Just the Facts Ma'am

In any debate between disputants, facts are weapons. An insignificant fact especially... because the mental models in our minds are in state of constant flux. The pace of life since a time long ago. The first human I can recognize is the human that knows his own grandfather. This event took place between 200,000 and 170,000 years ago in East Africa. That was the scale of time our new minds were built for at first.

The longest time span imaginable or imagined to this newly minted imaginer was three lifespans. There were no histories that went back more than 100 years an included more than 100 close kin around us. This is the architect of evolved man - the shorter I can get the specious present the more fit I am in a population of fewer and fewer individuals that can detect that this is the main problem of modern life.

We no longer seem to know when now is. We transpose multiple nows - specific flashes of memory about the past-now the future now and the specious present, that small interval around the tickiing of an atomic clock that determines our pace of time. For the first time, an interconnected world runs on a single clock. The cesium atoms while bombarded with energy create a perfectly imagined oscillator - it beats at the heart-beat rate of the universe. A quantum effect is hijacked by a race of men that have made quantum effects crude, simple and even  uninteresting.

The prosaic atomic clock is easy to reverse engineer in Wikipedia. But look up to the heavens - the province of holons - and imagine the leverage of our quantum rodeo. I dug a great mine underground that pumped quarks in one end and IEEE floating point arithmetic on IP machines at the edge of the internet on the other. The tunnels were filled with the most amazing material created after years of research and development - metal routes on integrated circuits of silicon. The purpose of the unobtainium metal was to steer electrons in the most exact manner to and fro with the currents produced by transistors.

So I can reverse engineer and forward engineer pretty well.

Here is the point. I can spew facts and you can spew facts. We can question the legitimacy of each others facts. Was that the Pew Research Poll from September or the new one that just came out? Is that the new Tea Party pseudo-fact that I can dismiss with snark? Is it true there is public sex in the Occupy camps when the sun goes down? Did Bill O'Reilly say that? Did Rachel Maddow say that?

Between disputants facts are weapons. What really matters is that we all acknowledge that the world exists between our ears and facts - any small misery pitiful half-remembered fact - can be minted on the spot. We start with confirmation bias. Here is my relevant fact that appears to stop your narrative as early as possible.

Women on welfare *rarely* drive Cadillac and people at Tea Party rallys *rarely* misspell signs. There is *rarely* sex when the sun goes down in the Occupy camp. Did these things happen at least once, at least on one encampment or rally or ghetto? Of course all these things and many more besides happened at least once.

"But what about a pattern of poor behavior?" ask Bill and Rachel. "We are talking about the preponderance of facts."

And that is my point - you on the TV... this means you... you are spinning a tale about the enemy *in your mind* to an audience that is trying to keep up with the *meaning* of the facts - your facts and not theirs - while relying on a crutch.

The crutch that Rachel and Bill both rely is the crutch of hindsight bias and mis-attribution of intent.

McCain was as old and uninteresting as a year old Time magazine at the dentists office. That is why I voted for Obama in the general but not the primary. I voted for Hillary because I knew who she was and did not have a solid clue about Obama. The thing I respected him for was voting against the war in the Senate. If you were counting that was the lone vote in the Senate.

That fact is part of a larger pattern of behavior. I do not have beliefs that I act on - I do not believe in belief. I have a response policy toward the cosmic environment. This is the description of the process that keeps every living thing alive. Living things preserve approximately useful guesses about how to move in space-time to preserve homeostasis. I react to the present moment while I remember the past and the future. These dual processes share this process. Neither is necessarily privileged over the other but the vast majority of phenotypes choose at random in many cases. This is based on the prudent selection of where and when the choice is made. The rational chooser gets to the same place in most cases as other rational choosers. That is, each phenotype makes forced moves in design space - the space shared by the memestrates of the past and the arbitraged risk around picking the most likely sequence of future states.

This was once a paltry affair. Going back to the first human who knew - who was capable of dreaming up and reflecting on this thought while at the same time realizing that he was capable of dreaming up and reflecting on the reflection. This is the strange loop that I am. I think about myself thinking about myself. In a Cantor set, I contain myself. And the mind stuff related to this selfplex plays by almost identical rules in each phenotype.

The impulse bred in the race is to remember only the changing landscape and not let the unchanging landscape interviene. The least amount of packets of information that gets to the main engine of cognition, my brain the least amount of 'touch' the big iron allots to the information stream.

Facts are uncountable and totally historical. The past is lost to us. There was not twitter in the past. There were not 7B of us then. Most people had dial up. Many people now do not even know what the difference between dial up and always connected means. Some people only have a computer if they can wear it on their belt or carry it in their purse. At first we just wanted to talk to people when we were not at home. Now we try to avoid going home altogether. We meet our friends on the spur of the moment online. There is rich information content exchanged. I get a Youtube video from you. I send you a link to 3QuarksDaily. We are sending an assload of historical facts to each other.

Except for the stories we tell each other about the future. We need a shared myth as a memestrate to hold the deluge of facts and raw information coming at us. What does it all mean? How do I put it into context. What exactly does the model in Rachels head look like. I cannot see it touch it smell it hear it or taste it. Everything Rachel knows is what is inside her head. The subjective experience of another sentient stays forever subjective. There may be animated simulations and live feeds on the screen - that is shared integrated information. But the sound and the visuals are hardly ever naturally mated to each other. When you hear a voice-over you are giving into a shared delusion that the narrative is true and perfectly describes how you store of facts match with the model in your head of how the world is. The closer I can fit the most useful information the faster I learn how to talk at the coffee shop or in therapy.

Facts are weapons in an admixture of armies. Corporate lobbiests, television hosts, bloggers, tweeters and others contribute to a vast and increasing fire hydrant stream of information. We vaguely remember the facts but we can usually apply enough plaster and touch up paint to cobble together a useful narrative when we next blog or comment or email or facebook or twitter.

"Here is another liberal rasing taxes..." link to article in Reason.com
"Libertarians are intoxicated teenagers..." link to article in Salon.com
"The lame stream media hates Fox..." ... random comment, fwd'd email.
These statements have ample facts - fresh unopened and unfiltered facts. These facts have the same usefullness. That is to say these first-level, I-think-I-can-remember-the-NPR-story, it-may-just-be-an-urban-legend micro-fact upholstered like a Duke to stand on its own as a golden fact. It is certain that some facts despirately need to be tied to other facts to prop them up where they will not fall over.

Now the memestrate supporting the narrative takes over and bludgeons the opponent. The Koch brothers. The NAACP. The Pew Research Center Poll from last February, The 99%. The Tea Party -or- . We kick into high gear on our prefered ideology as we shut the door on the bunker of truth and the comfort of the newly preserved narrative.

But shouldn't we spend more time just thinking about what happens next without the embroidery? Damn facts.



 in some distant past on a distant savannah.