The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the 'Rats of NIMH'
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
> But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.
Actually, nature had a patent on that one long before humans showed up. It's the author of that "primitive cerebrum", too. We've been spending the past however many thousands of years to try undo this reality. But we're really new to this party.
These AI's also sound awfully like humans. And they're motivated to create lots of humans (regardless of happiness of thereof) and collect them as batteries. Surely we should trust these ones to create a best world for us, and they have no reason to lie to us. I'm sure people resisted this in the Matrix because they disliked happy worlds. Not, you know, because having your entire reality be controlled by some other entity is worrying.
Apart from its rhetorical value, the allegory is interesting because of it raises questions concerning life-as-suffering and painful knowledge/blissful ignorance. The Matrix does a decent job of relaying both of those concepts to a mass audience.
Personally, I'm not certain that humans can create a meaningful utopia. Empirically, we seem to be very bad at personally gauging our absolute welfares[1].
[1]: http://faculty.som.yale.edu/ShaneFrederick/HedonicTreadmill....
The Hedonic Treadmill for me gets about the same treatment as Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs - it's too simplistic and the conclusions it makes are biased by the beliefs of the culture it originated in. It's fairly easy to find many questions to ask and many holes to poke. A lot of "happiness" studies sadly tend to tap directly into cultural norms and expectations and are very difficult to untangle. Including the cultural norm of giving "happiness" a high value, higher than the painful knowledge you mention, for instance. One objective I would have for a utopia is that knowledge would cease to be painful. Until then, it's a lie either way, and a true utopia is not a lie.
Not to mention, if the Hedonic Treadmill is true, it's highly likely to be genetic, which is should not be an obstacle give or take a few centuries.
I would recommend against throwing out the utopian idea based on social science theories. The Hedonic Treadmill is maybe 40 years old, utopias are probably many k years in the future.
How exactly is this laughable? it is generally true as shown by the predator-prey cycle - a form of balance. The exception to this cycle is usually invasive species that do not have a natural predator, these populations grow until they exhaust their food source and the population collapses.
Also by the predator-prey cycle argument, humans just haven't reached the balance yet. We have an abundance of food currently, so we are still growing to the balance point.
So now I am imagining row after row of mice in little mouse chairs, wearing tiny VR helmets, organizing for a raid on the MegaMechaCat boss in the Mousecraft MMORPG.
It would be interesting to see if escapist recreation is necessary for a healthy high-density society. Purely for self-rationalization of my own gaming activity, you understand. Any scientific benefits would be purely accidental.
That's really nifty, and there are a lot of interesting directions that could have gone it. But it would have driven it closer to more hard sci-fi, and I don't know how well that sells.
They probably did it because test audiences (or maybe studio execs) didn't get the computation thing. If you watch the films, they really only changed it superficially to account for that, and lots of it only makes sense with the computation explanation, which even before I knew it was the original concept I assumed was the real thing going on, and that "batteries" was a faulty conclusion reached by the free humans.
I dislike that interpretation because it's really insulting to the intelligence of those humans. (Specifically the idea that they would conclude that as a group, with years of consideration. I'm not disparaging any individual that would find it plausible.)
I remember watching that part & thinking hmmm, that's me at my job, except I'm generating money instead of energy.
You're only partly correct. The battery story was told to the humans to blind them from the truth, which would have been revealed to us in the sequels, except in between, the Wachowskis seem to have left planet earth. The question shouldn't be what is the Matrix, but what is its purpose.
The original matrix was created by the humans, but once the Architect became self aware he hijacked it for his own purpose. The Architects true purpose in creating the Matrix was to model a piece of reality and therefore by observing that, might discover the nature of the AI that created it.
In order for the experiment to succeed everyone except the Architect had to be blinded as to its true purpose. The previous Matrices were the result of failed experiments and so had to be destroyed. As such the Architect, the Oracle, Agent Smith, Neo and the humans were engaged in some kind of gargantuan scientific experiment. You would agree the above would have made more interesting sequels.
If the machines needed a power buffer for their nuclear plants, they could certain mass produce lithium ion cells. Or if they really needed a bio-battery, they could use cows, which wouldn't resist so much. Or they could simply remove the parts of the human brain that cause trouble. Put every human in a persistent vegetative state by physically destroying the part of the brain that controls consciousness.
The one and only conclusion you can draw from this is that if the Matrix is a battery bank, the machines are idiots. Clearly, judging from the remainder of the script, they are not idiots. They are, in fact, quite clever. So in order for the humans to believe the Matrix is a battery bank, they have to be the idiots. They can't just be ignorant of non-human batteries, because they exist inside the Matrix program, and Morpheus actually shows one to Neo.
So the AIs would have to perform a physical surgical intervention in human brains, inserting an autonomous microsurgeon robot attached to the Matrix connection hardware that is constantly identifying the neurons activated by the concept of a computer CPU, and those activated by the concept of the human brain, and physically removing and blocking any connections between them. The Matrix connection hardware is much more precise than an fMRI, and clearly, the machines are capable of doing fine microsurgery into the human brain to install it in the first place. The Matrix-born humans then have to connect the concepts in a way that routes around the physical block in order to understand them at all. So the humans are like batteries, but they provide a different kind of power than electricity. What kind of power? I can't tell you, and even if I could, you wouldn't be able to understand it, because the machines have deliberately damaged that part of our brains. The freeborn humans of Zion actually gave us the battery metaphor, that is as close as we can physically get to understanding what the Matrix is for.
Morpheus even says, "Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself." If you are told, the physically enforced agnosia kicks in, and you are physically incapable of understanding what you hear. If you ever do manage to make the link, a microscopic pair of scissors inside your skull snips an axon or two, and you immediately forget it.
That's the only retcon I can come up with that doesn't make the whole battery concept sheer idiocy.
...
MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?
NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!
MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?
(Pause.)
NEO: ...in the Matrix.
MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.
They do, every so often some do wake up, that's why the agents have to hunt them down before they contaminate the rest of the matrix (whole crops were destroyed), or failing that destroy and remake the matrix.
> If the machines needed a power buffer .. Put every human in a persistent vegetative state by physically destroying the part of the brain that controls consciousness.
The experiment doesn't require them as a power plant but as a living conscious biological computer. Once the Architect realized that machine intelligence wasn't up to the task, that's when he/it decided to enslave all of humanity. The question being; what would be the nature of an artificial intelligence responsible for creating the physical universe. By recreating a small part of it in the Matrix the architect could study the experiment under controlled conditions.
Was there a "cure"? The article speaks of the fashion in which his later efforts attempted to alleviate the catastrophic social problems he'd observed in his earlier utopian designs. It is craftily silent on the subject of those efforts' results.
http://www.brucekalexander.com/articles-speeches/rat-park/14...
I interpreted that as "no one wanted to fund [finding] the cure". And then he died, and that was the end of that.
> In his early experiments in the outdoor pens, Calhoun had witnessed a creative act by his rats that he likened to the discovery of the wheel by man: when building a new burrow they did not simply dig out the dirt as they went, as any normal rat would do, instead they packed it into a large ball which they then rolled out. This innovation had not come from the socially dominant animals but from a highly disorganized and predominantly homosexual group of subordinates, partially withdrawn from the larger social organization. As Calhoun saw it, the repression they had suffered at the hands of their superiors had resulted in deviant, creative, and thus adaptive behaviour. Inspired by this example, in his laboratory at NIMH, Calhoun attempted to design rodent universes that would both stimulate, resulting in “creative deviants,” and ameliorate: removing the worst excesses of crowding pathology.
Probably the most direct section is this:
> Through a variety of methods, such as operant conditioning and determining which of the mice and rats could eat, sleep, live, with whom, he sought to design ever more intelligent and collaborative rodent communities, capable of withstanding ever greater degrees of density. Here, then, was the hopeful agenda: if the wrong environment would drive us to destruction, perhaps the correct environment would be our remedy.
> Calhoun suggested organizing scientists into a global, intercommunicating network composed of independent but interconnected groups and sub-groups. Only then could the necessary conceptual growth to avoid a catastrophic sink be achieved. He claimed it was “toward a concern with science as a world system which must be understood if the human race is to survive.” He saw these attempts to defer social pathology as the centerpiece and real import of his work. Here was the profit, the positive signal from the noise of the behavioral sink.
> It was in through this growth in conceptual space – enabled by the design of new buildings, new technologies, new social and intellectual networks – that humanity was presented with a more desirable future: what Calhoun called “Dawnsday” in opposition to von Foerster’s “Doomsday.” All of mankind might become part of a single “world brain,” consisting of numerous and diverse subsystems, each interlinked to, aware of, and dependent upon, the other.
Could it also be that the group was simply different, and suffered because it was different/non-dominant, but it was not the suffering that made them different to begin with? And getting away from the main group allowed them to do those things?
I would posit a utopia where there is such a thing as "dominant group" is not a utopia, after all.
Remember these guys? http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/no-time-for-bullie...
Groups of people interested in esoteric things who just want to be left alone... sounds familiar.
Dominance is something else entirely and I staunchly disagree that this strictly evolutionary construct needs to persist forever.
Every time I read about these experiments, this is the stirring part. Individuals that appear to be the most fit just fail to mate for no apparent reason, yet they live as if they were always preparing for it.
Maybe there's an evolutionary adaptation that lowers testosterone production during times of high population, and in the artificial conditions of the experiment that adaptation exhibited itself too strongly?
That would also explain why mice taken out of the experimental environment didn't rehabilitate. There are other studies cited in "The Red Queen" that suggest that levels of testosterone are largely determined by the mother's environment and stress levels during gestation.
Perhaps our work to eliminate many of the more primal issues that affect us (the need to hunt, survive in the wild, etc) are only making us worse off?
It would be interesting to hear more about this, as well as what the potential "cures" may be, as alluded to at the end of the article.
There's plenty of "strife" in day to day life, some other jerks on the road, to your co-workers, to your friends and family. Or just working on your long term goals and dreams in the face of the demands of every day life.
I don't think human conflict or violence is necessary for flourishing.
There are examples of great creative people who had come from backgrounds of violence or abuse, but I don't think that means much. If they were exposed to more violence, would they have been even more genius? What is the right amount of violence to expose people to to have genius blossom?
Kind of like the human who makes the rat park and complains the rats are not happy?
Perhaps we will be happy in environments we choose to make for ourselves, not some that others have arbitrarily decided we should be happy in. I would say there's something inherently corrupt in an environment you do not control.
http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13
James Q Wilson, the guy who came up with "broken windows theory," said the manifesto was "a carefully reasoned, artfully written paper… If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers — Jean Jacques Rousseau, Tom Paine, Karl Marx — are scarcely more sane."
I wrote an article about the man a while back, so I'm always interested when ideas like this pop up. Here's the article: http://dark-mountain.net/blog/ted-kaczynski-and-why-he-matte...
And yeah, I used to write TK and he's hard to get along with. But I think a lot of his "antagonism" isn't personal so much as it is an attempt to stir up popular antagonisms, a propaganda of sorts. I can't ever be sure though. Guy's a mystery to me in a lot of ways. Super interesting though.
>Perhaps our work to eliminate many of the more primal issues that affect us (the need to hunt, survive in the wild, etc) are only making us worse off?
this is why we have "strife" of science and exploration, and this is why need to go to Mars - to avoid civilization implosion into always connected-status-updated one big Palantirized Facebook graph of well-fed humans. The key choice of our civilization today - between Thiel and Musk.
At least one human based model of "what rodents need" is that. Perhaps it was more an experiment on crowding than utopian needs being met.
Edit: one, not our
This has direct application not only in dense populations but in our relationship with other species. Our bodies and our culture has evolved in the presence of rats, insects, dogs, cats and billions of bacterial and viruses. Isolation from these other species will doom us as it did these mice.
Human beings in some societies are reaching the point where disease, fatal accidents, and similar stressful or population-reducing effects are minimized. For example, Silicon Valley. I'm not so sure though whether it is a utopia though. Physical living space, aka real estate, in SV is certainly at a premium.
And I've seen similar cases mirroring the study's "beautiful ones", the drinkers, and rowdy youths. There are parallels and insights to be drawn from these studies of mice and men.
With humans, it's also not as simple as population control. The presence of other species, even predators, is a cornerstone of our evolution and culture. We are afraid of the dark for a reason. We protect our kids from the unknown for a reason. We keep dogs as guards for a reason. A world truly without predators might result in very different culture. I'm often taken aback by how people who live in regions without large predators (UK, Japan) differ in their views on nature from those who walk beside predators every day (Canada/Australia).
Talk to a tourist on a beach about shark attacks. Then talk to a surfer. The former has strong opinions but isn't under any real threat. The later is often much more tolerant of sharks despite the increased risk (see Australia's shark cull debates). Even a slight but real risk of dangerous predators, imho, gives one a much greater respect for nature.
(http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)
If food isn't constraining, it's not your limiting factor, something else is.
The general idea is expressed in Leibig's Law of the Minimum, from Justiz Leibig, a 19th century botanist.
This is why counterarguments to Malthusian philosophy based on showing that some arbitrarily selected factor isn't constraining are moot. The question is, what is limiting in the environment. And if growth has stopped, something is constraining it.
Possibly the best piece of children’s literature that is explicitly about evolution, neuroscience and society, and they turn it into a woo-woo adventure about a MAGIC AMULET
ugh. Read the book. Buy your kids the book. Terrific book.
I felt the same way with Never Ending Story. And, as a kid, I loved that movie. Book was so much more, though.
Howl's Moving Castle was one where I actually had a hard time liking more than one or two scenes of the movie, because of how much I liked the book.
As a Miyazaki/Ghibli fan, I got into the film more than the book.
I still need to read The Never Ending Story. But yeah, the movie of Rats of NIMH was super disappointing to me.
I'm much more of fan of his other works, like Castle In The Sky, and Kiki's Delivery Service. And The Wind Rises. And the Cat Returns.
Okay, let's just pencil in that I like all of Miyazaki's work.
And I am generally a fan of Studio Ghibli. I specifically am not saying it is a bad movie.
I am curious if you have any particular reason for not liking the book.
They've narrowed it down to Daniel Kristoff's theory of "Genetic Rot", according to the behaviors observed.
● evolution is not perfect, each generation has good genetic mutations and bad genetic mutations
● the bad genetic mututations normally die off and are weeded out of the gene pool
● fighting for resources causes natural eugenics and the betterment of a population by only the best get food and the weak dying off
● the mouse experiment basically shows how communism caused ALL mutations to continue to the next generation both good and bad.
● untill eventually an uncontrolled pattern of defective genes plagued the mice and could no longer be weeded out. This is why mice taken out of the experiment did not recover.
● resource abundance caused individual mice who never should have reproduced to reproduce introducing their defect genes into the gene pool. (most animals get a huge decrease in population after a huge increase due to over-abundance of resources)
● the mice reproduced to a point until every single mouse had bad genes and could no longer save the population
● The mouse experiment mirrors what's happening in our society right now
Also, keep in mind this is a very sanitized version of the experiment. Somewhere out there is a complete list of behaviors observed, I can't find it but altasobscura doesn't talk about the controversial findings like "gender roles broke down" and "there was an increase of homosexuality" of the mice. Basically hinting that homosexuality, gender roles, and instinct are all heavily genetic based. And bad genes can often invert or flip instinct.
"For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles, and having expectancies to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation."
Scary insightful, but hopefully not prophetic.
This is precisely why, earlier, I was against calling the setting in this experiment a utopia. It's anything but. But call it that, convince people it's actually good conditions, and then other people will run to make unfounded claims that good conditions are bad. Not to mention that basic income is not going to magically create good conditions, anyway.
NEETs may be caused by poor life prospects, not the presence of food, shelter, and internet. I imagine you have access to those things, too, so do many other people who are not NEETs. People do not do well when they feel life is pointless, and many people do just as poorly as NEETs do but you don't see them or think about them because they don't make headlines.
>NEETs may be caused by poor life prospects, not the presence of food, shelter, and internet.
I am intimately familiar with NEETs, having spent years interacting with them. The pattern I have noticed is of above average intelligence, many even brilliant, who would have thrived if the world had only given them a push, but left to their own devices commit slow, masturbatory suicides.
Some people can invent purpose from thin air. This is especially common amongst the kinds of elites and academics that most eloquently advocate basic income. But the vast majority of us cannot any more than a mouse. Most insidious is that even those for whom purpose is closest to grasp lose their drive. The artists lose the joy of painting and the programmers never begin their projects.
The true utopia is the harsh, cruel world of nature that provides purpose to every living thing.
If you want to get people out of the house and interacting, that will go a long way, and doesn't require 40 hours of drudgery.
I don't know the same people you do, but for the people I know, I think they could be thriving if the world would stop pulling. They don't need a push. They need to have a way of doing things on their own without ending up in extreme poverty. We were not designed for the increasingly complicated and demanding market economy. Some of us can't handle it.
I haven't interacted with NEETs specifically, but I have interacted with a few people in a similar bucket. Including people who actually exhibit some similar signs but are not NEETs because they technically are in work or education or something (in fact, I think that part of the definition is not really relevant and is just an easy shorthand - which is why I'm not buying the "need a push" thing - often these people can adapt to a push just fine). The issue I often found is that they lost life purpose, and often they're rather hard to argue with. The more intelligent people can't convince themselves with nice sounding falsehoods. But there's little else offered them. God, of course, is dead. And, after a while, there may not be anyone for them to talk to whether they go out there or not. Let's say that I'm not too surprised at their existence, and no weird explanations about how man moved too far from nature or something have anything to do with it.
A person being brilliant doesn't deal with unpleasant people or environments, it doesn't solve all the nasty hoops that one often has to jump through to do certain things, it's really not something that gives you all that much power. If anything, a more brilliant person may realize how powerless they are while a less brilliant one will keep pushing. If we have groups of intelligent people repeatedly refusing to participate in society that may mean something's wrong with the society. Something's driving them away, making them give up. I can see many such forces.
We should stop trying to create a surrogate purpose, whether it's through the worship of nature's hardships or deities that probably don't exist. We should, you know, maybe actually look at the problem, and figure out what we want to do. I think people want to do plenty of things but are usually not invited.
I'll agree that some people may not find a purpose on basic income, but they already don't have one. Someone in 3 jobs on min-wage drinking themselves to death in a bar is hardly better off than a NEET. Or what of people in gangs or cartels, what of drug addicts. There are many groups like this, NEETs are pointed out because it's a fun target people like to pick at. There was always a sizable percentage of people who had issues. Those people do not magically disappear in the natural world. This is a more advanced issue that basic income neither causes nor will it fix. But it should at least help make their lives a little less miserable, just like many other movements made the lives of certain groups less miserable.
> The artists lose the joy of painting and the programmers never begin their projects.
You appear to be referring to something that happened in the past? What?
A harsh and cruel world, is, by definition, not a utopia. At most you can argue that a utopia is not possible. But let's not call a bad thing good. Most beings do not enjoy suffering by its very definition. We've moved away from the natural state of things for a reason. Nature is not the way it is to make anyone happy, quite the opposite, really, so do not expect it to be the one to accomplish that task. That one is on you. There are far worse situations than being a NEET and nature offers so many of those. If that's all the world can offer, I'll keep looking for more.
A simulation of strife, if such is so required, is already far superior to true strife. Strangely enough, simulated strife hasn't really been all that popular so far - people seem to ultimately prefer their games to be a bit more forgiving and fair.
And let's be suspicious of claims and theories that just say: "Let's go back to how it used to be". This is an expected rollback. You venture into the unknown, you don't know what to do, so you want to run back to how it was, because it's familiar. But consider how big the unknown is, how much possibility there is there. Why settle, why not make sure there is nothing higher? When we fail to fly, do we stop trying? When we can't find a solution to a problem, do we stop looking? Why do you expect the design of a world in which all humans are happy some easy task you so flippantly dismiss the moment there's a roadblock? It's only logical that there will be many, many errors and setbacks and failures along the way. This IS, perhaps, the true purpose of humanity.
Can you really not imagine a world better than this?
>if you judge by the NEETs of today.
I think its pretty obvious that NEETs are very much in denial, or have no access to, the mental healthcare they need. We also need to accept that a lot of people on the autism spectrum will end up as NEET-like and there's probably nothing to be done about it.
I realize it's colloquial to continue the bastardization of NEET to mean someone who has withdrawn from society, though I feel the nuance requires particular attention especially if we're attempting to diagnose problems and propose solutions. Indeed there may be overlap, but what can be said for one set may not be true of another even if one is a subset of the other.
(In case you think this is just laziness, it's not - look at the hobby craft world. People can do a lot of hard, difficult work, as long as they have any say in what they do. It seems that a lot of people crave more autonomy now.)
That's why I'm hopeful about basic income idea - it seems like a way to give more autonomy to people who do not have the grit to fight for it on the job market. A way to channel this untapped productivity.
Industrial Society and Its Future http://wildism.org/rca/items/show/13
Also Ellul's The Technological Society
Bill Joy cites Kaczynski in his own Wired 2000 essay, "Why The Future Doesn't Need Us".
And more seriously, it's sad that people weren't interested in his attempts to fix it... which sound interesting even if they didn't work either.