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Reflections on Egypt

As a rule, the masses will not revolt against even the worst government unless they are starving, and Egypt is no exception. Having endured the unpopular Mubarak regime for 30 years, Egyptians did not suddenly discover the internet or develop a stronger taste for democracy. What has happened in recent months is that food prices have escalated without an increase in government food subsidies, bringing an already impoverished society to its breaking point.

A nice graphical depiction of Egypt’s food and energy crisis can be found at The Oil Drum, showing how Egypt’s increased oil consumption is leading it to become an oil importing nation for the first time. Without the windfall of oil export revenues, the government can no longer subsidize its failed domestic economy to alleviate the cost of food and other necessities. Egyptians literally have nothing to lose by resisting a government that has denied them the means of subsistence.

Egypt’s problems are an extreme form of similar problems held throughout the Middle East, as global oil exports are down, and many Arab governments find themselves too cash-strapped to keep their populations fed by subsidies. Only in such extremes do we find genuinely spontaneous mass movements from the bottom up, which are not orchestrated by any political or military cadre. The success of the Egyptian revolution in a mere 18 days has removed the biggest obstacle to mass revolt, namely the fear that there is no chance of success.

Ironically, most of the Arab dictatorships came to power by leading populist movements that toppled Western-backed monarchs in the 1950s and 60s. Several of these regimes, facing the same economic problems as their predecessors, eventually became dependent on the US or the USSR for military aid in order to secure their rule. The nations with greater oil wealth could afford to deliver economic improvement to the lower classes, which was generally implemented through socialistic or statist programs. The inefficiencies of socialism led to attempts at privatization reforms, such as those enacted by Mubarak, but the implementation of these reforms reeked of cronyism and corruption, offering little tangible benefit to the lower classes.

The mass revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere have no discernible political program other than to get rid of the existing failed regime. It is by no means guaranteed that the long-term result of these revolutions will be parliamentary democracy. After all, that had been the intent of the 1952 revolution that resulted in Nasser taking charge of Egypt. The present Egyptian military has disavowed any intent to rule, but even civilian leadership in the Middle East often proves reluctant to relinquish power, once obtained. Whatever the form of the new government, it will face the same structural economic and social problems that brought down the previous regime, and free elections will not bring any miraculous solutions. Both the market economy and the social welfare state can bring their fair share of ills, as the wealthy nations of the West have recently learned or re-learned.

Much has been said of the role that so-called “social media” played in the Egyptian revolution. Such tools were undoubtedly helpful in coordinating mass revolts without the help of structured leadership, but they would have come to nought if there was not a broad determination among the people to persevere in their protests. The Egyptian government was astoundingly successful, from a technical perspective, in shutting down the Internet for five days, yet the protests persisted with even greater fervor and finally the government relented. Shortly after the revolution, Syria actually liberalized internet access, realizing that its suppression would only give the people one more occasion for discontent, as if you had cut off power or water or any other utility. The Internet does not create revolutions, but gives voice to discontent that is no less real if the nation is unplugged.

Parsing Is Not Understanding

The substantial advances in natural language processing made by IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer, while genuinely impressive, have unfortunately given rise to exaggerated claims of the sort that is all too common in computer science. Our tendency to anthropomorphize our creations has led many to uncritically claim that Watson has “intelligence” or is able to understand “meaning” in words. Even less soberly, some are envisioning a day when such “artificial intelligences” will make humans obsolete. These silly claims are grounded in a philosophical sloppiness that fails to distinguish between concepts and their representations, between signal processing and subjective awareness, between parsing and understanding. I have already addressed some of these errors in the eighth chapter of Vitalism and Psychology.

While a little fanciful anthropomorphizing of a computer may seem harmless now, there is a grave danger that we will be led into disastrous social and ethical decisions when computers are able to mimic intelligent behavior more convincingly. As an extreme example, if we were to take seriously the claim that a computer has rendered humans obsolete, we would foolishly replace ourselves with a bunch of unaware machines sending signals to each other, yet having no interior psychological life. Alternatively, we might decide that machine “intelligences” should enjoy rights formerly reserved only to humans.

These absurdities can be avoided if we confront the reality that there is nothing fundamentally different about the behavior of supercomputers like Watson as compared with its simpler predecessors. All these machines do is process signals algorithmically. They have no intensional understanding of meaning. What we call a computer’s “understanding” or “intelligence” is really how it treats a certain signal object. This is strictly determined by its hard wiring and its program (though the latter may include random variables). It is completely unnecessary for the computer to know what it is doing. For example, Watson may distinguish which of the several definitions of the word “bat” is intended by context, but this distinction does not involve actually knowing or seeing a baseball bat or a flying mammal. It is a strictly functionalistic analysis of language, selecting one of several possible attributions based on a probabilistic analysis using syntactic context.

Years ago, I wrote a C program that solves quartic polynomial equations, which was simple enough to run on an IBM 386. This program did not give the computer the power to understand higher mathematics. I simply reduced an intelligible process to an algorithm that a machine could execute without understanding anything about anything. The computer did not know it was doing math any more than a chess program knows it is playing chess. The same is true with respect to Watson and language. It has not the slightest grasp of conceptual meaning. The impressive achievement in its programming is reducing the vast possibilities of natural language parsing to an executable algorithm that has a high degree of accuracy (though not perfect) in its results.

It is certainly not true that Watson understands language the same way humans do, much as Deep Blue did not play chess as humans do. Quite simply, humans do not have the computing ability to explore millions of possibilities in a few seconds, so that is certainly not how we identify the meanings of words in speech in real time. We are able to intuit or directly understand the meanings of words, so we do not have to do much deep analysis to figure out how to interpret ordinary conversation. The great power of rational understanding is that we can get directly at the answer without walking through countless possibilities. This is why I was much more impressed with Kasparov than with Deep Blue, for Kasparov was able to keep the match competitive even though he could not possibly go through millions of possibilities each turn. He had real wisdom and understanding, and could intuitively grasp the most likely successful move on each turn, with a high degree of accuracy.

Some, unwilling to accept a fundamental distinction between computers and authentic rational beings, have sought to demote the latter to the status of computers. They will say, in effect, that what we have said about how computers work is perfectly true, but human beings do not do anything more than this. All we do is process data, and relate inputs to outputs. This position can hardly be characterized as anything but profound willful ignorance. A moment’s careful introspection should suffice to demolish this characterization of human intelligence.

Unfortunately, philosophical naivete is endemic in computer science, which purports to reduce intensional meaning and understanding to its extensional representations. This is linguistically naive as well, for if a signal is an arbitrary sign for a concept, it follows that meaning is not be found in the signal itself. The computer never interprets anything; it only converts one set of signals into another set. It is up to us rational beings to interpret the output as an answer with meaning.

Highly accurate natural language processing is an important step toward establishing credible computerized mimicry of intelligent processes without subjective understanding. Although we can never create genuine intelligence using the current modalities of computer engineering, we might do well enough to create a superficially convincing substitute. In a world that increasingly treats human beings with a functionalistic input-output mentality, such developments could have profound social and ethical implications, which I treat in my new short story, “The Turing Graduate,” to be published soon.

Leaks in Government Intelligence

The WikiLeaks scandal is exposing the internal contradictions of liberal democracy, which pretends to promote an open society while its heavily entrenched power structure relies on coercion and espionage. The hypocrisy of Western democracies is not a new thing; in fact, we can turn to the revolutionary movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to see how the principles of “liberty” and “equality” were often imposed by brute force or deceit.

The infamous “Reign of Terror” in revolutionary France was but the culmination of an increasingly aggressive secularism that had sought to turn the Church into an arm of the state with its Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1791. Thousands of priests, aristocrats, and peasants who opposed the new order were killed or exiled. Similarly, in Mexico, the liberals, once securely in power, abolished the Catholic university, and eventually all public manifestations of Catholicism. Back in Europe, democratic and republican revolutions were prompted through coups and assassinations, including the infamous throat-slitting of Pellegrino Rossi, interior minister of the Papal States.

The use of secret societies, Masonic or otherwise, was a staple of liberal and revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century, as is well documented. In England, whose Protestant culture is also the product of a successful intrigue – the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 – and its cultural heir the United States, it has been common to dismiss such claims as paranoia, since they are vested in defending the legitimacy of the liberal power structure. In fact, the existence of a real Masonic conspiracy (as opposed to the various bugaboos of more recent times) was publicly exposed in France in 1904. In “l’Affaire des Fiches,” the anticlerical war minister General Louis Andre was found to have been determining promotions and denunciations on the basis of a card file he kept of who was a Catholic and who attended Mass. Both Andre and Prime Minister Emile Combes were Freemasons, and had acquired their information from the spy activities of the Masonic Grand Orient of France.

Once victorious in destroying the cultural infrastructure of its rivals, democrats hypocritically proclaim “freedom of education”, where all education dogmatically accepts the tenets of secular democracy, which is why, to a historically educated person, there is surprisingly little ideological diversity in modern academia. The dissenting academics having been purged or rendered impotent, a new form of coercion is free to impose itself. It is only through a historically inaccurate demonization of previous forms of government that our modern Western governments can pretend to any virtue.

After the outbreak of the First World War, the governments of the West gradually abandoned any notion of aristocratic honor, and learned to wage war and peace mercilessly. Apart from the mechanical destruction of much of Europe’s cultural patrimony in the two world wars, there arose intelligence agencies that took the ancient art of espionage to new levels, systematically intercepting communications even of allies, and attempting to corrupt foreign citizens into betraying their governments (i.e., act as “agents”). The U.S. and Britain were most advanced in this regard, especially in the aftermath of World War II.

In the U.S., the presence of an agency that systematically violates personal privacy would run into constitutional problems. These were circumvented by allowing the CIA only to spy on foreigners, and by collaborating with the FBI, which spies on U.S. citizens in the name of police security. The NSA can spy on U.S. citizens indirectly by making use of data gathered by British collaborators. Between the U.S. and the U.K., no one’s information is safe, as was proved by the infamous scandal of the U.S. and U.K. spying on UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other officials.

We know from bitter experience that the U.S. and its allies are ruthlessly amoral when it comes to espionage – absolutely nothing is exempt from the catchall excuse of “security”. The successful 9/11 attacks only allowed the U.S. to declare openly what it had already been doing in secret for decades: illegally spying on its own citizens, and detaining people in foreign prisons for years without trial. A majority of the docile public actually supports these policies. So much for their supposed love of liberty.

Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange have lain bare the contradictions of our liberal establishment, which demands that we respect the authority of governments that were founded by murdering and destroying the previous social order throughout the nineteenth century. Liberal democracy, at its core, was founded on intrigue and brute force, so it is only fitting that it clings to power by using coercive tactics against its citizens. We should find it blessedly ironic, then, that the government of Sweden makes use of its extraordinarily liberal laws regarding sexual consent as an excuse to arrest Assange shortly after his latest wave of embarassing leaks. Liberal efforts to defend women, the poor, and the disabled are really designed to pit the citizenry in competition with one another, always asserting their rights against each other, rather than joining forces against their real enemy.

When the core of the liberal democratic establishment (and I use “liberal” in the classical sense, which includes today’s so-called “conservatives”) is challenged, it is remarkable how everyone suddenly marches in lockstep. Credit card companies refuse to process payments, hosting companies drop the site, and even the ostensibly neutral ICANN takes away the domain name ‘wikilieaks.org’. It is chilling how all the powers in the world can line up against someone and try to suppress them, even on the supposedly free and open Internet.

Fortunately, there are countermeasures available. Already, a host of mirror sites have been created, and there are even instructions online for creating a mirror site. Supporters of Wikileaks have initiated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against some of the companies that tried to kill the original site. While such activity is illegal, it is surprisingly easy to accomplish, as are other forms of online hacking. A person needs only to set himself up behind a proxy in a country that does not forward tracking records to the U.S. or other Western countries, or simply login through a neighboring wireless network. These tricks and other hacking tools can be found by searching on the scraper site Scroogle, which lets you search without being tracked by Google.

The weapons of the hacker can provide a potent counterbalance to the temerity of our governments, which pretend that they own you and have the right to spy on you or do whatever they want with you, but heaven forbid that you should find out what they are doing. These illegitimate usurpers, who use public authority for private aggrandizement, should be thankful that we do not do anything worse to them.