Stray Ideas

Consciousness Before Birth and After Death

2011-09-05T11:26:00.000-07:00

What is the difference, to consciousness, between being dead and being not yet born, or more exactly, being not yet even conceived? Are they equivalent states of consciousness?

After you die, your individual consciousness ceases to exist. Religion generally denies this, but that is wishful thinking. The main purpose of religion, after all, is to deny death. For believers, who are alive, not dead, this is a comforting, though delusional idea that has no basis in evidence or logic.

So let us agree, for purpose of this essay, that individual consciousness ceases to exist when, or sometime very soon after, all the systems of the physical body cease to function.

Now, how is that different in principle, to an individual’s state of consciousness prior to being conceived? In that condition (or non-condition), there is no physical body to define the boundary of an individual, and with no body, no individual consciousness. Functionally then, being unborn (unconceived) is equivalent to being dead. In both cases there is no individual consciousness because the functioning, individual embodiment to support it does not exist. Individual consciousness depends on individual embodiment – which is not to say that consciousness is caused by embodiment; there is no evidence for that. There is simply a dependency, of an unknown kind, between embodiment and consciousness.

It is only during a brief segment of less than 100 years, while we have a functioning body, that we have a functioning individual consciousness. Prior to the beginning of my tiny moment of individualism, the world extended backward in time beyond history and took place entirely without my presence (difficult though that is to imagine). And after my flicker of time is over, the world will continue on, in some form or other, without me (difficult though that is to imagine). Beyond the boundaries of my particular individual life, my consciousness simply does not exist in the universe. Why then, do we so carefully distinguish between being dead, and being not yet born?

An easy, and wrong, answer, is that the unborn are full of “potential” while the dead are not. This is a linguistic confusion, for “the unborn” do not exist. What the expression means is that some hypothetical individual who might be conceived and born at a future date, would have the potential to have experience, and to cause things to happen in the world. But that is a fact about someone who hypothetically will be alive, not an entity actually unconceived and unborn at this time. That entity does not literally exist yet. Something that does not exist has no potential for anything.

A person might take a God’s-eye view of human life and declare from that omniscient mountaintop that new individuals will be born, and when they are, will have “potential” for life whereas the dead never will again (assuming that dead is forever). But there is no God’s-eye view. We are humans, not gods, and we only have a human point of view, which is not omniscient. To take a God’s eye view is either imagination or self-delusion. If you’re going to pretend you have a God’s eye view of life and death, you might as well imagine reincarnation, or zombies and vampires if you like, because it is unconstrained fabrication anyway.

From actual human, not presumptive divine, knowledge, we can again only conclude that there is no functional difference between the state of (non-) consciousness prior to conception and after death. That conclusion is an inference based on evidence available to living humans.

However, there is a psychological difference that matters to living humans. I have memory of personal experience that seems to extend backward in time before my birth. This is possible through the magic of history. By contrast, except for religious stories, I do not imagine any personal experience beyond my death, since, unlike for history, there is no human evidence that any experience continues beyond death.

Of the uncountable billions and billions of people who have died on this planet, and among the millions who die every day, not a single person has ever “come back” to the living and reported any experience beyond death, or even communicated with us “from the other side” about what postmortem experience is like. In this assertion, I rule out fictional stories, religious fabrications, fraudulent reports, and tales from the mentally abnormal. By comparison, with history, we have written records, fossils, geology, astronomy, genetics and so forth, which give us verifiable, scientific evidence of what happened or probably happened before my individual experience began.

World War II ended before I was born, which seems odd to me, because I feel like I remember it, but that’s because of having studied history. My father fought in WWII and he actually remembers it (or would, if he were not dead). But what would he remember? He would remember his naval experience, his buddies, the situations he was in. He would not remember the entire war, though, because nobody could, because nobody experienced the entire war. People can only literally remember their own experience, not somebody else’s. And yet, after a lifetime of reading about the war, and watching uncountable movies and newsreels covering all aspects of it, I feel I have a personal memory of it, although that is not literally possible because I wasn’t yet born when the war ended. Still, that quasi-memory, a function of internalized history, extends my memory of collective human experience back in time beyond the moment of my conception.

There is a complementary, if not parallel, kind of quasi-experience after death. After a person dies, their memory continues in the collective experience of those who knew that person. In cultures that emphasize ancestor worship, this mnemonic persistence can last quite a long time. Eventually, and inevitably, it fades from the collective memory. Even if a family has an extensive, documented genealogy, we can be confident there is little, if any, collective memory of individuals who lived thousands of years ago, or who lived before history. Some individuals who are deemed noteworthy by a cultural tradition may be remembered less intimately for much longer than average. We collectively remember Albert Einstein, Thomas Aquinas, Jesus Christ, Socrates, and a collection of Egyptian Pharaohs. As more time elapses since a person’s death, the less detailed is the historical record of them and the dimmer the collective memory.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which an individual’s experience persists beyond death in the collective consciousness of the community in which that individual lived. The dead individual has no personal consciousness or memory, but as long as the community persists, there is yet a persistent psychological trace of that individual’s experience.

To the extent that an individual, while living, defines himself or herself as a member of that community, psychologically constituted of it, then the individual can anticipate being remembered in the collective consciousness after death. That is, in a sense, another form of quasi-memory, an imagined future memory in the minds of the community. That is why some people are so extremely motivated to “leave a mark,” “make a difference,” “leave a legacy,” or otherwise make a noteworthy impression on their community so that their imagined, future, collective memory will persist longer than average.

The quasi-memory after death is actually an imagination of the community’s future rememberance, not a literal individual postmortem memory, but it can be conceived as a hybrid form of postmortem consciousness. In comparison, the quasi-memory of experience before birth feels like an individual form of consciousness, but it is derived from the collective experience of historians, scientists, and the like, and so is also a hybrid of personal and collective consciousness. The two kinds of hybrid quasi-experience have different qualitative feels.

Thus, there is, after all, a difference in consciousness between being dead and not yet having been conceived. While there are hybrid forms of quasi-personal consciousness before birth and after death, they are strangely different, and complementary rather than parallel or equivalent.

Why Solipsism is Impossible

2011-08-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Solipsism is a huge problem for anyone interested in promoting introspection as a way to understand the mind (which includes me). You can only introspect on your own mind, not on anybody else’s. So technically, all you really know for sure is your own mind. The existence of any other minds is purely hypothetical.

The same would go for the existence of the entire world. If you accept introspectively known sense impressions as valid information, you realize that you have no other information. All your sensory data are known to you and only you, by mental impressions. A touch on the arm is known as the mental feeling of a touch on the arm. The arm itself knows nothing. All you can know for sure is the mental impressions you have of the world. You can’t know if anything else is really “out there.”

In the most extreme form, a solipsist asserts, “I am the only self that exists. All the rest of the world is, at best, a hypothesis, or possibly just a figment of my imagination.”

There is no way to refute solipsism. Any counter-argument against it would just be another figment of my imagination. If it is false, I could never know it, because my own mind is the only thing known to me. Solipsism is an extreme form of idealism, which says that only mental events can be known to exist (or, only mental events do exist).

Once you take introspective findings as valid knowledge, you are confronted with the question, How is introspective knowledge different from other, empirical knowledge, such as scientific knowledge? The difference is that introspective knowledge of one’s own mind is certain, whereas scientific knowledge is hypothetical, merely a set of agreed-upon propositions. Scientific knowledge cannot be certain because it is not acquired through introspection, which gives the only direct, certain knowledge. (Image: feelwelcome.com.uk)

Consequently, in scientific psychology, introspection is not allowed. No introspective observations can be accepted into discussion of how the mind works because introspection is private, and if you accept private data as valid, it takes precedence over hypothetical, consensus-based scientific data, and no further scientific agreement or progress can be expected or achieved. In other words, introspection implicitly carries the threat of idealism, and then solipsism, which is ultimately nihilistic. If my own mind is the only mind that can be known directly for sure, how is a scientific psychology possible? It isn’t. The threat of solipsism therefore is serious. It would destroy everything else. That’s why it is simply outlawed, and so is introspection. And that’s why there is no generally accepted methodology like “scientific introspection.” (Despite that, I have published a book by that title, explaining how it would be possible).

The threat of solipsism is false; not a real threat at all. It is based on a misunderstanding of the human mind, which does not, and cannot exist in isolation from other human minds. One's own self and mind are learned (acquired) from socialization and cannot ever be separated from that context. The image of Rodin’s solitary thinker is profoundly misleading. We are not monads, and never have been.

The philosophical problem of solipsism is posed by abstracting one’s own mind from that of others, but this abstraction presupposes that the world is already given as a shared world. Hence solipsism presupposes its own refutation. It is a confusion, not a valid proposition.

True solipsism would require that I do not experience myself as a single self in distinction from other selves, but that I experience myself as the only self that exists. But that is impossible, for self is only defined by other. So again, solipsism is impossible in principle.

What about a person, say, an infant, who has virtually no self-awareness. Could that person be a solipsist? Such a person does not have the resources to contemplate the possibility of solipsism. So the thesis of solipsism is impossible in principle in this case also.

Suppose a philosopher, using reason and analysis, abstracts the personal self away from its social origins and maintenance, and considers it as an absolute, transcendental ego, disconnected from all others. From that position of the abstracted transcendental ego, could solipsism be taken seriously?

Husserl, inventor of the transcendental ego, might seem to have believed that. But he also wrote that only his reflections on intersubjectivity make “full and proper sense” of the transcendental ego (Husserl cited by Zahavi, 1996). This is why Husserl claims that a phenomenological discussion of subjectivity in the end turns out to be a discussion not simply of the I, but of the we. Thus once again, even from the position of the transcendental ego, solipsism is not possible in principle.

What is possible: An object can be experienced in different mental attitudes. Hegel noted that a book can be experienced by the senses not as a book, but as merely an existent object with properties, not as a social, historical object with meaning. So it is possible to “pretend” or imagine that one’s own self is merely an existent object, divorced of its social meaning. But that is imagination. We can imagine flying pigs, too, but that doesn’t prove a thing. We can imagine an isolated, mondadic self, but to take that fantasy seriously is the delusion that constitutes solipsism. So that solves a problem you didn't even know you had. Don't thank me.

Reference
Zahavi, D. (1996). Husserl's Intersubjective Transformation of Transcendental Philosophy. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 27 (3), 228-245.

What do you know when you know you are going to sneeze?

2011-06-23T13:18:00.000-07:00

What causes a sneeze? Is it a tickle in your nose? The sneeze is a surprise, a reflex, not a response to a stimulus comparable to the one that leads you to brush a mosquito from your arm. When you’re going to sneeze, you open your mouth and get ready. Sometimes nothing happens and the sneeze “goes away.”

We should assume that a sneeze is a response to some biological event. You can’t sneeze at will. It is a reflex response to something going on in the body. Most probably a sneeze is a response to an irritation of the mucus membranes somewhere in the nasal passages.

But I have no awareness of my mucous membranes, in the nose or anywhere else. I can’t visualize them; they don’t give me any information; and I am unable to introspect on their state of being. This is true for most of the inside of the body. We have no direct mental access to its various states of being. You can feel a pain in your knee, but you cannot introspect on the various parts of the knee itself. You know when your bladder is full, but you have no direct mental communication with your bladder.

Yet there is warning for a sneeze. Rarely, if ever, is a sneeze completely a surprise. We are aware that a sneeze “is coming.” What is the nature of that awareness?

My hypothesis is that we are aware of a particular kind of brain activity that is distinctive enough to be discriminated from others, and associated with the actual sneeze. How that could be so is a mystery. The brain does not give off any sensory data, like the heart does. I can hear and feel my heart beating so to that extent I am aware of its location and activity in my body. But I have no direct awareness of my brain. I only know it’s in my head because I have been told. I can’t feel it in there. It doesn’t make any noise and doesn’t jump around.

But somehow, we can discriminate brain states from each other. We know the difference between having a full bladder and a pain in the knee and being about to sneeze. But since we do not have direct awareness of the brain, we have no easy way of describing these brain states, so we talk about them in terms of associated effects. For example, the sneeze itself is sensory and observable, so we say of the pre-sneeze condition, “I am going to sneeze.” All the talk is about the sneeze. But actually, what we’re referring to is not the sneeze-to-be, but the pre-sneeze condition of the brain, which we have learned to discriminate but not name.

Other examples of awareness of, and discrimination of, specific brain states include being aware of blood sugar level, pre-orgasm, pain, a feeling of nervousness or restlessness, being overcaffeinated, and being drunk. We talk about these brain states in terms of their observable bodily effects, but actually, we can discriminate the phenomena as specific brain conditions before there are overt bodily effects.

I think the most dramatic example of being aware of a brain condition, without being able to name it directly, is dreaming. We make up all sorts of fantastical stories upon awakening, because we have no vocabulary for naming or discussing the brain activity that we just experienced.

It is inconceivable that someone properly socialized would not be aware of their heart. We have anatomy books, the history of medicine, the doctor’s stethoscope, Poe’s story of the “Tell-tale heart,” and so on. But we do not have comparable socialization in our culture to name and discuss brain activities. We don’t even have any reliable visual imagery to attach to different brain states. That’s too bad. If we did have appropriate vocabulary, we could contribute a lot to understanding of the brain simply by discriminating and naming its various states when they occur.

We don’t understand the interface between the biological neurology and the mental experience, but the answer is, when you are about to sneeze, you are aware of a particular brain state.

Why is Logic Logical?

2011-05-11T16:10:00.000-07:00

For years I have puzzled over the validity of logic. Why does one idea compel another? What is the nature of that compulsion? For example, why is the “law” of the excluded middle true: A thing cannot be, and not be, simultaneously. A equals A, and A does not equal not-A. There is nothing “in the middle” between A and not-A. That’s what Aristotle said, and it’s been true ever since. But is it only true by convention, or does logic follow some natural laws, either laws of the world or laws of the mind?

In day-to-day experience, the middle is not excluded. There is the luxury car and there is the economy car, and plenty of choices in between. There is one dollar, and no dollars, and fifty cents in between. There are guilty and innocent, and shades in between. So why is it true that there is nothing in between A and not-A?

At first consideration it seems that the difference is that the law of the excluded middle is about existence. It says a thing cannot BE and not-BE simultaneously. That’s about what IS. By contrast, everyday examples are all about degrees of qualities that all exist. The economy car exists, and so does the luxury car, and all the ones in between. The qualities of price and value vary along some (abstract) dimension, but all of it exists.

But we cannot say that THIS particular car (not in the abstract, but this one right here) exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. Why not? Because that would be illogical. But why? That is the question.

Is it a matter of abstraction? In algebra, which is very abstract, we all agree that A cannot be equal to not-A. that is uncontroversial. But we refuse to say the same about a particular stone.

The difference seems to boil down to what exists and doesn’t exist. But how is that determined? How do we know what exists and doesn’t exist? Do flying elephants exist? Well, yes and no. It depends on what you mean by “exist.” They exist in animated movies and in the minds of millions of children, but not on game reserves in Africa.

So do we restrict the scope of the question to things that exist physically, not mentally? That would seem an arbitrary restriction. Anyway, it would make algebra and logic, and science, higher mathematics, and law, and much else, not susceptible to the law of the excluded middle, and by extension, not susceptible to logic and reason. The purpose of logic is to bring the order of reason to abstraction. So it can’t be right to exclude mental abstraction from logic.

Besides, even in the so-called physical world, there are counterexamples to the law of the excluded middle. Light exists as light waves and as photons, simultaneously. That seems to violate the rule, doesn’t it? Hawking radiation around a black hole exists and doesn’t exist at the same time. There aren’t too many examples like that however, and in general, we tend to quarantine the principles of relativity theory when we consider logic in general.

I think the answer lies not in abstraction itself, but in the human capacity for discrimination. When we are ignorant of a thing or a topic, we cannot perceive distinctions. Someone who does not know wine literally cannot distinguish between cabernet and merlot. A person who does not know philosophy cannot tell the difference between Kantian and Cartesian ideas. Someone who does not know airplanes cannot tell if they are about to board a Boeing or an Airbus. I remember once looking over a locksmith’s shoulder as he fixed a lock on my door. “Look at that!” he exclaimed in disgust when he took off the outer cowling to expose the insides of the lock. “The quality these days is just disgusting.” I saw nothing but a jumble of metal parts. I wasn’t disgusted because I didn’t know what I was supposed to be seeing. I failed to discriminate what he did.

After training or other experience however, it becomes possible to discriminate parts from wholes and parts from other parts. Then a person can discuss the merits of cabernet and merlot, or well-made from poorly-made lock mechanisms. It works the same in the world of abstract ideas. It takes instruction or experience to discriminate democracy from authoritarianism and A from not-A.

Simple sensory discriminations enable abstraction. A door lock is a door lock, but a well-made lock is an abstraction, it is a kind of lock, or a category of locks. Once the discrimination has been made and conceptualized, multiple instances of a like kind can be grouped into an abstract category.

Thus “dog” is a category of animals, but that abstraction was developed only after I became able to discriminate dogs from cats, and from other kinds of animals. In turn, that discrimination was explicitly taught by parents and teachers, who dwell obsessively on helping children discriminate categories of animals. Why that is considered important is a separate mystery. Finally, there must have been some sensory discrimination at the bottom, by which I learned to identify my dog, a particular, concrete, sensory dog, as a “dog” and discriminated it from myself. So the sequence of abstraction goes from a particular, sensory being that exists right now in my presence, to a category of all such animals, which are then further discriminated and contrasted with other animals, and so on up the chain of abstraction.

The sequence of discrimination, conceptualization, and categorization is so automatic that I suspect it is a faculty of the human mind. Teachers teach us how to discriminate and identify, and categorize dogs, cats, forms of government, and much else, but nobody teaches us how to discriminate in the first place. We just do it.

Other animals discriminate in a similar way. In classical conditioning, a type of learning, the dog learns to salivate when the bell rings. Why? We say the dog has “associated” the bell with forthcoming food. However the dog first had to discriminate the bell from the general background noise, and also the occurrence of food from other events, and also the fact that the bell sounds just before food appears. Those are all sensory discriminations that the dog learns fairly easily, without the benefit of language. As far as we know the dog does not conceptualize any of it, but does manage somehow to generalize a more-or-less abstract category about what we would call the conditioned stimulus, because if a buzzer is sounded instead of a bell, the dog salivates in the same way he would to the bell. He obviously has an abstract category of sorts.

I’m not aware of any animal species with a nervous system that is not susceptible to classical conditioning, so I would have to conclude that discrimination and abstraction are built into the architecture of animal neurology.

Does that answer the question of what compels one idea to follow another and why logic is logical? Partially, it does. But the rules of logic are themselves so abstract that it is difficult to believe they are neurological manifestations. Suppose a proposal says that if p exists, then q will always occur. But if we look and find that q did not occur, what is the only logical conclusion? It has to be that p does not exist. This rule is the absolute foundation of reasoning in science and statistics. What makes it valid?

According to the analysis given here, that rule of logic, called modus tollens, is valid because it is an abstraction of sensory, bodily experience that many humans have discriminated and agreed is universal. We have all observed that if the bulb inside the refrigerator is working, then when you open the door, there will be light. If you do not see light, the conclusion is that the bulb is not working. Enough people have had experience like this, so that as a community, we have agreed the relationships involved are worthy of becoming a “law,” the law of modus tollens. It’s logical because we all say it is, not because of neurology.

The implication of this finding is that reason compels one idea to follow from another because of generalization of discriminations that many people have similarly made and conceptualized and categorized. The validity of logic is a social construct, not a natural phenomenon.

So what are we to make of the situation where people do not agree? Different groups insist that their god and only their god exists. Is there any concrete sensory discrimination at the bottom of those abstractions? I would say, no, and virtually all scientists would agree with me. Are there neurological differences supporting the abstractions? No. The human nervous system and brain is 99.999% similar across individuals.

But are there discriminations among abstract ideas beneath the disagreements? Of course there are. Different groups have different ideas about history, justice, virtue, beauty, and many other abstract categories, and they assiduously teach these discriminations to their children. Higher abstractions are based on discriminations made among lower abstractions and it is around these higher abstractions that wars are fought. Fundamentally though, the mid-level abstractions upon which they are based do not rest upon sensory discriminations. The validity of logic in the abstract realms is socially constructed.

At the bottom we are all the same kind of animal and make the same kinds of sensory discriminations and the same kinds of basic abstractions. It is only our teachers that guide us to abstractions among the abstractions, and therefore to differences we will kill for. Anybody can discriminate a brown skin from a white skin, narrow eyes from round eyes, male from female, but what those differences mean must be taught to us. There is no universal sensory or neurological basis, and therefore no intrinsic rationality that justifies what our teachers make of those differences. Whether my god or your god is the true god, is essentially culturally constructed, and we would say, “not logical.”

Ideas compel other ideas then, not because there is some intrinsic validity to the rules of logic that make it so, but only for two reasons.

One, because concrete, sensory discriminations that anyone, even a dog, can make, seem universal, as in classical conditioning. Red is different from blue, and we all agree on that, regardless of culture. Therefore it is “logical” to insist that Red cannot be Blue and vice versa.

And Two, logic is logical because the teachers in a cultural tradition decide, based on contingent values (that is, arbitrarily), that some abstract ideas “should” compel other abstract ideas. That compulsion is valid inasmuch as everybody lives in a culture and nobody can live outside of culture, so nobody is immune from cultural values. So if “The Bible is the word of God,” it follows that the Biblical God is the “correct” God. That is cultural logic.

These two kinds of logic are both valid, but for different reasons.

New Evidence for ESP?

2011-01-08T14:22:00.001-08:00

The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a respected academic journal published by the American Psychological Association, will soon release an article by Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem, that supposedly demonstrates the existence of “extrasensory perception,” or ESP. A preprint of the paper is available at http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf.

ESP is a term used in popular culture for unexplained psychic effects. It is used exclusively, for example in the New York Times article of Jan 5, 2011 reporting on Bem’s paper (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/06/science/06esp.html?src=me&ref=general). Academics refer to such effects either as “paranormal,” “parapsychological,” or “psi” phenomena. These psi phenomena allegedly include a potpourri of unexplained effects, such as mental telepathy, remote viewing, clairvoyance, telekinesis, precognition, and communication with the dead, to name just a few varieties. Bem’s paper focuses on precognition, which is unexplained knowledge of the future, and premonition, which is the same thing only felt emotionally instead of known intellectually.

The paper reports nine experiments, only 4 in any detail, that were conducted over a decade, with a thousand people tested. In a typical experiment, participants make a prediction about where a picture, (called the “stimulus”) will appear on a computer screen. If the prediction is correct, then either it was a lucky guess or, the person had a premonition of where the stimulus was going to be. In a typical experiment, participants had to guess whether the picture would appear on the left or right side of a computer screen. Random guessing would produce a 50% correct rate, but the guesses were correct 53% of the time, a percentage greater than chance. That doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but since the test was run many times on each person, the finding is statistically rare enough that it is probably meaningful. Therefore, according to Bem, a slight, but scientifically proven result of precognition, or premonition of the future, was demonstrated.

Bem notes in his paper that “Psi is a controversial subject, and most academic psychologists do not believe that psi phenomena are likely to exist.” That is correct, and I am one of those psychologists. I do not believe any psi phenomena have ever been demonstrated scientifically, nor indeed that they exist at all. How do I explain then, scientific findings such as Bem’s (and there have been many such supposed demonstrations of psi phenomena over the years)? There are four obstacles to acceptance that any such scientific demonstration must overcome:

Methodology. . The experiment must be designed and conducted in such a way that the best, most reasonable conclusion is that psi phenomena have been demonstrated, rather than some other explanation, such as pure chance, lurking (uncontrolled) variables, equipment or procedural error, biased sampling, unintended clues being given to participants, inadequate experimental controls, or other kinds of unintended bias or error (deliberate fraud is not considered, as that is rare and easy to detect).

2. Statistical. The experimental data must be conceptualized, analyzed and reported in a simple, correct, and non-controversial way, so that the best, most reasonable conclusion is that psi phenomena have been demonstrated. Even if the experimental procedure was sound, the statistical handling of the data can introduce biases that lead to invalid conclusions, such as when the data are manipulated inappropriately (e.g., leaving out some data from the analysis), or conceptualized strangely (such as counting certain results in one way, other results in another), or analyzed with controversial or questionable statistical techniques, or interpreting the outcome in obscure or inappropriate ways.

3. Theoretical. The findings must be coherent with an existing body of scientific data, or if they are not, some revision in understanding of the existing data must be specified which accommodates the new, anomalous finding. There are two reasons for this requirement.

One is that according to the scientific method (a consensus model of scientific reasoning), the hypothesis that an experiment tests is drawn from the existing body of scientific data. A scientist does not just wake up one morning with a hypothesis that says, “I suspect that giraffes would float in water as well as raspberry marshmallows.” That is not how science is done. Instead, the scientist finds areas in the existing body of scientific knowledge where there are questions, errors, gaps, unexplained connections, or incomplete understanding. A hypothesis is then generated that could extend the existing knowledge or make it more understandable or more internally consistent.

The second reason for requiring that scientific findings must mesh with existing knowledge is that science is a cumulative exercise in knowledge production. Even if some arbitrary and idiosyncratic hypothesis were experimentally tested and confirmed, the result would be uninterpretable because it would not connect to existing knowledge, would not further general understanding, and would not even contradict what is already known. There would be no context for making sense of the experimental result, making it essentially meaningless, no matter what it purports to demonstrate.

Historically, strange things have sometimes been found in nature that could not be explained until much later, such as lightning or x-rays. But technically, those discoveries were anomalous observations, not scientific findings, until some explanation was hypothesized that could be tested under a scientific hypothesis.

4. Philosophical. A scientific finding that meets all of the foregoing requirements still must be interpreted in a scientific way. For example, a finding that concludes, “All human beings are therefore merely ideas in the mind of God,” cannot be accepted without a great deal of further explanation. The interpretation of the finding must conform to principles of scientific reasoning and evidence. This examples fails on both counts, because there is no scientific evidence of God, and to characterize humans as ideas rather than as biological objects is not consistent with scientific reasoning.

Alternatively, the interpretation of the finding can go too far in the other direction, being so scientifically overspecified that the result admits of no generalization, an error of “external validity.” An example would be an experiment that claims to study “violence in children” but defines violence as a high frequency of button presses on laboratory equipment. Since that does not describe what we normally understand as violent behavior, even if the study meets all other criteria, we are unable to say anything about the result beyond the specific experimental procedure.

Another common error is that an study defines its variables in terms of laboratory procedures, but interprets its results in different terms, an error of “internal validity.” In the example above, if college students were used as participants, it is not valid to conclude anything about violence in children.

Bem’s studies that purport to demonstrate psi phenomena fail to overcome any of the obstacles described, and therefore I remain unconvinced of the existence of so-called psi-phenomena.

To prove this definitively, I would have to study the experimental protocol, data, and statistics to make detailed criticisms, and that would require either that I have access to Bem’s laboratory notebooks, which is not going to happen, or I would have to repeat his experiments, step by step, in order to understand what he did and what kind of data he obtained. That is also not going to happen. So, like any other ordinary consumer of scientific information, I must base my acceptance of, or criticism of the experiments based only on the scant information provided. Here are some criticisms then, within that constraint.

Summary of Bem’s Experiment 1

1. Methodological factors. In Experiment 1, a featured experiment supposedly demonstrating precognition, participants had to guess which of several pictures would be randomly shown. I’ll start by summarizing the experimental procedure.

One hundred Cornell undergraduates were self-selected (volunteer) participants, half men, half women and were paid for their participation. They all knew it was an experiment in ESP.

A picture of starry skies was shown on the screen for three minutes, while new-age music played. Then that picture was replaced (and presumably the music terminated, although that is not stated), with two pictures of curtains, presumably side-by-side (although that is not stated). When a participant clicked on one of the pictures of a curtain, it was replaced with another picture, either a picture of a wall, or a picture of something other than a wall.

The content of the “other than a wall” pictures is not described, except to say that 12 of the 36 non-wall pictures showed humans (presumably – this is not specified) engaging in “sexually explicit acts” (not further described), while another 12 of the non-wall pictures were “negative” in emotionality (not further described), and the final 12 non-wall pictures were “neutral” (but not described).

All these pictures had previously been (although when, is not stated) rated by other people not in this experiment as being reliably “arousing” for males and females (although “arousability is not defined), or as being reliably “emotional.” There is no information about whether any arousing pictures were also emotional, and it is hard to imagine that they were not. There is no definition of what constituted a “neutral” photograph, and there is no description of the arousability or emotionality of the wall picture or of the curtain pictures.

Part way through the experiment, some or all (not specified) of the “arousing” pictures were replaced by more intense (not otherwise described) internet pornography pictures, which were not reported to be scientifically rated for arousability and emotionality, so in the end, the nature of these pictorial stimuli is essentially unknown. (We assume that among the 36 non-wall photographs, none of them was in fact, of a different sort of wall, although this is not actually stated.).

The non-wall pictures were selected at random from the group of 36, with randomness defined by a software algorithm. Whether the wall or non-wall picture was placed on the left or the right of the screen was also randomized by the computer.

Each participant’s task was to click on one of the two pictures of curtains to indicate which one they thought would be replaced by a non-wall photograph. They were told that some of the pictures were sexually explicit and allowed to quit the experiment if that was objectionable. No information is given on how many participants quit. After the participant’s choice was made, the curtain picture was replaced by another picture, either of a wall or a picture of non-wall content.

Errors of Internal Validity

That summarizes the experimental protocol. According to Bem, this methodology made “the procedure a test of detecting a future event, that is, a test of precognition” (p. 9). However, that is not how the results were recorded. You would think that the scientist would simply record whether or not the participant had correctly predicted which side of the screen the non-wall picture had appear on (since that was the instruction given to the participant, and that was the hypothesis to be tested). Instead some other, strange measure was recorded, namely, the number of correct predictions of which side of the screen the “erotic” (meaning sexually explicit) pictures occurred, even though that was not the hypothesis being tested. This odd recording of the results constitutes an error of internal validity.

The hypothesis that college students will be better at predicting the location of a sexually explicit picture is unconnected to the introductory literature review, which referred only to a previous body of findings that asked for straightforward predictions of visual content, with no special reference to sexually explicit material. This new (implicit) hypothesis is then, essentially like the “giraffe and marshmallow” hypothesis, arising “out of the blue” rather than being logically derived from existing knowledge. This is another methodological error. If there is, in fact, a previous body of knowledge about predicting the locations of sexually explicit photographs, then the error is one of scientific reporting, since the literature review was obviously grossly incomplete.

One other, rather minor error, is the experimenter’s referring to the participants’ prediction of the location of a non-wall photograph as a “response” to that photograph. But this is a semantic distortion, since the participant’s choice is made before the photograph is shown. Ordinary, common-sense language would call that choice a “prediction” not a “response.” For the experimenter to call it a “response,” presupposes the validity of his belief that the participants are seeing into the future, but until that is proven by the experimental results, it is scientifically inappropriate to use the language in a non-standard way without justification.

Statistical Errors
Next, Bem reports that participants correctly predicted the position of the sexually
pictures significantly more frequently than the 50% rate expected by chance, and in fact were correct 53.1% of the time. But this is an incorrect analysis. To be counted as correct, a prediction would have to correctly say on which side of the screen a non-wall photograph would appear (one chance out of two, or 50% chance rated) AND, if that guess were correct, they would also have to predict that it was a sexually explicit photograph (12 chances out of 36, or 33%) for an overall probability of 0.50 x 0.33 = 0.165, which means that one would expect a person to guess correctly fewer than 17 times out of a hundred.

Did that happen? No information is reported on how many times the participants DID actually predict the location of sexually explicit photographs. It was not 53.1%. That is the number you get when you ignore, or leave out of the calculation, all the wrong predictions of the non-wall photograph. But that is an illegitimate way to count the results, unless there is a very good reason, and none is given.

Still, can we at least say that the participants correctly predicted the location of ANY non-wall photograph better than chance (53.1% vs. 50%)? No we can’t, because that information is not reported either. Instead, what is reported, is that participants predicted the location of only the sexually explicit photographs at 53.1%. But that leaves out all the results for the non-sexual predictions, which is not a legitimate way to count the results. So in the end, the results that bear on the experiment’s stated hypothesis are not reported at all.

This kind of anomalous counting of the results constitutes a statistical error and makes the experimental findings uninterpretable.

The same kind of anomalous, illegitimate, and uninterpretable counting of results is given for non-sexually-explicit pictures, emotional pictures, and neutral pictures, and even for pictures that were “romantic but non-erotic pictures,” a category that was never defined in the description of the pictures (let alone in any experimental hypotheses).

The experiment also reports that there were no significant differences in response findings between males and females. That is a legitimate “control variable” to be reporting, although the experimental hypothesis being tested has nothing to do with gender. So that is not an error, as much as an irrelevance.

Then the experiment reports on a history of findings in other experiments that turns up a small correlation between the ability to predict the occurrence of visual materials at a rate greater than chance, and the participant’s score on an extraversion test, with extraverts supposedly being better at making such predictions over introverts. There are two problems with this so-called result.

One, is that it is based on a statistical technique called meta-analysis, in which the main findings of individual experiments are treated as if they were individual response data points observed in individual participants. While this statistical technique is now widely used in the medical literature, it is by no means without controversy when applied to psychological experiments, and I reject it as a valid statistical technique for psychology.

The main reason for my rejection is that the technique generally does not take into account the quality of the underlying experiments, or if it does, does so inadequately. For example, if some future meta-analysis includes this experiment, that will introduce significant undocumented error into the meta-analysis because this experiment does not actually report any valid results, despite its claim to the contrary.

The second problem with this so-called reported result between predictive success and personality is that it is irrelevant to any scientific hypothesis, implicit or explicit, that was supposed to be tested by this experiment.

Errors of Interpretation:
The experimental report goes on at great length to determine what “kind” of psi phenomenon had been demonstrated by the test results (which were never properly reported). Was it simple clairvoyance or was it a subtle form of psychokinesis? Or was it actually pure chance (admirably, the report does consider that possibility).

But a simpler explanation is hinted at by the experimental procedure itself. After the participant made his or her prediction of where the non-wall photograph would appear, the curtain picture chosen was replaced with either the wall, or a non-wall photograph. This essentially gave the participant feedback on the correctness or non-correctness of the prediction. But why was that necessary or desirable?

The experimenter knew immediately upon the participant’s click whether the prediction was correct or not. That could be scored right on the spot by the computer. Why was it important to give the participant “feedback?” The experimental hypothesis was about ability to see into the future, precognition. Why is feedback necessary to do that? Was the hypothesis really that ability to predict the future can be taught by a computer and learned with practice? There is no theoretical or practical reason to believe so, and the experimental report does not suggest it.

The only reason I can think of to give the participants feedback on the correctness of their predictions is so that they might be able to learn from their mistakes and improve their performance. That is a standard learning procedure going back over a hundred and fifty years in experimental psychology and thousands of years in human experience. The experiment thus introduced a spurious learning paradigm into a procedure that was supposed to test only ability to predict the future. That is a serious error of internal validity that renders the experiment uninterpretable (if it was not already).

What would the participants be learning, with this embedded learning procedure? I am unable to say without more detail about the experiment. Could they be learning (even if only implicitly) to detect a non-random pattern in the order of presentation of the materials? A non-random pattern could have emerged. Either the random number generator could have been imperfect (since there is, theoretically, no such thing as a perfect random number generator), or, within the pseudo-random sequence of events, an identifiable non-random pattern could have emerged, just as when one flips a fair coin “heads” 7 or 8 times in a row, just by chance. These things happen. It wouldn’t take much non-randomness to produce a mere 3% deviation from chance expectations.

Or, more likely in my opinion, the participants could have been learning something else, some other clue that was unintentionally left in the procedure by the experimenters. I cannot say what that might be. For example, it would be interesting to know if an experimenter was in the room while the participant performed. There is no reason why one should have been, but if one was, there are all kinds of opportunities for subtle, unintended clues (or “experimenter effects”) to be transmitted to the participants.

Bem reports that he re-ran the experiment but using randomized, simulated computer inputs for the “predictions,” with no human participants involved. Under those conditions, no psi effects were detected. I am not surprised, but that result furthers my skepticism about the human-based findings: that if there really were any legitimate ones (which I doubt), they were due entirely to unintended experimenter effects or performance biases.

The only way to satisfy my skepticism on this point would be to re-run the experiment, with humans, but omitting the spurious learning component from the procedure, and isolating the participant completely from any contact with the experimenter or any other participant. I would be extremely surprised if any so-called “psi effect” were reported under those conditions.

Theoretical and Philosophical Errors:
Aside from the methodological and statistical problems with this study, there are additional theoretical and philosophical problems. First, I must emphasize again that no psi phenomena were demonstrated by any of these experiments, as reported. But even if there were such a thing as psi phenomena, for example, ability to predict the future at a rate better than chance, what sense would it make?

There is no known mechanism, either biological, physical, or psychological, by which that would be possible. Human beings are simply not able to predict the future very well. Would that it were otherwise! Bem does some hand-waving around quantum indeterminacy and the earth’s magnetic field to suggest possible explanations of psi phenomena (if they existed), but that verbiage constitutes, most generously, only loose metaphor, nothing close to an explanation.

Could the explanation of psi effects, if there were any, just turn out to be something bizarre, something we have never thought of yet, not related to anything familiar, not like anything ever reported in the accepted scientific literature? Well, yes, that is possible in principle. I’m sure Socrates himself would not have been able to understand a butane lighter or a sheet of plastic food wrap, let alone some of our more complex technological marvels. So it is not a denial of the possibility of psi phenomena to assert that there is presently no conceivable explanation of them, as they have been described. But it is utterly idle to speculate on explanations until the phenomenon to be explained has been demonstrated, and I am not convinced it ever has been.

Conclusion:
In his forthcoming paper, Bem describes three additional experiments, similar to the first one, in some detail, and refers to five others, not fully described. However, as is always the case when I take the trouble to read such experimental reports, after analysis of the first one (an analysis that was by no means exhaustive), I simply have no energy to go on to the rest of them. The quality of the first one is so poor that there is little promise that the others will be much better. So I give up at this point and return to my default belief, that has not been challenged by Bem or anybody else, that no psi phenomenon has ever been scientifically demonstrated. Show me a proper demonstration and I’ll change my mind.

What is the purpose of the cerebral cortex?

2010-05-02T17:28:00.001-07:00

The main part of the human brain is the cerebrum, the big piece of folded, wrinkly meat that covers the older, more primitive “snake brain” or limbic system and brainstem. Different areas of the cerebrum support different cognitive and bodily functions. In nearly all mammals, the brain has an extremely thin (no more than two-tenths of an inch thick) wrapper around it made up of neurons, and that is the cerebral cortex (“cortex” comes from the Latin for “cap.”). The cortex, thin though it is, actually is made of even thinner layers of cells, up to six distinct layers of so-called gray matter. While there are connections in and out of the cortex to the cerebrum underneath, more than 99% of cortical activity takes place strictly within the cortex alone.

Most animals do not have a cerebral cortex. Only mammals do, and among mammals, the human version is the largest and most complex. If billions of animals get along just fine without a cerebral cortex, it raises the question, what is it for? That is a mystery.

We know that sensory signals coming from the receptors eventually end up in the cortex. Visual data, for example, ends up at the back of the head in the so-called visual cortex. What it does there, we do not know. And we know that parts of the cortex send signals out to the muscles, presumably as part of coordinated actions. But what about the 99% of a cortex’s activity that goes on within the cortex itself? What is that about?

We don’t know what the function of the cortex is, but scientists believe, based on observations of people with brain damage, and on animal studies, that somehow, activity in the cerebral cortex produces meaningful experience of the world, and also, somehow, abstract thinking, planning and language. How that could be possible is a mystery, but that seems to be what is going on.

What’s the great mystery? The mystery is that we don’t know how a physical organ like the cortex could produce mental functions like thinking, planning, and language understanding. According to the principles of science, it is not actually possible. No physical activity can produce any nonphysical effect (energy is “physical”) like a thought. Why not? Because if it did, that would violate the law of conservation of matter and energy (and many other laws of nature besides), and if that can happen, well, then we don’t know anything about anything.

E=MC2 is only true because of the law of conservation of matter and energy, for example. Violate that law and you have nothing.

And it’s not just a matter of preserving the integrity of science’s precious little formulas. We can’t even conceive of how a physical thing like a group of neuron, which are just protein, fat, and a few chemicals, could cause or create something as intangible as an abstract thought or even the experience of color. How would that work ? It would have to be magic. We can’t think of any example of any machine, no matter how complex or fantastic, that could do such a thing.

Some scientists have become so frustrated with this problem that they have just declared that thoughts, experiences, and other intangible mental phenomena do not exist, except as illusions. But that is just crazy talk. Even an “illusion” is a mental phenomenon.

Despite this impenetrable mystery, we still want to ask, what is the cortex for and why do we have one, because its occurrence is quite rare in evolution.

1. Does the cortex produce or create the conscious mind in some way? That is scientifically impossible and even unintelligible, for reasons just described. Parts of the cortex are proven to be correlated with aspects of the conscious mind, but we cannot explain that correlation.

2. Does the cortex create and store a map of the whole body, including its history and modifications? Some scientists think so (e.g., Antonio Damasio). That would require an awful lot of capacity, since the body has a lot of parts and a very long history. Still, it might be possible. But what good would it do to have such a map? Who would look at it? There is no little man in the head.

3. Could the cortex have/be historical record of bodily connections as suggested above, not used as a map, but rather, as some kind of a switchboard, so that signals incoming to the brain get routed to the correct output action signals? That seems highly implausible to me, since there are an infinite number of possible combinations and sequences of sensory information that one encounters every day and just as large a number of movements that could be made in response. The brain is very large and complex, but it is not infinite in capacity, and the cortex is, after all, only 4 millimeters thick. Also, such a “switchboard” or “blackboard” hypothesis does not allow any scope for creative action, if every input is wired to an output or even to a selection of outputs. Some scientists deny that there is any such thing as creativity, but I am quite sure they are wrong.

4. Here is my hypothesis about what the cortex is for. I think it supports intersubjective social life. Intersubjectivity is a kind of empathy that allows humans to understand each other, and that’s what is necessary to have complex civilization like ours. Without empathy, there could be no poetry, no arts of any kind, no jurisprudence, no government, no sports, no teaching and learning, not even symbolic language.

Since we are the only species that indulges such things with such intensity, it makes sense that we have the most developed cerebral cortex. Chimps have societies and maybe elephants grieve over their dead. Most mammals have a cerebral cortex and so most are intersubjective to some degree. But no other mammals use symbolic language or have courts of law or try to entertain each other. We are the only ones with a hyper-developed cortex.

How would it work? It has been proven that the brain does physically change in response to learning and adaptation. So it is plausible to imagine that the cortex is a matrix for social learning. It stores all the intermediate states on the long social journey each one of us takes from infancy to adulthood and on to the grave.

The cortex does not store individual experiences as you would store marbles in a bag, but it would store developing subsystems. You need some kind of storage to accumulate and integrate experience over time, experience like complex social understanding; like intersubjective social learning. It is the skills of social mind-reading that are accumulated and integrated and refined in the cerebral cortex.

Those cortical representations of complex social understandings are not retrieved, as from a file (because there is nobody to read such a file anyway). Rather the representations are the basis for creatively responding to new social situations. They form the basis for creative projection beyond what is known, to what might be, and at the same time, they constrain creativity to what is feasible and acceptable within the social community. So each time a new situation comes up (and every situation is new in some way), you do not need to start from square one. You start your response from what you already have in the vast network of your cerebral cortex and creatively project something from that.

Where does that creative urge or impetus come from? I don’t know. That’s the magic part.

What NOT to buy at Staples

2009-12-11T10:38:00.000-08:00

Staples is my favorite office supply store. They have everything, at good prices. However, there are some desk essentials you should not buy there: paper clips and staples. Why? Because they slap their brand label on everything.

Every time I am low on refill staples, I check the shelf under the printer, and what do I see? Sure enough, there is a large box labeled “Staples.” So I figure, no problem, I am well supplied. But actually, it is paper clips, and I am out of staples.

Once in a while I remember this little conundrum and so I explicitly put “staples” on my shopping list. However, once at the store, I inevitably buy paper clips, because they are easier to find and they say “Staples” on the box.

I am chronically “long” on paper clips because I am always buying them when I am out of staples. Also, when I run low on paper clips at my desk, I look on the shelf, and see only boxes labeled “staples.” So naturally, next time I am out, I buy paper clips.

So forget Staples for your paper clips, too. If you need paper clips, call me, I have plenty.

Finally, I should just mention these related perplexities: 1. Why do you always run out of staples right when you need one? The stapler goes empty at the exact moment when you are squeezing finality to that critical report. Click! Out of staples. That is infuriating. The stapler never goes empty in the middle of the night when no one would be bothered. No. Only when it matters most.

And 2: Where do paper clips go? Why do we have to buy them at all? I always save and re-use them, unless they are badly distorted. Most people do the same. So why is there inevitably a net shortage of paper clips? Is there some undocumented law of paper clip entropy?

New Look at Dream Interpretation

2009-11-01T11:12:00.000-08:00

I had a waking up dream that involved an assemblage of musical notations: black quarter notes, in three dimensions. They were intertwined as the twigs in a bird’s nest to make structures 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 falling asleep dream, while listening to quiet jazz on the radio. I did not hear music, but in the dream I 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, the things you dreamed about are bizarre, and you realize your thought processes were bizarre because you accepted 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 might think, “How odd, horses normally cannot fly,” but you accept that this dream horse can. So your consciousness, though more lucid, is still delusional.

If you recalled a dream that was completely reasonable, you would not 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 is the grounding for other variations in mental state. But if you return to dreaming, you must give up your wakeful reality testing. You can’t voluntarily suspend all reality-testing and remain awake. Dreams and wakefulness are thus as incompatible as oil and water.

3. Dreams are identified in retrospect, from the point of view of awake consciousness, and from which all conversation and communication flow. In a dream, the dream is the reality. There is no other point of view from which to critique that reality.

I am not worried that I might actually be a butterfly dreaming I am a person because wakeful consciousness is known to itself. Dream consciousness is not. (In lucid dreaming, only the lucid consciousness is known to itself.)

Within a 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 and lucid, can you say, “Man, that was crazy!”

I had a dream of a straight-backed chair made out of giant, three-dimensional quarter notes. Within the dream, that was real, by definition. But in what way was it real?

4. What if dream images 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 images 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. 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 a brain neuron to cause a mental experience. If that were to happen, it would violate the law of conservation of energy because memory is non-physical. 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 for 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 then have no use for the term “memory” since it would not refer to anything. So if we are going to use the term “memory”, it refers to the nonphysical mental phenomenon. How a brain circuit is related to a memory, exactly, is an unsolved mystery.

5. What are we aware of when we have a toothache? We experience a mental state 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. The dream could have been my mental “reading” of residual brain activity.

6. 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.

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 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.

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 people will 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, as in, “How ‘bout them Yankees?”

In the future people will refer to numbered and idealized fMRI sequences correlated to common experience. They will talk about a fMRI 42a followed by a 197-3 then ask, “What do you think of that?”

Too bad I’ll miss it.

Crazy-ass Bombers

2009-10-11T09:03:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-06T09:42:00.001-07:00

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

2009-08-09T12:12:00.001-07:00

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

2009-04-24T10:12:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-03-23T10:37:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-02-25T07:39:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-05T17:24:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-07T18:08:00.001-08:00

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?

2008-12-15T18:26:00.001-08:00

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?

2008-11-14T12:19:00.001-08:00

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

2008-10-26T18:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-03T11:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-24T07:53:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-08T13:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-20T15:30:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-07-31T10:14:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-07-16T17:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-26T11:10:00.001-07:00

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!

2008-06-07T09:40:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-05-22T17:04:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-04-22T10:31:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-06T13:42:00.001-08:00

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

2008-02-06T09:01:00.000-08:00

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

2007-12-13T12:54:00.000-08:00

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.

Music and Machine

2007-11-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

In listening to Beethoven’s piano sonatas, it occurred to me why his rhythmic patterns seem so different from those of today’s music. He was not surrounded by machinery as we are. The sonatas span 1795 to 1822. The Watt steam engine wasn’t even patented until 1769 and did not become commonplace until much later. Railroads were limited to coal mines until the early 1800’s, so he would not have much, if any experience of train sounds. In Beethoven's experience, it would have been relatively rare to hear the regular whumpa-whumpa-whumpa of rotating machinery. There were waterwheels and some farming machines, but these were not ubiquitous, and they did not spin at the tempos we associate with music.

I have read that the emergence of rock and roll music out of blues in the 1950’s was stimulated in no small part by the wide availability of the automobile in America. Most rock music emphasizes 4/4 time with a relentless drum that recalls the internal combustion engine.

Beethoven’s tempos are subtle, variable, and deeply internal to the harmony and melody. When his rhythmic structure does become obviously regular, it usually sounds like a march, a waltz, or some other human movement, like a person spinning, or like something falling down a slope. From what does the regular arpeggio of the Moonlight Sonata derive? To me it sounds like the movement of a human body, swaying or tapping. It does not suggest any kind of mechanical action like that of an engine.

Music experts always tell us that musical elements refer only to themselves, not to anything in the world, but I have never found that argument convincing. There are, after all many “pastoral” musical forms, madrigals, and other types designed explicitly to be representational. I don’t say that all music is symbolic, but musical ideas have to come from somewhere, and where else but the composer’s experience could they come?

That’s why I think Beethoven’s sound is so organic, compared to modern music. The musical ideas are intimately from the natural world, deriving from wind and waves, footsteps and horse hooves, dances, songs and screams. Just about all pre-modern music would be that way. You never get a sense of machinery. There is something almost suffocating about Beethoven’s music just because it does immerse you in the sounds of life.

Maybe that’s why classical music is considered “difficult” for most people. Anyone would understand more easily music that reflects the soundscape of their everyday experience and for us, that is a mechanized world. Our machinery keeps us distant from the natural world. We drive in our car out to the country to visit nature. We don’t live in nature anymore and our mechanically inspired music reminds us of that.

Beethoven’s is an ambient auditory world that is lost to us, probably forever. (And of course was lost to him as well, in his later years of increasing deafness).

Funniest or Stupidist Joke Ever

2007-10-30T17:02:00.000-07:00

I was reading a humor book with all kinds of jokes when one hit my funny bone:

A man goes to a costume party with a woman draped over his shoulders and says he’s come as a tortoise. “Who’s that on your back?” asks the host. “That?” he says, “That’s Susan.”

I visualized the situation and the dialog and laughed so hard I had tears in my eyes. The absurdity of it just blew me away. Even now I am chuckling as I read it again.

So I read the joke to my wife. “That’s more stupid than funny,” she said without smiling. What? How could she not appreciate the surreal insanity of the joke?

I read the joke again and realized I had misunderstood it. The last sentence of the joke actually reads, “That?” he says, “That’s Michelle.”

It always did say Michelle, and that’s what I read the first time, but I did not connect the name to a terrible acoustic pun, “That’s my shell.” In my mind, “Michelle” could have been “Susan” and the joke would have been just as hilarious and that’s how I read it. My wife was right, the joke, as intended, was stupid, not the least bit funny. She had ruined it for me!

But if I ignored the acoustic pun and read the joke again as I had originally, it again became so funny I could not stop laughing for several minutes.

What was going on here? If the last line had been:

“That’s my dog.” Not funny.
“That’s just some woman.” Not funny.
“I don’t know.” Slightly funny.
“That’s my wife.” Slightly funny.
“That’s a corpse.” Not funny.
“That’s a Martian.” Not funny.
“That’s my collar.” Not funny.

What is it about “That’s Michelle/Susan” that makes the joke so funny the way I read it?

I was set up for a tortoise joke, and in the special syntax of jokes, you expect the punch line to involve some distinctive feature of tortoises, such as the fact that they move very slowly, or are hemispherical in shape.

(www.davethompson.org)

That the man had a woman draped over his shoulders is already slightly funny. To say he came as a tortoise is also slightly funny, but the two ideas don’t add up to anything. If the joke had ended there, it would be such a total nonsequitur that I might have thought it was a misprint.

But when the host inquires about the woman on his back, I am led to imagine that there is a mystery to be solved about the costume. The host is thinking, “Okay, tortoise, if you say so, but what part is played by that woman on your back?”

The man answers with a surprised question, “That?”

That’s a nice bit of joke-writing there, because why would he be surprised by the question? If the woman really is part of the tortoise costume, he should be eager to explain the connection, but instead, he acts as if he had forgotten he had a woman on his back. So as the joke reader, I am thinking, well, maybe there is some other explanation here. I have been misdirected.

But the punch line, “That’s Michelle,” implies that she is always there. “Oh her, that’s just Michelle. Don’t pay any attention to her.”

It’s as if the guy is completely accustomed to having Michelle draped over his shoulders. I imagine Michelle being rather slim and drape-able, dressed in a tight, shiny party dress, lying limply over his shoulders with her long hair, arms, and legs dangling toward the floor.

But given the setup about a costume party and him presenting himself as a tortoise, with the forgotten Michelle on his back, the punch line is hilarious because of the juxtaposition of the two speakers’ assumptions.

The host is inquiring about the costume, but the guy answers as if he heard the question as an inquiry about the girl, which he answers matter-of-factly, as if it were a reasonable answer to a simple question.

It is that sudden shift in context that made me laugh. Even after analyzing this to death, I am still chuckling now.

Here’s the same joke in a different form:

A man walks into a bar with a beautiful multicolored bird on his head. “Wow,” the bartender says, “Where did you get that?” “I got him in France,” the bird answers, “They have millions of them there.”

Again the humor arises from the juxtaposition of the two speaker’s differing points of view, each oblivious to the others’. But this version is less funny because the differing contexts of understanding are confounded with the violation of expectation by having a talking bird, and that diminishes the effect of the context shift.

In the original joke, the opposition of the two speakers’ contexts is pure funny. Why, exactly, I still don’t know.

Food and Health

2007-10-07T17:27:00.000-07:00

Food and Health

I’m always fascinated to learn interesting facts about food that has (allegedly) important health consequences, for example, that red wine is good for your heart. I am skeptical of all such claims, because they are incomplete, always changing, and often contradictory. Red wine may be good for the heart, but it can’t be that good for the brain, for example.

Nevertheless I did a quick search through back issues of Science News, a magazine I read, to collect some recent food claims. Here is a selection of what I found:

Broccoli Prevents Cancer
A federal study has found that selenium eaten as a pure compound may not protect as well as selenium consumed as a part of food such as wheat or broccoli.
April 21, 2001; Vol. 159, No. 16 , p. 248

Broccoli Prevents Skin Cancer
When sulforaphane, a compound found in broccoli, is applied to the skin of cancer-prone mice after sun exposure, they develop fewer skin tumors then they otherwise would.
Nov. 19, 2005; Vol. 168, No. 21 , p. 334

Broccoli, Turkey Control Blood Sugar
A cup of cooked broccoli typically contains 22 µg of chromium, and 3 ounces of cooked turkey-leg meat has 100 µg. April 16, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 16

Broccoli, Sushi Prevent Prostate Cancer
Prostate cancer remains the most common malignancy among U.S. men, and internationally it ranks fourth. Though few studies have offered much insight into what triggers this disease, a growing number of researchers have found evidence suggesting that dietary selenium protects men against this cancer. Sushi and organ meats and broccoli
Week of May 3, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 18

Fruits And Vegetables Prevent Colorectal Cancer
Fiber in foods such as whole grains, fruits, and vegetables can reduce colorectal cancer, coronary heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and perhaps other ills.
March 11, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 10

Chocolate Reduces Blood Pressure
The antioxidant flavonoids abundant in dark chocolate appear to reduce blood pressure and perhaps protect people from dangerous blood clots. However, Most commercial chocolate products have few natural flavonoids left in them. However they are found in tea and apples.
Feb. 25, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 8

Chocolate is Usually Contaminated with Lead
The shell of cocoa beans is a remarkably efficient sponge for lead. It can tightly bind the metal, preventing it from reaching the interior bean. Samples of shells from Nigeria contained between 60 and 417 nanograms of lead per gram. That's at least 300 times as much lead as was in the beans inside. Still, there was lead in the cocoa beans. Dark chocolates, including bittersweet and semisweet, had the highest lead concentrations—roughly 30 to 70 nanograms of the heavy metal per gram versus just 11 to 35 ng/g in milk chocolate. Dec. 17, 2005; Vol. 168, No. 25

Tofu Reduces Lead Poisoning
Lead, a toxic heavy metal, can show up in the most unexpected places. For instance, several recent studies documented a worrisome tainting of calcium supplements. A new study finds that for people who can’t avoid such lead exposures, there may be a simple means to limit the body’s uptake: Eat tofu.
June 23, 2001; Vol. 159, No. 25

Cranberry Juice, Chocolate Prevent Heart Attacks
Molecule for molecule, the antioxidants in chocolate exceed the potency of vitamin C, but cranberries even moreso.
March 29, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 13

Coffee and Tea Prevent Liver disease
A study showed that people who routinely drank more than two cups of coffee or tea per day faced only half the risk of being hospitalized with cirrhosis and other types of serious liver disease.
Jan. 21, 2006; Vol. 169, No. 3

Milk Improves Lung Functioning
Physicians in New Zealand have linked the vitamin to improved lung function. Most commercial milk has added Vitamin D.

Cheese Cures Arthritis and Asthma
Data from a new study finds that an unusual fatty acid, a type of dairy fat, can modulate the injurious, runaway inflammation that underlies arthritis, asthma, and many other diseases.
Oct. 29, 2005; Vol. 168, No. 18

Teflon Kills You
High concentrations of a chemical used in the production of Teflon surfaces have turned up in people living near a Teflon-manufacturing plant in West Virginia. It is the first government-sponsored epidemiological study of the chemical, known both as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and C-8. Teflon is not a food, of course, but it is widely used in food-preparation kitchens. (Later studies clarified that the risk emerges only when an empty Teflon-coated pan is left on a high burner for at least 15 minutes. Since I never do that, I have kept all my pans, but some friends have traded them all in for cast iron.)
Aug. 27, 2005; Vol. 168, No. 9

Black Beans Prevent Heart Attack
One serving of black beans a day helps stave off heart disease, researchers have confirmed in a new study. July 9, 2005; Vol. 168, No. 2

Mayonnaise Makes you Blind
A pair of new studies from a Boston research team links mayonnaise, as well as certain vegetable oils, to an elevated risk of age-related cataracts.
May 14, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 20

Food Additive Prevents Peanut Poisoning
The additive is BHT (for butylated hydroxytoluene), and the poison is aflatoxin, a fungus, and one of the most deadly poisons known to man, and commonly found in peanuts and even in commercial peanut butter. Food laced with BHT almost eliminates aflatoxin poisoning in turkeys, animals that are substantially more sensitive to it than people are. March 26, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 13

Overcooked Meat Kills You
On Jan. 31, the National Toxicology Program (NTP), part of the National Institutes of Health, published its latest update of materials known to cause cancer in people. Among the 246 agents on the lists are the heterocyclic amines that develop in meats when they're cooked too long at high temperature.
Week of Feb. 19, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 8

Beer Prevents Cancer From Overcooked Meat
A new study shows that, at least in mice, beer limits the DNA damage triggered by exposure to the carcinogens that form in overcooked meat.
March 5, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 10

Tea Makes You Lose Weight
Oolong tea was enriched with some of the antioxidant compounds that naturally occur in green tea. Men who drank this hybrid brew during a 3-month study in Japan lost 1.1 more kilograms in weight than did men drinking conventional oolong tea—with no other difference in their respective diets or exercise.
Feb. 12, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 7

Tea Treats Prostate Cancer
Tea drinking appears to seed the body with compounds that retard the growth of prostate cancer, a new study finds. Although the men taking part in the new study all had advanced prostate cancer, the data suggest that it might be possible to slow the early development of this cancer, and perhaps others, with regular consumption of tea.
May 1, 2004; Vol. 165, No. 18

Green Tea Prevents Breast Cancer
Now, California researchers report data suggesting that drinking green tea may lower a woman's risk of developing breast cancer. The study failed to identify a similar advantage from black tea, much less coffee or herbal "teas" such as chamomile.
Sept. 13, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 11

Tea and Wine Improve Your Memory
The antioxidants in tea, wine, red fruit juices, and chocolate that may help lower people's risk of heart disease. They’re also among the berry pigments that experiments have shown boost memory and other aspects of mental functioning in geriatric animals (SN: 9/18/99, p. 180: www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc99/9_18_99/fob2.htm).

Tea Prevents Cavities
Globally, in terms of its popularity as a drink, tea ranks second only to water. Researchers have recently turned up a variety of reasons to reinforce tea-quaffing habits. The newest: It slows the growth of germs that lead to cavities.
July 14, 2001; Vol. 160, No. 2

Coffee Treats Diabetes
New data now indicate that drinking coffee lots of it, and especially the caffeinated form—can curb type II diabetes.
Jan. 17, 2004; Vol. 165, No. 3

Vinegar Treats Diabetes
Two tablespoons of vinegar before a meal—perhaps, as part of a vinaigrette salad dressing—reduces the spike in blood concentrations of insulin and glucose that come after a meal. Dec. 18, 2004; Vol. 166, No. 25/26

Sauerkraut Prevents Breast Cancer
Midwestern scientists have found evidence that something in sauerkraut and related foods blocks the action of estrogen, a hormone that can fuel the growth of breast cancer and other reproductive-tract malignancies.
March 3, 2001; Vol. 159, No. 9

Fish Prevents Heart Disease
The Food and Drug Administration has announced that it will allow food manufacturers to make health claims for omega-3 fatty acids typically found in coldwater fish. Food labels can now note that products containing these oils might provide some protection from heart disease.
Sept. 25, 2004; Vol. 166, No. 13

Cinnamon Cleans the Breath
Dental scientists in Chicago have shown that an essential oil from cinnamon can kill oral bacteria, including germs responsible for a chemical that imparts the rotten-egg smell to the breath. May 22, 2004; Vol. 165, No. 21

Trans Fats Kill You
Scientists have warned us that A recent study has strengthened the caution, as researchers have investigated these fats in the bodies of first-heart-attack patients.
Whenever food manufacturers transform vegetable oils into solids—via a process called hydrogenation—trans fats are created. For the sake of texture and preservation, trans fats show up in most margarines, shortening, and foods cooked with partially hydrogenated oils. Eating trans fats can lead to heart problems. Different types of trans fats also occur naturally in dairy foods and some meats, but they tend to have health benefits
April 10, 2004; Vol. 165, No. 15

Tuna Kills You
The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for the first time gave joint advice on what types of fish are best to eat for those concerned about toxicity from mercury. Because mercury is harmful to the developing brain, health officials suggest that pregnant women, nursing mothers, women who may become pregnant, and young children reduce their intake of mercury.
March 27, 2004; Vol. 165, No. 13

Yogurt Prevents Osteoporosis
Foods such as yogurts supplemented with fiberlike sugars are commercial goods seeded with ingredients that boost their nutritiousness or healthfulness. Makers of foods doctored with these unusual, nearly flavorless sugars claim that their products improve the body's absorption of calcium in the diet, thereby strengthening bones. A report of the most recent animal tests suggests that by judiciously supplementing the diet with these carbohydrates, an elderly woman might significantly reduce her risk of osteoporosis.
Feb. 7, 2004; Vol. 165, No. 6

Eggs Improve Your Memory
Egg yolks are a rich source of choline. Researchers reported that a choline can substantially preserve an aging brain's dexterity. An experimental formulation of choline known as cytidine (5')-diphosphocholine (CDP-choline), might however limit the subtle onset of mental fuzziness that comes with age. At least, that's what it did for rats.
Nov. 22, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 21

Strawberries Prevent Cancer and Heart Disease
scientists at Cornell University find that strawberries may offer potent benefits in the body's fight against cancer and heart disease.
Oct. 18, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 16

Soybeans Lower Cholesterol
Soy can lower blood concentrations of the so-called bad, or low-density-lipoprotein (LDL), cholesterol. July 5, 2003; Vol. 164, No. 1 [I vaguely recall reading that this alleged benefit of soy has recently (in 2007) been overturned by subsequent studies].

French Fries Give you Heart Disease
Numerous studies have linked heavy consumption of saturated fats to elevated cholesterol, a major risk factor for heart disease. Now, Johns Hopkins University researchers tie high-saturated-fat found in French Fries to abdominal fat, a second risk factor for cardiovascular disease.
April 5, 2003; Vol. 163, No. 14

French Fries and Gingerbread Kill You
Acrylamide is a chemical that causes cancer in rats and is widely found in gingerbread. The FDA tested 53 samples of french fries, which are likely to develop fairly high concentrations of acrylamide. In the new survey, this food again had substantial acrylamide in every sample.
Dec. 14, 2002; Vol. 162, No. 24

Microwave Popcorn Kills You
Researchers with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services initially investigated a report of eight cases of serious lung disease among former employees of a microwave-popcorn factory. Half of these were mixers—workers who add salt and flavorings to tanks of soybean oil. The air at their workstation not only carried a strong buttery odor but also bore a cloud of visible dust. The other four workers came from popcorn-packaging stations 15 to 90 feet away. The rate of lung disease turned out to be about 31 percent for mixers, 1 percent for packers, and zero elsewhere in the plant.
May 11, 2002; Vol. 161, No. 19

Conclusion: The Perfect Dinner
A hamburger (barbequed, not fried in a teflon pan), with a large side dish of broccoli, and plenty of beer (in case the meat is overcooked), served with red wine and green tea (this is a classy dinner). Second course: fried eggs on a bed of sauerkraut. And for dessert, chocolate-covered tofu. Mmmm, delicious!

Firewater

2007-09-18T11:08:00.001-07:00

A Techno blog at New Scientist Magazine recently covered a story that I had only just glimpsed in news releases.

(Photo: John Kanzius)
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/technology/2007/09/
fire-from-seawater-claim-lights-up-web.html

Apparently, a U.S. inventor, John Kanzius (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kanzius), has discovered that sea water will burn with a flame when it is irradiated with radio frequency waves around 13.5 Mhz, which is in the neighborhood of ship-to-shore radio.

See a YouTube demonstration at
www.youtube.com/jp.swf?video_id=4kKtKSEQBeI

The water heats up and escaping gases can be ignited into a brightly burning yellow flame. The phenomenon has been replicated. It looks like Kanzius has discovered a new method of electrolysis, the breaking apart of the hydrogen-oxygen bonds in water to release hydrogen and oxygen as gases. In the more traditional method, an electrical current is passed through the water between two metal electrodes, to do that job.

(Diagram: www.greencarcongress.com)

The news media have focused on the potential of burning seawater as a fuel to replace oil. That will probably not happen. We have so much water on earth because water is extremely stable stuff. It takes a lot of energy to break it up, much more energy than the value of any free hydrogen you could ever get as a result.

Furthermore, traditional electrolysis is a lot cheaper and lower energy way to break up water than by using radio frequencies, so there is no obvious benefit to Kanzius’ method of electrolysis.

Still, some interesting questions arise from this finding.

Normally, an atom of oxygen has two stray electrons banging around loose in its outer shell. But an atom of hydrogen happens to be short one electron in its outer (and only) shell. So one oxygen makes two hydrogens very happy by taking care of their electron shortage while putting its two extra electrons to work. That bond between two hydrogens and one oxygen (H2O), works out extremely well for all concerned.

Traditional electrolysis works by providing such an overabundance of free electrons at the cathode (negative end), that the hydrogens do not need to share with oxygen any more. They can get electrons on their own, allowing them to form molecular hydrogen gas (H2), which boils off and can be burned, as Kanzius demonstrated. At the positive electrode, oxygen atoms give up their spare electrons and combine to form molecular oxygen gas (O2).

But why would a radio signal cause the hydrogen-oxygen bonds to break? No new electrons are added to that system. One imagines that the radio frequency used just happens to be one that resonates with the H2O covalent bonds, causing the water molecule to essentially shake itself apart. The fact that the water heats up to 3000 degrees Celsius suggests something like that is going on.

Still, if the radio frequency is really about 13.5 Mhz, not even as much as an AM radio signal, it would seem that the wavelength would be far too large to affect the covalent bonds. I don’t know enough physics to know for sure, but it seems like there is something going on here that is not obvious. What would other radio frequencies do in this situation, for example at exactly half the wavelength?

Next, why is the flame yellow? Hydrogen burns with a colorless (white) flame. Since the demonstration is done with sea water, which has a lot of sodium chloride (salt), we should probably assume that the yellow in the flame comes from oxidizing sodium, which does burn yellow.

I’m not sure how that would work, though. What, exactly is burning? Sodium hydroxide? Some weird hydrogenated plasma of sodium? Again, I lack the basic chemistry and physics to know, but it seems like something unusual is going on there.

Would the demonstration work at all with pure distilled water? If it is merely electrolysis, it should work fine. Yet all the articles I’ve seen on the topic describe only a salt water demonstration. Sea water, to be precise. Why? Would the demonstration work on isotonic saline, or does it have to be sea water? Again, something more than meets the eye is involved here.

Oddly, Kanzius describes the effect not as electrolysis, but as “reunification,” a kind of reverse electrolysis in which atomic hydrogen and oxygen come together to form water. That doesn’t make any sense, since that would consume the flammable gases to create water, which does not burn. Kanzius is not a credentialed scientist, but he clearly knows a thing or two, so I wonder why he would choose such an odd description for his phenomenon. He isn’t saying anything more about it while he applies for patents. This makes me wonder if he knows or suspects something more than electrolysis is involved.

Finally, even though breaking up the hydrogen-oxygen bonds will always use more energy than it releases, that isn’t necessarily a showstopper. Fuel cells and the much ballyhooed “hydrogen car” of the future consume more energy than they produce, but there are other factors to consider besides just thermodynamics.

Sourcing a fuel has costs. Is it cheaper or easier to generate a radio signal than to drill an oil well? Maybe. Distribution and portability of the fuel cost something, and maybe those costs can be lowered. Exhaust gases from combustion can be extremely costly, as we know with petroleum fuel, and those costs are greatly lowered with hydrogen as a fuel. There are also severe political costs and risks associated with fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are much less abundant than seawater. All these non-thermodynamic considerations need to be worked into any feasibility analysis.

So it is not out of the question that hydrogen produced by radio frequency radiation of sea water could be a viable fuel.

People Never Seen in the Same Room

2007-08-28T10:36:00.000-07:00

Assuming they are actually different people, I wonder why no one has cast James Bond star, Daniel Craig, in the part of Vladimir Putin? Or conversely, invited Putin to play a role in a Bond movie?

Vehicular Obsession

2007-08-07T13:06:00.001-07:00

Why are people so interested in vehicles? All around the world, as soon as they have enough money for food, what do people want more than anything? A bicycle, scooter, car, or truck. When they finally have plenty of money, what do they want next? A bigger car, another car, an SUV, and a trailer. If someone is lucky enough to have rivers of cash or credit, what do they buy? A sailboat, snowmobile, jet ski, and a Harley. We want a huge RV with bicycles tied to the back, a boat on the roof, and a tow car behind. We would buy jet planes and helicopters if we could. What is the meaning of this human vehicular obsession?

Vehicles are often the tools of production. You can’t get your vegetables to market without a cart. Likewise, you might need a car to get to work. Okay fine. But that cannot be the whole story. You definitely do not need a kayak and a Hummer for anything. A Corolla will get you to
work.
People will buy vehicles even when they don’t need them, can’t afford them, can’t maintain them, and have nowhere to store them. But even if you are swimming in money, why would you spend it on vehicles? How fast do you expect to go on the freeway at 5pm? When I see the sailboats and fishing boats struggling to avoid hitting each other in the bay, I wonder, “Where is the fun in that?”

Why not buy books or music? You can never have too much of those. If money is overflowing your bank account, why not create a scholarship fund, or support health care for people who would really, really be grateful? There are a hundred things to do with money more useful than buying another vehicle.

There must be a deep psychological reason for vehicular obsession because it makes no rational sense. I think it involves subconscious fantasies of omnipotence, omnipresence, and to a lesser extent, omniscience, for the imaginatively challenged.

If you have an attractive, powerful car, then you are attractive and powerful. If the car is expensive, then you must be rich. If it is shiny, you must have good taste. The vehicle defines a new bodily self better than your run-down, flabby body. Actually, even if your body is in great shape, and you look good, and you are rich, you still can’t go from 0 to 60 in five seconds, can you? So you still need a better physical “shell” to fulfill your fantasy life.
Inside the vehicle we put aside our mortal embodiment and become re-embodied as an anonymous homunculus in a steel and glass superbody. The homunculus issues performance commands, enjoys the scenery whipping by, and imagines the awed respect of onlookers (as if anybody really cared how you spend your paycheck).

Other vehicles are seen as people. The person who “cut you off” in traffic is just the red coupe, because you have no idea who is actually in the car. It doesn’t matter. The behavior of the car is the behavior of its driver, just as your car represents your own superpowered body.

Notice that nobody fantasizes about owning a metro bus or an Amtrak train. We’re not interested in possessing public transportation, only personal vehicles. It’s not actually the vehicle we want, no matter how big it is. What we want is a fantasy superbody that can do amazing things.

It is a childish fantasy, like kids who want to be Spiderman, Batman, or Wonder Woman. They can’t think beyond behaving physically in the physical world. Rarely do you hear a child of ten say they would like to become a concert cellist, biologist or novelist. They simply don’t know the range of possibilities that life offers, so all they can think of is running, flying and punching bad guys. Their world view is restricted to the physical.

Vehicular obsessives are that way too. I submit it would be a rare concert cellist, biologist or novelist who drives a Ferrari or owns a sailboat. Why? Because those people have learned to enjoy a life that extends far beyond the physical body.

On the other hand, adults who glorify the physical body and who lack awareness of the depth and extent of intellectual, social, and aesthetic life, would be more likely to suffer vehicular obsession. That crowd would include body builders, dancers, athletes, and people whose mental life is centered around physicality. It would include television and movie actors, models and public figures because they trade in their physical image. The physical is all for them. It would not include radio personalities because only their voice matters so they don’t need a superbody.

If you won the lottery big time, what would you buy? Vehicles?

Science and Islam

2007-07-06T16:26:00.000-07:00

I ran across an interesting book by Turkish-educated physicist Taner Edis: An Illusion Of Harmony: Science And Religion In Islam. Prometheus Books, 2007. It is well-reviewed on Amazon.com.

The book asks why Islam has contributed nothing to modern science. The answer is simple, frightening, and perplexing. Muslim society is centered on literal interpretation of the Koran, and when scientific findings contradict scripture, science is rejected.

Unlike western societies, Muslim cultures did not experience a historical period like our Enlightenment, from about 1500 to 1650 and continuing to the present. Cultural attitudes about knowledge and truth changed radically in the west during that time. Instead of relying on the king, the church, and the ancients to define truth, the idea emerged that anyone could find out about the world by observing carefully and thinking critically.

The transformation from authoritarianism to empiricism did not always go smoothly, as when Galileo was imprisoned for insisting that his telescopic observations proved that the Earth was not the center of the universe. But over time, educated people in western cultures came to accept that empirical observation made by any suitably trained person produces truth about the natural world, regardless of pronouncements from crown or cross. That is the definition of modernism and of the modern mind.

None of that happened in Muslim history, for reasons that are not clear to me. Consequently, in today’s Muslim culture, religious authority still defines truth and there is no tradition of science. Engineering is well-advanced, according to Edis, but the mentality for questioning, experimentation, skepticism and reliance on empirical observation required for basic research is lacking. Islamic scholars try to reconcile scientific findings and principles with a literal interpretation of the infallible Koran, much as Christian fundamentalists do with the infallible Bible, and failing to find success in that effort, they turn to crackpot pseudoscience that is more compatible.

While western society was changing during the Enlightenment, Islamic cultures remained dominated by orthodox religious scholars who did not encourage “attention to knowledge that did not have any explicit religious purpose,” according to Edis. If one’s world view is totally defined by what’s in the Koran, then of course science would be a waste of time. But how could anyone live like that? What about natural curiosity?

It seems perfectly obvious to me that given the right population density, health and nutrition, with plenty of commerce to facilitate the exchange of ideas, the modern mind, and with it the scientific world view, would automatically flourish. People are naturally curious, they want to understand the natural world, and given the opportunity to explore, they would. But what is obvious to me is obviously wrong, since it did not happen that way in Islamic societies.

It’s a frightening contrast because it reminds me how totally alienated the two world views are from each other. We are never, ever going to resolve our differences in discussion over coffee! The historical differences have produced mind-sets that are too different to support much discussion.

But why can’t fundamentalists let it be? Why do they have to blow things up? If they prefer to live in a premodern state, why not do so quietly? What is the source of the animosity between us?

There are historical animosities, like the Crusades and the taking of Muslim lands by Israel. But there have been similar animosities in western cultures, including two recent world wars, but we worked it out. There is something else going on in the tension between western and Islamic cultures.

The obvious answer is that we want their oil, and they want our respect. Could it be as simple as that? I don’t think so. Such a simple trade could easily be worked out if that’s all there were to it.

Instead, I think each side wants the other to conform to its self. We want them to be secular democracies like us, with liberal, tolerant values and a modern, scientific outlook, like ours. But they want us to be fervent, unquestioning, literal believers of every word of the Koran, like them. Each side wants to recreate the other in its own image and is not content to let the other be different.

Why this mutually exclusive absolutism? Because each side believes its view of humanity, God, life and world is absolutely correct and that the other side’s is absolutely wrong. These unyielding positions are not just prideful postures. Their assumptions are so deeply ingrained into the fabric of each culture that it is not mentally possible to question one’s own position without a great deal of education and reflection.

We are modernists, products of the western Enlightenment and it is not actually possible for most of us to get free of that and think in premodern terms. It’s not a question of listening more carefully to the other side; we just can’t comprehend their assumptions about the world. Why not?

This is a perplexing mystery.

Who’s the Peacock Now?

2007-06-11T16:42:00.000-07:00

Last weekend I had to go to a “gala” charity event. I hate those things, with their ironically named silent auction, with the countdown of time remaining to bid blasted over a loudspeaker to penetrate the din of banal conversation blanketed by a layer of canned music from a half century ago (Ray Charles, Nat King Cole, and even the comeback Tony Bennett, not the Tony Bennett of the 40’s and 50’s who could actually sing). Last year we got a live string quartet. They must be cutting costs. And the speeches, good lord, the unending self-congratulatory speeches! But attending is the socially responsible thing to do, so I hold my nose, watch the clock, and make nice.

(Notice in the picture that my lovely wife is not displaying a peacock fan.)

Anyway, a woman with breath of crab cakes shouted an interesting offhand comment into my face. “It’s amazing what the women wear to these things,” she said, “compared to what men wear.” I looked around and she was right. Women had all manner of fantastic getups, in drapes of shiny fabrics, gauze, or lace; dripping sequins, jewels, and shiny pins; wearing upright collars, enormous floppy collars, no collars; cut-away fronts, backs and sides (not all on the same woman). There was every imaginable color including some you couldn't name. Men, on the other hand, were uniformly in dark blue suits or black tuxedoes. The daring ones allowed themselves a colorful print on the bow tie.

In the animal kingdom, the male is the brightly colored one. That spectacular peacock tail has very high evolutionary cost, since it serves no purpose, save one: to attract females, in the hope of scoring fertilization of some eggs. The eggs are the high value resource that males must compete for.

But in the human world (of charity events anyway), eggs mean nothing. The women give the showy display instead, apparently competing for men. Why? Presumably for the opportunity to score (or retain) wealth and security. The evolutionary script has flipped. How did this happen?

Why There Are No Aliens

2007-06-05T14:24:00.000-07:00

People are fascinated with the idea that there are aliens out there; intelligent beings like us, or maybe not like us. This theme has been a staple of television and movies for decades, and is an obsession of UFO buffs. Scientists started the SETI project (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in the hope of making contact with aliens. But there are no aliens.

How can I be so sure? With tens of billions of galaxies each containing hundreds of billions of stars, many of them like ours, statistics alone would argue for the nonzero probability of life elsewhere in the universe.

Ah, but I do not argue against the probability of extraterrestrial life. It would not surprise me too much if bacteria were found in some moist spot on Mars.

What’s impossible are intelligent aliens; beings that have thoughts, and technologies like radio and space travel and who could communicate with us. Why is that impossible? Because it is oxymoronic. It’s like trying to conceptualize a square circle or a flying pig. You can do it vaguely, in abstractions, as long as you don’t think it through too clearly. But if you give the idea a moment of serious thought, it becomes obvious that it is so muddled, we don’t know what we are talking about.

“Alien” means not like me; foreign in nature; from some other context. Yet we always assume our own context. That’s why E.T. (from the famous movie) looks so remarkably humanoid: one head, frontal eyes, mouth for speaking and eating (language too of course), two arms, two legs, one torso, ten fingers, bipedal locomotion, breathes air, functions in 1g of gravity, and on and on. Sure, he has some special powers and some special needs, but don’t we all. The differences are minor. How alien is E.T.? Not very. He is us.

The old TV show, Star Trek, had some imaginative aliens. My favorite was the Hortas. They were a silicon-based life form (as opposed to our carbon –based) and they looked approximately like a two-foot long gray egg with a fringe around the edge. The fringe presumably was for locomotion, as the Horta were ground dwellers. They looked like big rocks, but they were intelligent, as Spock proved by making a Vulcan mind link with one of them. That was a good representation of an alien that tried to cut through anthropocentric imagery. Nevertheless, the Horta still had thoughts and concerns very much human. It was concerned with territory, safety, family, nutrition and longevity. It didn’t look like us, but it was us.

Another good fictional alien was the race of Krell, the mysterious, extinct beings in the movie, Forbidden Planet, who left behind a gigantic underground computing complex. But surprise, they were not extinct as thought, and when they manifest, they appeared as wavering ghostly shapes of light, a sort of body. It turned out that the Krell were actually projections of the unconscious mind of man, the opposite of alien; extreme intimates of humanity. But their initial representation without a substantial body was innovative.

But why would a real alien have a psychology anything like ours? Would an alien distinguish subjectivity from objectivity, as we do? There’s no reason to think so. Would aliens think of the world as separate from themselves? Could they distinguish themselves as individuals in a group, or not? Maybe they would be absolute individuals. Is intelligence necessarily social? Would alien minds undergo years of socialization as ours do? Would they necessarily have language? Would they be mortal, and if so, would they conceptualize their mortality, and if so, would that mean anything important to them? Would they be susceptible to perceptual illusions (assuming they had perception)? Would they have emotions?

That list goes on endlessly. The fact is, we cannot conceive of a psychology that is very different from our own. We have no reason to expect that we could ever recognize aliens as intelligent beings since only egocentricism prompts us to suppose they would have a psychology like ours. Maybe they’re here now! Maybe the trees are them! That makes about as much sense as anything else.

A related problem is that we have no idea what “intelligence” is, not even in humans, let alone in aliens. We have vague ideas like “smart” versus “dim” people, but we really don’t know how to define that, even for ourselves. So looking for an alien intelligence is looking for something we cannot conceive.

In the movie, Contact, a message from aliens appeared on a computer screen in the pattern of a circle. The scientists looking at it appeared to be gazing into a large hand-mirror. As in fact they were.

The spacecraft Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972 by NASA. It left the solar system after its mission, to fly forever into deep space. The question arose, "What if someday, some intelligent extraterrestrial beings saw our spacecraft floating through deep space, and caught it. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a message for them." So it was decided that a small plaque would be mounted on the spacecraft with a message to the aliens. This is not a Hollywood movie. This actually happened.

What should we say on the plaque? And how? Do aliens know English? What if everyone speaks Spanish in interstellar space? The scientists got around that dilemma by using only pictures and symbols on the plaque. The nine planets of our solar system are shown lined up next to our sun as ten circles. The fourth one from the left (our circle) has an arrow coming off it that points to a little drawing of the spacecraft. Obviously, what we're trying to say here is that this spacecraft came from Earth, third planet from the Sun.

Is that obvious? Would it be obvious to an alien? This plaque is a monument to our ignorance and egocentricism. In what way does a circle represent a planet? Planets aren't circles. And in what way does a line of ten circles represent a solar system? Maybe the illustration means we really like to play billiards here on Earth. As for the arrow on one of the circles, what is an "arrow" anyway? A drawn arrow is a derivative of a hunting arrow, isn't it? Do we suppose that any aliens worth their salt would have used arrows at one time? For hunting space buffalo?

The line drawings of the naked man and woman are uninterpretable. They could be diagrams of electronic circuits. They could be coffee stains. How would an alien even know which side of the drawing was up? The incredible naiveté of the plaque designers seems to suggest that the aliens will look at the drawings and say, "Oh look. On Earth they're parting their hair on the left now."

Even if we allow that aliens might have some experience in common with us about solar systems and hydrogen atoms, it is a vast leap to assume they will also share our concepts of circles, arrows, binary arithmetic, time, distance, figure-ground relationships, spatial orientation, and two-dimensional line drawings. That plaque is just another hand mirror. We cannot conceive of an alien intelligence.

To summarize then. Why are there no intelligent extraterrestrial aliens? For the same reason there are no xlotopopples.

We Live in the Past

2007-05-01T14:24:00.000-07:00

English astronomers have discovered some very young galaxies, according to a new study (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, abstract available at www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/, cited by Cowen (2007).

Twenty-one extremely young galaxies were identified. (Audience yells: “How young were they?”) These galaxies were so young, their eyes had just opened even though they had no face yet (see spooky picture above from the Hubble space telescope). Actually, they formed only 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang, which on a human time scale is about 8 years old.

These galaxies have many interesting properties, but what made me stop was the thought that if a giant green monster appeared in the sky and ate these galaxies, we would not know. It takes 12 billion years for light from these galaxies to reach us, traveling at, of course, the speed of light!

This is an old mind-twister that we learn in high school, but I still have trouble with it. As we see these galaxies now, we are looking at light that has reached us after traveling through space for the last 12 billion years, beginning long before the earth itself even existed. We are seeing what they looked like 12 billion years ago. They could have turned pink and formed the word “Hello!” in the sky, then gone back to their present configuration, but such antics would not be visible to us until many more billions of years from now.

The Hubble is a time machine. How do we feel about that? We are looking at these galaxies now, right now in the present moment. Yet we are seeing them as they were 12 billion years ago. What sense does that make?

It’s not like looking at an old picture of the 1880’s. Even though all the people in the picture are long since dead, you don’t get the sense (very much ) that you are peering through the veil of death because the photograph itself has survived (even if it’s a copy of a copy). We understand that many things in the universe survive longer than a human being.

But in this case, we are not looking at an old picture of a galaxy. We are looking at the galaxy as it appears in the natural world today. How can we be looking at something in the natural world today and be seeing it as it was 12 billion years ago, with no possible way to observe it as it is today?

This is also not like reconstructing the ages of things in the fossil record. We can say a certain plant lived 2 billion years ago, based on fossils. There were no humans around to see it, but we are here now and we see the traces it left behind. That’s like seeing someone’s footprints in the snow. The person is gone now, but the footprints reveal their former presence.

We are not looking at these galaxies' footprints or the dust and gas left over after they blew up. That’s them, right there, in the sky now. And yet, we are seeing what they looked like before we got here; before there even was a here here.

And the lifetime of those galaxies, as they grew up from 8 years old to the 80 years old they would be today, on a human scale – that lifetime is in the galaxies’ past, but it is in our future to observe it. In that sense, the galaxies, as they exist today, are 12 billion years in our future.

What’s amazing is that the same principle applies to looking at anything. When I look at my computer screen, I am seeing it in the past, because it takes a certain finite, non-zero amount of time for the light to reach my eyes, just as it does for the light from those distant galaxies. Of course that time is much shorter for the computer screen. In the same way, everything I see, I see in the past. It is not possible, in principle, to ever perceive anything in the present moment. Everything we perceive is history. We just choose to ignore the time lag when convenient. So is there a present moment? There can't be, in principle. We live in the past.

Reference:
Cowen, R. (2007). Back to (Near) the Beginning: Galactic Springtime. Science News, 171 (April 21) 246.

Are Birds Imposters?

2007-04-17T18:26:00.000-07:00

It has come to my attention that fish have no legs. This makes perfect sense for them, since they are fish. So why do birds have legs? A bird is designed as a flying machine (ignoring penguins, ostriches, and so on) and yet they can’t really make a living in the air, the way fish make a living in the sea. Who are birds trying to fool with the flying stunt?

Birds need those ridiculous little stick legs for landing on wires and for hopping about in the grass. Those are not serious legs. If you really need to make your living in on the ground rather than in the air, why be designed as a grand flying machine with inadequate legs?

It’s as if humans were designed with gills, but since we make our living on dry land, we had to evolve a bubble of water over our heads to breathe. It wouldn’t be efficient.

A bird should have proper legs like a mammal or a reptile so it can get around for hunting and breeding, and if it needs to fly, then some auxiliary wings. An eagle is a reasonable design, since it has substantial legs for hunting from the air, although it doesn’t walk well.

Geese should be embarrassed to walk. What sense does it make to be a bird that eats grass? Why not put wings on a cow?

Birds are really terrestrial animals just pretending to live aeronautically. Imposters, all. (Except raptors, perhaps.)

The ideal bird would be able to make its living entirely in the air, by intercepting insects the way bats do, or by filtering tiny organisms out of the air, as whales do from the water.

The basic problem with birds is that they are heavier than air so they can’t stay up all the time. The ideal bird would be about the same density as air. Then it could live in the medium for which it was designed. It wouldn’t need legs and I would feel better about that.

Hearing Voices

2007-03-30T10:33:00.000-07:00

An interesting article in the New York Times questioned the unquestionable assumption that a person hearing voices in their head is pathological, mentally ill, in need of immediate treatment (Smith, D.B.: Can you live with the voices in your head? March 25, 2007). Auditory hallucination is the hallmark of schizophrenia, although some schizophrenics do not have auditory hallucinations, and they also occur in other psychoses as well, but generally, if you are hearing voices, you want to get rid of them – right away, by taking one of the antipsychotic medications that suppress or eliminate the voices (with substantial side-effects).

(Pic from http://uberpup.deviantart.com/)

According to the NYT article, there is a group based in Manchester, England, the “Hearing Voices Network (HVN), that advocates making friends with the voices instead of trying to get rid of them (www.hearing-voices.org). In group sessions, participants talk about their voices and how they relate to them. The goal is to accept the voices as part of “normal” consciousness.

Hearing voices is not fun, according to what we read in the psychiatric literature. It is extremely frightening, like having an alien within your body. Hearing voices is not like talking to yourself, because it is not your voice. The voice typically comments, often sarcastically and critically, on what you are doing and thinking. The voice is intrusive. You can’t read, can’t think. It won’t shut up. Often, according to patients, the voice urges you to commit suicide. Sometimes it is two different voices talking to each other, commenting on and criticizing the patient’s thoughts and actions in the third person. I’ve never read about a friendly, encouraging, helpful auditory hallucination. They’re always bad news.

The article describes a typical incident:

Angelo was walking home from the laboratory when, all of a sudden, he heard two voices in his head. “It was like hearing thoughts in my mind that were not mine,” he explained recently. “They identified themselves as Andrew and Oliver, two angels. In my mind’s eye, I could see an image of a bald, middle-aged man dressed in white against a white background. This, I was told, was Oliver.” What the angels said, to Angelo’s horror, was that in the coming days, he would die of a brain hemorrhage. Terrified, Angelo hurried home and locked himself into his apartment. For three long days he waited out his fate, at which time his supervisor drove him to a local hospital, where Angelo was admitted to the psychiatric ward. It was his first time under psychiatric care. He had never heard voices before. His diagnosis was schizophrenia with depressive overtones.

HVN disputes the assumption that hearing voices always indicates psychosis. They claim that many ostensibly normal people hear voices and live with them. Some interpret the voices as messages from a spirit world, some as thoughts from their own unconscious mind. The article did not present any evidence that normal people hear voices, or if they do, how prevalent that might be. It’s an interesting and plausible idea however that should be investigated.

I have heard a voice in my head that did not seem to be my own, when falling asleep, where the boundary between dreaming and wakefulness is not clear. It’s rare, but I have “heard” my name being called loudly and clearly, and was startled, only to realize “it was only a dream.” But what does that mean, “It was only a dream?” I heard a voice in my head; It was not my own voice; It called my name.” Why is that not an auditory hallucination? I can well imagine that some people might experience similar events throughout the day. There is wide variation in the quality of normal human consciousness.

When you have a tune in your head that keeps repeating, against your will, and you can’t get rid of it, isn’t that an auditory hallucination? It is, but it is so common that we accept it as a normal, albeit annoying part of life. But voices speaking sentences are not common so we pathologize that.

This is an amazing idea, that otherwise normal people might routinely hear voices. Julian Jaynes, in his weird book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) claimed that humans enjoyed two distinct, parallel conscious experiences, one in each hemisphere of the brain, until recently in evolution. His evidence ranged from none to sketchy, and I wasn’t convinced. But there may well be brain-based structural or biochemical factors behind hearing voices.

The idea promoted by HVN is that a person should accept the voices as meaningful and try to understand them, much as we try to interpret the meaning of dreams. I think that is a good idea. The brain does not manufacture sentences. Only a socialized mind can do that. So whatever the brain basis might be of the voices, their manifestation as language statements is an ego phenomenon and subject to meaningful interpretation.

I don’t think there is any reason to think that the voices are from angels, spirits, or aliens, although I can appreciate why sufferers might believe that. The voices are dissociative, that is, they seem ego-alien, or “not-self,” but they do come from within the psyche of the person and should be interpreted as clues to how that psyche operates.

Unfortunately, it seems like there is usually more than one brain malfunction going on – more than whatever cause the voices. Angelo, for example, was diagnosed also with depression, which may arise from another brain dysfunction, or maybe another aspect of the same one – who knows. In schizophrenia, there is a broad range of clinical symptoms, not just voices. So it may be next to impossible, in practice, to find much sense in the hallucinatory voices, since they may also be manifestations of other problems in the brain. It might nevertheless be possible to disentangle these multiple strands by careful analysis, the way a skilled mechanic can identify multiple problems in your car’s engine by isolating one thing at a time.

Did Egyptian Pharaohs Seek Immortality?

2007-03-02T11:40:00.000-08:00

On a recent visit to the Portland, Oregon art museum, I saw an exhibit called “Egyptians: the Quest for Immortality.” It was a Disneyesque crowd-pleaser including a dimly lit mockup of a pyramid tomb room where you could see the writing on the wall. Despite the show-biz tone and the oxygen-deficient tomb room, I enjoyed studying the hieroglyphics, mummies, and other displays.
www.portlandartmuseum.org

However, in examining the exhibit, it occurred to me that the Pharaohs were not questing for immortality at all. They simply assumed it, for everyone. The idea of personal nonexistence was probably inconceivable to them.

Why would you assume that at death you ceased to exist? You have never ceased before, despite having gone through innumerable transformations, from infant to adult. Always, you continued on. And so why would death be any different? Obviously, you would continue on as you always have, albeit in some other form. That would make perfect sense and would be beyond question for any normal ancient Egyptian.

When you think about it, the idea that death is oblivion only makes sense if “the person” is identical with the physical body. That view is recommended by modern science, but is far from being a fact. Intuitively, we feel there is more to a person than meat. Prescientific Egyptians would have no reason to doubt it.

It is more consistent with common sense and life’s experience to assume that one continues indefinitely. The ancient Egyptians were NOT on a quest for immortality because they knew they were immortal.

However, they did seem confused about what “the person” is. They put an enormous amount of resource into retarding the decay of the physical body. Why? They were unclear on the concept of immortality if they thought the physical body would continue after death, but they probably had not conceived of a physically transcendent soul or spirit yet. That would be for later monotheists to invent. So the Egyptians made do with what they could understand.

Nevertheless, if you assume immortality of “the person” (however that is defined), then the question would be, what can I do now to make my continued existence in the next world go better? For a pharaoh, the answer would be obvious.

A pharaoh would need the trappings of wealth and power, because that is the only way to distinguish a pharaoh from anybody else after death. Even the humblest farmer has the same number of fingers and toes as Pharaoh. Only wealth and social status make the difference, and if you’re leaving this social world for another, you are leaving your social status behind.

Therefore, the grand pyramids and their tombs are necessary for preserving one’s social status in the coming realm. For a big dude like a pharaoh, social status must be preserved at all costs, because that’s all you have, all you are. That IS your personhood. If you expect to have any clout with the gods on the other side, you will need credentials. The funerary art and treasure are the perfect calling cards (overlooking the awkward fact that they will remain tangibly located in this world).

Building a pyramid tomb is not a denial of death and it’s not a quest for immortality, it is like pressing your good suit in preparation for a party.

On the other hand, if you are a farmer in this life, and you have no social status, you don’t need a fancy tomb. You have nothing to lose and nothing to prove.

Early Neandertal or Pleistocene graves might have had a different purpose. Those people probably just accepted the evidence of the senses: at some point a person stops moving and someone declares, “He daid!” (That’s how early people talked).

They might put a few flowers in the grave out of respect for the memory of the living, a gesture of remembrance, without any thought of transition into another world. If people had little self-consciousness, the idea of personal continuation would not come up, and the idea of immortality would not come up.

It was the intellectual achievement of the Egyptians (or their forebears), to conceive continuous personal self-identity, and its corollary, immortality.

Today, we have lost that pharaonic certainty. Scientific naturalism tells us death is the end, the total, absolute, permanent, irredeemable end of everything you are. Religion assures us there is an escape valve: only the body dies, not the soul. We are not sure who to believe. It was easier for the Egyptians. They knew.

So I think the curators of the Egyptian show at the PAM misunderstood the meaning of the Egyptian tombs. Billing the exhibit as a “quest for immortality,” they projected their own existential uncertainty onto the pharaohs.

Of course, since we don’t really know what the pharaohs were thinking, it is all a mystery.

What Has Sex Got to do With Religion?

2007-02-12T08:22:00.000-08:00

I can’t understand why religious fundamentalists get so upset about human sexuality. They are forever ranting on against nudity, homosexuality, masturbation, promiscuity, contraception, sex education, and on and on and on. This sex obsession is exercised by Christians and Muslims alike. What is the rationale for it?

Obviously, adultery upsets the social order and that’s cause enough for it to be forbidden. Child abuse is always wrong. Prostitution brings ancillary social problems. But I don’t think religious people are worried about the economics and politics of the family and community, despite their ravings. If you look at the distribution of divorce, domestic violence, and child abuse, there are no exemptions for church-goers.

Sex is biology. Why is the church in the biology business at all? Does God care about human sexuality any more than he cares about human digestion? I would bet that God has other things on his mind besides our body functions. And to anticipate an objection to that idea, let’s remember that babies do not come from God (or the stork), they come from mitosis.

It’s true that sex is more than biology, it’s also sociology and psychology. It’s complicated. So why don’t we study it? If we want to regulate the sexual behavior of our children because they are too young to have good judgment, then okay, let’s do that with some good parenting and public education. But it's really not a moral issue.

I suspect the real concern of religious moralists is actually pleasure, not sexuality. They have somehow got it in their minds that pleasure is evil. I don’t know where they get that idea, since it is obviously false. It is a mystery to me.

Why Doesn't Angular Motion Count as Inertial?

2007-01-07T13:05:00.000-08:00

Suppose you were in the dining car of a train traveling 50 mph and rudely tossed a bread roll across the table to your companion, who is sitting with her back to the locomotive. How fast does the roll travel? More than 50 mph? She would have to be very alert to catch a bread roll traveling at that speed!

But as Einstein told us, the motion of the roll is relative to the motion of the dining car, so even though the dining car is moving at 50 mph, the roll is moving within the car at perhaps 1 foot in a second at most.

Why? Because a frame of reference moving at a constant velocity is indistinguishable from one at rest. If there were no windows in the train, you wouldn’t even know you were moving.

You could throw a ball (or bread roll) back and forth with a friend on the moving train and have no trouble throwing or catching, even though the whole train is moving at high speed.

But if you are standing on a playground carousel and you try to throw a ball to your friend, it doesn’t work right. The ball seems to curve away from its target, opposite the direction of motion. Why?

The “correct” answer is that the carousel is not a uniformly moving frame of reference. But what is so special about angular motion that makes it non-uniform and makes the ball curve away?

Traditionally, we appeal to Newton’s laws of inertia, which say that a body in motion will continue indefinitely until acted upon. But the centrifugal and centripetal forces are exactly balanced in an ideal spinning top, and in a frictionless environment, it would spin forever. Why is that not a stable inertial frame of reference? It seems extremely stable to me. The principle of the gyroscope depends on it.

It seems like Newton’s laws of inertia are mere descriptions without explanatory power if they just arbitrarily declare that angular motion “doesn’t count” as inertial motion. That doesn’t explain why the ball on the carousel curves away.

Are Corpses Really Dead?

2006-12-20T16:07:00.000-08:00

Recently I attended a show in Seattle called Bodies: The Exhibition. Complete, human, adult bodies have been skinned and imbued with silicone or polymeric plastic, in a process similar to fossilization. The chemicals replace bodily fluids down to the cellular level, preserving all details of the body. The plasticised corpses are clean, odor-free, completely detailed, and have cutaways so you can see the interior of muscles and organs. The bodies are on display for examination.

It was an impressive and educational show. It forces you to adjust your mental ideas of what body parts are like. I was surprised, for example, at how thick the skin and fat layer is on a body. The belly button sticks out a good inch from the abdomen without that layer. I was surprised at how big the bladder is, how small the brain really is, how small the lungs are, the enormous number and complexity of blood vessels, how extremely long some neurons are, and so on. Plus, the displays are physically attractive. Artists would love them.

The show has appeared in Amsterdam, Miami, Las Vegas, and New York. There are other, similar exhibits traveling internationally, such as “Body Worlds.” The web site for the exhibit I saw is http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/bodies.html

The controversy about the show is about where the bodies came from. Apparently there are no documents proving that the owners of the bodies had consented that their bodies could be used for medical purposes after they died.

Below: Nationalgeographic.com (Runner)

“The bodies belonged to people from China who died unidentified or unclaimed by family members, said Dr. Roy Glover, a retired University of Michigan anatomy and cell biology professor and spokesman,” according to Graham and Duryea (2005). The Chinese government owns all unclaimed bodies, and often donates them to medical schools. The Dalian Medical University of Plastination Laboratories in the People's Republic of China is
the source of the bodies in this exhibit. The owners of the Exhibit, a for-profit corporation based in Atlanta, leased the bodies from the university.

The spokesperson for the exhibit points out that lack of written consent is not necessarily illegal or unethical.

“In some states, if a person dies and can't be identified by a medical examiner or family member, local university medical schools have an opportunity to receive the remains for study.”

“Glover said he assumed a similar process was used in China for acquisition of specimens” (Graham and Durya, 2005)

Below: Times photo: Melissa Lyttle (Blood vessels in the hand)

Those are all accurate facts, as near as I can determine. So what is the basis of the controversy over the exhibit? Many objections have been raised but only two, it seems to me, are legitimate, and both of them are weak.

One argument is about money. Some big bucks are involved here. The organizer of the Bodies exhibit paid $25 million to rent the corpses and they expect to make all that back and more. We don’t know if Dalian Medical University paid the Chinese government for the bodies, but on the assumptions that nothing happens without money, especially in China, and that human beings will do anything for money, and knowing that the Chinese government does not have a strong record on human rights … assuming the worst, a reasonable person might worry that these bodies were “harvested” from among the living, by the government, as a cash crop. If so, an ethical person would not want to endorse such behavior nor further it, by paying the hefty admission fee ($27.50 per person in Seattle).

This is a legitimate, but weak objection because it is based on a whole set of presumptions about how the bodies were acquired. We simply do not know the facts. Furthermore the bodies did not appear to be traumatized (e.g., no gunshot wounds to the head or broken bones). It is a little odd that they are so young (I would guess 25 to 50) and apparently were in rude health, suggesting they did not die of a wasting disease or violence. But again, we just don’t know how they died and we have nothing to back up the mere suspicion of foul play. I admit it would have been better to have signed medical donation consent forms on public view.

Remaining Photos: Karen Ducey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The second objection is cultural. In some cultures traditional people believe that a person’s soul is disturbed if the bodily remains are disturbed. I don’t know if that is true of traditional Chinese culture, but let’s assume it is. In that case, it could be considered culturally insensitive to display Chinese bodies in this manner (even though the bodies came from the Chinese government itself).

That is a valid objection, but a weak one, because this exhibit is displayed for a Western, modern, scientifically oriented audience that does not hold similar cultural beliefs about the soul. The organizers of the display are pretty clear what it is all about, and it would seem obvious that if a person felt they would be offended that they should not go to see it. The argument that nobody should see it because somebody might be offended, is weak.

Other objections voiced by protestors are less cogent.

“We don't know their names, or if they mind our stares.”

Not knowing the names of the prior owners of these corpses is not an ethical or legal issue. They obviously represent “the human body,” not named personalities.

We can be sure that the corpses do not mind our stares, because these are dead bodies, not people.

“These people would not have approved of how science is using their bodies.”

We don’t know that. In any case, it doesn’t matter to them now because these are dead bodies, not people.

“The displays desecrate the human body for profit.”

You can desecrate a temple or a holy image. Desecration is the violation of the sacred nature of something. But in modern medical science, the human body is not holy or sacred. It is a biological machine, especially after it is dead. So for a modern, scientifically minded person, this exhibit desecrates nothing.

The fact that the exhibit is a for-profit enterprise is not relevant to anything.

“This treatment of a body condemns the soul to wander the netherworld with no chance to rest.”

That is a particular cultural belief, but not one embraced by the organizers or viewers of this medically oriented exhibit. A person who has such concerns about other people’s souls should not see the exhibit.

"I know I wouldn’t want to be somebody's Saturday entertainment."

There’s nothing to worry about there, because the ‘I’ referred to in that objection would no longer exist, because these are dead bodies, not people. No serious person could believe that socially-aware consciousness would continue to inhabit their dead, plasticized body.

"The display is not honoring the dead and not treating them with dignity.”

It makes sense to honor the memory of the dead, but to a scientifically educated person, it does not make sense to honor a dead body.

As to whether the bodies are treated with dignity, I believe they are. The exhibit is a completely serious educational presentation. There are no profane, vulgar, obscene, or undignified displays in it.

My feeling is that most objections to this exhibit stem from an unacknowledged denial of death. They seem to be based on the idea that somehow, the dead are not really dead, but still alive in some unexplained sense, and even still inhabit their dead, plasticized bodies. That is not a well thought-out basis for objection.

My unanswered question is, how can a modern, educated, rational person deny death in this way? It is utterly perplexing.

References:

Benedetti, W. (2006). Education or freak show? 'Bodies The Exhibition' cashes in on our own curiosity. Seattle P-I, 28 September 2006. (Online at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/lifestyle/286689_bodies28.html )

Graham, K., and Duryea, B. (2005). Who is running man? St. Petersburg Times Tampa Bay, 28 July 2005. (Online at http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/28/Tampabay/Who_is_running_man.shtml)

What is the Meaning of Lens Flare?

2006-12-12T06:37:00.000-08:00

Lens flare is an equipment artifact in photography. Pointing the lens directly at a light source can illuminate hexagonal lens elements within the camera, producing ghost images in the picture. It is actually an error, but it is often used, especially in movies, to mean “really hot,” or “really bright.” It’s common in desert scenes to see the camera swoop past the sun, producing streaks of lens flare. We don’t think, “Oops, they really goofed up there.” Instead, we take it to indicate extremes of temperature and brightness.

With lens flare, we attribute an equipment malfunction to the environment being portrayed. It has acquired a conventional meaning, even though most people have no idea what lens flare is or what causes it. It’s as if you had a crack in your glasses but interpreted it as a fracture in the world. That seems an odd thing to do, but we do it with photography.

What’s amazing is how adept we are at seeing through the technology to the scene represented, yet keeping our awareness of the technology. A movie clip with dancing vertical lines and discolorations means “old piece of film.” We accept that. A shaky camera can mean rough road or first person point of view. A blurry image can mean the character is drugged.

When photography is first introduced to a society, people are amazed and frightened at how the real world is “captured” in an image. But by now, we are so jaded that we incorporate the technology of taking pictures into our understanding of the images. Is there any possible error you could make with a camera that could not be interpreted as part of the meaning of the image? Probably not.

Why is Half the World Missing?

2006-12-03T10:27:00.000-08:00

When I look forward, I cannot see what’s behind me.

I can turn my head but that hides exactly as much as it reveals. Fully one half of the world is hidden from me at every moment! This is alarming!

What hides half the world? Me, myself. Literally, half the world is hidden from me by the fact of my own presence in it. I am my own blind spot. No matter where I look, there is a big hole in the universe that reminds me of my own existence.

I am the invisible one. I see, but I do not see the one who sees.

Why is it that way? If our eyes were on flexible stalks rising above our head, we could see all around, both forward and backward at the same time. For an animal so extremely dependent on vision as we are, that would have been a better design. We got cheated.

Why Do Stealth Aircraft Have Flat Bottoms?

2006-11-27T15:10:00.000-08:00

The flat-bottom design would seem to give a fine reflecting surface to ground based radars, not stealthy at all. The ventral surface is no doubt coated with radar-absorbing material, but that couldn’t be adequate or else they would have made the plane aerodynamic and just coated it all. Seems to me this design would only deflect radar originating from angles above the aircraft. But most radars are below.

Or, if you were coming straight in, head-on at the radar, you would be invisible, but that seems like a highly specialized mission, hardly worth a billion dollar aircraft.

For just flying over a ground based radar, it seems like you would show up like a giant Frisbee.

(And, on a related note, a stealth aircraft could not have its own radar, because invisibility makes you blind. See an earlier post on that thought).

Well, apparently, stealth design does work, but I can't see how.

What Ever Happened To White Wall Tires?

2006-11-11T12:28:00.000-08:00

I always liked white walls. Why don't we see them any more? Was there something wrong with them?

(Pic from wikipedia)

Would Invisibility Make You Blind?

2006-11-05T08:43:00.000-08:00

We see a thing by detecting light reflected from it. Three components are necessary to see something: 1. A light source. 2. A reflective object. 3. A receptive retina.

There are several obvious ways to make something invisible. Method one: turn off the lights. If no light is reflected from an object, you can’t see it. When it’s completely dark, all objects are invisible.

Method two: close your eyes. If the light reflected from objects does not reach your retinas, the objects are invisible.

Method three: put a box over the object. You would see the box, but you wouldn’t see the object because no light would be reflected from it. It would be invisible.

But now there is a new method four. Scientists at Duke University, the Imperial College London, and the SensorMetrix company in San Diego have created a device that reduces an object’s reflectivity and shadow. It diverts the light rays around the object so they do not reflect off it. If it reflects no light, you can’t see it. (Associated Press, 10/19/06) (Diagrams from MSNBC)

(Actually, the device only works in 2 dimensions, not three, and it diverts microwaves, not visible light waves, but it is a demonstration of the feasibility of the concept).

How is this device different from putting a box over the object, which also prevents it from reflecting light? It differs in that you would not see the object or the box. You would just see the background behind the object as if it were not there.

In principle, you could touch the object and feel that it was there, but you couldn’t see it because no light would be reflected from it.

Microwaves bent by the concentric walls of this 1-centimeter-thick invisibility device circumvent the center area and emerge on their original paths as if nothing had been in the way. The copper hoop that was cloaked in the tests isn't pictured. Picture from Science News, Oct. 21, 2006; Vol. 170, No. 17 , p. 261.

Now what if I were the hidden object at the center of the device? I could be standing right in front of you and you wouldn’t be able to see me. But I couldn’t see you either! Any light reflected from you toward me would be diverted around me by the cloaking device and would never reach me. So I would see nothing.

I would be functionally blind. I could hold my hand in front of my face but I couldn’t see it because I need incident light to see things and there wouldn’t be any. For me, it would be like being in a totally pitch-black room. So invisibility makes you blind.

But what if I had a small flashlight with me? I could shine that on my hand, which would reflect the light and I could see my hand. I could read a book if I wanted. It would be like turning on the lights in my room.

If I shined my flashlight outward toward you, you would not see me, but only a strange bright spot in the background behind me.

If I shined the light onto myself, you would be able to see me, at least the parts of me illuminated by my flashlight. But I would seem to be a ghost, not properly connected to the background, because I would be illuminated by a different light source than the ambient incident light that was being diverted around me. Maybe it would look like stage lighting. And my eyes would appear as two black holes, because where they absorbed the light shining on me, none would be reflected back to you.

But I still couldn’t see you. I could only see the parts of my body illuminated by the light. No other reflected light would reach me. I would still be blind to the world.

So as far as the Harry Potter invisibility cloak goes, it wouldn’t be practical because its wearer would be functionally blind, although if his head stuck up out of the cloak, he could see while his body remained invisible, to himself and to others. That probably wouldn’t be very practical either. If you couldn’t see your own body, you probably would have trouble walking or moving about for any length of time. It would be like walking while looking up at the sky. You would soon bump into something or fall down, I think.

How Do Maps Work?

2006-10-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

I was lost in a shopping mall so I found a directory map and there was a big red circle on it labeled, "You Are Here." But what did that mean? I was not even touching the map. Now, if the big dot were on the floor and I was standing on it, it would make sense for the dot to say, You Are Here. But that wouldn't be helpful.

From what point of view was I “here” at the red dot on the map? Somebody who had an impossible view of a transparent mall from a blimp overhead, might be able to identify my spatial location in relation to the shops and corridors around me, and they could take a picture and put a dot on the image and say, "He is here." But that wouldn’t help me.

A map is a view from nowhere. How does one take a view from nowhere when each of us is always somewhere?

A map that includes a representation of its viewer is a paradox, and yet you must have an idea of where you are on a map in order to read it. But you can't be represented on the map and the viewer of the map at the same time.

I don't understand how maps work.

What Could This Mean?

2006-10-08T10:49:00.000-07:00

Here is an actual sentence from an article I did not finish reading:

"In this context of political defeat and disillusion with the possibilities of subjective action, structuralism, with its discovery of a Platonic world of mental phenomena conceived on the model of Saussurrean langue, immune from material determination, historical forces, or the effects of social activity, and equally insulated from the illusions of subjectivity, transmuted the political alienation of a generation into the appearance of an apolitical, scientific approach capable of penetrating levels of humane psychological and cultural reality inaccessible to either traditional Marxism or Sartrian phenomenology."

-- Terence Turner, Bodies and Anti-Bodies, in Csordas, T.J. (Ed.) Embodiment and Experience: The existential ground of culture and self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 32-33.

Why is it so much easier to destroy than to create?

2006-10-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

You drop a serving tray full of dinner on the floor and it is ruined. The whole thing takes maybe 2 seconds. Yet it might have taken hours to prepare the meal and who knows how long it takes to make a dish.

You can destroy a person's reputation in a few days, but it takes years to build a reputation.

Your house, that took months to build and perhaps years to furnish with your stuff, can burn to ashes in an hour.

You can kill a person with one bullet in one second, even though it took that person their whole life to become that person.

The asymmetry in effort between creation and destruction doesn't seem reasonable. Why is it that way?

Could I See With My Tongue?

2006-09-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

I saw a show on TV about an artificial retina. A tiny computer chip contained

photocells whose electrical signals stimulated the optic nerve. The blind guy could "see" light patches projected on a wall, could locate them in space, and could discriminate vertical and horizontal orientation.

What was he seeing? Electrical signals? His own brain? Surely not light, because he was blind. But he said patches of light.

What if, in the middle of the experiment, all the lights in the room were cut, leaving a totally dark room, but the computer continued to trigger the same patterns of electrical signals to the optic nerve as before. The guy should continue to see rectangles of white light, just as described before. But there would be no light in the pitch-black room. So would he be wrong in saying that he saw patches of light?

What does it mean to "see" something if no actual light is involved? If seeing only means that a certain area of the brain is active, then if I routed electrical signals from my tongue to the visual area of my brain, I should be able to see light when I suck a lemon. It's logical, but I'm not sure if I believe it.

Do Funnels Take Up More Space Than They Should?

2006-09-16T17:03:00.000-07:00

A funnel is difficult to store, whether you put it in a drawer or hang it on a wall. It seems to take up way more space than it should. Nothing else stacks or packs well with it, not even other funnels of the same size. A funnel is an odd shape, and it is difficult to estimate visually how much space it needs. Why is that? It seems somehow related to its function.