to prevent them from hurting others, but that when they are held against their will, it would be more of a hospital type setting where they are kept safe and medicated and given therapy and taught skills that allow them to survive in the real world, rather than punishing somebody and throwing them into prison at an enormous price tag with a very high recidivism rate.
So what are these social norms or rules, what would be the ethics of such a society? My favorite philosopher Josha Bach defines ethics as the principled negotiation of conflicts of interests and the conditions of shared purpose. So first, what is purpose what is meaning, a mental model of your needs, the story or abstract representation that we tell ourselves about the relevance of a perception that motivates us to action, the meaning is something that we generate, meaning and purpose are things we impose on the world. It’s not something given to us, it’s not something inherent in the world or an object. Thus, it is critical that we share a story for what we are, how we operate on a physiological and a sociological basis. That helps us generate the shared purpose so that we can begin to principally negotiate conflicts of interest, we can recognize the complexity and gray areas in the world. We don’t have to blindly accept a moral list of shoulds and should nots given to us by some sheepherder prior to the invention of chemistry. So where do we get these “shoulds”? Once again, we generate them. We generate them based on the responses that we see in people based on policies that we enact. We collect evidence, we empirically test, we adjust our policies to achieve both the social outcome and the internal states that we desire. This model will never be complete, nor exact, it’s a dynamic socially agreed upon approximation of how we should behave.
And if we consider the sum total of all human behavior or all human actions, and we call that the economy, and not limited to some reductive, limited numbers, such as GDP, then we can start talking about the ways of organizing labor and distributing the fruits of the labor. No economy is either purely socialistic, or purely capitalistic. As I started this whole thing with those are just words that represent ways of thinking about how we organize ourselves. If we are able to break out of these rigid dyads, then we can start to ask ourselves, what are the empirically better ways of transacting of moving stuff from one place to another, and of holding and counting credit? The human cortex is an amazing, General abstractor that could in theory, understand just about anything. But if you remember that we weren’t inherently adapted to consider a complex worldwide economy on timescales that involve lifetimes, centuries and even millennia. So for returns on investment on the timescales of multiple generations. Perhaps it doesn’t make sense for short term markets to determine things like environmental policy, public health, and educational structures. Whereas for consumer goods and innovative technology, a market economy is quite useful for generating lots of useful technologies. Thus, the question becomes not socialism or capitalism, but which aspects of the human project are best run with social governance versus market redistribution.
And while we’re talking about the economy, we should probably talk about the religion of money. I heard a phrase A while ago, that we should think of money as the unit of caring. Money is another social technology. And how it comes into existence is going to have large influences on our behavior on the both micro and macro scales. We certainly need some form of trust token between unknown parties. And we could even consider an ecosystem of trust tokens. Things like social credit, or time banking. How money comes into existence has consequences as well. We currently have a fractional reserve fiat currency, where the Federal Reserve creates money out of thin air, loans it to the government at interest, and then puts it into circulation. The principle is held in reserve, which is then loan to corporate banks at some fraction. So for example, if the Federal Reserve loans the government a billion dollars, then they have a billion dollars that they use as a fractional reserve of say, 10% so that they can loan out $9 billion to corporate banks. Again, these are all loans, loans have interest that needs to get paid back. Where does the money come from, to pay back the interest on this principal, another loan, and thus we have a pyramid scheme, where if all loans were to be paid off, there would be no liquid cash in circulation, but there would still be interest needing to be paid off. So we have a self terminating scheme that lends itself to consolidation, and wealth generation through debt. So if we’re looking for places that might help curb the consolidation of wealth and control, that might be a good place to start.
As an example, for an alternative, if all of money came into existence through universal basic income, for example, say we give everybody $1,000 a month from the time they’re born, it averages out to about the same amount of productive work that an average healthy person will put back into the economy over their lifetime. In such a world money flows in from the bottom, people spend the money on their needs and on goods and their local community. And it funnels up, there’s a fixed supply, so that we just can’t create more of it at our wins, but it’s sufficiently elastic, and is reflective of the population productivity. I’m no macro economist, I just bring this up as a I’m a fan of universal basic income and be that the way we have constructed money is not set in stone. And if we want to change our macro economic fallout, we need to change how we use and create money. So it would seem to me it’s more a matter of political will rather than lack of resources to make a school like the one I’m envisioning happen.
If only we had robots that could just build this thing like we wanted, which we probably will before too much longer. Automation is going to be doing most of the things that we typically associate with wealth production, taking resources from the earth and turning them into useful things, as well as shuffling the numbers around that assign credit in society. So clerical jobs, retail, truck driving, manufacturing, all of these are going away of automation. So unless we rethink how to redistribute resources, it’s all gonna end up controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk. So how do we find meaning in this world of automated robots? We educate ourselves, education to bring out of childhood. And I mean this in a very broad and comprehensive way. The intergenerational transmission of information, literally what makes human civilization possible, we need to expand beyond the current school house based assembly line, memorization and regurgitation, and think more along the lines of emotionally focused peer led project based, meta learning, people capable of complexity thinking.
The robots are coming. And the work that’s leftover is going to be worked best suited to human hands, creativity, caring for each other art, making the world a better place. Everything about you is the product of luck, good, bad, otherwise, you didn’t choose when you were born to whom you were born, or any of the characteristics of your personality, or biology. So it gets really hard to say that anybody really deserves anything in this world. Certainly people make decisions, and certainly people capitalize on opportunities. But again, they had to have sufficient intelligence to recognize an opportunity be born in the right time and place to eventually get to an opportunity, which is why I find john Rawls, his veil of ignorance thought experiment, so compelling, if you could choose to be born in one of two societies, one where dog eat dog and the strong role, or one where there’s an adequate social safety net for anyone, but you couldn’t choose who you would be born as, which society would you be more attracted to. And we currently have the technology and resources to build a society that can meet a lot more needs a lot more proactively than we’re currently doing. And I just can’t shake the idea that if we were to robustly invest in education, and social safety nets, then we can have a next generation of people who are able to confront the crises of ecology, and starvation and spirituality that are fracturing this world and causing so much immense, unnecessary suffering.
If every local public school was open all the time on some level, to accept children and keep them warm, give them food, have access to information or an adult who can help them regulate. Or if not, at least be able to get them some place to meet those needs, if it’s beyond what you could reasonably staff. Then think about how many fewer crimes will be committed, think about how many fewer people will end up in prison. Think about how much more productive people might be. Think about how much more caring people might be. Think about how much more of a longer term investment people might be capable of making.
I talked a lot about behavior. But I don’t want that to seem like I’m neglecting the internal experience. One of the first things I talked about was consciousness. And it’s only from consciousness that we derive any value. It’s only because we have an experience of suffering, or joy, that any action or experience takes on value at all. Without consciousness, there is no value in the world. So we can’t go looking for it out there. We have to give each individual the language to be able to explain their own experience to somebody else. We need the tools to investigate our bodies in ways that language wouldn’t have access to: our blood count or blood pressure, for example. But those are just superficial characteristics. And we can dive deeper into somebody’s DNA, family history, myriad of other variables that contribute to anyone’s subjective experience. And for most healthy people there is a spiritual drive and need to connect with something larger than the ego. And so we can honor this need for spirituality, as it’s what’s allowed us to become the social species that we are today. We can generate a moral narrative that values each individual subjective experience that takes into account the physics of the situation that makes somebody feel the way that they do. And we can use the tools of science to adjust the environment and get people to a place where they can connect with the larger human project in a way that’s joyful and honest and sincere. And perhaps, a useful step to get there might be a school that’s open inclusive and free at the point of care
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