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4/21/19

Ben Underwood Clicks His Tongue To See


"To society he's blind," said Ben's mother, "but that doesn't make him handicapped. He just can't see."

She also said, "One thing that I truly get back from Ben being blind is that he truly sees people from within.

When he hears someone say that someone else is ugly, or anything negative towards someone else. He says, 'That's whats wrong with sighted people, you all look at one another and judge what you look like,' I see that statement being so true. "

His eyes removed because of cancer, Ben grew up without sight, but at age five learned to click with his tongue about every half second—to echolocate—to ride his bike, shoot hoops, play video games, and throw pillows at his sisters. Echoes informed Ben as to the position of objects, how big they were, their general shape, and how solid they were. Ben recognized a pole as tall and narrow, a building as tall and very broad. A pillow was soft and not dense.

I am left with mystery. Watching the boy in action left me scratching my head in amazement. Take a look for yourself:



Sadly, just shy of his 17th birthday this amazing and inspiring boy died of another cancer after the one that took his eyes. The obit video can be watched here. Also read another Mind Shadows post on echolocation, bats, dolphins, and Ben Underwood.

By clicking, Ben avoided curbs while riding his bicycle in his Sacramento, California neighborhood. Even though he couldn't see the hoop, he could sink a basketball through the basket. He played video games by distinguishing sounds. He wrote a novel, typing it at 60 words per minute on a standard keyboard. "I can hear that wall behind you over there. I can hear right there--the radio, and the fan," Ben told one reporter.

Ben was not the only blind person who developed echolocation. Others are Daniel Kish, 40, of Long Beach, California, who leads other blind people on hikes in the wilderness or in mountain biking. "I have mental images that are very rich, very complex,” says Kish. James Holman (1786-1857) used the sound of his tapping cane to travel alone around the world.

See the piece on Graham Young, a man who is blind but somehow can see. Young can sense moving objects but doesn't know how he does it.  In that article V.S. Ramachandran, a neuroscientist, explained Young's ability.

Here is a web site dedicated to Ben Underwood. Here is his mother's account of him in "Ben's Life."
__________________
Bats send sound signals in rapid bursts at high frequencies. Their sonar can bounce off flying mosquitoes, which the bats swoop on with open mouths. Dolphins find their meals in the same manner. Echolocation, uses sound to identify objects and their locations. As with vision, the brain processes energy reflected off an object—only as sound rather than light.

4/9/19

Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Dawkins' Memes and Kurzweil's Singularity


Jaron Lanier Disagrees with Richard Dawkins' Meme Theory and Ray Kurzweil's Singularity

As a goat farmer, Jaron Lanier supported his way through college. While growing up, he lived far from cities and near Mesilla, New Mexico, with his father in tents until they built a house centered around a hippie-esque geodesic dome designed by Jaron. (His father's Ukrainian family fled the pogroms for America. His mother, who survived an Austrian concentration camp, died in a car accident when he was nine.) As assistant to a midwife, he helped deliver a baby. The father gave him a car as a gift. When he was 13 New Mexico State University let him enroll. There he took graduate-level courses.

The phrase virtual reality was coined by Lanier, to his eternal regret. He recalls the early Utopian vision of his fellow youthful hackers and laments how quickly it was corporatised. A prodigy from the start, he helped create Web 2.0,  futurism, digital utopianism, and their ideology, which he now calls “digital Maoism.” He accused giants Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.”  He believes the "hive mentality" destroys political discourse. It is the wisdom of the crowd, he says, and it cannot evolve upward but lead only downward.  The mentality weakens economic stability. With its alienated processes the hive mentality can destroy our personhood in the sense of social and legal dignity. He sees it all leading to “social catastrophe." He fears a cybernetic house of mirrors that could be manipulated by whoever is "the biggest asshole."

Born in 1960, Jaron Lanier shuns career stovepipes and has taught computer science in various institutions, including Dartmouth, Columbia, and Yale. His books are You Are Not a Gadget (2010), Who Owns the Future (2013), and Dawn of the New Everything (2017). Lanier reacted against an acquaintance of Timothy Leary who once told him to surround himself with gorgeous young people and flatter them. He decided to never fool people and tell the truth, especially when it was unpleasant.  He has never taken drugs.  A polymath, he a philosophy writer, computer scientist, visual artistcomposer of classical music, and  founding father of the field of virtual reality. A pianist, he writes chamber and orchestral music. He is also a visual artist. In 2010, Lanier was nominated in the Time 100 list of most influential people. He is sought out as an important contributor to current discussions on matters such as the philosophy of consciousness and the findings of science. His interests are widely divergent, among them the interface between artificial intelligence and biology as well as quantum physics.

 In "One-Half a Manifesto", Lanier disagrees with Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director of Engineering, and a well-known futurist who has scored well with accurate predictions. It is said that since the 1990s his 147 predictions turned out 86 percent accurate. He writes of the Singularity and predicted that by 2029 artificial intelligence (AI) "will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence" and  has 2045 for the Singularity, when effective intelligence will be multiplied by "a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created."  He finds abhorrent the belief that  virtual worlds can be "on an equal footing" with reality.

Lanier says humans are not to be considered to be biological computers. Humans will not be generally replaced by computers in a few decades, even economically. This is highly unlikely. He says "Simply put, software just won't allow it. Code can't keep up with processing power now, and it never will."

In an interview, he was asked about the Meme Theory of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. In his classic book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins explains memes thus:

"Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passed it on to his colleagues and students. . . . If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. `. . . memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. . . . When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. . . . 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over."

Here, then, is the question and Lanier's answer:

"Q: Is culture as important as genes in shaping the future of our brains? I'm not talking about Richard Dawkins' idea of memes here, which I dislike anyway.

A: I think the meme idea is wrong for a variety of reasons. First, there's an obvious sense in which ideas are Lamarckian and genes are not. Memes promote the wrong idea about genes. Richard's idea about genes is that there is a continuity of different creatures that come into being and evolution is walking through an infinite library where each space on the shelf is a slightly different creature. It's like Borges' infinite library, which contained every book that could be written. Every organism that could exist is in Richard's library, and there are two problems with this idea, both of which should kill this metaphor. The first problem is the size of the library. Let's suppose Borges' library was actually created and only held books up to 300 pages. Even in that case the library could not fit into our universe. Our civilization could not possibly survive long enough, even with the biggest starship we could build, to hold it. Just to get from one interesting book to the next would require more energy or space than our civilization has available to it. We're lucky enough to be next to one readable book and that's the only one we'll ever see. You could think of his library as the most efficient, definitely mathematical, perfect, conceivable form of procrastination ever invented.

The second problem is the difference between Borges' and Dawkins' infinite libraries. In Borges' library all the books in between the readable books might not be sensible to us but at least they're printable. But in Dawkins' library, all the creatures between viable creatures are not sensible or even viable. They're just possible creatures. You can't take an arbitrary genetic sequence and have a creature come out." (The link for this no longer exists but you can read his opposition to Memes at Edge, The Reality Club, The Value of Memes, A Powerful Paradigm or a Poor Metaphor?

4/8/19

Polish Exchange Student's Host Parents from Hell


Christian Fundamentalist Host Parents from Hell for Polish Exchange
Student

Michael Gromek
Landing in Greensboro, North Carolina, Michael Gromek, 19, stepped off the plane from Poland. He had come as an exchange student and looked eagerly for his host family at the airport. When they found one another, he felt like running back toward the plane. They met him holding a Bible, and saying,"Child, our Lord sent you half-way around the world to bring you to us." He spent four hellish months among Christian fundamentalists, with dawn church visits and sex education talks. His new family were bent on banishing Satan from his soul.

Here's what he has to say. "Things began to go wrong as soon as I arrived in my new home in Winston-Salem, where I was to spend my year abroad. For example, every Monday my host family would gather around the kitchen table to talk about sex. My host parents hadn't had sex for the last 17 years because--so they told me--they were devoting their lives to God. They also wanted to know whether I drank alcohol. I admitted that I liked beer and wine. They told me I had the devil in my heart."

"My host parents treated me like a five-year-old. They gave me lollipops. They woke me every Sunday morning at 6:15 a.m., saying 'Michael, it's time to go to church.' I hated that sentence. When I didn't want to go to church one morning, because I had hardly slept, they didn't allow me to have any coffee."

One day I was talking to my host parents about my mother, who is separated from my father. They were appalled--my mother's heart was just as possessed by the devil as mine, they exclaimed. God wanted her to stay with her husband, they said.

The exchange student eventually discovered that they had more than his soul in mind. In short, they had a reason for agreeing to host him. Their generosity had not simply arisen out of the goodness of their hearts. They needed his help to construct a Fundamentalist Baptist church in Poland.

They thought it was God's will, something he could not avoid. He saw the matter otherwise. They had already begun construction in Krakow, and needed his help with translations and filling the church. For him, that was the last straw. His hosts could not understand his refusal, but refuse he did. They were appalled.

I am reminded of the Stockholm Syndrome, in which victims come to identify with their captors. Michael says, "It was a weird situation. After all, these people were my only company at the time. If I hadn't kept in touch with home through e-mail, I might have been sucked into that world." Fortunately, he was sufficiently strong-minded and had access via email to those with perspective.

At this point, four months into his stay, he asked to change his host family. Of his fundamentalist hosts, he explains that "they didn't understand--how could they? They had grown up with their faith and were convinced of it, and then suddenly I turned up and refused to fit in."

He had to wait two months for a new family, two months of hell. "My host parents detested me."

Finally, he went to live with his new family, young, "more friends than host parents," and he was happy.

Found at Spiegel.

4/1/19

George Berkeley: Rocks Are Not Physically Real


Bishop George Berkeley
George Berkeley: A Rock Is A Mental Perception. There Is No Matter. Only Mind and Perceptions


George Berkeley (1685 –1753), known as Bishop Berkeley, was an Irish philosopher whose main theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers and, as a result, cannot exist without being perceived. Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism. His famous phrase is  esse is percipi (to be is to be perceived). In other words, we are our sensations, mental events, and the things perceived are not material, but also a form of the mental.

Because he said "Westward wends the course of empire," the city of Berkeley, California, known for The University of California at Berkeley, was named after him.

He wrote Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, which presented his argument.  His views are represented by Philonous (Greek: "lover of mind"), while Hylas (Greek: "matter") embodies the Irish thinker's opponents, in particular John Locke. Berkeley argued against Isaac Newton's doctrine of absolute space, time and motion in De Motu (On Motion), which anticipated the  views of Mach and Einstein.

With his wife, Anne Forster, in 1728 he moved to America to live near Newport, Rhode Island, where he bought a plantation at Middletown, Whitehall. In 1732 he returned to London.

Here is an excerpt from the Three Dialogues:

Hylas to Philonous: You were represented, in last night's conversation, as one who maintained the most extravagant opinion that ever entered into the mind of man, to wit, that there is no such thing as MATERIAL SUBSTANCE in the world.

Philonous: That there is no such thing as what PHILOSOPHERS CALL MATERIAL SUBSTANCE, I am seriously persuaded: but, if I were made to see anything absurd or skeptical in this, I should then have the same reason to renounce this that I imagine I have now to reject the contrary opinion.

Hylas: . . . can anything be more fantastical, more repugnant to Common Sense, or a more manifest piece of Scepticism, than to believe there is no such thing as MATTER?

(First of The Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists.)

When James Boswell told Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) about Berkeley's assertion that matter does not exist, Dr Johnson took offense and said, "Sir, I refute it thus!," kicking a rock away from him.
William Fawke Statue
of Dr Johnson
Kicking Stone

Laurance R. Doyle, SETI Institute, has this to say about the world as traditionally physical: ". . . the elementary particles making up the trees, people, and planets—what we see around us—are apparently just distributions of likelihood until they are measured (that is, measured or observed). So much for the Victorian view of solid matter!"

Ronald Knox, English theologian, priest, and crime writer, wrote these limericks, with a mockery and a reply to the mocker of Berkeley:


 Mocker:
There was a young man who said "God
Must find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the quad."

Reply:
"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why the tree
Will continue to be
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God.