New Look at Dream Interpretation

I had a hypnopompic (waking up) dream that involved an assemblage of musical notations: black quarter notes, in three dimensions, about three feet high. They were not on any staff, but intertwined as the twigs in a bird’s nest to make structures of such as a straight-backed wooden chair.

I realized I had seen these things before including the chair-like structure. It had been the previous night during a hypnagogic (falling asleep) dream, while listening to quiet jazz on the radio. In that dream I did not hear music, but examined the note structures as if they were perfectly reasonable objects that one might study scientifically.

This sequence of two dreams reveals some interesting points about the nature of dreams and their interpretation:

1. Usually when you recall a dream, it seems bizarre and fantastic, both objectively and subjectively. That is, the things you dream about are bizarre, and your own thought process is bizarre because you accept the bizarre goings-on of the dream as a real reality.

In a lucid dream (in which you are aware that you are dreaming), you may realize that the dream events are bizarre, but you still accept them. You might think, “How odd, horses normally cannot fly,” but you still accept that this dream horse can. So your consciousness, though more lucid, is still delusional.

If you recalled a dream that was completely reasonable and reality-oriented, you would not even call it a dream, you would call it a thought. You would just be remembering a thought that you had.

2. Dreams cannot be turned on and off like imagination. Once you are “awake” in reality mode, that becomes the grounding for any variation in mental state that you might choose, except dreams. If you choose to return to dreaming, you must “give up” your wakeful reality testing to sleep again. You can’t voluntarily suspend all reality-testing and remain awake. Dreams and wakefulness are thus incompatible in the way that oil and water are.

3. Dreams are identified in retrospect, from the point of view of awake consciousness, and from which all conversation and communication flow. I am not at all worried that I might actually be a butterfly dreaming I am a person. Wakeful consciousness is known to itself, but dream consciousness is not. (In lucid dreaming, only the lucid consciousness is known to itself.)

Within any non-lucid dream, there is no question about the reality status of the experience, because literally that question does not come up. Reality testing is only a question that can be raised from the point of view of lucid consciousness. So if you dream you are a butterfly, you are a butterfly within the context of that dream, because there is no other context from which to question that reality. Only later, when awake, can you say, “That was crazy!”

I had a non-lucid dream in which, in the retrospective judgment of the recall, I believed I was lucid. Therefore, within the context of that first dream, I was indeed lucid. Given that, the structure of a straight-backed chair made out of giant, three-dimensional quarter notes, was real, by definition, to my dreamingly lucid consciousness. But in what way was it real?

4. What if dream images, the chairlike objects built of giant, three-dimensional quarter notes, corresponded to activation of certain brain structures? A quarter note has a shape not entirely dissimilar from that of a neuron. A networked cluster of quarter notes would not be too different from a cluster of neurons. If the dream structures were in some way shadows of actual brain structures, that could be one sense in which the dream structures were real.

But what kind of a “shadow” of the brain could the dream structures be? There is no known or even imagined causal linkage between brain physiology and mentality. We know there is a correlation, but we have no idea what kind of relationship it is. For example, from the Penfield and Roberts (1959) studies, we learned that electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex in a live, conscious human was followed by spontaneous reports of episodic memories of extraordinary vividness, but we cannot explain that association.

There is no way, according to the laws of physics, for a change in the physical world, such as in a brain neuron, to cause a non-physical phenomenon, such as a mental experience. If that were to happen, it would violate the law of conservation of energy. Unless, that is, the mental experience, the actual memory, were somehow a physical event also. But that doesn’t make sense. Memory cannot be measured in space and time. It has no no width, no mass, no volume; it conducts no electricity and absorbs no light. Memory does not meet criteria of physicality.

To insist that memory is actually a physical circuit in the brain, is to say that electrical stimulation of one part of the brain causes neurological activity in another part of the brain. We would have no use for the term “memory” in that case, since it would not refer to anything. So if we are going to use the term “memory” at all, it refers to the nonphysical mental phenomenon.

Since there is no known, or even allowable causal connection between brain events and mental experience, we are not justified in saying that the dream image of the quarter note chair was caused by a certain brain event. We can only say it might have been correlated to a brain event, the causal connection behind that correlation remaining a mystery.

5. We have mental awareness of some physical conditions of our body. We know when we are going to sneeze and when our bladder is full and if we have a toothache. How do we know such things? Somehow, in a way that cannot be explained, we have a mental experience, which we have learned, through socialization and language, to identify as, for example, hunger or pain.

What are we aware of when we have a toothache? We experience a mental state that we have learned to call “pain.” I hypothesize that the mental state is correlated to activation of a network of brain cells that include some neurons in the somatosensory cortex, which is what enables us to locate the pain in the mouth and not the toes, for example. If true, we can say that the mental experience of toothache is a “reading” of a certain brain state, in the same way that the mental experience of having a full bladder is a “reading” of a different neurological condition of the body.

In a similar way then, the dream of the quarter-note chair was a mental reading of a certain brain condition, albeit not one that is readily interpreted as some condition of the body.
Under this interpretation, one can speculate that the quarter note chair might have been a mental conceptualization of activity in the right temporal cortex, which is active when we hear music. Since I was listening to music before the first dream, that is a plausible assumption. Perhaps after I fell asleep, activity in that part of the brain persisted even though I turned off the radio with my last gasp of consciousness before falling asleep. The dream could have been my mental “reading” of that residual brain activity.

6. But why a chairlike structure built of giant quarter notes? Images of parts of the body are derived from socialization. I have read anatomy books and seen physiological models and charts. That’s where I get my mental images of the insides of the body. They are socially acquired through specific education and general language learning.

In a typical dream, in which horses fly and rivers flow with melted cheese, it is difficult to speculate how the mental images might be readings of brain activity. However, if one wakes up from a dream with a full bladder, it is often the case that the dream images involved water, swimming, and the like, so there is a plausible relationship between the dream image and the “reading” of the bodily state.

It follows that physicians and brain physiologists should have dream images that are more easily associated with bodily conditions than would be true for other people, because they have more detailed, ready-made social-linguistic conceptualizations of those bodily conditions to draw upon.

7. It also follows from this line of thinking that Freud’s method of dream interpretation by free-association has nothing to do with the meaning of dreams. Of course it is possible to free-associate to the ideas and images in a dream report, just as it is possible to free-associate to something that actually happened yesterday. The dream report is just a kind of short story, no different in principle from one plucked from a published anthology.

Free-associating to its elements may be a fruitful way to start a conversation about previously unconceptualized feelings and ideas, but it is no way an “interpretation” of that dream. The correct interpretation of any dream is that it is a mental conceptualization of brain events occurring during Phase I REM sleep.

How are we able to mentally conceptualize physical brain events at all? What is the interface? That is a separate mystery. But the fact hypothesized here is that we can do it, even if we don’t know how.

8. In the future there will be a downloadable iPod application that will allow real-time fMRI monitoring of brain activity so you can see what your brain is doing while you type, eat, walk, fantasize, and listen to music. Over time we would learn to conceptualize and control the brain’s activity as well as athletes do their muscular activity today. Most dreams then would cease to be bizarre and would be more like descriptions because the correlation between brain activity and socio-linguistic conceptualization would be stronger.

People will inevitably communicate by reference to commonly identified brain images, the way we now maintain the social fabric by reference to commonly understood activities: “How ‘bout them Yankees?” In the future people will refer to numbered and idealized fMRI activities understood to be correlated to common experience. They will talk about a situation involving fMRI 42a followed by a 197-3 then ask, “What do you think of that?”

Too bad I’ll miss it.

Crazy-ass Bombers

In September, a 24-year old Afghan immigrant, was arrested for planning to blow up a New York Building. A week before, a 29-year old fry cook who likes to be called Talib Islam, was charged with attempting to blow up a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois. A day later, a 19 year old Jordanian national was arrested for attempting to detonate a car bomb in Dallas. According to the Heritage Foundation, 23 known terrorist plots have been foiled in the last eight years (www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandSecurity/bg2294.cfm).

What is up with these people? I’m wondering if my wife is right, a tax on all males between 15 and 50 would finance most law enforcement and national security. Assuming these nutcases are not actually psychotic, what motivates them (other than 72 heavenly raisins)? The Islamists are attacking the infidel, they believe, a righteous battle in the name of God. But why do they believe that, and what do they hope to accomplish?

The proximal issue is education. The terrorists uniformly are not well educated, by Western standards. They know only the Koran. They know nothing of secular history, science, philosophy, or the principles of critical thinking. I’m sure that is a point of pride for most of them, but an extremely narrow world view does not leave much room for getting along with other people.

Presumably, Islamists get along fine with their own people, and that’s all that matters to them. They want the esteem of their imagined peers, not of the infidel. If they broadened their sense of community beyond the cult, they would quickly realize that they would take a serious hit on the esteem front from pluralism. So there is a built-in defense against consideration for outsiders.

“Islam” means peace, submission, obedience. Submission to what or whom? Not modern law, not community standards, not philosophical principles. It means only submission to God as defined in the Koran and often interpreted by extremist nuts. But in the beginning the term referred to the principle of submitting your personal ego to the good of the tribe. That was a huge innovation in early Arab tribalism. If each individual was utterly subservient to the tribe, you had a fighting machine with replaceable parts as good as any modern army. The “sword of Islam” would have been demonstrably superior in warfare.

Why would an individual want to submit his individual will, either to the will of the tribe or later, to the will of Allah? What’s to gain from loss of self? Immortality. Or, at least the fantasy illusion of immortality. If you are not an individual, you cannot die, because the tribe lives on. We know that for a fact because as members of the tribe we see individuals die all the time, but the tribe continues. So if you abrogate individual intentionality and responsibility to the will of the tribe, you too will continue indefinitely. The core motivation for adherence to Islam is fear of death.

Many Islamists deny that and boast of their love of death. However, that is a reaction formation, a defense against death anxiety. What they long for is immortality, not personal annihilation. That’s why suicide car bombers have their hands taped to the wheel, and why they are only ready to serve after intensive indoctrination. If Islamists really loved death so much, suicide would suffice. For example, public self-immolation can make a powerful political or religious statement, and still accomplish death, if that were the goal. Instead the goal of killing a flock of infidels reveals a more pedestrian motivation to achieve the esteem of peers (“martyrdom”) through distinction in tribal warfare.

All the religions have fairy stories to alleviate death anxiety. That is the main service provided by religion. In Christianity, good works (or arbitrary grace) will get you to heaven, where you will sit at the right hand of God forever, which is presumably a good thing. That promise is supposed to reduce your death anxiety. Coming out of a tradition of tribal warfare, Islam emphasized instead that the key to immortality is to support your tribe in fighting other tribes, or at least, for moderates, to abjure completely the ways and ideas of tribal outsiders. The Islamic promise of immortality is no less fantastic than those of other religions.

Dealing with death anxiety is not easy for anyone. The idea that you will cease to exist while everything goes on without you, is almost unthinkable. We deeply need an alternate story, and religion supplies it. But religions come in all flavors, and unfortunately for us, Islam is one whose solution to the problem was interpreted as xenophobic warfare. The only thing that is ever going to change that is a modified system of Islamic education.

My Bedroom Fan

I spend a lot of time contemplating the fan that spins over my bed. This is a picture of it. That’s approximately how it looks to me most of the time. But that’s not how it really is. In reality the fan is a hub and spoke system with five blades. But when the blades are spinning, they cannot be discriminated and the fan looks more like a solid wheel.

Why is that? Why can I not see the fan as it really is? Why do I see a false image, of a wheel that is not actually there? Am I hallucinating? No matter how carefully I stare, I cannot see actual fan blades. What am I seeing, if not reality? This should shake my confidence in the veracity of vision. Except for tricks and special situations, we generally believe that “seeing is believing.” In other words, what we see is what is there.

But this is a clear case of seeing what is not there, and not seeing what is there. And it is not a trick or special situation. Apparently, the mechanics of my eye cannot resolve the details of the blades as they spin. In order to fixate an image of something on the retina, the image must be still, for a moment at least, about a fifth of a second. That’s the only way we can see something.

What about things that are moving? We can see those under normal circumstances because the eyes take successive “snapshots” of the scene and integrate them over time to communicate movement to the brain, much as the rapid succession of snapshots in a film appears to us as a moving picture (another delusional visual experience). We do not actually see motion. We infer motion.

But in the case of my fan, the movement of the blades is faster than the snapshot rate of my eyes, so I cannot get a fixed image of the blades. The eyes are always moving, jerking around in a process called the visual nystagmus. They vibrate at least 20 times a second, sometimes faster, fixating here, there, everywhere, taking snapshots. It seems like the visual world is stable and that we just look at it and see it as it is, but that is not true. The eyes get at least 20 snapshots per second, no one of them taking in the whole scene. Each snapshot is with the eyes focused on a restricted detail of the scene. Then you synthesize the overall scene in your brain, based on the snapshots. The nice stable scene you think you see is a total fiction. You never saw it. You only saw dozens and dozens of tiny snapshots.

So I thought I would try to beat the visual system and my bedroom fan. I moved my eyes in a fast counter-clockwise motion around the hub, to see if I could make my eyes catch up with the fan blades. And it worked! Every few seconds, I would get a brief image of the individual blades of the fan. That’s because the muscles and nerves for voluntary eye movements are different from the ones used in the visual nystagmus. By adding the two eye movements together, I gave the nystagmus a chance to make a fixation on the blades.

It seemed to work randomly. Whenever there was an eye fixation that happened to hit a blade and not the space between blades, I would see an individual fan blade. Why this did not occur more often, I am not sure. Perhaps I also needed to catch a moment when the blurred motion signals to my brain were calm enough to let an individually fixated image through. Or perhaps my voluntary, circular eye movements were not really very circular, but most often erratic. It is impossible for me to know that.

Anyway, the demonstration proved visually that the blurred circular image I normally see is a complete illusion, not the reality of what is there. The fact that I could force the visual system to apprehend the true reality of the individual blades confirmed the presence of the illusion. So it makes me wonder, what else am I seeing that is illusory? How can I trust that what I see is really there if I know for a fact that sometimes I am seeing it wrong?

Descartes asked this same question in 1640 and came up with this answer: God is good, and God would not deceive you (most of the time). Therefore, you can be reasonably confident that what you see is what is there. Well, that answer doesn’t work for me. In the first place, it is not entirely clear that God is good. Biblical and contemporary evidence would speak to the contrary.

Secondly, my experience with my bedroom fan proved that Descartes’ answer is wrong in this case. What I see most of the time is clearly illusion. Should I assume that God deceived me because God is a malicious trickster?

And finally, Descartes had no evidence to support his claim. It is merely what he believed, because he had been told as much by the Church. I can’t assume his answer is correct if he just made it up or parroted what he had been told. It seems just as likely that the correct answer is that you cannot and should not believe that what you see is what is there. What’s wrong with that answer?

Turing Test Redux

A recent article in The Economist (“Diagnosing Comas: Unlucky for Some” July 25th, 2009) pointed out that distinguishing between different types of comas is difficult even for specially trained physicians. If someone is in a “persistent vegetative state” they show no signs of consciousness at all. It may be merciful, and legal, to cut off their food and water and let them go.

Other coma patients are in what’s called a “minimally conscious state,” meaning they can sometimes communicate by blinking or moving their eyes in response to questions. That communicative consciousness may be intermittent, displayed only for a few minutes in a month, but it is enough to make a large moral and compassionate difference between the two coma states.

A recent study in Britain found that 40% of patients diagnosed as being vegetative were actually not. Careful and detailed screening tests for communication can show up the difference, but most doctors do not use these tests, preferring to rely on “clinical experience.” This replicates a similar finding from a decade ago.

Unsettling as the finding is, one interesting aspect is the use of what amounts to a Turing Test as the definition of consciousness. In 1950, computer scientist Alan Turing proposed a way to tell if a person (or a computer, for that matter) is conscious. In the now-famous “Turing Test,” you have a conversation with a robot, and a person, both hidden from you by a curtain. If you cannot tell which is which, the robot passes the test and you must, to avoid inconsistency, admit that it is conscious. So the ultimate criterion of consciousness is meaningful communication.

Unknowingly, the researchers whose work was reported in The Economist article were using a variant of the Turing Test to determine if a coma patient is conscious or not. If the patient can communicate, they are conscious. If not, they are “vegetative.”

Is that a criterion we are comfortable with? Are we quite sure that vegetables have no consciousness? Are we perfectly clear on what constitutes “communication?” If I ask a tree how it is feeling and it suddenly bends way over in the wind, has it answered me? Who is to say?

The Turing test has been hotly debated among cognitive psychologists and A.I. researchers for half a century and is by no means universally accepted. It seems odd that the pinnacle of neurophysiological practice would now strive to depend on it.

Dogs Don't Know What Dreams Are

What do dogs dream about? Chasing rabbits, or something similar, we assume. Dog brainwaves during sleep show rhythms similar to ours, including REM periods during which dreams occur. So it is a reasonable guess that dogs have dreams.

I saw a video clip of a dog having a dream. It is embedded in this inane “news” report (as of 4/21/09):
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/03/03/the-shot-dreaming-dog/

The dog is asleep, lying on its side, when its feet start twitching. The feet and legs move faster, and become increasingly energetic until the dog looks like it is running full stride about as fast as it can. The forepaws reach out and the back legs push off powerfully. This is a dog in full pursuit!

Then the dog gets up on all fours, and still asleep, or mostly asleep, barks, and bounds headlong into a wall. The dog falls down, gets up again and looks around dazed and confused. It’s a humorous video.

But the interesting part is that dogs don’t know what dreams are. They have limited conceptual capacity, certainly nothing that would enable them to understand the difference between dreaming and wakefulness. Children may have the same problem until caregivers instruct them on the difference. “Don’t be afraid, it was only a dream; It wasn’t real.” Nobody tells the dog that.

From the dog’s point of view it was, for all psychological purposes, actually in pursuit of some prey when suddenly a solid wall intervened. What kind of world is that to live in? That’s a world that makes no sense. Yet what can the dog do but accept it? That is just the reality of the dog’s experience.

Normally, during REM sleep (dream sleep), the musculature of the body is paralyzed (REM atonia). Signals from the somatosensory cortex are damped so we do not act out our dreams. In abnormal cases, a person might partially act out a dream, such as by sleepwalking or sleep talking. But normally, the brain inhibits the action signals so that doesn’t happen.

This video showed what looked like an older dog, and it is likely that his brain was not functioning properly, not inhibiting his bodily action during REM sleep. A few twitches might be normal, but such vigorous acting out of a dream is an abnormal occurrence.

Even for us, from inside the dream, the activity of the somatosensory cortex is the same as it would be in waking experience, so the dream seems “real.” It IS real, as far as it goes, because the same brain circuits are being used as would be used in waking life. But without feedback from the body, those action signals don’t have normal consequences, so you might find yourself flying through the air or walking through walls. As far as the brain is concerned, it is just another experience.

Why dream? There are theories that say the dreamer needs to work through psychic conflicts, express subliminal id impulses, and so on. The dream therefore serves a psychic need. But it seems implausible that a dog has repressed sexual urges or familial tensions. It is more likely that the dog’s dreams (and our own) are simply attempts to interpret the brain’s REM-phase activity as waking experience.



The dog does not think, “Aha! Rabbit! Must catch!” The meaning is automatic. Dogs chase rabbits; that's it.

For the dog, there is no difference between chasing a dream rabbit and chasing a real rabbit. In the dream, joyfully chasing the rabbit over hills and vales, that is just as valid and real as any other experience in the dog’s life.

After waking, the dog does not think, “I wonder why I feel tired and sore, when just a few minutes ago I was chasing that rabbit all over creation.” The dog cannot think like that and is oblivious to the question. The dog does not think, “Hey, what happened to that beautiful field I was just in? How did I get into this dingy, stuffy room?” Again, ignorance is bliss . Dream and reality are not even alternate kinds of experience for the dog. They are just two experiences that happened. Nothing is reasonable or unreasonable for a dog.

Why isn’t it that way for us? We are extremely keen on making a distinction between what is real and what is only a dream. It doesn’t matter to the dog. Why does it matter for us?

Real Memory?

Scientists at Tel Aviv University claim to have created neuronal memories on a silicon chip. Live neurons were put on a silicon chip that had electrodes for reading electrical activity. Every time scientists put a nerve-stimulating chemical at the same spot, they saw the same pattern of electrical activity come out of the electrodes, then die down. After several repetitions, the pattern continued without further chemical stimulus. The researchers believed the neurons learned to anticipate the chemical and claimed that the neuron group had formed a memory.

But there are two things wrong with the analogy and the conclusion. First, there was no conditioned stimulus, the equivalent of Pavlov’s bell (he actually used a buzzer, but the idea of a bell has become fixed in folklore). Pavlov paired the bell and the food many times, then found that the dog would salivate to the bell alone. (Pavolv's Nobel Prize acceptance speech about this topic was scorned as "too mental," not scientific).

In the neural cell assembly scenario, the neurons had nothing to anticipate. There was no bell (and neurons can't hear anyway). They merely perseverated their previous activity. A plucked guitar string will continue to sound a tone for a while, but that does not demonstrate learning or memory, at least not in the cognitive sense of memory.

The second problem is with this study's conclusion. The authors assume that memory is a certain pattern of neural activity. But that definition plays on a semantic ambiguity. An alarm clock has memory, but that is a functional use of the term. If we mean cognitive memory, as humans have, then the alarm clock doesn't have it, and neither do the cells on a chip. A cognitive memory is a re-experience.

My memory of last night’s dinner includes lemon, risotto, and Syrah. It does not have any quality of a cell assembly,which is not an explanation adequate to the phenomenon. Pointing out a neural correlate to memory is helpful, but naming cell activity, literally, “a memory,” is thoughtless or malicious misdirection.

Overall then, the interpretation of this study is utterly confused. It has nothing to do with memory. Don't believe everything you read!

Reference:
D.C. (2007). This is your brain on a chip. Science News, 171, (April 21), 253.

Why Accept Your Name?

Why do we accept the name assigned to us before we were born?

At maturity we should choose another. People try to adjust their given name: Margaret becomes Maggie, Marge Madge. Elizabeth morphs to Beth, Betty, Lissa, Liza, Elisa, Elspeth.
(Dan Pirarro www.bizarro.com)

But these are minor variations on the inherited moniker. Why not choose Pixie or Pyrgopolynices? Few people do. I always thought Boutros-Boutros was a nice first name.

Some cultures assign you a new name at maturity, such as Dances With Wolves. But that’s still not your own choice.

We name our pets Jingles, Boots, Spot, and the like. The pets don’t mind. Most will respond to their given name. We have the right of naming because we own the pet.

Do your parents own you? Are you the equivalent of a pet? If you are your own person, why not choose your own name?

Time Travel in a Box

Here is the plan for a simple time machine. Consider the drawing at left.

A projector, at the lower left corner of the box, shines a light up to a mirror, on path “a” where it is reflected down to the detector at the lower right along path “b”. The total distance the beam of light travels is thus a+b.

Now suppose the box moves so fast that it is able to complete a journey during the time that the beam of light is traveling from the projector to the detector. In the drawing below, the middle position shows the box at a time exactly in the middle of its journey, just as the beam of light strikes the mirror. On the right we see the box at t3, the end of its journey. Now we ask, how far did the beam of light travel? Was it not the distance e+f?

It must be, because when the journey started at t1, the projector was in the leftmost position, and in order for the beam of light to be detected at all, it had to arrive at the far right position at time t3, where the detector ended up.

How could the beam of light travel the whole distance e+f in the same time it took to travel the shorter distance a+b when the box was stationary? This should not be possible because the speed of light never changes. In the laws of physics, it is a constant, known as c.

To travel a longer distance in the same amount of time, the only possibility is that time slowed down while the box was moving, giving the light more time to make the longer journey at a constant speed. Thus the box is now displaced in time with respect to the rest of the world, literally “living in the past.”

Perform that same sequence again, and the box falls even farther back in time. Cycle the experiment rapidly, and the box steadily recedes farther and farther back in time.

Put an easy chair in the box between the projector and the detector, settle into it, and you could take a ride into the past, as far back as you wanted to go. Unfortunately, you could never return to the present, so take a sandwich and a beer.

With suitable controls, you could stop the machine and get out of the box anytime you liked. After exploring that period of history, you could get back in and go even farther back into the past.

It’s so simple, you could build it in your garage!

Thinking is the Best Way to Travel

A recent science article reported that the first earthlike extrasolar planet has been found. An exoplanet is one that orbits a star other than our sun. All exoplanets found up to now have been giant gas balls like Jupiter. This new one, Gliese 436b, is rocky, like earth, and could possibly have water, like earth. Those two criteria make it “earthlike” under an extremely generous interpretation.

We need to identify earthlike planets rather soon, since it will become necessary for us to find a new planet if the species is to survive. Current plans call for us to colonize the moon, then Mars. But those are extremely harsh environments, not likely to be long-term bolt-holes for our species. Wouldn’t it be nice to find another planet, rather like Earth, where you did not have to wear a pressurized radiation suit and could play baseball outdoors? Gliese could be the “New Earth.”

The trouble is, Gliese is 20 light years away. If we could travel at the speed of light, some 386,000 miles each second, it would take 20 years to get there. Unfortunately we can travel only about 5 miles a second in spacecraft like the Shuttle (18,000 mph). So it would take us over 200,000 years at top speed to reach Gliese.

Even allowing for improvements in transportation technology, it seems doubtful that humans will ever travel at a speed sufficient to reach the extrasolar stars. It would be great if someone could just command, “Warp factor five, Mr. Sulu,” but there is no warp factor.

How frustrating it is, to be facing our demise on this planet, to discover an Earth-like planet where we could be comfortable, and yet have no way to cross the great ocean of space!

I thought of four ways to attempt the journey.

1. The Colony
One way would be to go in a flying colony like the space station, only much larger. During the voyage, everyone who left earth would die, but their children would continue the voyage, and after many thousands of generations, the distant descendants of the original crew would land on Gliese.

The constancy of the spacecraft would prevent natural selection from morphing the travelers into some other kind of animal. Inbreeding would become severe however, so there would have to be enough genetic technology on board to maintain the genetic mix and to tamp down harmful mutations.

But psychology is a bigger problem. In order for each generation of voyagers to grow up with a normal human mind, they would need the social infrastructure necessary for socialization, from teachers to police, from doctors and farmers to entertainers and politicians. It would never work. It’s just barely working now, on our spaceship planet of 6 billion people. It is unimaginable that a band of twenty, or even a few hundred space travelers could survive in a metal can for a hundred thousand generations.

A possible fix for the psychology problem would be to plug everyone into virtual reality environments for all that time. We do not know exactly what would be needed for the virtual reality, but maybe someday we will. However, body functions would still have to be bodily, not virtual, especially reproduction, birth and death. It would be complicated.

2. Cryogenics
The second idea is cryogenics. Could the travelers simply be put into suspended animation for the duration of the trip? That is not possible today, but it is a conceivable technology. However, from what we know of modern technology, the probability that an autonomous life support system would function properly for a continuous quarter of a billion years is essentially nil. So forget that idea.




3. Robots
What about robots? If we could make robots that could survive a journey of 200,000 years, that would be quite an achievement, but what would be the reward for us? We’d all be dead long before any robot got even a fraction of the way to Gliese. If global warming or nuclear war didn’t get us, then reversal of the magnetosphere surely would. Surviving cockroaches, if they eventually evolved the intelligence to think of it, would not even know we had ever sent robots. There would be no mental connection between the robotic voyagers and any humans. The robots might survive, but who would care? Not the robots.

4. Return-Only Travel
The limiting factor in space travel is the human body; its mortality and its frailty. There is no way to overcome those limitations for the very great times and distances required, so don’t even try. The only way to travel those vast distances is without any sort of body, robotic or biologic. We have to broaden what it means “to travel.” It must involve something other than moving meat through space.

We could think our way to Gliese. We would need a new mode of cognition for that, one in which we recede from the intellect and the imagination to a primordial consciousness prior to individual personality, call it Groupcon-1

Our bodies make us individuals because no two physical things can be in the same place at the same time. That guarantees psychological individuality. But Groupcon-1 is not an individual consciousness, so it requires no body. Death becomes irrelevant, as does life, because those are biological concepts. In Groupcon-1 you exist in a state prior to biology. You are immortal, but you don’t know that, since you have no individual consciousness.

Is there actually such a mental state as Groupcon-1? There might be. In normal consciousness we are aware of phenomena like deep empathy, in which we temporarily lose our individual consciousness while we inhabit another’s. Something similar happens while watching a movie or reading a good novel. You temporarily forget yourself, lose yourself and your body, inhabit some fictional world and fictional characters created by the author. During those moments, the reality of your physical body and the physical world around you are temporarily nonexistent, from your own point of view.

So the trick is to understand the state of Groupcon-1 until it can be sustained for long periods of time. There are mental techniques for doing that now but they work only for a few hours. Still, it is not inconceivable that Groupcon-1 could become one’s main state of consciousness rather than just a mental curiosity. Anyone who could do it would be free of the body and physical distances.

But how would Groupcon-1 get us to Gliese? It wouldn’t, because when you are in Groupcon-1, you are located exactly nowhere because you have no body and no individual mind. It would be necessary to become skilled at moving between Groupcon-1 and individual, embodied consciousness in order to enjoy the benefits of being located in space and time with an individual consciousness. Since we are coming from nothing and nowhere, into somewhere, we would be free, in principle, to specify the somewhere into which we arrive.

So let the specification of the new somewhere be Gliese 436b, modified as necessary to be compatible with our individual bodies and lifestyles. In essence then, one never travels to Gliese, but rather, one only returns to Gliese as if one had been away. We return to Gliese from Groupcon-1.

So that is how we will get to Gliese, not in a spaceship, not through a wormhole, not with a warp drive engine, but by return-only travel.

What would Q-tips look like if we had three ears?

A Q-tip is a remarkable invention. It is a paper stalk with cotton batting on each end. They are sold by the millions, perhaps the hundreds of millions. The box lists all kinds of interesting uses for them, such as cleaning your computer keyboard. But we all know what they are really for: cleaning out the ears. For that they are excellent.

I find it particularly felicitous that there is a cotton tip at each end of the stalk, for a total of two, and we happen to have exactly two ears that need cleaning! What are the odds of that?

What if we had three ears? I don’t think Q-tips would sell very well then, because you would need a minimum of two Q-tips to do the job and would end up throwing away one of the Q-tips having used only one end of it. It just would not seem right and I don’t think people would use Q-tips so readily.

So someone would have to come up with a three-headed Q-tip, which is not inconceivable, but no matter what it looked like, it simply would not be as elegant as the simple double-ended Q-tip we enjoy today. It would cost a lot more to produce and would never work as well.

Having two ears is technically useful, especially when they are separated by the distance of the head, as in our case. That allows good echolocation, finding the source of a sound in space. You could do it with one ear, as a rotating or oscillating radar dish does, but that is technically complicated. You could have one fixed ear and scan it by moving your head from side to side, but you can’t move your head at the speed of sound, so precision would suffer. You would simply miss a lot of sounds.

Having a third ear would not give you any particular advantage over the two you already have, and would complicate the wiring quite a bit. The evolutionary cost would be high for very little gain.

So it turns out that two ears is just right: elegant, simple, economical, efficient. Just like a Q-tip, but for different reasons.

Bilateral symmetry in a body does not seem very complicated. The double helix itself is bilaterally symmetrical. So if you’re going to have one ear, you might as well have two. The incremental cost is negligible. But three is too many.

It just happens that a stick has two ends, so each end of a Q-tip can have a cotton swab. There is no a priori reason why that topological fact about sticks should fit so nicely with the symmetry of our developmental morphology.

There are a lot of forms in nature that are not stick-shaped, like loops and branches and ovals. Stick shapes are not terribly common. And of the stick shapes, many, like tails and antennae, do not have two free ends. And even of those that do have two free ends, the ends may not be symmetrical, as in a picked flower or a femur.

There is something non-obvious, even paradoxical, about purpose-built devices for the body. The body allows expression of human intentionality and yet we are perfectly capable of objectifying it to make devices like eyeglasses that hook over the ears. Convenient!

What good would t-shirts be if we didn’t have shoulders? Would scissors ever have existed if our thumbs weren’t just as they are? And isn’t it amazing that Q-tips have exactly two tips! Who thought of that?

We should appreciate Q-tips more for the elegant design they illustrate.

What is Introspection?

The fact that I can be aware of my own thoughts is preposterous. How is it possible? Is my cup aware that it is a cup? Is the coffee aware that it is hot and brown? Of course not.

Why should I be aware of what I am thinking? That is not reasonable. Nor could it have been predicted by any scientific observation. It is utterly perplexing.

There are many philosophical and quasi-scientific explanations of introspection. One is to deny that introspection is actually a fact. That eliminates a large anomaly from the purview of the scientific explanation of the world, but at the expense of self-contradiction. Introspection is required to understand what is being denied.

Another explanation is that one part of the brain becomes aware of another part of the brain, so really, introspection is just brain activity, completely physical. Beside the awkward fact that there is no scientific evidence for this hypothesis (nor could there be, since “awareness” is not a scientifically defined function of brains), this proposed solution does not answer the original question. I am a person, not a brain. It is I who have the introspective thoughts. If my brain also does a little introspecting on the side, so be it. Perhaps my liver introspects also. It wouldn’t matter to me.

What if we set aside self-contradictory and confused biological explanations of introspection, and consider only the mental experience? What is the experience of introspection?

We don’t introspect every minute of every day. On the contrary. Most of the time we are focused on the world, not on our own thoughts. But when we are focused on our own thoughts, what is going on? Who is focused on what? If I am the thoughts, who is looking at them? If I am the witness to the thoughts, who is in charge of the thoughts? I am pretty sure there is only one me.

This is one of the most profound mysteries confronting humanity.

Why the World Owes Me One Day

Some time ago I flew from San Francisco to Tokyo, crossing the international date line. It was Friday morning when I left and it was Saturday afternoon when I arrived, even though the flight was only about 12 hours. I lost a calendar day, as one does when crossing the dateline going west. Normally, you would re-gain that day on the return trip and everything would be fine.

But I kept going west. I went to Beijing, then Bangkok, New Delhi, and Mumbai. This all took a year or so. Continuing west for another year, I was in Istanbul, Sophia, Rome, and Frankfurt. I finally returned to the U.S. by flying from London to New York, and from there, back to Seattle on the west coast.

When I arrived home, I realized I never got that original day back that I lost going across the dateline. I had been robbed.

When I am on my deathbed and the grim reaper is nigh, I will have a legitimate protest: Wait! You can't take me now! The world owes me one more day!

Sensorimotor Dreams FAQ

These questions and answers concern "sensorimotor dreams" the most common type, which are also the foundation of social dreams.

What Causes Dreams?
During REM sleep, an area in the brainstem called the pons becomes active, causing the eyes to move about. Some researchers (e.g., Alan Hobson) believe that the pons activity is random and has no intrinsic meaning or purpose.

The pons is connected to the sensorimotor cortex at the top-center of the brain, and activates neural circuits there for basic sensorimotor behavior, such as reaching, walking, and moving the eyes.

The sensorimotor activation is not strong enough to cause actual bodily movement (other than in the eyes), or actual sensations, but it is strong enough to be experienced by the dreamer as reaching, walking, looking, and so on, and that is the dream: experience of random activity in the sensorimotor cortex.

Why do dreams seem meaningful?
Dreams seem meaningful because when you remember them you are awake, at least awake enough to say, "Wow, what a dream! I dreamed I was ..." When we are awake, we seek meaning and we find it. That's why there is a face on the moon -- we do not like random, meaningless patterns, and especially not random, meaningless experience.

As we recall the dream experience, we invest it with emotional and social significance. The process is like creative story telling. A list of the brain areas that were activated would be like a list of random paragraphs. But in recalling the dream events, we make them into a (more-or-less) meaningful story.

What is the meaning of this dream?
The source of the dream has no more meaning than a burp, because it originated from some brain circuits that became lightly activated as part of an automatic bodily process. But the dream report has all the personal meaning that any story you made up would have. As a creative product it reflects your interests, experiences and concerns, whether those are explicitly acknowledged by you or not.

Do most dreams have sexual or aggressive meaning?
There are basic brain circuits for sexual or aggressive acts, and these might have been activated during REM sleep, which you would have experienced as sexual or aggressive urges. In the same way, if you have an empty stomach or a full bladder, you might experience those in a dream as food scenes or as swimming in the ocean. You provide detail as you create the dream story at recall.

Do certain dream images have fixed symbolic meaning?
Certain images or thoughts have commonly recognized meaning because they are well-known cultural images. You don’t need an unconscious id or superego dreamwork for a sexual interpretation of a train plunging into a dark tunnel. It's a common image suitable to describe having experienced activation of a sexual arousal circuit. However there is no justification for most interpretations listed in books of dream symbols.

Does dreaming of spiders mean you fear being engulfed by your mother? There is no necessary connection. However, brain activation of tactile (touch) receptors on the skin could appear in a dream report in any number of expressive ways, including feeling enveloped, smothered, hugged, or covered in spiders.

Are dreams the royal road to the unconscious?
Analysis of dream reports can reveal hidden motives, attitudes and beliefs of the dreamer, but so can analysis and discussion of TAT stories (Thematic Apperception Test) and Rorschach (“inkblot”) responses, artistic products of all kinds, and even ordinary conversation. Dream reports may be fertile for this kind of exploration because they are typically recorded when the author is not fully awake, but they are not any more "royal" than any other creative product.

Why can I fly in my dreams but not in real life?
The dream story tries to accommodate the feelings of lightly activated brain circuits. If an activated sensorimotor pattern involves movement in space, then coordinated visual input would change accordingly. Sensorimotor patterns are interconnected in that way. But that particular complex of sensorimotor pathways might not involve any activation associated with walking or running, for example.

So how is the awake self, constrained by reality, supposed to interpret this vague dream experience? “I feel like I moved from Point A to Point B, and the perceptual scenery changed appropriately as I moved, but I didn’t walk or drive, or bicycle or swim. I don’t know how I did it. So I must have flown.” That is the most direct and “logical” explanation consistent with the “memory” (feeling) of the dream-activated sensorimotor circuit.

Why are dreams bizarre and irrational?
Dream reports are bizarre and irrational because they are waking fabrications constrained by the real world that attempt to articulate correlations between sensori and motor patterns felt in the brain. The dream story tries to flesh out a narrative from those minimal patterns and the result is like trying to construct a sonata from random groups of notes. The result is not likely to have much structural integrity, but might be creative and amusing.

Is it true that every dream is two dreams?
Yes. As psychoanalysts have said since Freud, every dream consists of the manifest dream report, and under that, the latent dream. The purpose of dream analysis is to use the manifest to understand the latent. But that process is no different in principle from how we analyze an utterance into its surface and deep structures or deconstruct an essay into its implicit meanings. Every human communication and social artifact has at least two levels: the manifest, realized product, and its latent, underlying intent. A dream report, as a creative product, is no exception.

Do we dream in color or black-and-white?
Neither. Dreams are attempts to explain certain bodily feelings, those of lightly activated brain circuits. Brain circuits have no color. It is completely dark inside the skull. However, the dream report might use either color or monochromatic imagery as appropriate in its construction.

Why can’t I remember my dreams?
What you have are feelings of lightly activated brain circuits at certain times of night. If you are not willing or able to conceptualize those into imaginative stories, then there are no dreams.

Is a dream a message from another dimension?
No, it is a complete fabrication of your own, formulated around dim experience of some lightly activated brain circuits.

Can I have a dream that does not belong to me?
Not unless you have circuits in your brain that don’t belong to you. However, you might construct a dream report using elements from public stories.

Why It Is Better Not To Know Italian

Puccini’s opera, La Boheme, includes some of the most beautiful songs ever written. I am especially fond of the arias and duet early in the play, when the starving writer, Rodolfo meets the waif, Mimi in his hovel. The romantic music and lyrics are enough to make anyone swoon. I don’t understand any Italian, but for some reason, that does not matter with music as fine as this.

However, I recently made the terrible mistake of looking up the English translation of the lyrics. What the two characters are actually saying (singing) to each other is depressingly banal. Rodolfo is saying something like, “Hey, baby, what’s your sign? Wanna blow this joint and grab some beers?”

That’s not a literal translation, but it conveys the sense of how utterly mundane the dialog is. Knowing that, pretty much ruins my imagination of high, spiritual romanticism. I have to will myself to forget the meaning of what they are saying. Too bad I looked it up. It is better not to know Italian if you love Italian opera.

What If There Had Been No Birds?

If there had been no flying animals, would the airplane have ever been invented? To even attempt flight, we had to believe it was possible. We had to see birds and dragonflies to get the concept.

Nobody today dreams of gliding through rock. Why not? What if there were animals in nature that could swim through a granite mountain and come out the other side? Assuredly, we would want to be able to do that too.

Would we have gotten the idea of flight from a maple helicopter or a dandelion parachute? We might have thought about gliding or floating downward, as seeds do, but never about hot air balloons or the Bernoulli effect. The Bernoulli effect might have been discovered anyway, but it would not have been applied to the problem of achieving human flight, because that would not even be a consideration. If there are no animals moving about in the sky, why would you even consider flying?

Anthropomorphism is the key. We have a certain physical empathy with the exertions of other animals and that is what prompted us to think, if they can do it, why can’t we?

What about flying squirrels or even leaping lemurs? Again, maybe we would have gotten the idea of gliding downward, but not flight. We have the birds to thank for Boeing, Airbus, and even NASA

Cracking Quantum Cryptography

There must be some error in my thinking here, but it seems to me that quantum cryptography has been over-hyped as being ultra-secure.

The idea of quantum cryptography depends on producing a pair of entangled photons. These are photons that have indeterminate polarization, either horizontal or vertical, say. But until they are inspected, it is not known what polarization they have, and indeed, according to quantum theory, they have no particular orientation until they are examined.

Being “entangled” means that when one member of the pair is examined, its orientation is at that moment determined to be randomly H or V, and automatically and instantaneously the same orientation is determined in the other member of the pair, no matter how separated the two are in space. Quantum entanglement is a well-documented phenomenon.

In Quantum cryptography, each member of a pair of entangled photons is sent to a different person. When Alice examines her photon and determines its orientation (H or V), she is assured that Bob’s photon has exactly the same orientation, because the two photons are entangled.

The change in status from indeterminate to determinate takes, literally, no time at all, which is how Bob’s photons manage to instantaneously match their entangled partners in Alice’s shop, across any amount of space.

Alice does the same on the next photon she receives. Each time this process is repeated, she records H or V orientation for the photon, lengthening her string of random, binary choices which becomes the encryption key.

The string of binary values (which could be represented as 1s and 0s) is random, and both Alice and Bob have the same string. Alice can encrypt her secret message with that key and confidently send it to Bob in ordinary email. It would be impossible in principle for anyone except Bob to decipher the message, since it is based on a random key.

How this technology differs from ordinary public key cryptography is that Alice and Bob do not have to share the key in advance. Having a shared key is less secure because such a “key” is typically a mathematical algorithm executed by a computer. Both parties know what that algorithm is. However, with a big enough computer and enough time, any such key can be cracked. With a quantum key however, there is no algorithm. The key is utterly random.

It is impossible to decipher the encrypted message without the quantum key, so you wouldn’t even try. Instead, you would attempt to intercept the key as it was being sent to Alice in the first place. Once you had Alice’s key, you could easily decipher her secret message to Bob.

If “Eve,” eavesdropped on the stream of encrypted photons headed for Alice, then Eve would have a copy of Alice’s key. But the photons would not look any different to Alice. They were always H or V at the moment she looked at them before, and they still are.

The standard answer to this attack is to note that Eve’s interception distorts the information encoded in the photons’ orientation in some way. I have no idea why that would be, especially for the “E91” protocol described here, where Alice and Bob each get one member of a very simple entangled pair.

In the articles I have read, it is just asserted that Eve’s interception would be detectable somehow. Probably the explanation involves some arcane physics or mathematics that I could not understand, so it is just as well that these articles do not say what errors Eve would introduce into a photon when she examines it. Let’s just assume that she does distort the key in some way however.

Nevertheless, Alice has no criterion for determining whether her quantum key has been tampered with or not. They are all just photons to her. If she were to compare her key with Bob’s, they would jointly determine that they did not match, since Bob’s photons had been previously disentangled by Eve, not by Alice.

But how are they going to compare the quantum keys? By sending them in an email? That wouldn’t be very secure. It defeats the whole purpose of the exercise. They cannot compare the keys prior to having secure keys with which to communicate. It’s a chicken and egg situation.

It’s true that Bob will not be able to decode Alice’s message, since their keys do not match, but Alice does not know that. So she sends her secret message by email, Eve eavesdrops on it, decodes it with her key that matches Alice’s.

Bob will realize that he cannot decode Alice’s message and will call Alice to let her know, and they will both realize there had been an interception. But by that time it is too late. Eve has the secret message.

Have You Ever Seen A Circle?

I was in the shower, looking down at the drain, and it appeared to be elliptical in shape even though I knew it was circular. So I moved my head directly over the drain to appreciate its true circular shape, but I couldn’t quite do it. For one thing, it was not possible to hold my head still enough that I could say for sure that I had seen a perfect circle. Secondly, there was a difference in point of view between each of my two eyes. Each eye saw the drain from a slightly different angle. Only one of them could be directly over the drain. Even repositioning my head with one eye closed, I couldn’t hold still, and anyway, I know that eyeballs always twitch about five times a second as a routine matter, so it was not going to be possible for me to truly apprehend the circular shape of the drain.

I realized that even the most sensitive scientific instrument, mounted exactly above the drain and kept absolutely still, could not measure circularity with zero error. There are probably instruments that can measure to 100 decimal points of accuracy, or better, but not an infinite number of decimal points of accuracy. Anyway, at some point, the measuring instrument would be so sensitive that no human being could calibrate it without error nor read its output without error. Besides, I doubt that the drain is genuinely circular in the first place. At some level of inspection, it surely would be “out of round”. So it became obvious that it was not possible, in principle, for me to ever apprehend the circular shape of my shower drain.

(Does this diagram show a circle tilted back, or an ellipse?
Joseph Brooks, socrates.berkeley.edu/ ~plab/earlygroup/shape.htm)

As the hot water began to turn cool, I concluded that there aren’t any true circular shapes in the world, and even if there were, as a practical matter, we wouldn’t be able to perceive them as such. Circularity could only be an abstraction; a generalization from many perceptual experiences of viewing approximately circular shapes, in comparison to other abstract shapes, such as ellipses. The mathematical formula for a circle is a further abstraction. In short, there are no circles, and nobody has ever seen a circle.
Except maybe Plato.

Plato appreciated the shower drain problem. He realized that objects of the mind, like the idea and image of a circle, are stable and perfect (and “eternal” he said). Objects of the world that we actually perceive are only approximations to the perfection of the objects of the mind, and on top of that, he knew that the body itself is forever changing, and inherently unreliable, so the appearances of things are always in flux.

By contrast, the perfect mental forms do not change. Plato called these the “essences” of things. The essence of something is what it truly is, its core nature, despite appearances. So my shower drain is truly circular in shape, despite appearances to the contrary.

But why assume something to which evidence speaks the contrary? The evidence is that the drain is not, in fact, circular. But Plato reasoned that if essences are perfect and eternal, and every object has an essence as its core, then every object must be perfect and eternal in its innermost nature. If our actual experience of the world contradicts that, well, so much the worse for experience. The experience is wrong.

But if experience is wrong, and always has been, how did Plato come to his theories about objects and their eternal essences? His whole life experience, like everyone else’s was erroneous. Plato’s answer is that he was just born with the knowledge of perfect essences, and so was everyone else. So there!

That’s a large pill to swallow. It is tantamount to the favorite argument of parents, “Because I said so!”

It is not necessary to assume that the perfect essence of an object resides in the object. Why can’t we say that essences reside in the mind, as inductive abstractions and deductive proofs? If that were allowed, then we would not be troubled by the fact that perception and measurement are inherently unreliable and that all objects are changeable. We could simply mentally accommodate for the error variance to infer the correct reality.

But Plato seemed blind to subjectivity, especially his own. Everything in his theory was “out there,” separate from the human mind, because he did not explicitly take the mind into consideration in his theory of reality. The best he could do was to say that the perfect and eternal essences lived in a special world, the spaceless and timeless World of Forms. The Forms were “out there” somewhere, although they would have to be in heaven to be in a spaceless and timeless domain.

So circles are in heaven. When you imagine you have seen a circle, you have actually glimpsed heaven. The same is true for a square, a triangle, or a dodecahedron.

In fact, we would have to say, keeping with Plato, that heaven is all you ever see. Everything has a shape, and a size, and so forth, because perceived things must have form. But when you apprehend and conceptualize a thing’s form, you are actually dealing with its Form, or essence, and Forms exist only in heaven. Therefore we have never, and cannot ever, perceive any part of the actual world, only the world of Forms.

(What shape is the rim of this cup?)

Plato’s is a profoundly antiscientific theory. Science is the observation and measurement of the actual world, not description of some theoretical heavenly world beyond space and time. So you would think scientists would be keen to avoid missteps leading to Platonist thinking. Yet they actually make the same mistake Plato made, assuming that everything is “out there,” nothing is “in here.”

In other words, scientists today are just as blind to their own subjectivity as Plato was to his. Scientific hyperobjectivity leads to the same reification errors that characterize Plato’s implausible theory of heavenly Forms.


Most scientists insist, for example, that patterns exist in nature that are not constructions of the human mind. I once pinned down a scientist who argued this way and asked him directly, “Do you really believe there is a face on the moon?” To my amazement, he answered yes. He said “If you set up an appropriate camera it will objectively record the pattern of a face on the moon without any human intervention.” (It did not occur to him that someone would have to look at the camera’s picture to prove the presence of a face).

Likewise, most scientists insist that there is objective “information” in the world and even “knowledge” independent of any knower. Many believe that numbers exist independently of the human mind, and so do space, time, energy, mass, and force. Theoretical physicists are convinced they are close to having a “theory of everything,” by which they mean everything in the objective world, which is the only world, in their thinking. Such hubris would be risible were it not pervasive.

Unfortunately, even the field of psychology, which supposedly specializes in the study of the human mind, has drunk the scientific Kool Aid. The American Psychological Association, and most of its members, insist that psychology is an objective science. Scientific psychologists have become blind to subjectivity, projecting and reifying their own minds onto the brain and the genome, the modern-day repositories of Platonic Forms.

What is the alternative? Abandonment of science and return to the prescientific darkness of ignorance and superstition? Hardly. All we need are a few tweaks to the philosophy of science to allow that subjectivity exists in the world as a natural fact and can be studied without shame.

Is Monotheism Obsolete?

If we are created in God’s image, and we believe that God is a self-sufficient individual, then so are we. That is how the myth of radical human individualism arose. Monotheism prompts us to see ourselves not merely as “the chosen people” (party to the covenant), but as individuals, self-contained, self-motivated, self-determining monads, just like God, in whose image we are created.

This myth of the individual has flourished and persisted to this day. It dominates Western philosophy, science, and psychology, especially cognitive psychology, which tries to explain the human psyche in terms of each person’s individual brain. But that’s not who we are.

The glorification of the individual psyche has been a mistake derived from monotheism. Put away the myth and look at the facts. The defining feature of the human psyche is that it is social. We are intensely social animals. We live with, for, and through each other. We cannot live without each other.

Language is a social invention, and to the extent that thought depends on language and linguistically based logic and conceptualization, thought is social. Even our most private and personal introspections and prayers, are social because we have internalized the image of the community and the thought processes given to us by the community.

It is not possible for a human being to live outside of human society. Sure, we can point to the lone monk on a mountaintop or the isolated recluse living in a forest. And what about Robinson Crusoe? But these are not true loners.

Through the decades-long process of socialization, one internalizes the language, values, assumptions, and concepts of one’s culture. The hermit on a mountaintop still has his language, memories, internal dialogs, and maybe books. He is still intensely social. The Unabomber was a recluse who shunned all society and lived alone in the forest. Except that he sent bombs to people, which is a social act. And when captured, his greatest wish was to publish a “manifesto” of his belief system. He was a nut, but an intensely social nut.

Robinson Crusoe? It’s a good thing his man Friday showed up or Crusoe would have eventually lost his mind. The internalized social community gradually fades away if it is not reinforced with new social interaction. After a time, Crusoe wouldn’t have had a thought in his head. He would have been reduced to a foraging animal, a human in outer form only. Perhaps De Foe knew that.

Children who are abandoned at an early age do not experience the years of socialization that create an internal representation of their social community. When such feral children are recovered by society, they are human in name and form only. They typically have no language, show no human emotion or understanding, and of course, know nothing of the ways of human society.

We are, above all other traits, social beings, intersubjectively linked to each other’s minds from our birth into a community. If we are created in God’s image, it follows that God must be similarly social in nature. Which implies a community of gods, not just one. Given the evidence, polytheism looks like a more reasonable idea than monotheism.

What are the implications of this conclusion? They remain to be worked out. I don’t think we should automatically assume a Greek or Hindu pantheon. We should develop our understanding of polytheism based on our peculiarly modern, Western ways of thinking.

But at least we can say that the doctrine of the cognitive monad can be set aside in favor of a more realistic psychology of intersubjectivity. And on the moral front, we can dispense with the absolutist thinking that derives from monotheism and which causes so much human grief. The implications for structured religion and Western society, are, of course, profound.

Perspective on a Difficult Idea

Linear perspective is an extremely compelling visual illusion. And it is an illusion. You know the train tracks do not really converge. If they did, the train would derail.

Why do parallel lines look like they converge in the distance? I think it is a learned response to living in a world of pictures. That interpretation is so overlearned, it occurs without explicit awareness. But it should be possible to unpack that illusion.

Linear perspective was invented in the early 1400’s by an Italian architect (Brunelleschi) and simultaneously by others trying to draw and paint, as a way to represent three dimensional space on a two-dimensional sheet. It is a good invention and it works pretty well. We do see "depth" in a flat picture, even though that is not literally possible because there is no depth in a flat picture.

In the 600 years since then, the technique has become so universal that pictures drawn without it don’t look right.











The artist, Albrecht Durer, in a famous 1525 lithograph, is shown using strings to represent the rays of light coming from the corners of his object. His canvas swings out of the way while he sights down the strings to the object. Then he puts the canvas back in place and makes marks where the strings would hit it. Connect the dots, and you have a mathematically correct map of what the actual object looks like from that point of view.

But what is it a drawing of? The sides of a walkway do not really converge in the distance. If they did, you couldn’t walk it to the end. So a perspective drawing is surely not an accurate representation of reality. Strings or no strings, the perspective drawing is a fantasy, like a unicorn. It is something that does not exist in the world.



Why then does the unrealistic perspective drawing look so convincingly real, at least with respect to depth? Is it because when we look at the world we actually see it wrong? When you look down a long walkway, not a picture of one, are you seeing the world wrongly? We know from practical experience in the world that parallel lines do not converge in the distance, so why do we see convergence? We have to make a mental correction: “The sides look like they converge, but really they don’t.”


I have spent a lot of time looking at scenes (not pictures, but situations) where there seemed to be converging perspective lines. Much to my wife’s consternation, I will often stop to stare down a long hotel hallway like the one shown here, and ask myself, “Do those walls really look like they converge, or am I only imagining it?” I will walk up and down such hallways, trying to understand what I am seeing, and hoping I won’t get reported to hotel security.

And my conclusion is this: I do NOT see the walls converging. I can talk myself into it, but if I turn off my metacognition, what I see is a continuously unfolding horizon and continuous visual information moving around my head. At no time do I worry that the walls are closing in on me.

If I stand motionless and look down the hall as if I were a camera taking a picture, then I CAN see convergence. But that’s because I am pretending to be a camera. I am using metacognition, the ability we all have to introspect on our own mental experience. Metacognition is what allows you to answer the question, "What are you thinking about?" To answer, you must think about your thinking process. For a visual scene, the question, "What do you see?" encourages metacognition. You must think about your visual experience. Instead of just having a visual experience, you are now one step removed from it. You have stepped back from your natural experience and instead you are now using metacognition to examine your own mental imagery.

We learn visual metacognition when we learn to understand pictures. For the last six centuries virtually all pictures used the linear perspective technique of representation, which is derived from metacognition, not simple visual perception.

It is extremely difficult to set aside the ways of seeing that you have unconsciously assumed all your life and which your culture claims is the “correct” way of seeing. When you look at a photograph, you automatically apply metacognition – actually you must. To understand a picture, you must abandon your natural, egocentric point of view and take up the special imaginary point of view implied by the picture so you can imagine you are looking at the scene depicted. It is a sophisticated shift in personal frame of reference, but we do it with ease.

It looks like the perspective lines are “in” the photograph because that’s how we have been taught to interpret such artifacts. A photograph is a 2-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional scene, so we apply Brunelleschi’s rules to it. Whipping out a Sharpie and drawing the perspective lines on the photograph only proves my point that we are using an artist’s metacognitive way of seeing the photo. But we don't normally do that when we are using ordinary cognition, as opposed to metacognition, in the real world.

When I look down the grocery aisle as if I were a camera, I am strongly tempted to see converging lines. Look at them there in the picture! I can do that, but why would I?

Never, when I have been shopping for a box of pasta, have I experienced converging parallel lines. Never. I just go to the pasta section and get what I want, and proceed to the next aisle. Not a single time have I worried if my shopping cart would fit out the narrow opening in the far end of the aisle. Linear perspective just does not come up when you need a box of pasta.

However, if I stand at the head of the aisle and imagine I am a camera, or an artist, and mentally "step back" from my experience, then pop! There are the convergence lines. But they are purely an intellectual, metacognitive, culturally contrived way of seeing, an overlay on my natural experience. I have been taught to see convergence lines and so I do. But when I do, I am not looking at the world any more, but instead, looking at my own mental imagery of the world.

Now that I have learned how to unlearn that cultural habit, I no longer see perspective lines unless I want to. That demonstrates to me that apprehension of linear perspective is not a native property of the biological visual system.

Discussions of the perspective illusion always present pictures to illustrate the points being made. I have done that here, too. I admit that the convergence lines are there in the pictures. Of course they are. But that’s because they are pictures! Metacognition is required to understand pictures, just as it is to read a map, a floor plan, or a blueprint. Understanding pictures is a culturally acquired skill. There is perspectival convergence in the pictures because that’s how we have learned to interpret pictures.

But if you observe the real world, not pictures, you can, with practice, get back into your natural attitude (non-metacognitive) way of perceiving, and there will be no linear convergence. Try it. Walk some hotel hallways and some grocery aisles and some railroad tracks. What do you really see? You will find that the sides do not close in on you. You do not really see linear convergence unless you imagine you are "looking at a scene" instead of being in the world. We CAN take an attitude of detachment toward our perceptual experience, but that is a learned, introspective skill.

It seems to me it would not be too hard to test this hypothesis experimentally, with infants and non-human animals. You could test them for discrimination of natural scenes with and without perspective elements (what most people would call perspective elements, like railroad tracks and hallways). My hypothesis is that there would be no discrimination between scenes conventionally interpreted as containing convergence, and those without. It would be hard to do this without pictures, but not impossible. I notice recently that some hotels go to great lengths to break up the perspective effect in their hallways by using alcoves, varied lighting and wall colors, and non-linear carpet patterns. It should be possible to find comparable but contrasting hallways.

Then you could train the animals or infants to discriminate comparable perspective and non-perspective drawings, then test them on the natural scenes again. If the training were effective, the post-test should show discrimination of scenes with convergent and non-convergent elements. However, It might be difficult to accomplish the pictorial training, as the skill takes a long time to acquire.

Who Cares?
Why does it matter whether we really see linear perspective in the world or just apply that cultural interpretation to what we see? I think it matters for two reasons.

1. It matters if we are seeing the world wrongly. We know the train tracks do not converge in reality but we see that they do. That’s wrong, a perceptual error. Well, if we see the world wrongly in that case, what else are we seeing wrong? What if it's all wrong? Is the world anything like what we think it is?

This is a fundamental question in the philosophy of perception. So-called “realists” believe that we see what is really out there. Sure we make errors, but over time, we generally understand what the world is really like.

On the other hand, “representationalists” say that our brain forms a neurological representation of the world and that is all we have to go on. We do not know anything for sure about the world in-itself. We know only what our brain represents for us, and that includes convergence lines of perspective.

I am a realist, and I have argued endlessly with representationalists about this. Representationalists tend to be interested in robotics and machines that can “represent” the world in computer memory. Representationalists use the illusion of linear perspective to argue, “It looks like the train tracks converge, but they don’t really. Therefore realism in perception is simply not true.”

My argument now is, “I deny that it looks like the train tracks converge. That is a learned attitude, an introspection, not natural perception.”



2. The second reason the perspective illusion matters is because it highlights a fundamental error people make about visual perception. The eye is not like a camera and does not work like a camera. Yes, the eye has a lens and a pupil (shutter opening) and the retina is analogous to a film. But the analogy is flawed and deeply misleading because an eye is a component of an active sensory system in an exploratory animal. A camera is an inert machine.

We do not look at our retinas, ever. The retinal image is nothing like the image on a film, and nobody ever sees it. A camera is passive, but vision is active, exploratory, selective, and cognitive. Recent developments in sensory substitution amply demonstrate how "mental" perception is (e.g., blind people learn to “see” from video signals translated into vibrations, sounds, pin pricks on their backs, or electrical signals to the brain).

Once you shake free of the erroneous camera analogy, you are free to see the world in your natural attitude, not through an arbitrary cultural lens.

Are the seats smaller in the back of this train?

Outlaw the Magnifying Glass!

How does a magnifying glass magnify? What is its secret? I looked into this recently and was amazed to discover that it works by playing on the human delusion that the world is just as it appears. A magnifying glass leads to a dangerous mind-game!

When you want to look at something very small, you have to move your eye closer to it, but there is a limit to that strategy. You can move a sheet of paper closer to your eyes but at some point it is too close for you to focus the lens of your eye on anything. For ordinary newsprint that distance is about 10 inches for me. Closer than that and the print is just a blur. The lens of the eye has a variable focal length, but it has limits.

Incoming light rays are bent by the lens at the top and the bottom, but pass straight through the middle. That’s how a lens works. The resulting image on the back of the eyeball is upside down, but we are so used to that, we don’t even notice it and we see the world as right-side-up.

To get a better look at a small object, we insert a magnifying lens between the eye and the object.






The magnifying glass is held close to the small object, so in the drawing above, the light rays from the object are diverging outward, so much so that an eyeball placed that close couldn’t bend them down to the scale of the retina (couldn't focus them).

The lens of the magnifying glass bends the rays of light just enough so they fit into the lens of the eye, which can take it from there and focus the object. You can move the magnifying glass back and forth until you find that good distance.

So now your eye can focus the object but why does that make the object seem bigger (magnified?). That’s where the mental delusion comes in. As far as the eye is concerned, if light rays come in at that angle, at that distance, they must be coming from a much larger object. The dashed lines show what the eye “assumes” about those light rays and where they came from.

The eyeball is not very smart and does not understand the optics of a magnifying glass. It only knows, from its whole life of experience, that when light rays come in at that angle, at that distance, the object is large. That is the message it sends back to the brain.

Consequently, when using the magnifying glass, we see the object as much larger than it really is, out of “eyeball habit.” THERE IS NO LARGE OBJECT out there. We see a magnified large object that does not exist! The actual object is the same size it always was. But by tricking the eye, we delude ourselves into seeing an imaginary larger object.

The larger, magnified object is utter fantasy, but we don’t interpret it that way. We implicitly assume that we are looking right at an actual object that just happens to be enlarged. As if objects in the world could really be enlarged on demand!

That’s not how the world works. Things are the size they are. They do not get larger because we wish them to. So why do we accept without worry that we have just magically enlarged an object? A magnifying glass promotes an incredible delusion!

Magnifying glasses should be regulated by the government. We cannot allow children to use magnifying glasses! A magnifying glass is far more dangerous in distorting the mind than any hallucinatory drug.

What is Laughter?

Laughter seems to involve a spasm of the diaphragm, but so does a hiccup, and laughter is not a hiccup. Both are involuntary, but that’s not much help.

Laughter has a stimulus, some visual or semantic event, even if only a memory, that triggers it. You don’t break out in laughter for “no reason.” Something makes you laugh.

Incongruity Hypothesis
Usually the triggering input is something unexpected, out of context, incongruous. Man slips on banana peel and falls. Ha-ha. That’s not supposed to happen. The context shift need only be very slight as with a pun, or a small reversal of semantic or attentional figure and ground, as in a riddle. A violation of expectations is funny. Sometimes.

At other times, violation of expectation is infuriating, as when a vending machine keeps your money and gives you no product. Not funny. Unless it happens to somebody else, perhaps. Violation of expectation can also provoke fear, even terror. So the incongruity hypothesis needs qualifications.

People laugh and giggle after smoking marijuana, possibly because the cognitive changes from smoking result in much relaxed expectations due to limited short term memory and short attention span. Under those conditions, it doesn’t take much to violate what few expectations are left.

Similarly perhaps, I am susceptible to fits of uncontrollable laughter when I am extremely tired. Again, there is a factor of diminution of cognitive faculties that accompanies extreme fatigue.

Tickling may produce laughter because of the incongruity of having your body stimulated in an unexpected way. The incongruity hypothesis is not an easy fit there, but it could be made to work.

Are clowns funny? They are for many children because they violate expectations of what is normal, both in the way they look and the way they act. But many children are afraid of clowns, so the violation of expectation hypothesis can only take us so far. Perhaps it must be a mild violation of context, or at least, one perceived as harmless. So safety seems to be a factor correlated with the incongruity hypothesis.

We laugh when something is funny, but for the most part, what's funny is culturally defined as whatever makes you laugh. Circular though that argument is, it suggests for the incongruity hypothesis that expectancies are culturally defined.

One group’s sacred ritual is another group’s comic farce. It all depends on what you expect and don’t expect in the normal course of things.

There are numerous physiological correlates to laughter in the brain, but that doesn’t tell us much, since we don’t know if they are causes or effects, or some mixture of both.

Likewise, laughter results in numerous changes in the body, but that doesn’t help us understand what laughter is or what causes it. Laughter can lead to tears, but that doesn’t make it the same as crying.

Social Hypothesis
Another hypothesis is that laughter is a social phenomenon, possibly a form of communication. Why can’t you tickle yourself? Maybe because that is uncommunicative. It takes two to laugh.

Of course you can laugh when you are all alone, but according to the social hypothesis, it’s when you are remembering a social situation that makes you laugh.

Laughter is often contagious, additional evidence for its being a social, rather than strictly an individual phenomenon, and more reason to think that it serves specifically a communicative function. What is the communicative message? I don’t think it’s necessarily a conceptualized, linguistic proposition. It seems more like an implicit social understanding, like “We are together now.”

Temperament
Despite the social hypothesis, a third component of laughter seems to be individual mood and temperament. I've met plenty of people I thought were humorless, yet everyone believes they have "a good sense of humor." I’ve never heard anyone say they have no sense of humor. Yet the plain fact is that some people are just not easily amused, while others can find almost anything funny. Humorless people perhaps feel under threat to the self, and if they are never safe, violations of expectations are fearful rather than funny.

Embarrassed laughter supports that hypothesis. Embarrassment arises from a violation of expectation, and can also produce laughter, if the personal threat is not too great. Phony laughter can pretend that the threat to self was insignificant, even when it wasn't.

Conversely, we might expect that people who are self-assured would have a more finely tuned sense of humor, meaning, they would laugh more readily at a wider range of incongruities. This could be tested experimentally, and probably has been.

I don’t think laughter is an emotion. And I don’t think emotions produce laughter, although laughter can produce happiness. We might try to make a grumpy person laugh just in order to elevate their mood. But the laughter is not the mood.

Any temperamental factor would be confounded with socialization, so there’s no way to get a clear picture of it.

Darwin
Charles Darwin, in his fascinating book on the Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (1898) Made the connection between laughter and aggression. We notice that laughter almost invariably involves showing teeth. Darwin surmised that it might be because laughter is similar to a self-defensive display of aggression.

I don't care for evolutionary "just-so" stories like that, but the conjecture is at least consistent with some of the other ideas I have put forward. If the perceived incongruity is felt to be threatening to the animal or person's self, then one natural response would be self-defense, and one way to demonstrate that is by showing teeth. It doesn't ring completely true to me, being based only on superficial observation of facial expression and not phenomenological analysis, but it is not unreasonable.

Individual Differences
There is another idiosyncratic factor about what makes a person laugh, and it may be different from temperament. Perhaps it is socialization history. Often it is surprising what will make a person laugh.

For example, my wife, a well-educated, articulate, and thoughtful person, loves slapstick physical humor. When she sees somebody walk into a door and bang their head, in a comedic context, she might laugh until tears come to her eyes. Her laughter makes me laugh, but I look at her with bewilderment. Who is this person that thinks a bump on the head is so funny? It’s unfathomable.

For myself, I am partial to linguistic jokes. I love badly formed, ambiguous newspaper headlines, for example, clever captions to cartoons and sly puns. I also enjoy well-observed satire, which relies on good phenomenology. People bumping heads is just not funny for me.
I don’t think those kinds of differences are merely temperamental, but it is difficult to say what could account for them, other than, vaguely, “socialization.”

Animals
Do animals laugh? Many animals make noises, show emotional expression, and vocalize in situations that suggest to us that they are laughing. Chimpanzees especially seem to laugh and they have the cognitive capacity to understand when an expectation is violated. I have read that it is possible to tickle a rat and make it emit a special noise that can be heard with instruments. Is that laughter?

We can’t know if animals laugh because we lack sufficiently detailed intersubjectivity to understand their minds as well as we do with each other. I can be pretty sure when you are laughing because we are the same kind of animal and we know each other’s minds. Speculation about whether animals laugh is best put aside until we understand better what human laughter is.

What is Laugher?
One memorable account of the origin of laughter came from an eight year old boy. When I asked where laughter comes from, he said, "From God. Or maybe from my butt." The first answer says, “Laughter is a part of me that does not originate with me.” The second answer expresses the sudden, involuntary, and inexplicable quality of laughter.

Do Robins Have a Self-Concept?

A fat robin landed on the ornamental pine tree in a corner right out side my study window and looked around. I knew what he was thinking: This seems like a good place for a nest.

But before long he noticed his own reflection in the window, and thinking it was a rival bird, started attacking the window. He flew vigorously up against it and pecked, only to be bounced away by that formidable adversary.

This tells me that robins do not recognize themselves in a mirror. And I’m not surprised. All robins look about the same to me. Of course, they probably think that about us.

The ability to recognize yourself in a mirror is considered an index of self-awareness. Children acquire the ability at around 18 months old. A small red spot of makeup is surreptitiously put on the child’s forehead, then the child is brought to a mirror. Children younger than 18 months do not seem to recognize the mirror image as themselves. However after 18 months they notice the red spot and touch it, or try to wipe it off, and often show signs of embarrassment, such as smiling and laughing.

Presumably, you must have a certain degree of self-awareness to recognize yourself in a mirror image. Children over 18 months pass the mirror test, and so do chimpanzees and dolphins, and even elephants. (See http://notexactlyrocketscience.wordpress.com/2006/11/27/elephants-can-recognise-themselves-in-a-mirror/ for an interesting report on elephants passing the mirror test of self-awareness).

Anyway, robins do not pass the mirror test, and that's too bad. I have had trouble before with robins attacking my windows. They just won’t give up. The window becomes all glopped up with dirt, oils, and bird poop as they maintain their attack for days on end.

So I got up from my desk and walked over to the window, about 12 inches from the tree branch. The robin immediately flew away. The window must not form a perfect mirror if he can see me, a major predator, through the glass. Fine.

But in two minutes he was baaaack! He sat on the branch for a minute, then started attacking his illusory competitor in the window. Again I got up and went to the window and again he flew away.

Two minutes later, he was back again and I scared him away again. This cycle was repeated five times. I wondered how long it would take for him to learn that this was NOT a good place for a nest. I wasn’t really prepared to play this game for several days. So I stood at the window and waited, to see if he would return with me standing right there.

Very shortly, he flew back, but saw me and diverted to land on the ground in the shrubbery below the window. He started pecking the ground "nonchalantly" (it seemed to me), moving around at random. Was it a diversionary tactic?

I soon lost sight of him in the brush, but continued to wait and watch. A few seconds later I noticed a remarkable thing, a single, motionless bird’s eye peering at me through a narrow clear channel from the ground, through the brush, to where I was standing.

The robin was watching me! It was eerie. His unblinking eye stared right at me. I could not see the rest of his body. He was hidden, I would say on purpose, and spying on me!

In order for an animal to hide and spy on another animal, it must have some sort of a self-concept. It must have the animal-equivalent of the thought, “I can see him, but he can’t see me.” Of course it would not be a linguistic conceptualization, but it would have to involve some kind of understanding like that. There is no other way to interpret the behavior of “hiding and spying”.

I was shocked that a bird would even know how to do that. Birds fly around in the sky. They are not adapted to peering through narrow openings in the brush, and you wouldn’t think they have much experience in hiding either.

But then I thought, they must have a lot of experience flying through tree branches and so on, so they would have good skills at seeing an opening through dense obstructions. And I guess nests are sort of hidden, so maybe they have the bird-concept of “hiding” also.

Could he really see me? Birds have excellent vision, as demonstrated by eagles and hawks, who can spot a tiny mouse on the ground from hundreds of feet in the air. Birds have pinpoint sharp vision at great distances, even if their field of view is narrow, like tunnel vision.

He watched. I waited. I started to get creeped out. So I suddenly waved my hands rapidly back and forth in front of my face. The robin immediately retreated and flew up and out of the brush. I never saw him again.

That was yesterday, but I am still unsettled by the experience. I was stalked by a robin! I was not frightened, but made uncomfortable by “le regard,” as Jean-Paul Sartre called it when someone stares at you. I had never considered before that a robin could have enough self-awareness to do something like that.

It seems like we need to discriminate different kinds of self-awareness. The mirror test indicates some kind of bodily self-recognition, but the ability to hide and watch may be an entirely different kind of self-awareness, something less physical and more social than the mirror test defines.

The Phantom Penis

A phantom limb is the feeling that amputees often have that the missing limb is still attached and giving sensations. More than 50% of amputees experience a phantom limb. Phantom breast sensations can likewise occur after mastectomy.

Unfortunately, sensations from a phantom body part are usually painful and that pain is almost impossible to treat, even though the pain is very real, not imaginary.

There is a section of the cerebral cortex of the brain where nerve signals from major body parts go. In a typical drawing of this somatosensory cortex, the amount of cortex dedicated to a particular body part is represented by the relative size of a drawing of that body part. The face, lips, and tongue use a large part of the somatosensory cortex, and that corresponds to our experience that these parts of the body are well-innervated and particularly sensitive, compared, say, to the middle of the back.

There are two of these somatosensory cortexes, one on each side of the brain. The left somatosensory cortex represents the right side of the body, and vice-versa. Normally, if your right hand is stimulated, nerves would fire in the left somatosensory cortex, in the area corresponding to the right hand.

The best explanation for phantom pain is that neurons fire in the relevant area of the somatosensory cortex, causing the sensation in the corresponding body part, whether or not that body part is actually present.

Why would neurons in the somatosensory cortex fire in the absence of the corresponding body part? There is some evidence that nearby areas “take over” the part of the cortex that had been used by the lost body part (Ramachandran, Rogers-Ramachandran & Stewart 1992). The brain acts as if it believed there is no reason to let perfectly good cortex go to waste just because a body part has been amputated. The result can be the experience of a phantom limb and its phantom pain.

In an interesting new study, Ramachandran and McGeoch (2008) surveyed a sample of transgender individuals (also called transsexuals), people who have chosen to change from one sex to the other through use of hormones and surgery. About one out of 2500 males underwent transsexual surgery in the U.S. in the last four decades (Conway, 2002). If you count those men who experience “intense gender dysphoria” (unhappiness with their anatomical gender and desire to be the other gender), but who have not undergone surgery, the frequency is one out of 500. So while uncommon, this is by no means a rare situation.

Ramachandran and MGeoch sampled both male to female (MtF) and female to male (FtM) transgender cases. They asked these individuals if they have ever experienced a phantom penis or phantom breasts. They discovered:

1. Among 29 FtM individuals 62% reported a vivid phantom penis, including phantom erections. Many said they had experienced these phantoms for years, well before the transgender program of hormone therapy. These are people who were born female, so finding such a large incidence of phantom penis sensations in people who had never in their lives had a penis, is remarkable to say the least.

For comparison, the authors interviewed a sample of ten college-aged females who were not transgendered, and none of them reported ever having anything like phantom penis sensations.

The implication is that for some reason the transgender females had the representation of a male’s body in their somatosensory cortex, giving them phantom penis sensations. Ordinary females have a female body represented in their cortex so they would not have phantom penis experiences.

2. Three of the 29 FtMs had postoperative phantom breast sensations. The breasts are typically removed as part of the transgender process. In the general population of women, 33% experience phantom breast sensations after mastectomy.

Why do the FtMs have such a low rate of phantom breast (only 10%), while in the general population it is 33%? The implication is that fewer transgender FtMs have breasts represented in their somatosensory cortex to begin with, so when the breasts are removed, there are no phantoms.

3. Among MtF transgender subjects, 30% experienced a phantom penis after penectomy. Based on published studies of penectomy, such as for malignancy, in the general population, 58% of men experience a phantom penis after the organ is removed.

Why would only 30% of men experience a phantom penis in the MtF group? Presumably, that group includes more men who did not have a penis represented in their somatosensory cortex in the first place, so when the organ was removed, they did not experience a phantom.

Taken together, these findings suggest that a person’s body concept and gender identity are strongly influenced by the neurological mapping of the somatosensory cortex. In the case of transgender individuals, it looks like the brain representation may have a stronger influence than even a lifetime of gender socialization and personal experience living in that body.

Regardless of the plain facts of their bodies and the advice of their social community, transgender individuals undergo enormous anxiety, trauma, risk and expense to get their body morphology lined up with their brain circuits.

This research seems to support the notion that when it comes to gender identity, anatomy is destiny – brain anatomy, not sexual morphology. And it seemingly refutes the idea that gender identity is merely a learned set of social attitudes and behaviors, as some philosophers have argued (e.g., Butler, 1990, 1993).

References:
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of 'Sex'. New York: Routledge.

Conway. L. (2002). How Frequently Does Transsexualism Occur? Retrieved from http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html on March 5, 2008.

Ramachandran, V.S., & McGeoch, P. D. (2008). Phantom penises in transsexuals: evidence of an innate gender-specific body image in the brain. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 15 (1), 5-16.

Ramachandran, V. S.; D. C. Rogers-Ramachandran & M. Stewart (1992), "Perceptual correlates of massive cortical reorganization.", Science (no. 258(5085)): 1159-1160

Achilles’ Choice: Another Way of Being

In the Illiad, the great warrior Achilles is publicly insulted by the Greek commander, Agamemnon, so Achilles goes to his room in a sulk and refuses to fight. When the Trojans then drive the Greek army to the sea, Achilles gloats with childish satisfaction.

Agamemnon realizes his mistake and entreats Achilles to come back and fight with the Greek army. Achilles relents and the Trojans are pushed back and defeated, almost single-handedly by Achilles.

An interesting part of the story is that before returning to battle, Achilles consults with the gods (actually, his mother, who was a god or a half-god), and he learns that if he fights, he will die in battle. Despite that prophesy (which eventually is fulfilled), he decides to go. Why?

His reasoning is that battle is an opportunity for him to achieve glory and thus immortality. If he stays home, he will live a long, comfortable life, but always in the shadow of his snub by Agamemnon. He would prefer death and the immortality his great deeds will bestow upon his name. And he was right, for here we are talking about him 3,000 years later.

Whether Achilles actually existed doesn’t matter. We are considering this psychological choice, either made by the real Achilles, or by Homer or whoever wrote the story.

It is not a choice I would make, and I daresay, few Westerners would make today. Achilles was not duty-bound to fight. He was a free agent, not under any legal or moral contract to return to battle. Let’s assume there was no compulsion of duty.

Humans seek the esteem of other humans. The psychoanalytic explanation is that we desire to displace our parents as the authoritarian arbiters of life’s meaning. A famous person seems to have transcended individuality, as bigger-than-life parents did, while we are the still-egocentric children.

But what are the rewards of fame if it costs you your life? Achilles knows that even if he is victorious in battle, he will be killed. He will achieve legendary, god-like omnipotence among his people and the immortality of his name, although he won’t be around to enjoy any of it. How is that a good deal?

Achilles' choice is sober: posthumous glory over life. That choice only makes sense if Achilles identifies himself fundamentally as Greek and only secondarily as Achilles. He fully expects to live on because his community will live on, and he is one with his community. The death of the man, Achilles will be trivial, because what matters is the adulation of the crowd, and he will be there among them, because Greek is who he is. That is not mere imagination of future adulation, it is certainty of fact.

I don’t think we have that feeling today, at least I don’t. Maybe some politicians or super-patriots do. For most of us, it is every man for his or her self, so to speak. We will give our lives for duty and honor, but that is about integrity of self-definition, not everlasting glory. We will sacrifice our life for our children, but that is our gift to them, not a personal grab at immortality. A hero will face death to save a community, and there we see the hero’s self-identification with the community, required of a genuine hero, but even there, I think that a non-pathological hero acts out of sense of community, not for the lure of personal aggrandizement.

Achilles was a different bird. He explicitly sought personal glory. When the Trojans were driving the Greeks to the sea, he gloated, “See, Agamemnon? You are nothing without me!” Achilles’ petulance expresses selfish aggrandizement. His later decision to go into battle perpetuates that theme, for he can by pushing back the Trojans, demonstrate to everyone how wrong Agamemnon had been. He will trump Agamemnon’s snub by delivering to him an even greater humiliation.

Yet when Achilles learns that he will die in battle, he decides to go anyway, motivated by the prospect of posthumous immortal glory, not personal revenge upon Agamemnon. That is a different motive that reflects Achilles’ transcendence of egocentric individuality and self-identification with his people.

As if to emphasize this second, mature motive, the Illiad provides us with a mirror image in Hector, the Trojan general. Hector’s wife begs him to stay inside the city walls. ButHector determines, much as Achilles did, that he could not live with himself if he failed to rise to the occasion. His honor was worth more than his life.

We moderns can more easily understand the psychology of Hector’s decision. “Death before dishonor” is a modern slogan. If one’s sense of self is deeply dependent upon the esteem of one’s peers, then dishonor is a far more painful death than any manner of physical demise. The choice is not perplexing.

But Achilles was already dishonored, already dead, psychologically speaking. Was his plan to rise from the dead, re-establish his honor, then return to the dead? I don’t think so. I am sure his plan was to transform his being from the individual personality of Achilles, to the ego-transcendent condition of being diffused into the Greek people admiring Achilles. He would transcend himself not by rising to become one of the gods, which would be hubris, but by dissolving back into the community that produced and sustained him. He wanted to be among the adorers, worshipping a god that he knew personally, the legend of Achilles.

The legend of Achilles won’t literally be him, because personally, he is disgraced, the most humble of persons. Rather, his immortal name will become his higher self, the far side of his mortal humanity. That’s the self he chooses.

In humanistic modernity, normal people don’t work that way. We might seek our inner divinity and strive to become that. But we do not strive to project our divinity outward as a self-object to be admired and worshipped from the point of view of our humanity. Yet that’s what Achilles did. That’s a very different psychology from ours, and we are lucky to have the Illiad still around so we can consider that difference.

In modern times, if a person construes life, self, and world as Achilles did, he is considered mentally abnormal. Consider Seung-Hui Cho, the young man who slaughtered 32 people at Virginia Tech University in 2007. Didn't he follow exactly Achilles' psychological template? We might say that Cho was not acting heroically on behalf of the community, yet in his own mind, he was. He slaughters the nameless others who dared ignore him, honoring his imagined community of like-minded peers. Cho is formally and unambiguously declared mentally ill, which is to say that we do not concur with his construal of the social world.

Was Achilles mentally ill? He acted the same way as Cho, but values have changed. Cho, and other mass murderers like him are therefore guilty above all, of anachronism.

Detecting Zombies

Only philosophers worry about zombies. The “philosophical zombie” is a thought experiment. Imagine a hypothetical being like ourselves in every possible observable way except one. The one thing a philosophical zombie lacks is a mind. If the zombie’s behavior and language performance were no different than what we would expect from a real person, how on earth could we possibly ever tell the difference between a real person with a mind, and a zombie devoid of inner experience? We couldn’t.

It is fortunate that zombies in the movies always stagger with outstretched arms and blood on their mouths, because that helps us identify them as zombies. If they behaved more normally (as in the recent movie, “Fido,” for example, or in the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”), we would begin to have difficulty discriminating them from real people. If a zombie acted completely normal, how would we know it had no mind?

The puzzle of the philosophical zombie may seem silly at first, but when you think about it more, you realize it is really just a way to pose a more urgent question: How do we know that any other person has a mind? I only know my own mind; nobody else’s.

As a practical matter each of us assumes that other people have a mind roughly comparable to our own. This assumption is confirmed by observing that other people’s behavior and verbal output is for the most part as expected. But oddly enough, we don’t actually know if anyone else has a mind.

It is an odd quirk of nature that each of us has access to only our own mind. It could have been otherwise. I can see your body. I can hear your words. I can watch your behavior. Why can’t I perceive your mind? Why couldn’t evolution have proceeded down that path? That would seem to be a better choice for a social animal like us. As it is, you could be a zombie, a perfect one, a philosophical zombie with no inner experience, and I would never know as long as you acted appropriately.

The same issue underlies a basic problem of artificial intelligence. It seems only a matter of time until robots become so sophisticated that they act and speak normally. When that happens, they will be functional philosophical zombies.

As long as a robot has a metal skin, and blinking lights on its head we will not be too worried. But as soon as such a robot is dressed up in a convincing artificial skin and a good suit of clothes, it will be come a perfect philosophical zombie. We will not be able to deny that it has a mind and a full complement of inner experiences and feelings like us, because we aren’t even sure about each other! If I deny the robot has a mind, why wouldn’t I also deny that you have a mind?

This puzzle of “other minds” bothered me for a number of years, but no longer. I now believe it arises from a faulty assumption, the assumption that our minds are private. They’re not, at least not completely. They are inherently social. Even introspection is social because it is a kind of thinking, and thinking is social. Thinking is social because language is social. Language is a social invention, arising out of human interaction.

Language does not grow on trees. It is a product of people interacting with each other. You must acquire language from another person, through explicit teaching and learning. If you don’t get the training (as feral children often don’t), language does not develop spontaneously. There is no pill you can take, no exercise you can do on your own to acquire language. It is uniquely a social phenomenon.

To the extent that thinking involves language, and introspection involves thinking, it is clear that introspection is fundamentally a social phenomenon, imbued to its core with the values and assumptions embedded in the individual’s community. Therefore, because I speak and understand the same language as you, I do in fact know what is in your mind (more or less) and I know how you think about things (in general), and most importantly, I know you are “in there,” and not a zombie.

With only a little difficulty, we can make a similar argument about visual imagery and other explicit mental representations of sensory experience and expression, like songs, and so on. They are all social conventions, taught and learned.

What about a robot programmed to have completely appropriate language? Could I discriminate it from a real person? That question constitutes the famous “Turing test” proposed by Alan Turing in 1950. In that test, you have a conversation with a robot and a person hidden from you by curtains, and if you cannot tell which is which, the robot passes the test. In that case, you must, to avoid inconsistency, admit that it has a mind, albeit an artificial one.

Some robots have already passed a limited version of the Turing test, fooling adults, children, experts, psychologists, and many others (http://www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html . While these tests have been limited in scope, are we justified to expect a future robot that qualifies as a perfect linguistic zombie? I think not.

The robot contains the language knowledge of the programmer. In that sense the robot is not a natural language user. It did not acquire its language through the normal course of socialization, which takes many years of daily social interaction. The robot has no family, no peers, no social network out of which language understanding grows. The programmer has all those social connections and is a natural language user. The robot becomes a repository of the programmer’s lexicon and grammar, but not of the programmer’s social history. Consequently, it is not possible in principle for the robot to ever be a perfect linguistic zombie, because genuine language usage and understanding arise from living in a community. That’s why a linguistic robot language will inevitably be identified in an unconstrained Turing test.

Well then, couldn’t a robot be made that does live in a community of humans, and does partake of ordinary social interactions, and does acquire language through interaction like a human does? That would work in principle, but nobody has any idea how to make such a robot, because we don’t even know exactly how the process works for a human being. So in the end, there is no fear of zombie robots.

But more importantly, we can rest assured that if there are any “pod people” among us whose bodies have been snatched, we will know it.