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12/16/10
12/14/10
Know Thyself and Theodore Dalrymple
On the one hand we have some people seeing advances in understanding the brain, mind, and consciousness as holding marvelous possibilities for humankind. On the other, we have those who believe that like all holy grails here is merely hope for one more. Theodore Dalrymple attended a neuropsychiatric conference and listened to smart, brilliant people, and came away with his own ideas about the future of the science of consciousness.
"Neuroscience, it seems to me, is the current most hopeful candidate for the role of putative but delusory answer to all Mankind's deepest questions: what is Man's place in Nature, and how should he live. What is the good life, at least in the western world?" Elsewhere he writes, " But even the most advanced societies are just as full of angst, or poor impulse control, of existential bewilderment, of adherence to clearly irrational doctrines, as ever they were. There is no sign that, Prozac and neurosurgery notwithstanding, any of this is about to change fundamentally."
In thinking about the conference, Dalrymple remembered patients who asked him why they drank so much. Dalrymple spoke to them of statistical correlations between the price of alcohol and the frequency of consumption. This did not satisfy a patient as to why he or she drank.
Dalrymple: "The fact is that, however many factors you examine, you cannot fully explain behaviour, not even relatively simple behaviour. And if you cannot explain relatively simple behaviour, how are we to explain the immense, indeed infinite, variety of human behaviour?"
I recognize that I am jumping from behavior to consciousness, but I believe the corrolary is revealing. In reading Dalrymple I was reminded of a statement by John Haught mentioned in one of my earlier posts. Haught said of Daniel Dennett's theory of consciousness that it was only one way to understand. Haught pointed out three ways of looking at a pot of water being heated for tea. (1) Electrons in the water are moving around, becoming increasingly excited or that H2O molecules are transitioning from a liquid to a gaseous state. (2) I turned on the gas burner under the pot. (3) I wanted tea. Dennett's philosophy of consciousness is the kind that belongs to number one, yet there are three points of view for the same phenomenon.
Dalrymple does not speak of three options, but observes that explaining behavior is manifestly complicated. More.
12/2/10
Barry Schwartz: The Paradox of Choice
Through the ages philosophers have posed the possibility of paradox in free choice. What has been called free will has certainly continued to puzzle generation after generation. Barry Schwartz has something to say on the subject.
11/18/10
11/11/10
The Stray Dogs of Moscow
Romanova was arrested, tried and underwent a year of psychiatric treatment. Typically for Russia, this horror story was countered by a wellspring of sympathy for Moscow’s strays. A bronze statue of Malchik, paid for by donations, now stands at the entrance of Mendeleyevskaya station. It has become a symbol for the 35,000 stray dogs that roam Russia’s capital." More
To see a photo album of Moscow's stray dogs, click here.
11/9/10
Free will not an illusion after all
In 1983, neuroscientist Benjamin Libet asked volunteers wearing scalp electrodes to flex a finger or wrist. When they did, the movements were preceded by a dip in the signals being recorded, called the "readiness potential". Libet interpreted this RP as the brain preparing for movement.
Crucially, the RP came a few tenths of a second before the volunteers said they had decided to move. Libet concluded that unconscious neural processes determine our actions before we are ever aware of making a decision (Brain, vol 106, p 623).
Since then, others have quoted the experiment as evidence that free will is an illusion - a conclusion that was always controversial, particularly as there is no proof the RP represents a decision to move." More (Requires a subscription)
A synopsis of the full article:
Jeff Miller and Judy Trevena of the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, experimented to determine what prompts the Readiness Potential (RP).
Like Libet, they used scalp electrodes, but with a difference. Volunteers did not decide when to move. Miller and Trevena had them wait for an audio tone. Upon hearing it they could decide whether or not to tap a key.
Given Libet's view of the RP, Miller and Trevena held that it should be greater after the volunteer chose to tap the key.
What did they find out? The RP was the same, both before and after the decision to move. For that reason, they posit that the RP may merely be a sign that the brain is paying attention and does not indicate that a decision has been made.
What about Libet's view that decision-making is subconscious? In a second experiment, they failed to find evidence for it. In this experiment, volunteers pressed a key after the tone, but had to decide whether to use their left or right hand.
This is revealing because movement in the right limbs relates to left hemisphere brain signals; the left side, to the right. If an unconscious process is driving this decision, brain location should depend on choice of hand. Choice did not correlate.
The findings do not refute Libet's experiments but they do undermine them.The original experiments by Benjamin Libet can be read about in Mind Shadows here.
11/4/10
IQ & Mass Media
Google, rock videos, and the Web will no more make you stupid and shallow than propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap will make you smart and deep, argues Steven Pinker.
"New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers’ brainpower and moral fiber.
So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we’re told, is reducing discourse to bullet points." More
11/2/10
The Power Of Negative Thinking
Was Norman Vincent Peale right? "Is there power in positive thinking? A study just published in the journal Psychological Science says trying to get people to think more positively can actually have the opposite effect: it can simply highlight how unhappy they are."
An experiment "provides support for newer forms of psychotherapy that urge people to accept their negative thoughts and feelings rather than try to reject and fight them. In the fighting, we not only often fail but can also make things worse. Mindfulness and meditation techniques, in contrast, can teach people to put their shortcomings into a larger, more realistic perspective. Call it the power of negative thinking." More
Also see Mind Shadows "Barbara Ehrenreich, Positive Thinking, & Smiley Faces Like Tony Robbins & Joel Osteen."
10/28/10
Afro-American Germans' Search For Identity
Rudi Richardson knew something about what it meant to be a black man in the United States. But after being deported to Germany, the country where he was born, shortly before his 47th birthday, he had to start figuring out what it meant to be black and German -- in a land he barely remembered and whose language he didn't speak.
He started life as Udo Ackermann, born in a Bavarian women's prison in 1955. His mother, a Jewish woman named Liesolette, was serving a prison term for prostitution. His father, whom he never met, was an African-American serviceman named George. Rudi was given up for adoption.Like thousands of other postwar children with black GI fathers and white German mothers, Richardson was raised by an African-American military family in the US. He has spent his life trying to find where he fits in. More
10/21/10
Douglas Hofstadter on his book I Am A Strange Loop
Here is an interview with Douglas Hofstadter on his book I Am A Strange Loop. (See sidebar, this page.) He makes comments on the soul that are relevant to the post, "Weighing The Soul," just below this one. The interview is translated from the Hebrew in the magazine Haayal Hakore.
Interviewer: You use the word “soul”, rather than consciousness. While you clearly qualified the term to remove any religious connotations, avoiding such connotations is not really possible; “soul” is a very loaded symbol in this respect. Why did you choose to use it, and not, for example, “mind” or “consciousness” or any of several other, less-loaded alternatives?
Hofstadter: I used the word “soul” because, out of all the various words that one might use — “consciousness”, “intentionality”, “mind”, and so forth — it is the one that I think most evocatively suggests the deep mystery of first-person existence that any philosophically inclined person must wonder about many times during their life. But I think that the first-person pronoun “I” is just as evocative a word for the same thing. I could also have used the word “spirit”, I guess, but that, too, would have seemed loaded with religious flavor to many readers.
The point is, whenever one talks about what life is, from the inside, one gets very close to what religion itself is all about. It therefore shouldn't be too big a surprise that I appropriated a religion-flavored word to talk about a deep mystery that is so close to the very core of religion.
Interviewer: You present a compelling argument for the notion of a soul surviving its physical body by being spread across multiple brains; the more a person is familiar to others, the better his soul is “present” in their brain, too. How will you respond to the claim that the “presence” of one soul in another soul's brain is merely a simulation mechanism, developed by the evolution process as a means to improve survival? (Being able to predict what members of your clan are about to do can certainly be a powerful survival tool.)
Hofstadter: My argument in I Am a Strange Loop is spelled out clearly. If a person's soul is truly a pattern, then it can be realized in different media. Wherever that pattern exists in a sufficiently fine-grained way, then it is, by my definition, the soul itself and not some kind of “mere simulation” of it.
“Mere simulation” is a phrase that sounds suspiciously like John Searle when he is contemptuously deriding AI in his usual flippant fashion. However, as I see it, there is no black-and-white dividing line between “mere simulations” of a complex entity and full realizations of it — there are just lots and lots of shades of gray all along the way. This spectrum is pointed out in many places in my books, including the three marvelous short stories by Stanislaw Lem included in The Mind's I.
Interviewer: Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil (The Singularity Is Near) presents a different take at immortality, a more physical one. Like you, Kurzweil views the soul as “software” that can be executed on different “hardware”. He further believes that in a relatively short while, we will have electronic hardware which is the equivalent of the human brain (which you eloquently characterize as a “universal machine”, capable as “executing” any “soul software”). Once such hardware is available, Kurzweil believes immortality would have been reached: by “downloading” our soul-software onto electronic brains (“Giant Electronic Brains”?), we will become immortals, able to create backups of our souls to be restored in case of disaster, and able to shift our physical location anywhere in the speed of a software download.
Do you share Kurzweil's view of hardware being able to execute human soul software within the foreseeable future? Do you agree with his view of this being the equivalent of immortality — will the software running on the electronic brain be the same “I”?
Hofstadter: I think Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil's desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity. More of the translation at Tal Cohen's site.
10/19/10
Weighing The Soul
But make no mistake, our students are very interested in the soul. More
10/14/10
Life, the Universe, and Everything, Including The Meaning of Life
The Meaning of Life, by Terry Eagleton
In Douglas Adams' The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy, super, pan-dimensional beings pose a problem to the computer Deep Thought. It is to calculate the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. Deep Thought goes to work. 7 and 1/2 million years later it finally provides an answer: 42.*
42?
This leaves the beings puzzled. Not to worry, though, Deep Thought predicts that another, more powerful computer would eventually be made and it would calculate the question for the answer.
Terry Eagleton's title, The Meaning of Life suggests the antics of Douglas Adams' imagination, but the book itself is a very good and serious read.
In Elizabethan times, Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be or not to be," was not just a question posed by the Prince of Denmark, but when answered, one which would have application to everybody, not just Hamlet. In our postmodern world, if I ask the same question it is my business and not yours. In Eagleton's book, this is not an issue easily dismissed. Here is one review of his book.
* When asked about his choice of numbers, Adams said of 42, it is "A completely ordinary number, a number not just divisible by two but also six and seven. In fact it's the sort of number that you could, without any fear, introduce to your parents."
10/12/10
Does High Culture Humanize Us?
"To walk through Dresden’s museums, and past the young buskers fiddling Mozart on street corners, is to wonder whether this age-old question may have things backward. It presumes that we’re passive receivers acted on by the arts, which vouchsafe our salvation, moral and otherwise, so long as we remain in their presence. Arts promoters nowadays like to trumpet how culture helps business and tourism; how teaching painting and music in schools boosts test scores. They try to assign practical ends, dollar values and other hard numbers, never mind how dubious, to quantify what’s ultimately unquantifiable.
The lesson of Dresden, which this great city unfortunately seems doomed to repeat, is that culture is, to the contrary, impractical and fragile, helpless even." More
10/7/10
The Final Days of Charles Sanders Peirce
One morning in late December 1906, Henry Alsburg was called by his landlady in Prescott Hall at 471 Broadway in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She wanted Alsburg "to come into one of the rooms to see an old gentleman, who had been ill and was very likely dying."
Entering the room, Alsburg found a sick man, suffering from malnutrition, his body worn out. Asked his name, the man answered "Charles Peirce."
Without enough money to buy food, Peirce was the same man of whom Bertrand Russell later said, "Beyond doubt . . . he was one of the most original minds of the later nineteenth century, and certainly the greatest American thinker ever."
Today there are university research centers devoted to Peirce studies and pragmatism in Brazil, Finland, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. His writings have been translated into several languages, including German, French, Finnish, Spanish, and Swedish.
Peirce was a brilliant man, acknowledged as the brightest of the bright even in his day. A logician, he pioneered the modern study, Semiotics--the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols.
Henry Alsburg--who found Peirce ill and dying--studied under William James, the first of the modern psychologists. Alsburg quickly told James about Peirce, whom James had held as a friend. Hearing about the man, James said, "Why, I owe him everything!" He and Alsburg left the Harvard campus, climbing into a cab to take Peirce home to James' house.*
Peirce spent much of his last two decades unable to afford heat in winter, and living on stale bread given him by the neighborhood baker. Unable to afford new stationery, he wrote on the blank side of his old manuscripts. An outstanding warrant for assault and unpaid debts led to his being a fugitive in New York City for a while. His debts were settled and his property taxes as well as mortgage were paid by his brother James Mills Peirce and his neighbors, relatives of Gifford Pinchot (chief of the US Forest Service under Theodore Roosevelt).
As an example of Peirce's mind, there is this: In his "F.R.L." [First Rule of Logic] (1899), Peirce states that the first, and "in one sense, this sole" rule of reason is that, in order to learn, one needs to desire to learn and desire it without resting satisfied with that which one is inclined to think.
So the first rule is to wonder.
Without steady income, he wrote for money in Popular Science Monthly Number 12 (November 1877), an essay titled "The Fixation of Belief." It can be read here.
*(William James In The Maelstrom of American Modernism, Richard Robertson, Houghton Mifflin 2007, p. 137)
10/5/10
Internet addiction: A New Category of Mental Disorder
The next volume of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the psychology bible, will include a new category that addresses people addicted to the internet without even knowing it. "Internet addiction sounds like a punch line. But it ruined my brother's life. . . . [He] sleeps in a roomy tent, atop three mattresses he's acquired from one place or another, between a set of railroad tracks and Oregon State Highway 99, in a clearing ringed by blackberry bushes. He lives most days the same way. He gets up when he feels like it, walks to the local grocery outlet, and uses food stamps to buy a microwaveable meal. Then he treks over to the local soup kitchen and enjoys a free lunch, answering the greetings of his other homeless pals, who speak to me highly of the obese, bearded man they call 'Ace.'
When the rest of his buddies head off to the park to suck down malt liquor or puff weed, Andrew eyes a different fix at the Oregon State University computer lab, which is open to the public. He'll spend the next 10 hours or so there, eyes focused on a computer screen, pausing only to heat up that microwaved meal." More
9/30/10
Spooky Action At A Distance & Reinhold Bertlmann's Socks
9/28/10
I Think, Therefore I Write
In the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, an almost totally paralyzed patient dictates his memories to his therapist using the only means of communication he has left: blinking. Soon, an eyelid will not be needed.
DIZ SENTENS IS WRUTEN WID TAUGHTS. Or, this sentence is written with thoughts. Thoughts can now write sentences, a huge help for the paralyzed or armless. Though it is misspelled, soon your thoughts will be able to form correctly spelled sentences.
Consider it again. DIZ SENTENS IS WRUTEN WID TAUGHTS: "that little sentence is like a little miracle. The old dream of mind-reading is slowly becoming reality -- though this time around it is the product of machines rather than the minds of fiction writers."
"The advances are tremendous," says Christoph Guger, the developer of a brain-reading system. "In the past, you would have had to train for days. Today, entering text takes only a few minutes."
"Guger is an engineer and a businessman. But with his hair falling past his jacket's collar, he looks the part of a start-up entrepreneur. Still, he is certainly not new to the business."
Niels Birbaumer "has been trying to teach people with physical handicaps to control their wheelchairs or prosthetic limbs using only the power of thought."
"But what happens if the day comes when we actually are able to drive cars -- or even fly fighter jets -- using our thoughts alone? The US Department of Defense finds this vision so promising that it has already invested $4 million (€2.8 million) to develop a certain kind of telepathy. The goal of the project -- dubbed 'Silent Talk' -- is to enable soldiers to communicate with each other 'on the battlefield without the use of vocalized speech through analyis of neural signals'." More
9/7/10
I'm Away
8/31/10
Once More: The Hard Problem of Consciousness Revisited (My Brain Is Starting To Hurt. Or, Is It MY Brain?)
Causal closure is what it's all about. How can a cause, brain matter, produce consciousness as some kind of physical phenomenon? How is my delight in the exquisite beauty of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata a physical phenomenon? How can you explain as physical phenomena what it feels like to be you? How is all that a physical effect from a physical cause, which philosophically would be physical monism? If we don't accept monism we are thrown back to dualism with its two things, some kind of (1) ghost in this (2) machine we call the body.
Put it differently and in grammatic conjugation: How do we get from the first person, "I," and how I live my life to the third person, where all is an object related to me, including my consciousness? How does this sense of being me get rendered so that it can be discussed in the third person? Can it ever be rendered thus?
For some time I have believed that the way out of this problem is to view the world as also containing consciousness. One way to think about it is this: Just as some quantum phenomena are up quarks or down quarks, or photon particles, so others could be consciousness phenomena.
As conjecture, this is not a great leap. We find that non-locality operates at the quantum level. That is, across great distances, photons, for example, can "talk" to one another so they change polarity as they speed toward a target. This is what Einstein would call "spooky action at a distance" but this quantum entanglement is nonetheless a proven case. So, too, perhaps, this is the case with consciousness as non-local. I find that Galen Strawson has a view that would be sympathetic to mine. Read on.
"The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?
Until quite recently, there were two main schools of thought on this. According to one, the hard problem is actually very easy: the answer is that consciousness ‘emerges’ from neural processes. This succeeds in replacing ‘what is consciousness and how is it possible?’ with ‘what is emergence and how is it possible?’ But it doesn’t seem to get much further; many find it less than satisfactory. According to the other view, the hard problem is so hard that it can’t be real: consciousness must be some sort of illusion. Many of this persuasion tried hard to convince themselves that they are, in fact, not conscious, but few of them succeeded. Centuries ago, Descartes suggested, plausibly, that the attempt is self-defeating.
There is, I should add, another way to respond to the hard problem. One might hold that the world isn’t made entirely of matter after all; there is also a fundamentally different kind of stuff – mind-stuff, call it – and consciousness resides in that. Notoriously, however, this view has hard problems of its own." More
8/26/10
Theodore Dalrymple: And So, Why Do You Behave Like That?
Of course, there was also the Steady State Theory of the universe's origin. Then along came the Big Bang. Way back when, there was the ether. A brainy Swiss patent-office examiner put that one to rest. What else? The patent-office examiner said God does not play dice with the universe, but quantum physics revealed that apparently He does. With breakthroughs in quantum physics, humankind was headed for brave new horizons. Then that cussed wave form collapse could not be understood and Heisenberg had to formulate his Uncertainty Principle. More recently, we have string theory, which presently is hanging by a thread for many.
Ah, but don't despair. A bold new group of men and women has emerged. They are highly confident they will find the answer about consciousness. Trumpet fanfare and drum roll, please. Enter: neuroscientists and neurophilosophers who will explain why you feel like you.
Theodore Dalrymple sees this kind of confidence as more than bothersome. Consider the issues of free will, the self, the soul, and human nature. Neuroscience and neurophilosophy have staked out the turf on these topics, and certainly it is turf that will unsettle the public mind, undermine the common weal. Some of the findings will have profound and unsettling implications for individuals and societies, in part because of public misconceptions, in part because researchers make arrogant claims without concern for religious as well as ethical and moral implications for societies and people. If neuroscience teaches us anything, it is that human beings are not ruled by reason.
Dalrymple attended a neuroscience conference and found great optimism toward unraveling the mysteries of consciousness and the brain. He does not seem especially impressed. More
8/24/10
Zen Buddhism At War
In WWII for the Japanese war effort, Zen Buddhists of the Soto sect raised money for two fighter planes. The Rinzai sect raised money for three. As well, Kanzeon, bodhisattva of compassion, was renamed Kanzeon Shogun, rather like Jesus General, an oxymoron.
A reading of D.T. Suzuki--the man generally acknowledged as introducing Zen to the West--reveals that Zen has no clear moral position. Suzuki says that Japanese Zen teaches its practitioners to merge with circumstances and be loyal. Hence, if you are governed by Tojo, Mussolini, or Franco, be a good fascist and make bullets, but don't make waves.
Quite simply, for all the vaunted emphasis on compassion of Eastern teachings, you must enter Zen (or any meditative religion) with your own moral compass accurately calibrated. More.
8/19/10
Steven Pinker on Moral Progress
Critics have scoffed at atheism evangelist Richard Dawkins for his belief that humankind has made moral progress over the centuries. Dawkins, of course, uses his contention to argue that religion is not needed to control moral behavior. (For Naysayers to Dawkins, see my 11 June 2009 post.)
Roger Scruton allows that while institutions are no longer medieval and, indeed, have progressed, human beings have not. Their institutions hold them in check. Just read the news to find daily examples, either among individuals or with countries, of cruelty and violence. He cautions us against looking on the bright side, saying it can be a dangerous tendency. More. In short, Scruton would have a lively "discussion" with Dawkins and Pinker.
Critics of Dawkins and Pinker could cite Auschwitz, Buchenwald, the Armenian Massacre, Stalin's Ukraine Famine,Darfur, East Timor, Idi Amin and Uganda, and on and on. I would add the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, of Uganda, which has no agenda--certainly not religion--and serves only its own barbaric appetites, such as kidnapping school girls, raping them, and turning them into prostitutes. One girl refused a commander, and he ordered other children to bash her head in. The girl's sister was forced to participate. Atrocities such as this leave me shuddering, and I know that for some children life is a vale of tears. They are not part of any statistics for moral progress.
For all that, statistics seem to bear out Dawkins' argument, though I would add, not support his atheism. (Atheism, like theism, comes about by a leap of faith, not through numbers.) Steven Pinker has entered the fray, and argues that human violence has indeed declined and, of course, Pinker has no need of religion to explain it.
What causes people to think our times are so horrific? Well, the Associated Press, Cognitive Illusion, and rising expectations, among other factors. More
8/17/10
Macular Degeneration & A Ray of Hope
There is hope for some people like him. Consider this: "Partially sighted and registered blind people can be taught to read and see faces again using the undamaged parts of their eyes, say experts.
When only the central vision is lost, as with the leading cause of blindness, age-related macular degeneration, peripheral vision remains intact.
And patients can be taught to exploit this, the Macular Disease Society says." More
8/12/10
A Hiccup of Gross Irrationality?
Some researchers "are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start." More
8/10/10
Do Animals Commit Suicide?
' The suicide was what turned me around,' says O'Barry. ' The [animal entertainment] industry doesn't want people to think dolphins are capable of suicide, but these are self-aware creatures with a brain larger than a human brain. If life becomes so unbearable, they just don't take the next breath. It's suicide.'
Animal suicide may seem absurd, yet the concept is as old as philosophy. Aristotle told a story about a stallion that leaped into an abyss after realizing it was duped into mating with its mother, and the topic was discussed by early Christian theologians and Victorian academics. . . .
The Romans saw animal suicide as both natural and noble; an animal they commonly reported as suicidal was one they respected, the horse. . . .
In 1845 the Illustrated London News reported on a Newfoundland who had repeatedly tried to drown himself: ' The animal appeared to get exhausted, and by dint of keeping his head determinedly under water for a few minutes, succeeded at last in obtaining his object, for when taken out this time he was indeed dead.' . . . " More
8/5/10
The Psychopaths Among Us
Are they psychopathic because of nature or nurture, genes or environment? The answer is uncertain, but they are almost impossible to treat because they believe the problem is with others, not themselves. They think they have no psychological or emotional problems. Not all psychopaths are criminals and not all criminals are psychopaths. Chances are good that you have met one or will some day. Beware. A checklist for the personality type would include these: glibness, grandiosity, lack of guilt, and shallow emotions, as well as social deviance traits such as impulsiveness, lack of responsibility, and antisocial behavior. More
8/3/10
Elyn Saks, Schizophrenia, & High Accomplishment
"Elyn Saks is a law professor at the University of Southern California, a Marshall scholar, and a graduate of Yale Law School. She also suffers from schizophrenia -- an illness that many would assume makes her impressive resume an impossibility. In 2007, she published an acclaimed memoir of her struggle with the disease, 'The Center Cannot Hold'. Her book is a frank and moving portrait of the experience of schizophrenia, but also a call for higher expectations -- a plea that we allow people with schizophrenia to find their own limits. "
Of her condition, she says this, "At one end of the spectrum, I will have transient crazy thoughts (e.g. I have killed people) which I immediately identify as symptoms of my illness and not real. A little further along the spectrum, I may have three or four days of being dominated by crazy thoughts that I can’t push away. And at the far end I am crouching in a corner shaking and moaning."
Despite all that, she attended graduate school at Oxford and has a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant. More
7/29/10
V.S. Ramachandran: Consciousness, Qualia, & Self
Some of his talking points:
- What is consciousness? He and his colleagues want to understand the logic of consciousness. There are two important problems regarding it:
- One is qualia. Francis Crick and Kristof Koch championed the view that it is sensations you're conscious of. (My opinion: this seems tautological. The hard problem of consciousness is to explain in the third person what we all experience in the first person.)
- The qualia problem: You cannot communicate your experience of green to anybody else.
- The second problem is that of self. Not only do you experience qualia but you know that you experience qualia and you know that you know that you experience qualia.
- There is no such thing as a free-floating qualia without a self and there is no such thing as a self without a qualia.
- Ramachandran: The two co-evolved in evolution and are intimately linked to language. Self and qualia are two sides of a Möbius strip.
7/27/10
Barbara Ehrenreich, Positive Thinking, & Smiley Faces Like Tony Robbins & Joel Osteen
In her new book, Bright-Sided, Ehrenreich explores the negative effects of positive thinking, and the "reckless optimism" that dominates America's national mindset.
"We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles," Ehrenreich writes, "both of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking." More
6/29/10
I'm Away
6/24/10
Rom Houben Misdiagnosed as In A Persistent Vegetative State
He described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.
"I screamed, but there was nothing to hear," said Mr Houben, now 46, who doctors thought was in a persistent vegetative state.
"I dreamed myself away,' he added, tapping his tale out with the aid of a computer.
Twenty years ago, Carrie Coons, an 86-year-old from New York, regained consciousness after a year, took small amounts of food by mouth and engaged in conversation.
Only days before her recovery, a judge had granted her family's request for the removal of the feeding tube which had been keeping her alive. More
6/22/10
Darwin in Turkey
It was only a matter of time. Creationism and Intelligent Design have come to Islam via The United States.
"Sema Ergezen teaches biology to Turkish students interested in teaching science themselves, and she has long struggled with her students' ignorance of, and sometimes hostility to, the notion of evolution.
But she was taken aback when several of her Marmara University students recently accused her of being an atheist, or worse, for teaching anything but the doctrine that God created the Earth and everything on it.
"They said I was a liar if I called myself a Muslim because I also accepted evolution," she said.
What especially disturbed -- and amused -- the veteran professor was that the arguments for creationism presented by some of the students came directly from the country where she was educated in the biological sciences years before -- the United States. Translated and adapted for a Muslim society, the purported proofs that Darwinism and evolution were wrong came directly from American proponents of Christian creationism and its less overtly religious offshoot, intelligent design." More
6/17/10
The Third Man Factor
Charles Lindbergh heard the Third Man on his 1928 transAtlantic flight, New York to Paris. James Sevigny heard the Third Man when he was tumbled two thousand feet by an avalanche, his back broken. "Most of the people who've encountered the Third Man aren't mystics," says John Geiger, "a senior fellow at the University of Toronto and governor of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society." A NASA astronaut heard him, as well as explorer Ernest Shackleton, who coined the "Third Man" term. They have been religious as well as atheists.
Ron "DiFrancesco was working in the World Trade Center's south tower on September 11 when the building was hit by a hijacked plane. He was trapped on the 91st floor of the 110-story building, gasping for air as the smoke and flames closed in.
He was about to pass out when he sensed someone near him. Then he heard a male voice. He says it told him to get up, and it guided him through a maze of hazards to safety.
DiFrancesco was the last person to get out of the south tower before it fell. . . ."
Not religious, Sevigny says "If it wasn't for the Third Man, I would be dead". . . . "There's no way that I would have the strength to get up and walk across that valley and do the things I did to survive." More
John Geiger, The Third Man Factor
6/15/10
The Peril of Positive Thinking
Don't like the news because it's always glum? Well, quit thinking the glass is half empty. Hey, it's half full, chum, and it's going to get fuller. Somebody will come along and top it off for you. Just don't ask me who. As for the news, you can always change your attitude toward events by getting your daily dose of Happy News.
"Ever since psychologist Martin Seligman crafted the phrase 'learned optimism' in 1991 and started offering optimism training, there's been a thriving industry in the kind of thought reform that supposedly overcomes negative thinking. You can buy any number of books and DVDs with titles like Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude, in which you will learn mental exercises to reprogram your outlook from gray to the rosiest pink: 'affirmations,' for example, in which you repeat upbeat predictions over and over to yourself; 'visualizations' in which you post on your bathroom mirror pictures of that car or boat you want; 'disputations' to refute any stray negative thoughts that may come along. If money is no object, you can undergo a three-month 'happiness makeover' from a life coach or invest $3,575 for three days of 'optimism training' on a Good Mood Safari on the coast of New South Wales."
What more could you want? Hmmm, let's see--maybe a dose of reality.
"What makes you think unsullied optimism is such a good idea? Americans have long prided themselves on being positive and optimistic — traits that reached a manic zenith in the early years of this millennium. Iraq would be a cakewalk! The Dow would reach 36,000! Housing prices could never decline! Optimism was not only patriotic but was also a Christian virtue, or so we learned from the proliferating preachers of the 'prosperity gospel,' whose God wants to 'prosper' you. In 2006, the runaway bestseller The Secret promised that you could have anything you wanted, anything at all, simply by using your mental powers to 'attract' it. The poor listened to upbeat preachers like Joel Osteen and took out subprime mortgages. The rich paid for seminars led by motivational speakers like Tony Robbins and repackaged those mortgages into securities sold around the world." More from Barbara Ehrenreich
6/10/10
Bobby Fischer: Genius & Idiot
"Is it possible for someone to be extremely intelligent and creative in a certain field and at the same time, in other respects, to be simple minded? The answer is yes.
Consider Isaac Newton. He was certainly a genius in the fields of mathematics and physics. On the other hand he devoted most of his life to studying the prophecies of the Bible, calculating the year in which God created the entire universe in six days, and determining the probable year that Jesus would return!
Consider Arthur Conan Doyle. He was a brilliant writer, creator of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, yet he firmly believed in the reality of fairies. He even wrote an entire book defending the authenticity of several crude photographs of the tiny winged fairies taken by two little girls.
My third example is Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, certainly the best known." More
5/25/10
On God & Morality: Robert Wright & Karen Armstrong
A god whose existence you can prove is a god to whom you cannot pray
Two books here on faith and belief: The Evolution of God by Robert Wright and The Case for God by Karen Armstrong. Wright holds that evolution deselects aggressive genes, enabling an ascent into greater moral order. Seeking an explanation for this morality, human beings posit God. Of Robert Wright's argument on gracilization (thinning of skulls), the reviewer tells us that "in each society the violent and aggressive males somehow ended up with a lesser chance of breeding. This process started some 50,000 years ago, and, in [primatologist Richard] Wrangham's view, it is still in full spate. And setting gracilization aside, can the later scriptures of West Asia--the Jewish and Christian Bibles and the Koran--be read as the record of a process of human domestication, a further taming and gentling of mankind over time? In The Evolution of God, Robert Wright argues laboriously that they can indeed be so read. . . as natural selection begot cultural evolution and cultural evolution begot successively more comprehensive forms of social organization, 'there appeared a moral order, linkage between the growth of social organization and progress toward moral truth. It is this moral order that, to the believer, is grounds for suspecting that the system of evolution by natural selection itself demands a special creative explanation. . . . And if the believer . . . decides to call that source "God," well, that's the believer's business. After all, physicists got to choose the word "electron".' "
Karen Armstrong writes of apophatic theology--the theology of the original, Greek-speaking Christian church. She calls it a "naysaying" theology. As her reviewer puts the matter, the theology was "a kind of religious language whose difficult task it was to acknowledge in human language the very inadequacy of human language.Armstrong writes the history of how apophatic theology was forgotten in the late Middle Ages; how rational and then quasi-scientific Newtonian theology rose to replace it in early modernity; how, when others were recognizing this as a mistake, fundamentalists tightened their embrace of it; and how, in the wake of the passing of modernity and the failure of both its theism and its atheism, postmodern theology may point toward the recovery of what was lost. A god whose existence you can prove is a god to whom you cannot pray, postmodern theology argues, and prayer -- not proof -- is where religion rises or falls." More
5/20/10
Ayn Rand: Bankrupt Intellectually, Morally, & Artistically
"I consider Ayn Rand to be one of the most evil women of the twentieth century, completely morally bankrupt and fortunately unable to see any of her warped philosophy or economic theories gain any credence. If they had, the results would have been every bit as disasterous as Hitler or Stalin. To me, Atlas Shrugged is as despicable and dangerous a book as Mein Kampf." ( Found here.)
Unfortunately, her ideas and theories did gain credence, and in no less a person than Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Chief, once her disciple. More about Greenspan near the bottom of this piece.
Almost all American philosophers do not consider Ayn Rand a philosopher or a thinker worthy of studied attention. You will not find her works taught in philosophy departments, except as examples of thought gone astray. You also won’t find her discussed in any standard works on the history of philosophy — either in general or specifically American philosophy. There may be rare instances to prove an exception, but that's all they are.
She doesn’t appear to be in Grayling’s two volume introduction to philosophy, the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, or Kuklick’s history of American philosophy. Rand’s writing has been routinely dismissed as juvenile and subliterate when it has been considered at all.
By the time she died, at age 77 in 1982, Rand had delineated what she and her followers insisted was the most significant new philosophy since Aristotle (“objectivism,” which emphasized rationality as the defining characteristic of humanity) and was hailed as the godmother of small-government, pro-freedom libertarians (whom she dismissed as “hippies of the right”).
Ayn Rand was a self-declared “radical for capitalism” who praised the “virtue of selfishness” in Atlas Shrugged upon its publication in 1957. This 1,100-page, densely plotted tale, packed in equal measure with descriptions of rough sex and paeans to capitalist innovation, climaxes in a Castro-length radio address in which the protagonist, John Galt, lauds “the man at the top of the intellectual pyramid [who] contributes the most to all those below” and attacks “the man at the bottom who, left to himself, would starve in his hopeless ineptitude.”
She is typically written off as a writer whose basic appeal is to maladjusted adolescents, a sort of vaguely embarrassing starter author who is quickly outgrown by those who develop more sophisticated aesthetic and ideological tastes. There’s more than a small degree of truth to such a characterization.
Yet she has become iconic in some quarters. Alan Greenspan admits to having been a disciple, although he allows that he was grossly wrong about objectivism in that he smiled upon unregulated self-interest, which manipulated the financial markets into creatures such as credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations. Recently Greenspan publicly admitted he was wrong about his views.
Recent books, Ayn Rand and the World She Made and Goddess of the Market provide a rounded portrait of a woman who, as one of the authors writes, “tried to nurture herself exclusively on ideas.” As Rand’s biography underscores, she failed miserably in that.
For more click here, as well as at this site and this one.
5/18/10
The Preachments & Preenings of The New Atheists
And how long should we waste our time with the sheer banality of the New Atheists—with, that is, their childishly Manichean view of history, their lack of any tragic sense, their indifference to the cultural contingency of moral 'truths,' their wanton incuriosity, their vague babblings about 'religion' in the abstract, and their absurd optimism regarding the future they long for?" More
5/11/10
Antonio Damasio: How Can Somebody Be Both Awake and Not Awake?
The classical dichotomy is of head and heart, reason and emotions. Good decisions, according to classical thinking result from good reasoning. Instead, Damasio says good rational decisions depend on feelings.
His patient, Elliot, had prefrontal damage, and was smart, pleasant, and engaging. He scored normal on a battery of personality tests. Yet he made horrible, life-ruining decisions. Why? Because his intellectual capacity was severed from his emotions, so to speak.
In The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (1999), Damasio takes a different argument--that the key to consciousness lies with the body's ability to sense and react to its own processes and its environment. The problem of consciousness, he maintains, has two related components. One is the question of how the "out there," the outside world, finds a parallel imagery in the brain. The other is how a sense of self arises from a "map" that correlates inside with outside.
He gains his theory from practice. His examples derive from real people with serious problems, He wants to understand how we know things about the world through our senses and also how at the same time we are aware of a self experiencing things. This is part of what he calls "the feeling of what happens."
In dealing with patients with brain damage, he developed insight into questions he had. As Damasio puzzled over effects to a patient's brain during an epileptic seizure, he sought an answer to a classic question among scientists and philosophers: What is it about the human brain and its networks of neurons that give rise to consciousness?
In The Feeling of What Happens he concludes that consciousness is layered. At its base lies a vague, animalian sense of self arising from the brain's "diagram" of the body. This proto-self props up the higher layers.
Even snails, have proto-selves, says Damasio, but they aren't really conscious. As to the seat of consciousness, the brain is a parallel processor, designed with redundant neuron networks. No single region of the brain has the seat of consciousness. Consciousness, he says,"is the feeling of knowing that we have feelings."
If his theory gains from practice, his practice was frought with troubled questions over real people. When young, he had a patient who was both there and not there, both conscious and not conscious. The man's consciousness became so empty that he could not respond to his name. At the same time, he recognized a cup of coffee and picked it up to drink it.
"This incident occurred more than three decades ago, when Dr. Antonio Damasio was a medical student in Lisbon, Portugal, and he has never forgotten it. How was it possible, he wondered, for someone to be there and yet not be there, to be awake and yet not be awake, to be aware of his surroundings and at the same time be oblivious to them?" More
5/6/10
Spirituality & Health
Sheri Kaplan's faith "is unorthodox, but it's central to her life. She was raised Jewish, and although she claims no formal religion now, she prays and meditates every day. She believes God is keeping the HIV virus at bay, and that her faith is the reason she's alive today.
'Everything starts from a thought, and then the thought creates a reaction,' she says. 'And I have the power to control my mind, before it gets to a physical level or an emotional level.'. . .
Gail Ironson is a professor at the University of Miami. Ironson, an AIDS researcher, runs down a battery of questions.
'During this time have you had any HIV- or AIDS-related symptoms?' Ironson asks.
'Nope,' Kaplan says. 'Nothing.'
'What percent of your well-being do you think is due to your own attitudes and behaviors versus medical care?' Ironson continues.
Kaplan laughs: '110 percent.'
Kaplan has never taken medicine, yet the disease has not progressed to AIDS (and she is not part of the population that has a mutation in the CCR5 gene that prevents progression of HIV to AIDS). In the mid-1990s, when having HIV was akin to a death sentence, Ironson noticed a number of patients like Kaplan never got sick. Ironson wanted to know why. And she found something surprising.
'If you ask people what's kept you going so long, what keeps you healthy, often people would say spirituality,' she says. 'It was something that just kept coming up in the interviews, and that's why I decided to look at it.' Ironson calls the finding extraordinary. Ironson was one of the first researchers to connect a patient's approach to God to specific chemical changes in the body." More
5/4/10
Did My Neurons Make Me Do It?
Nancey Murphy is a Christian theologian and philosopher at Fuller Theological Seminary. Psychologist Warren S. Brown is director of the Lee Edward Travis Research Institute there. He spent 11 years as a research scientist at the UCLA Brain Research Institute. As their background might suggest, their book, takes as key interests the physicalism of science and the room it leaves for the existence of God. I offer a review of the book, but do not want it to become overlong. For that reason, I do not develop explanations of some of their points.
Both Murphy and Brown believe in God but hold that the world can be explained by a physical account of it. Still, they argue that a physicalist account alone cannot make sense of meaning. We find meaning in our lives and in the world, which cannot be explained by a resort to only physical explanations. More
4/27/10
I'm Away
4/22/10
Americans & Trust: An Interview With Steven Pinker
"Americans' trust in the media, their government, and each other has declined over the past four decades. And yet, according to many national surveys, trust in science and scientists remains high. In a 2006 Harris poll, for example, 77 percent of respondents said they trust scientists to tell the truth–roughly 60 percent more than the number who trusted the president.
In recent years, however, several areas of scientific research—from global warming to stem cell research to evolution—have become highly politicized, in ways that threaten the credibility of prominent scientists and their findings.
In one notorious instance, the Bush administration fired cell biologist Elizabeth Blackburn and medical ethicist William May from the President's Council on Bioethics, a decision that many critics alleged was part of an effort to purge the Council of dissenting scientific voices." More