How Israel Makes You Stupid

No Fate.

I have yet to read one book about the special relationship about the US and Israel, but I recently read one about the special relationship between the US and the UK. What I recall most from that is how a strategic blunder in UK politics over the Suez Crisis led the UK to believe that they were more geopolitically important than they actually were. Furthermore this belief led them to consider that their special relationship with America was proof that they had no reason to change their bully attitude. It turned out they were profoundly mistaken and never attained the level of power in the world they had before Suez.

The details of the Suez Crisis are forgotten to me, only in linking to Wikipedia might I remember it involved Israel. Nor can I even remember the name of the book. I have outsourced that bit of my memory to the computers that work for me. Nevertheless, I can say without hesitation that nobody making decisions about how to handle those matters knew what the long-term effects might be in the midst of that crisis. So now as then, I say nobody making decisions about how to handle the current wars in Ukraine, Yemen and Gaza know what’s next. I wouldn’t have any of these people handling my retirement portfolio. It’s a wonder that despite all of our human understanding that we even bother to assemble in the streets and blather on about our sensibilities.

Even so, anyone afflicted with my levels of curiosity and budget of info subscriptions cannot help but be bombarded with verbiage on the subjects. I do love the saying that exchanging conversations and ideas are particularly useful because it means we don’t have to do anything that would actually get us killed in reality. So I can satisfy my curiosity without risk, and so can you. But can I shutup about the whole thing? Can you?

I’ve been up this morning since 4:30 because I’m still on East Coast time and I tried but couldn’t sleep through two podcasts on the subject of Israel’s conflict with Gaza and Hamas. You are probably aware of Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris. Both of them have interviewed a cat named Graeme Wood who immediately booked the first flight to Israel at the onset of bloodletting this go round. I’ve had quite enough lucid dreams on those two scores, thank you very much. And yes, if you didn’t know, I have that ability to have my dreams narrated by what’s playing on my bluetooth speaker in the wee small hours. I especially like them when my hands are playing Chopin etudes or I am riding horses with characters from Louis L’Amour. This last time I was at an astoundingly colorful multiethnic wedding party in a souk. It didn’t end bloody but I had to eject and jerk awake as I heard the rumblings of a fight emerge.

In other news tangential to this I am backfilling my mind with fiction and other meta on the dark side of AIs taking over the world. So over the weekend I watched the first three Terminator movies. I never had before and now I finally see the appeal. In addition, I watched an excellent lecture by Stephen Wolfram, one of my intellectual heroes. He claims to have proven something world historical, that there are computable rules that can represent everything in the universe. He even explains a way to disambiguate Heisenberg’s observability problem in his multicomputational idea.

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Can one therefore predict everything?

“No. There is what I call computational irreducibility, in which in effect the passage of time corresponds to an irreducible computation that we have to run in order to work out how it will turn out.”

I would have to say that this is the most profound thing I’ve heard all year. It nicely dovetails with my principles of discovery and humility, and it’s clearly rule-based so reason is right there too. Since it makes me giggle to think about it, that’s the magic foursome. It might get better than that, but that’s for my future self to figure out in my own irreducible computation.

But the other thing that Wolfram projects is an understanding that there are multidimensional spaces where human brains simply cannot navigate. The knowledge is real and can be had, but our compute hardware is simply too slow and with too few memory locations, too little bandwidth and too few neurons ganglia to fit it. In other words, there are always things to know that we don’t care about, and even if we did, we couldn’t understand it systematically. So we outsource our minds to computers that help us see what there is to see, like fail videos, TED talks, porno and podcasts. Such things are just our speed, but there’s so much more dark matter in that information universe that we’ll never puzzle out with the naked brain.

So what has that got to do with geopolitics in general and Israel in particular? It means the same thing it meant in Terminator. No Fate. There is no fat but what we make for ourselves. The future might actually be completely determined, but every small change makes for another. The computation across time is irreducible and we have to let it run in order to work out what the results will be. There’s something to say for Kant’s categorical imperative. All we can do is be truthful in reporting what we were thinking and why it led to our own actions.

Also, as I was saying in The Trash Experience, we humans can be mighty reductive. After all our complexity, and one might consider us overly complex as animals, our purpose remains one of evolutionary fitness. We don’t spend a lot of calories in sexual intercourse, it’s damned simple. We don’t have to think much about it and it often seems accidentally successful. Nevertheless we are complex, much more sophisticated than trash, and we cannot as a collective of a few millions, much less as a species, be oversimplified and disposed of. That takes a hell of a lot of resources, money, energy and time, something I was reminded of in my trip to the Holocaust Museum.

Thus, even as sophisticated and nuanced as Sullivan, Harris and Wood might be in their successful pursuit of satisfying our curiosities about that Middle East situation, they are woefully inadequate to fill in more than a small fraction of the blanks in our understanding. This is why I am working to studiously avoid making any partisan announcements or even supporting conceptual frameworks begged by certain political questions. People hate Donald Trump for saying that there are good people on both sides, but there are always good people on both sides. Not only that, there are always more than two sides. Still our silly obsessions and curiosity wants reductive abstractions. That’s why we, unlike Graeme Wood, did not book a plane as soon as the first body dropped in the street.

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If you’ve ever turned off the volume of your television during a live broadcast of a football game, you might find yourself announcing the play by play. You’re probably not as good as you think you are despite knowing all of the rules. One of the reasons I love football is because of the infinite combinations of movements of the 22 players on the field can manifest. Yet immediately when a spinning runner breaks a tackle and bursts downfield to the goal, we react with a yelp. Our yelp is instantly correct. We can all see it. Enormously satisfying. But our yelps are not the announcer and the announcer is not the game.

I have a special relationship with football, but only at this time of the year. All of us curious folks have exposed our naked brains to those announcing and pronouncing the current conflict in Israel, peppered and salted with its special relationship to the USA, but what do we know, really?

Geopolitical kibitzing is a first world entertainment. Enjoy the peace you have knowing you are incapable of ending the war you do not have.