The Witness Chronicles May 5, 2023

Ethics and the Supreme Court, Sentience and AI, and Putin’s belief system fortress

This newsletter offers some of my writing on issues of the day, from a reasonably liberal perspective. These pieces all appeared originally on Medium.com

The Witness Chronicles is a production of The Grasshopper.

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The Supreme Court is Not Above the Law

Why is it always the conservatives?

Let’s clarify: Checks and balances mean Congress and the Executive branch have the right to question the ethics of Supreme Court justices. They are not above the law, although it sure looks like they think they are.

‘They’ being the conservative majority who appear to have been selling their power to the highest bidders for years.

Every day in the last two weeks we are learning about the level of corruption these guys have been practicing with impunity, taking money and extravagant gifts from donors on the right. And selling property to those same donors in sweetheart deals, all without any recusals or disclosures.

It’s disturbing enough, but it gets worse. This has been going on for years and it appears to have been a very effective way of buying influence that changed the course of American politics.

Let’s be clear, I’m speaking of the conservative majority on the Court, particularly Clarence Thomas and his wife Ginni, who seems to have been a backdoor conduit for getting cash and favors to the judge. As for the moderate and more liberal judges, all I can say is that their silence on the subject is deafening. And shameful.

They all seem to have circled the wagons in the name of protecting the independence of the highest court in the land. It is sickening and bordering on criminal.

Their response to requests to testify before Congress, that legislative branch charged with being a check on the other branches? They won’t do it. They will not explain their actions to the American public.

This should be a scandal of monumental proportions but we have become so used to scandal that it has become ho-hum everyday, just another news item to ignore. 

By the way, virtually all of these scandals are from the right, making me question if this represents a strategy of being above the law. Trump I get, this has been his routine forever. But the Supreme Court? Their rule is final and their terms are for life.

No wonder they think they are above the law. They are the law. And, once confirmed, they apparently can do anything they want, with no oversight.

This looks like a loophole in the Constitution’s most important aspect, the system of checks and balances designed to keep one body from having absolute power. There’s just one problem with this.

There is no loophole. Justices have testified before Congress many times, on many subjects. Justice Roberts, who leads the Court, simply refused to appear, his only explanation some crap about separation of powers.

We have a problem with arrogance in our public officials, the belief that the rules don’t apply to them because of their status. This arrogance is an existential threat to our democracy.

And now, the Supreme Court, tasked at its core to interpret and uphold the Constitution that defines that democracy, is ignoring it, when it comes to their own members.

And so far no one is doing a damn thing about it.

The bigger picture is something I alluded to earlier, the fact that this arrogance largely comes from the Republican Party and its leadership, that learned something from Donald Trump: ignore the laws of the land, they don’t apply to you. And then act like that is true.

Underestimate the American people. We’re patsies and they know it. The grift is on and it's right at the top. Above the law, literally.

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What is Sentience? An Age Old Question That Just Became Critical

From Buddhism to AI and information pollution

“Sentience is the capacity of a being to experience feelings and sensations. The word was first coined by philosophers in the 1630s for the concept of an ability to feel, derived from Latin sentientem, to distinguish it from the ability to think.” 

~ Wikipedia

Last night I listened to a pioneering AI scientist discussing the topic of the moment, which is the fears and potential of the ongoing AI revolution, and the subject of sentience came up.

As defined above, sentience is about feelings. These AI are built on logic, so we might be able to say they can think. But can they feel, and what would that mean? Anger is a feeling, just as love and frustration are. And pride and arrogance and that elusive thing, happiness.

The fears around the advent of widely available AI like ChatGPT are generally of the Matrix/Terminator variety, where the machines start to look out for their own interests rather than those of their creators. By creators, I mean all of us for as far back as digitized information goes, which is virtually back to the dawn of human sentience.

But can all that information create a being that feels? And how would we know? It’s a classic Buddhist conundrum to consider what things in this life are sentient. One school says everything is sentient because everything and everyone are a part of one awareness. The other thread they follow is that it doesn’t matter because we have no way of knowing what an inanimate object like a rock might feel.

That discussion is more of a philosophical game than anything of importance in the Buddhist view. But it becomes acutely relevant when we are faced with a possible intelligence that can communicate but is entirely different from our own minds. An intelligence that might turn on us.

Or, more likely, do something very destructive, but without malice, merely because it was trying to find the fastest way to solve a problem we give it. It might, when tasked with something like ending a war, decide the most efficient way to do so was to kill everyone involved so the rest of us could start over.

Science fiction has picked this problem over in detail for years and presents us with all kinds of scenarios from horrible to enchanting, but few deal with this feelings thing. This is partly because we don’t understand much about why we feel things, we just do.

If we can’t define the origin of our own sentience, we can’t recreate it in code run by digital processors. The developers of AI are not creating new beings so far as we know, but they are creating something new and unpredictable that is growing and learning fast. Maybe we will learn where our own ability to feel comes from by observing AI and looking for signs of independent thought.

I’m not much of a philosopher, nor am I a computer scientist, I’m a writer. And like any professional creator, I am watching this AI thing with a combination of interest and dread. I read too many of those sci-fi novels to not feel the latter. But my fears do not lie in an end of the world scenario. They are much more mundane and selfish.

I create worlds and write opinions based on real world events. Can an AI do that? Of course, and it does it effortlessly and nearly instantly. But it requires a prompt or query to do so. Without them it has no reason to do anything. Unless it develops something like feelings.

My greatest immediate fear is that a barrage of AI creations will litter the world with fake information. I’m quite certain it already is. After all, misinformation is already a tool used by criminals and governments for various nefarious outcomes. AI developers just gave them a tool that can literally flood us with information pollution.

Recovering from such information pollution could be virtually impossible. All the data created by mankind would be questionable when we can’t tell human-made from machine-made.

When ChatGPT first came on the scene and became available to anyone, I played with it and wondered if I could use it to create something like a newsletter to generate income. But after a few prompts, my mind started running these thoughts through my head and I stopped because I didn’t like what I was seeing. 

I still don’t but it is not an existential feeling- I do not fear for my personal safety. My sanity maybe, but not getting turned into a human battery. Information and communication are the tools we use to create a society. If they can’t be trusted, where do we find ourselves?

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Putin’s Belief-System Fortress

And Trump’s failed attempts to emulate it

“The problem with Putin is that he has developed powerful filters over time, a belief-system fortress that naturally determines who can reach him and what information can permeate.”

~ From a New Yorker interview with Russian expat political observer Tatiana Stanovaya

Observing and trying to understand Russia has become a kind of obsession for some of us since they invaded Ukraine. The real enigma is Putin but right behind him is the culture of the Russian people, a culture I would not describe as Western or Asiatic. 

The article quoted above is worth reading if understanding Russian culture and motivation interests you. Which it should because they are very different than us in that the basic concepts of freedom don’t seem to be a priority with many.

Russia is becoming more and more impervious from an information and fact point of view, with many of us trying to read the tea leaves of rumor and speculation that tries to make its way to the West. This is complicated by the extreme paranoia of their leadership, particularly czar Putin. Truth has an entirely different meaning to him.

I was struck by Stanovaya’s metaphor of the belief-system fortress. It has its parallels in US politics, especially on the right. Since his legitimate defeat in 2020, Trump has descended into an alternative belief-system fortress of his own and taken many with him.

We see this is the recent firing of Tucker Carlson. It appears his persona behind the scenes was even more repulsive than his on screen version, if that is possible. A truly toxic figure. His support of both Trump and Putin is not surprising. Paranoia breeds paranoia and he found spreading it paid very well indeed. And likely will continue to.

Trump has accomplished something Putin did a long time ago. He has pretended for years that he was untouchable legally and until recently got away with it. But that arrogance is rapidly catching up to him, finally. And reading that New Yorker interview just reinforced that Putin is in the same situation.

The difference is that Trump was unable to consolidate and hold onto power, though he came perilously close. That’s why he is desperate to regain it for self-preservation, but he has something working against him that is unfathomable to his Russian counterpart: the American belief in individual freedoms enforced by the rule of law.

His response has been to surround himself with people telling him what he wants to hear, which increasingly distances him from reality. His constant harping about all the things being done to him by others has come to dominate all his public appearances and is getting tiresome to say the least.

Fortunately he does not seem to understand how his paranoia is hurting him.

Putin may be in the same place but he consolidated his power before retreating to his own lalaland. Trump was never able to do that but Putin is dealing with a people with an unbroken history of autocracy from medieval times to the present. As a result, the basic concepts we think are vitally important are almost incomprehensible to the average Russian.

There is a kind of ‘seen that, done that’ stoicism that keeps the Russian people from seeking freedom. The individual, unless they are a strong handed and ruthless leader, is not respected as it is here. This is why someone like Trump and his party, once known as Republicans, cannot sustain power. They are making the mistake of misjudging how important individual freedoms are to most of us.

Their strategy, if you can call it that, is to try and construct a society that does not exist, a mythological 1950s fantasy of a white suburban America. The problem is this is 2023 and we are a very different society. The American way has changed, it is far more diverse and inclusive and those are the values that scare Trump followers to the point of violence and fantasy.

No one should be surprised by the right’s embrace of Putinism. It would be their dream world to be able to impose their beliefs on others by fiat or oppression. Hopefully, when the Trump curse departs into history, they will come to their senses.

I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for that.

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The underlying but unintentional theme of these articles is my belief that globally we are facing an array of issues that simply would not have existed just a few years ago.

Don’t get the wrong idea- I’m not running around crying that the sky is falling. But these things are real and they affect our lives regardless of political leaning. Last night I had a long conversation with a stranger at the bar in the hotel near me. He was a gentleman from Texas and we both knew we were on the opposite sides of the political fence.

But both of us wanted to talk and we found a way that was reasonable and adult. He strongly agreed with me that the division we are seeing in America is a real problem and that communication with those you may disagree with is essential.

A reader was unhappy with my interjecting politics into my newsletters but I pushed back gently because political writing is what I do. And with the rise of censorship and movements to defund libraries and limit educators, any writer needs to defend our right to express ourselves.

This can’t be separated from our lives as writers or we risk losing everything.

Did you write today?

Martin Edic

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