what is right and what is wrong?

When my new boss showed me around the lab and showed me the video of the rats in the chamber being shocked, I had to pretend something was in my eye to blink back the sudden tears. I knew that crying would give me away. They needed someone who would do the job compassionately but with as much detachment to the animals as possible. I have never figured out, really, how to detach my affections, even from rats.
She told me that per regulation they kill all the rats, either to harvest their brain material or as standard procedure after a behavioral experiment. She said our experiment wouldn't require killing as many rats as a behavioral experiment but if I ever had to help out the graduate student in the lab, I may have to kill as many as forty rats at once. Later I learned that they anesthetize them and then put them in a kind of guillotine designed to waste as little of their body as possible. They are asleep and don't feel a thing. They kill all of them because it is considered inhumane to just keep rats in little cages forever as they grow cramped and obese.
My boss was concerned for all the wrong reasons about my interactions with the rats. She was worried I'd freak out, think they were gross or something. When she took me in to look at the rats though the only reason I had trouble picking them was because it seemed like it would be painful to dangle them by the tails, although she assured me it wasn't. The adorable brown and white mouse with its inquisitive nose and friendly paws sat still for a moment in my arms before it started scrabbling about. It was one of the cutest things I've ever seen. I tried to imagine refraining from naming it, refraining from showing any kind of attachment to it as I trained it, shocked it, and finally killed it.
I kept my wits together for the remainder of the interview, but I felt quite sick and hollowed out inside. When I left the brain and cognitive science building after promising to get back to her, a single memory was pulsing through me. At the beginning of junior year of high school I think I was sitting on the basement floor doing something when one of those disgustingly hairy and huge and poisonous hobo spiders crawled up to me. There was a moment of indecision and hatred (I HATE spiders, all of them, with a burning passion), and then I made a decision that would prove pivotal in my life. I grabbed a nearby Mormon find the Nephite book (like Where's Waldo), and I smashed the spider. I slammed the book down hard to be sure to kill it. When I lifted the book, it was dead in a little ball, its legs all curled up, probably from the lack of disengagement of myasin heads on the actin in its tiny muscles. I felt, in that moment, far more monstrous than the spider. I felt dirty through and through. I felt like throwing up. I flushed the spider down the toilet, and I actually cried, because no matter how much I hate spiders, I recognized that I had prematurely ended something before nature had ended it. There's nothing natural about squashing something with a where's the Nephite book. I decided then and there to never again intentionally kill anything.
In the years since then, things have been hard. I have had to take showers with poisonous hobo spiders, had to try, beating back the fear all the while, to trap them in cups and shove postcards beneath them and put them outside. I have had to defend bees (which I also hate because they keep hurting me) and mosquitos, withstanding bites to preserve their lives. It has been hard for me in a way, I'll convince, but in another way it has been easy becaue I am so certain, especially after that spider incident, how strongly I believe in the sanctity of life. I tend to believe in it more than the quality of life because I think it's just such a miracle, a beating heart. I don't believe in euthanasia even when something (like my dog was at the end of junior year) is suffering very, very much. To me it seems like playing God, messing with the power of life that I hold so sacred.
I am the girl that doesn't kill bugs that even she detests because she sees such a miracle in their simple existence and interconnectedness.
When I got back to my dorm and futilely tried to study organic chemistry (whose final I ended up doing miserably on and ruining my grade, unfortunately), I couldn't stand it anymore. I kept imagining that cute rat I was holding, and then trying to imagine putting it in a guillotine and chopping its head off. What's worse is that decaptiation has always horrified me. There's something senselessly brutile about it to me, and I have always been a little obsessed with the question of what the man in the guillotine is thinking and feeling right before the blade falls, trying to cope with that ending.
I was in a bind. Here is the bind. That lab is exactly the kind of thing I want to do with my life, and every lab I will ever really want to work in will also kill rats or mice. The lab I interviewed with is doing work on the neurological basis of PTSD so as to develop better pharmaceuticals eventually. The rats have a shock-tone pairing over the course of two days in order to imprint a fear memory so they have PTSD when they subsequently hear a tone. Part of the research revolves around drug trials, and part of it revolves around locating proteins. What my boss is doing that I'm sure I will help her with is inserting glo DNA with a vector into proteins involved in the fear response and determining (by killing the rat and looking at the nueral material) where exactly in the amygdale those proteins are located.
The reason I want to help people with PTSD and mental illness is that I have a very close relationship to those things as well. I have moderate PTSD from trauma in my past, and I have bipolar. I have seen my grandfather and my uncle torn apart from PTSD after witnessing horrors in the wars, Iraq and World War II. My uncle had to shoot an entire family. Now he is having a ton of problems with flashbacks and he has taken to self-medicating with drugs and alcohol since he got back a few months ago (how he can still support this infernal war after that, don't ask me). I know how debilitating it is to wake up so depressed you can't move or so manic you can't think. I know how it sucks away life and hope and results in bad quality of life and a lot of suicide. I know the hollow, gnawing ache as PTSD flings you back into some nightmare. I'm feeling it right now as I struggle to survive life at home with the people I love so much who made my childhood such a hellish place at times. I know that this research can help. I'm not screwing aruond with Bayesian modeling anymore. This can make the difference I want it to make.

Do you see my dilemma? I am so opposed to killing things, and yet the good things I want to bring to the world require this kind of utilitarian animal sacrifice. I have a very black and white, deontological view of killing, and now I am presented with a situation that severely strains my moral ideals. I have never really been opposed to medical research on animals, but I suppose I never really made the connection that it violated this other opinion that I have about sanctity of life. As I tried to study for chemistry, though, after I thought about it a lot, I realized that I do believe it's just, not really right, but justified, to kill animals if it brings drugs that help severely hurting people. I know all of the drugs that I take have required that sacrifice, and I know I'd be dead without them. The problem was, though, that I couldn't imagine killing a rat that I loved myself. If I couldn't kill a spider that I hated, how could I kill a cute rat that I loved, that I had worked with for weeks? How could I kill forty all at once? Even thinking about it twisted something in me, and trying to imagine it I started sobbing. I wasted a lot of time that night that I could have been studying for that disastrous chemistry test just crying and trying to imagine, trying to wrap my head around, really intentionally killing something innocent that trusted me. I think that's a terrible part of it to me, the fact that you condition those rats to trust you, to believe in you for sustenance, and then you kill them. It seems like one of the terrible things about human nature to me that we're capable of that kind of betrayal.

I talked to a friend that has done it before, and she made me feel a little better. I talked to my mother who reminded me that if I want to do psychopharmacology this is just something I have to do, whether this year or next or in graduate school, but eventually it will have to happen. I went back and talked to my boss more about the procedure and how she deals with it. Ultimately, it didn't seem like I had a choice, and I liked that because I coudln't face the choice. If I wanted to help people with mental illness, this was just something I had to do, and I knew I wanted to help people with mental illness. So I took the job.

But this week when I was supposed to be buying Chile peppers at Albertsons I went by the pet store and just knelt for a long time outside of the rat cages that said things like "friendly male, wants a loving family" and tried to imagine killing them, and finally I had to leave because I just felt so sick. I imagine that the same thing that gave me PTSD, my capacity to dissociate from bad situations, will allow me to follow through with this. But like how in Harry Potter a soul is fractured a bit from casting the deat curse, I think I will break some part of me in this process. I'm confused still about what is wrong and what is right. Mostly I just wish Kant was applicable in the real world. Even the religion I believe in requires kind of situational ethics, and the Book of Mormon at one point explicitely advocates utilitarianism when it says something like "it is better that one man perish than an entire nation dwindle in unbelief." Also, Abraham was prepared to kill Isaac even when it was seemingly against the very black and white ten commandments. I guess there are always exceptions in life that require the retirement of certain stiff ideas about the way the world is and demand more flexibility.

I don't like this though. I really, really, really, really don't want to kill those rats. And I imagine that the first time I have to do it will be like hell for me. And I don't know, then, whether I hope I become desensitized or not. For my sanity, I hope I do. For my innate sense of morality, I hope I don't.

hope

When I am getting too cynical, I see things like this.

A whole family in a day... your whole life... and yet, you forgive.

"How do you pick up the threads of an old life?  How do you go on, when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?  There are some things time cannot mend.  Some hurts that go too deep that have taken hold."  -LOTR

Though it seems obvious that we proceed linearly through time, physicists don't really have a good scientific explanation for this imprint.  According to most laws of physics, things should be temporally symmetric.  So what is time?  I suppose in part it is the arrow of entropy, pointing constantly from order to disorder.  It dictates the states of our universe.  Right now I am typing this, and a moment ago I was typing the LOTR quote.  And somehow, then, the universe was a more ordered place than it is now.

But of course there are all sorts of confusing things to think about with time, such as Einstein's twin paradox, and the speed of light being a barrier for total energy (spacial + temporal),  and wormholes, and multiple universes, and those confusing things about going back in time and killing your father.  It seems like some argument against free will.  If time travel exists, then my free will is limited.  Because, at least in one continuous world, if I go back in time before I was born, I cannot kill my mother.  I don't have that choice.

There is something about the nature of long-term-potentiation of excitatory post synaptic potentials in the brain and working, short term, and long term memory in its various locations (hippocampus, frontal cortex maybe?) that makes memories of the past but not of the future, even if physically the ordering of time seems a bit ambiguous.  Something about me traps me in this entity that no one can characterize, this weird next of seconds and the decay of atoms and slowly turning gears.

To me, at least, time is the most incomprehensible thing that we humans can think about, and yet we have managed to make it so integral in our daily lives.  In linguistics we learned that they thought they had found a tribe in some rainforest somewhere that had no language for discussing the future or the past I think.  They originally thought that this tribe had no concept of the future or past, but they've concluded now that they just didn't have a way to articulate their concepts of time.  Is it possible for a human being, isolated from everything, to be unaware of time?  Doesn't he or she sense something changing?  Change, derivatives... those somehow define our lives and yet they mean nothing, really, I mean, semantically, what does it mean for time to have passed?  We have all of these physical by-products we can reference (like atoms decaying), but that seems more like an effect that happens because time passes rather than the actual entity of the passage of time.  Who knows what that is?

What makes us so dependent on time?

who?

Who decides what we are, who we are?  Who puts us up on a pedestal with the lights glaring bright in our faces, grins at the glare of the sweat on our cheeks, puts the labels on over our mouths, fills out the skeletons of our existences?  Who makes us full?

the falcon cannot hear the falconer

 Turning and turning in the widening gyre 
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand; 
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi 
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand; 
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
    The darkness drops again but now I know 
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

(Yeats, "The Second Coming")

I know he wrote this poem a long time ago, but it is so prescient, and I feel like the older I get, and the older the world gets,the more true it becomes.  

I'm not sure whether this is totally true, but at my college back home my creative writing professor told us that although Yeats was not Christian, he thought time was a spiral that narrowed into the birth of Christ and has been slackening and growing since then.  It really seems like every year we all become more disordered, morality, everything.  

I think I have a distorted perception of this because I am only nineteen.  To me, it seems things in the world have grown drastically worse, but really that is probably because I was mostly oblivious to such things until at least high school, and since then as I have started reading more and watching the news more and talking more about the world and politics and everything, of course everything has seemed to be following apart, really, since I just been gaining aware of the existent awareness that might have always existed.  

That aside, though, I really do think the world is falling apart.  This is partially a religious belief (a la "Revelation") but it is also just a simple revelation.  So thinking about that, thinking about things loosening and expanding, brings up some stuff to me.

I suppose people haven't changed that much.  I don't really think that people have really grown more terrible, or developed a greater capacity to be terrible; I think technology and networking have created a greater capacity for terror.  Take for instance the events that prompted me to ramble on about this: the terror in Mumbai, India.

I probably wouldn't have cared anymore about Mumbai than other parts of the world that are falling apart,  but there are a lot of kids from India at my school, including my best friends, and one of my friends' fathers just left Mumbai yesterday morning.  I'm fairly certain he wasn't staying in one of the targeted luxury hotels, but it still seems like a crazy scary place to be right now.  So I have a slightly more personal connection.  My friend told me, "India is burning and it hurts to watch.  ...We just keep praying I guess."  She has other family in Mumbai, but I guess they are okay too.

So what made terrorism in India, or any place around the middle east in particular, possible?  Beyond human nature, part of it is just the sectarian politics, the way those areas have evolved to be so fractured politically and religiously.  It is made possible by an influx of diverse, averse beliefs, doctrines of intolerance.  It is also made possible by availability of technology for weapons and networking.  The prime minister of India or the British something or others said that they thought the group responsible was working with groups from outside of India.  Technology makes this possible.  Technology makes it possible, as well, to clean up the damage.  It is quite a powerful tool for good and evil.

I was talking to a friend a while back when I was feeling more pessimistic about humanity about the movement of civilization out from its origins.  I told her maybe it would have been better if we'd never left the Messopotamia or wherever it was that we all started off.  There were wars back then, sure, but the damages seem globally smaller and the differences between people's beliefs seems less pronounced.  I don't know.  There had to have been a moment, so many years ago, when everyone in the middle east was the same religion.  And what is it about those particular religions in that location that made so much friction?  In other parts of the world we don't have too much trouble living with people of different religions.  I don't get it.

We get mad at people that take this stuff so lightly, that act ignorant like little kids, but maybe the world would be a better place if we held on to the innocent lack of prejudice that we have in childhood and didn't develop all of these complicated biases and hatreds.  I think that in The Lord of the Flies by the end of the book the kids are not kids anymore; they have somewhat grown up.  But the way they are at the beginning, before the development of division and the capacity for true evil, that is the way that we should be.

That said, I'm not too optimistic.  We are not just watching India burn; we're watching the whole world burn.  And it's not just technology-aided terrorists; as the Joker says in The Dark Knight, all it takes to turn a city upside down and against itself is one person and a few cans of gasoline.  In some ways I think organized terror is a lot less frightening and more sensible than the isolated, senseless crimes I read about on the news such as that one in Canada or something earlier this year when this guy that had never really done anything wrong before randomly took leave of his job and decapitated the guy sitting next to him on the bus, who he didn't even know, for not apparent reason.  I guess the idea that people can act in horrible ways for conceivable reasons is less frightening than people acting in horrible ways for inconceivable or nonexistent reasons.  The first gives me more faith in humanity and in the revision of such actions.  If you believe in something, at least you have some kind of conscience, and it seems like people like that guy on the bus don't have that.  Now that scares me.  

To end on the bright side, though, the worst in some people does bring out the best in others.  Through the worst tragedies we've experienced, we've also experienced the most compassionate efforts of ameleoration.  Although I think the 9/11 aftermath was negative in that it involved a lot of hatred towards a terrorist group, which really made us terrorists as well, I think in a way it was really amazing that the whole nation was united together in cleaning up the mess made by the attacks.  Irrespective of feelings towards Afghanistan or Iraq or whoever the government wanted to pin the blame on, we truly had a united feeling of compassion for those people in New York as is evidenced by the iconic firefighter as a hero.

I think, really, that that is the only thing holding us together.  No matter how terrible we get, those who are not terrible become better, and it provides enough balance that we don't spin completely out of control.  However, who knows what's coming.

a few things that are bothering me right now

1. I have lost my miniature stapler which I cannot live without.

2. I am completely lost in math right now, like in outer space.  And the sad thing is that we are doing Bayesian inference, which I have been theoretically doing for my job since last Spring.

3. Since eighth grade geometry, every time I am afforded the opportunity to walk the hypotenuse of  a right triangle rather than around the other two sides, I do so. and I usually think to myself "the hypotenuse of a right triangle is shorter than the sum of its other two sides" which really annoys me.  Anyway, it seems to me of course that I do that *every* time I am faced with this situation, because every time that I consciously remember, I was conscious enough to think that.  The question is whether I do it unconsciously, or whether I have ever really been that unconscious of encountering a right triangle.  See, I don't know if I do that *all* the time because I have no way of recording my unconscious actions.  So in a way I don't know a large part of myself, which is still more annoying.

Obama and drugs (unrelated :-) )

So first about drugs.  I want to spend my life working on finding effective medications and solving the neural basis of mental illness.  If we could even find a more effective and inexpensive medication for schizophrenia, for instance, I am convinced there would be a lot fewer homeless people.  So many people are plagued at some point in their lives with debilitating mental illness.  I don't think the problem gets as much scientific attention as it deserves.  Sure, I support research on Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.  My own mother has Parkinson's.  But as debilitating as a disease that strikes you when you're older is, I think a mental disorder that is always a threat throughout your life is just as terrifying.  

Some people don't believe in using drugs to treat mental illness.  I think people are uneasy about altering brain chemistry that changes their personality or their behavior.  But people are less opposed to using drugs for Alzheimer's or something, and that is truly irrational.  They both biological disorders that affect personality.  There is a hazy line to me between altering the peripheral aspects of your personality and changing who you are, but still it seems crazy to not accept the neural basis of mental illness.  Take schizophrenia again for instance.  There is plenty of evidence suggesting that Schizophrenia results from overactive dopamine receptors.  There is also plenty of evidence suggesting that Parkinson's is caused by the depletion of the dopamine system.  They are two sides of the same coin, and yet treatment of Parkinson's is totally accepted while drugs treating a mental disorder are not.  It makes no sense.

Mental disorders are neural disorders.  I know that I am a staunch dualist and I don't necessarily believe that everything behavioral is rooted solely in biology, but I do believe that mental disorders are.  I think there is a part of us, a soul or something, that really is conserved, but these alterations in our brain chemistry change the parts of us that are subject to change.  Depression can be caused by not enough transmission of monoamines like seratonin and norepinephrine in the synaptic cleft.  Anxiety can be caused by insufficient GABA transmission and decreased glucocorticoid receptors in the hippocampus that inhibit the hippocampus' inhibition of cortisol circulation and the stress response (or an overactive amygdala).  Bipolar disorders are caused by who knows what, but it likely has something to do with second messengers, as lithium acts on second messenger systems.  The reason I want to go into this is that we don't really know any of the specifics of these systems.  But there is ample evidence that they are in fact physical system, and that drugs work because they change something physically.  I want to be a psychopharmacologist.  I feel obligated to defend the use of drugs in treating mental illness.

Anyway, that's my rant against people who argue against use of drugs to treat mental problems.

Now on to Obama (and not related to drugs, although I found his admittance to his drug use problems as a kid very interesting... I think honesty is definitely the best policy when you're in that position).  I've been reading that he is attempting to pull off the whole FDR New Deal thing with his honeymoon period.  I have been thinking about that, and I really think he can pull it off.  Ask us, the whole nation, two years ago if we believed an African American could be president, and I bet we would have said no.  A combination of factors (the very bad track record of the incumbent party, the insufficient credentials of the Republican vice presidential nominee, Obama's cool-headed nature and his magnetic personality, running against Hilly Clinton- although I ended up really liking her) contributed to his election, but now here he is, defying what most of us could have predicted.  I'm still terrified that he'll get assassinated.  There are enough people just trying to assassinate the president out of principle, and now add to it all the crazy white supremacists that are livid over his election, and I'm worried.  But through all the odds he's here.

I think he has it within him to really produce the change he's promised.  He's hyped this change thing up so much that he really has to or his approval ratings are going to dive, I think.  While he is young-ish and lacks experience in some areas, I think he will be well-stocked with an experienced cabinet.  I can't imagine they could possibly work any worse together than the Bush cabinet (as stubborn as Bush has been about claiming executive power, he really failed in having any kind of unified control over the operations in Iraq).  I think, though, that the complex somewhat corrupt power-plays that usually dominate white house politics will be a little less preeminent in his era, just because I think he really does work together with the people he is calling to his team.

We're not in a great depression, but there has been a lot of analogy (even if it is a little overzealous) between economic recession and explosiveness now and the economy when FDR stepped up to the plate.  I saw a comic that showed Obama holding his suitcase standing in front of the white house.   There was a dog house on the lawn, and in front of it was this huge Cerberus with its three snarling heads labeled "Iraq," "Afghanistan," and "the economy."  The caption said "We come with the house."  Obama really is walking into a loaded white house.  This really is his opportunity to change things.  But on the same avenue, he really could screw them up even more.  Things are at such a tipping point.

I am party a cynic, partly convinced that the world really is just ending and sometimes we just are forced to watch it burn.  But I am very optimistic about Obama.  I think he has the leadership skills it takes to pull our country back together.  I think he has the reform plans that FDR had to really take control of recession and division in our country.  

And, of course, he is the first physically attractive president (I don't buy this business about JFK), which helps :-P

Anyway, I have high hopes, and I am actually fairly confident that he won't let me down.

why there is a ghost in the machine

(pre-script- note on my last post- it turns out c-fibers are actually in the brain, which slightly wipes out a little of my argument, but not terribly)

It is very late, and I should be sleeping.  But alas, the insane school I go to, the job that I have, the violin lessons I pay $80/week for, literature club, Amnesty International, and Global Poverty Initiative guarantee that sleep is a distant memory (although I don't regret anything I do).  And now, when I could sleep for three and a half hours instead of three, I write.  It is the plight of us writers I suppose.  The impulse hits, and either we write or we lose it.

We learned today in neuroscience about the neural basis for learning and memory.  It has something to do with back-propagation from action potentials seeping back into the dendrites just when another excitatory post synaptic potential hits the dendrite, giving the membrane enough voltage to dislodge magnesium from the NMDA receptors, which through a G-protein process of some sort causes the expression of more AMPA receptors, which, I think, which allow influx of positive ions that cause more depolarization, enough to cause an action potential in that post-synaptic neuron.

I think that that is only the very rudimentary basis for learning.  I'm sure there is loads more they are not telling us, and honestly, considering the amount of information we have to absorb for our test, I am glad (see what education does to our curiosity?).  

Earlier today in philosophy we were also talking about Turing machines as computational models for the human brain.  The whole field of cognitive science is based on the idea that the brain works like a computer.  

These two things got me thinking.  First, it reminds me of the Chinese Room thought experiment in which someone that knows Chinese and someone that just has the programs to generate Chinese appear the same computationally but obviously have a fundamental difference.  I think the Chinese Room is the strongest argument against AI, and I think on some level it proves, to me at least, that there must be some kind of mind-brian dualism.

After learning about learning, I was humbled again at how complicated we are, and confused again about how any scientist could think life was just a grand coincidence.  I know that the argument to my protestation that life is too complicated and rich to be an accident can be countered with the idea that the exact conditions that led to life are all based on chance, and we just happened to draw the lucky straw.  But that just doesn't satisfy me.

I was talking to my friend about evolution, and she said that she has never had any trouble buying evolution, but that she views it as just a mechanism rather than a be-all, end-all.  We both believe pretty strongly in spirituality.  My argument is that the brain is like evolution, the same way it is like the ignorant man in the Chinese room- it is just a mechanism.  Real computation requires real consciousness, not just deterministic models of neurons.

This is where I always run into trouble though.  The work I am doing with Bayesian models of inference is based on the assumption that the brain is computational, which I just said I could accept if we considered it a computational mechanism controlled by a mind.  However, while I believe the mind is not deterministic, it seems that the brain is.  For some reason it is so much easier for me to accept that the world can be modeled by differential equations, that nature works according to calculus, than it is for me to accept that the human mind is also ruled by deterministic- albeit stochastic- math.  That makes us like any rock governed by forces whose action is entirely mathematically predictable.  How is there room for a mind in such a model?

And yet I am very certain that it is obvious through the Chinese test and my own opinion that there is a mind, and that the brain, if it is computational, is just a computer being used by that mind.  I guess the most logical counter is to make an analogy between the mind and a computer user.  I mean, sure, computers are deterministic.  They are made out of a lot of little circuits that employ a binary system that, though infinite seeming, isn't really infinite.  There are electronic rules that govern a computer.  However, we could still conceive of a computer using as having free will even when the computer does not because the user has some knowledge of causality within the computer and exercises free will in employing deterministic programs.  It could be argued that that is the way the mind utilizes the brain.  That seems kind of weak to me though for some reason.

The sad thing about neuroscience, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind to me is that the more you know the less you can just believe in the things that feel right.  The general public believes in dualism while most of the scientific world does not.  The exception is free will, which most everyone just seems to want to believe in even when it is far from probable.  I think I learned last year in my psychology and free will class that most scientists, even if they held deterministic views about the world, believe in free will, even when it seems contradictory with their other beliefs.  Free will, it seems, is kind of an a-priori assumption.  If you don't believe in free will, you're not terribly happy, and the legal system falls apart.  How can a murderer be culpable for an inevitable crime?  Kind of like "Minority Report."

Anyway, I'm getting distracted.  My point is that life is too complicated to be an accident, and if the brain really is computational, it is controlled by some separate entity the mind.  The mind somehow avoids the deterministic nature of a computational brain to exercise free will.  I am not entirely sure how all of this works yet.  Somehow I think I will spend my life trying to fine-tune my opinion of the psychological model.

More to come.  Right now I'm dropping dead from exhaustion.

One more interesting but unrelated thing I learned today: when kids are acquiring language they make only grammar mistakes that are consistent with some human language.  i.e. they will invert word orderings only if there is some other human language has that inversion.  My linguistics professor described it as a child that knows he is learning a language but hasn't yet figured out that that language is English.  Children never make mistakes that are inconsistent with any other human grammar.

This lends support to Chomsky's universal grammar (I like Chomsky, even if he did shut me down last year when I emailed him my ideas about why his theory of the media showed that communism is impossible).  That's insane to me, really.  How can one be born with a capacity for German grammar structures when one has never heard German?  How can one actually employ German word ordering when one has only heard English?  It's quite the mystery to me.

Ok.  Now to bed for reals.  Peace.

down with identity theory!

I have been thinking about identity theory, or the theory that brain states are equivalent to mental states, and trying to come up with arguments against it.

ARGUMENT 1

So this only works for identity theorists that assume the existence of implicit beliefs.
Ok, so I could organize this as an actual premise-premise conclusion argument, but it's not really organized enough in my mind yet so I will give you the confusing, scrambled version.

So if you believe in identity theory and implicit beliefs, you accept that both are physically represented, and thus you have to believe that a representational physical change occurs in your brain when you formulate an explicit belief from an implicit belief. I.E. someone asked me whether taking an elephant apart could ever assemble a bicycle (a question I had never heard before), there had to be a physical event in my mind that changed the belief from implicit to explicit. Now if you consider beliefs (as I think is generally the trend these days) as mental tokens coded by neuronal connections (that are unique, so a specific neuron connection leads to a specific belief), then the formation of a new belief would involve the reorganization of neurons to connect previously unrelated parts of your semantic net. The creation of an explicit belief from an implicit belief would involve this reorganization.

However, before this belief concerning elephants and bicycles was formed in my mind, those neurons were not connected. They had the capacity to be connected, but they lacked the actual unique connection of the conscious belief. If identity theorists are going to acknowledge the difference between conscious/unconscious beliefs and thoughts, they have to admit that it is a physical difference. And yet, here is an example of a physical belief that, if they believe in implicit beliefs, has to exist, yet lacks the characteristic physical representation.

The conclusion I get from this is that if you believe in differentiation of conscious/unconscious thoughts/beliefs, you can't believe it's a physical difference, and thus physicalism (and identity theory) fall. I know there are a lot of holes in this argument, but to me it still proves at least that it is somewhat contradictory for physicalists to acknowledge the existence of unconscious or implicit beliefs. So even if physicalists can get by by just discarding the belief in implicit beliefs, that at least denies a semi-accepted philosophical entity.

I sent this argument to my TA for my philosophy class, and she gave me the response I was expecting, namely that identity thoerists could counter that an implicit belief is a potentiality rather than a substantially existing entity. This still seems a weird statement to me coming from a physicalist philosophy. Also, the easy way out is to just reject the existence of implicit beliefs altogether, but that, to me, doesn't seem quite right either. I know there are ways to neurologically prove or disprove this argument of mine, and I'm not sure if the necessary experiments have been carried out. For the time being, it's an interesting, if not shaky and semi easily defeated, argument.

ARGUMENT 2 (which I find stronger epistemologically but less convincing personally)

This is vaguely going off of some arguments by Hillary Putnam...

Identity theory says that the stimulation of C-fibers is the same as the experience of pain. Thus mental and physical properties are identical. I think the idea is that even for people feeling phantom pains in an amputated limb, the neurological pain response is still actually occurring, and that even for superstoics that can act as if they are not feeling pain, their c-fibers are still being stimulated.

This line of reasoning is fairly sound it turns out in the world today, and it is hard to find arguments against it. However, I think I have come up with something. There have been experiments performed (on cats, sadly) where the spinal cord was disconnected from the brain and the cat's paw was touched to a hot surface. It was found that the paw still retracted reflexively, even though there was no communication to the brian. The reason for this is that the physioligical reflex mechanism is localized and can occur without CNS involvement.

We consider the reflexive withdrawing of a body part from a hot surface a behavioristic pain response. Thus we can conclude that the C fibers (or whatever it is these days that produces pain; we unfortunately skipped the somatosensory chapter in neuroscience this year) are still firing.

The mental experience of pain, however, involves mental processing of pain events within the mind. This is especially convincing if you consider pain as a mental state as consciously observed. The conscience resides in the CNS, not in peripheral pain reflexes. So in a whole cat, C fiber stimulation of the paw causes action potentials to run along neurons until they reach the brain where a pain even is evoked. There is a very small time delay between fiber stimulation and pain feeling, but it isn't enough to deny that c-fiber stimulation is pain, and thus pain is a physical property.

However, what about the bisected cat? The paw's c fibers are stimulated; the limb is withdrawn; but no information ever reaches the brain. We would say that the cat exhibits c-fiber stimulation behavior, but not that the cat experiences pain the way we usually think of pain. Therefore there is some inherent subtle difference between pain and c-fiber stimulation, and either pain is a mental response while c-fiber stimulation is a physical response, or pain is the physical composit of two phyiscal responses (c-fiber stimulation and CNS awareness), in which case it is still not identical to a single physical event (although arguably that could go down, molecule by molecule, forever, and I may not be justified in saying that it isn't a single even in the physicalist schema).

So both arguments are far from perfect, but I think they have potential at least.

sleeping (nothing profound yet)

I haven't thought about this stuff enough to have any really unique ideas, but I do want to mention that I am fascinated with dreaming and with hypnogogia. One thing about dreaming that I find most interesting is the coexistance of some kind of relativistic dream time with an actual awareness of time. For instance, you can set your alarm for 7 a.m. and wake up at 6:59 a.m. each morning because your body just knows when your alarm is about ready to go off. That indicates that some biological clock in you is keeping time with the real time of the waking world. However, on that same night that you wake up at 6:59 right before your alarm, you can have a dream in ten minutes that spans a whole day, and really feels to you like an entire day in duration. So that indicates that there is some sense of time inside of you that isn't in conjunction with real time at all, but rather is molding to fit your thoughts. How can a person have a consistent time clock and also inwardly distorted time without getting confused at all? How do we keep these different experiences of time- subjective and somewhat objective (as objective as can be in this relativistic age) separate? And also, fascinating to me, how do we have a better sense of time when we are sleeping than when we are awake? My perception of time when I am wake is never accurate to the minute after eight hours of not looking at a clock the way my sleeping internal clock is.
I know the physicist view time as a kind of accidental side effect of a kind of accidental entropy, but I think it is so interesting that everything in the phyisical world from purely physical processes like rock weathering to very high-order biological processes like sleeping and knowing when an alarm is set for are all so tied up in the regularity of time.

Another thing that interests me about sleep in a very personal way is hypnogogia. I never used to have hypnogogic phenomena, but one of my best friends growing up was narcoleptic, so I heard enough from her about sleep paralysis and hynogogic hallucinations that when they started happening to me at the end of my senior year in high school, I knew what was happening and it made the ordeal a little less frightening. Before any kind of hallucinations, I experienced the sleep paralysis. It started out just like feeling that waking up involved clawing my way out of a deep well. It was probably a delayed product of four high school years of lack of sleep, and I know I was profoundly exhausted by the middle of senior year, but it was so weird and sudden. Waking up suddenly became a difficult process. My alarm would go off, and my mind would wake up and hearing the alarm and be aware of the world around me, but I would be unable to open my eyes or move for several seconds (the length of paralysis has even increased in the past few years). I would just lay there knowing I was awake but being unable to move or open my eyes or anything. Over the years incidences of this grew more frequent and more severe. Now it happens to me often, and it is up to a minute or two before I can move. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night because I'm sleeping on something wrong, but I literally cannot get my body to move, so I eventually give up and go back to sleep. It's really scary sometimes. Especially if I am in a place with people around me, because I can hear their conversations and feel their motions but I can't get my body to respond. It is like... well, being paralyzed. I don't really like it, but I am also at the same time really fascinated with it. I want to learn more about it.
I usually get sleep paralysis when I am waking up, but there have been a few times when I've been really tired that I've gotten it upon waking up.

Recently, in the past year, I have also started getting a few hypnogogic hallucinations. For instance, a few weeks ago as I was waking up, I felt some guy grab my thigh. This wasn' t just a sensation in a dream either. This was an actual physical boy that I saw grab my thigh while I was awake. Of course there was no boy there, and when I tried to fight back it was useless. Today, I was struggling to get up from a nap when I heard, dinstinctly, outside of me and not in my dream, my friend saying my name. I thought she was in the room with me, so I battled the sleep paralysis to open my eyes and turn over, but she wasn't there.

I wonder if when I am older and out of college and actually getting a decent amount of sleep these effects will end. They didn't come out in me until I had been getting an inadequate amount of sleep for sustained periods of time. So maybe they wil go away with the reverse. I don't know. And at the moment I have nothing of philosophical interest to say about them except that they are really fascinating. It is kind of the opposite of the random noise generated by my mind when my body is awake but my mind is asleeep. In these instances, my mind is awake but my body is asleep.

school is destroying my creativity and curiosity

I believe that for people that think too much in general, school is pretty much a damper on excess creativity. For instance, reading for school has always gotten in the way of my actual reading. Now what I am noticiing is that with my mind all occupied with organic chemistry and neuroscience etc etc in the quantities they feed it to me, there's not room for anything else, even speculation about those topics.

Example: in neuroscience we are learning about the visual system. In high school, that would have generated a lot of interesting anatomical and philosophical questions in my mind. Now, I am so overwhelmed with just the data fed to me that I don't find myself extrapolating off of it mentally at all. I don't think beyond becuase it's alreadfy hard enough to swallow most of what there is in front of me.

Also, in high school I thought about philosophy and theoretical physics literally like al the time. Now I barely ever think about either because my mind is so cluttered with cyclohexane conformations and convolutions of multidimensional probability distributions of functions of random variables. Those things are interesting too, but given that they have been discovered and fairly thoroughly exhausted, I really don't think about anything original ever.

It's one frustrating thing about school here. I only have so much mental capacity, and school takes up all of it. There's no room left over for creativity or original questions. There's not even room enough for everything I have to know for school. For days on end, I think of nothing intellectually interesting or unique. I am becoming boring or something.

It's really quite tragic. Maybe I should read another Brian Greene book or something in my loads of spare time.

oddities of the human mind

First off, so this post makes some sense, I will point out that I have been awake for the past 26 hours, and that before that I slept only four hours, and the night before that only four hours, so I am really tired (and as I don't drink caffeine, I am only running on my own juices).

I am only writing this post for the immediacy of scientific inquiry.

My first point is unrelated to my exhaustion. I have been doing this experiment on myself and polling random people. I have been telling people they cannot think, that they have to answer me with the first thing that comes to mind, and then I ask "Name something you haven't done before." I've gotten some appropriate answers (the most common being "had sex" as my friends here, unlike back home, are mostly virgins), but I also got some inappropriate answers (like "sleep," which is wrong but it is always on our minds). It got me thinking about the generation of random noise by some kind of synaptic connection in the semantic net. When I tried this first on myself, I thought, "driven through the grand canyon" which is fairly normal, but the second time I tried I thought, "eaten an apple on the moon" which really is just noise. So there are three subtypes of results: accurate answers, random noise, and errors. I was wondering what exactly in our cognitive structure determines these immediate answers and what kinds of connections produce gross errors or bizarre noise. It is like when you play that game where someone says a topic and you have to immediately say something related or you lose. For instance, when I've played, someone could say something like "things found in an office" and two people would say "folders" and "pens" and someone would say "tigers." All three had the same task at hand, but for some reason the third person generated an error while the other two people produced accurate results.
I realize this probably seems boring, but as I work in a cognitive science lab and read lots of papers about these sorts of errors in statistical thinking, it is interesting to me. It has also allowed me to experiment and think on my own a bit and break free from the Bayesian statical models I'm surrounded with at work (although I do not doubt that this noise/error generation could probably be modeled with Bayesian statistics as well).

Interesting thing number 2: (hopefully I haven't gone on about this before in here; I don't think I have) my experiment at work, in its most recent form (it is again under revision now) failed, and it failed because of human illogic. I have learned in this job that people really aren't logical. We model them with computer models, and they still answer random, wildly contradictory things on occasion (or as in this experiment, frequently and reliably). The only person to pass the experiment is a friend of mine that has taken it in every version and heard me explain it.
So the experiment consists of showing people evidence of causal structures (in this case it is evidence of physical effects in mice from hypothetical injections of chemicals). Subjects are given twenty pieces of "evidence" (slips of paper with affected mice on them). There are five structures. First off, I have really enjoyed watching the learning curve as people learn how to more efficiently organize the data. Ok, so after each structure they are asked two sets of questions: what chemical would you inject to get effect whatever, and what was a scientist who injected chemical whatever trying to do.
The conditions we were testing for made this question a little bit tricky, but some amouunt of logical thought would produce the result we wanted. However, we found that everyone relied solely on numbers and really deconstructed the causal structure. Many people answered the question of what they would do correctly but missed the questions about the scientist (which is blatantly contradictory). We tried everything we could to get people to connect the structures in their minds, but nothing worked.
Friday (some day anyway, I can't tell which) I tried something new. I first gave my friends the experiment using the paper evidence (this time taking away the evidence before allowing them to answer in an effort to discourage reliance on numbers). I honestly was expecting this revision to work, but it didn't; people still answered incorrectly by decoupling the structures. Then I gave them the same *exact* structure but in word form (ie instead of ten out of twenty mice with pictures of brittle hair, they hear that chemical whatever "sometimes" causes brittle hair; the "sometimes" replaces the specific causal frequency). Everyone (except on confused friend) got that structure right. They were all shocked when I told them they were the same structure. So anyway, I discovered something really interesting about human reliance on numbers in empirical data. It makes you question some scientific qualitative vs quantitative observations if quantitative details can cause very illogical thought processes.

Random fact number 3 (this one finally relying on my exhaustion): I was standing in front of the mirror brushing my teeth a few minutes ago when I underwent this thought process:
If I just open the sodium channels to depolorize it then it will let in peace, hope, love, safety---
wow, my thoughts are really random and don't make sense--
and if it lets those in then I will fire and things will be okay.
So obviously my thought process, due to exhaustion and the repetitive motion of brushing my teeth, was really nonsensical. But what is so interesting is that somehow, in the very midst of my illogical, disconnected thinking (mixture of my sadness over past memories and my mental fixation with neuroscience at the moment), *I thought something very self-reflective and logical, namely that I was thinking illogically.* Then my thoughts promptly becane nonsensical again, but I realized in some non-thinking part of me that I was aware of their nonsensical nature. When I get really tired, this happens to me. It could have to do with some unique psychological features that my mind has, but I think it is possibly somthing humanly ubiquituous (it would be interesting to try to find that out, but not feasible) that the mind, even as it strays absolutely into a sort of non-conscious haze, is still *aware* of itself in a very passive way. I could hear my thoughts, but I just was idly aware that they were discombobulated. Somehow there was a logical aspect of me making this observation of the illogical part of me.

Final tidbit: I wrote my linguistics paper on statistical learning of word segmentation in infants and monkeys. I find it really interesting that generative grammar and other statistical formulas for language rule acquisition can apply in a species that has never said a human word. What I mean is that it makes sense that monkeys can derive some language rules since it has been shown that some species of monkeys (Vervet, Tamarin) have something that strongly resembles a language. But what baffles me is that these monkeys can determine word segmenation in *human* speech. They've never spoken a word like the words we speak in their lives, but somehow their orientation responses prove that they comprehend the differences between words, non-words, and word-boundaries. That is so bizarre to me. I wouldn't believe it if they hadn't done the experiment to prove it (although I don't find the experiment compellingly absolutely conclusive). Why in the world do monkeys have the evolutionary equipment to determine *human* (not just monkey) grammar rules?
And the more interesting question- why do we not have the capacity to determine monkey grammar rules intuitively the way they have the capacity to determine our rules? Our language is far more complex and developed, and yet we lack this advanced intuition that primates can have.

Ok that's quite enough and quite more than I was planning on reambling about. There are just too many interesting things to think about. Sadly, though, I have been thinking about math and physics less and less and computer programming, neuroscience, philosophy, and cognitive science more and more since the latter are the fields I am going into and the former are just the fields I love.

FINAL FINAL tidbit- I just realized upon looking back at old posts that I did write about the monkeys on here before (probably when I read the papers), and I think it's really quite interesting that I have/had no recollection of that.

Malady of Formality

I just thought I'd take this blog as an opportunity to share my amazing poetic talent (written while frustrated in linguistics):

I'm sitting in linguistics
learning about heuristics
and it all seems quite mystic
so it makes me go balistic

rules and sounds and articulation
don't encourage my participation
i'm just so glad I live in an English nation
because Chinkschee would fear my presentation

most of these kids learned at two
the velum, the alveolar, the glottal crew
but for me this gibberish is quite new
so I'm never quite sure what to do

I fear for my safety on the exam
for no matter how much I crunch and cram
I know that these geniuses my hope will slam
and make me go crying home to mam

So this is my letter from the heart of phonology,
when you know deep inside I'd rather be in biology
where failure is not inherent in my methodology
and I am sure of my own neurology

I was quite excited to take this class
now I fear it will drop me on my .............

(profound, I know)

another note on identity

I was thinking yesterday, and I realized I don't really know what non-dualists think about conservation of identity. If everything is material, then doesn't the fact that all of your cells die and regenerate several times over the course of your life indicate that there is no conservation of identity overall? How could there be, unless there is some cell in the body designated as the identity holder and they keep trading off? You could argue that the identity comes from the patterns the cells interact in, and that new cells fill the same roll in old patterns, but then it seems identity wouldn't be purely physical then either.

saddest words in literature

Et tu, Brute?

(sorry if I spelled something wrong)

mind/body again

I want to be a psychopharmacologist. I'm on drugs right now that affect my neurochemical functioning.

I have always found it confusing to think about this boundary though. I told you I'm a dualist, that I recognize some distinction between myself and my body. But when I design drugs that change neurological functioning, at what point am I righting something that was "wrong" before, and at what poing am I altering the fundamental nature of the personality? Mental disorders, for instance, can be partially rectified with medication. But what am I changing? Am I fixing a malfunctioning neurotransmitter process, or am I actually altering the personality, changing the person? It is obvious that chemical changes caused by drugs affect the "mind" in the form of changing emotion, concentration, etc. Where is the line?

I guess that is the problem with Cartesian dualism. There has to be a line, and who knows where it is? I don't think it's right to drink caffeine or to use LSD because I think it alters me unnecessarily. But aren't the drugs I'm on altering me too? And why do I feel like they are providing me a way to be my essential self? Aren't I just changing my essential self by taking them?

We live in a world that claims to be mostly (scientifically at least) material, but even in science there is evidence that people don't truly believe in the absolute mapping from mind to body. If so, how would we have an identity at all? And like the Cartesian argument for existence, how can we not have an identity if we are capable of questioning its existence?

People with disorders that result in rapidly changing, constantly inconstant mentalities like schizophrenia, bipolar, borderline personality, dissociative identity, report a loss of continuity of self. But what is self but a collection of ultimately quantized chemical states? There really is not a thread of connection. There is constant chemical flux. So if there is such thing as a sustained identity, how does it arise, and how do we explain the constantly changing identity of people with constantly haywire neurological chemistry?

And yet, if there is no self, why the accute feeling of loss when a disorder like that triumphs? One must have once felt something like continuity of self to notice its lack.

All so confusing, so so confusing.

ethology meets linguistics

This summer I read two interesting things about linguistics (both relating linguistics to cognitive science, as I work in a computational cognitive science lab). The first was part of Daniel Dennett's The Intentional Stance. For the most part I found that book rather difficult reading, but I thought his essay on language and monkeys was interesting (even though I can't really remember how it fit into his argument). I think he concluded that you couldn't really tell if monkeys were using a language or not.
The other interesting thing I read was a paper written by the professor whose lab I work in describing how to use Bayesian statistics in conjunction with probabilistic grammar.

Today I was reading these papers about how both 8-month-old infants and cotton-top monkeys can determine segmentation of nonsense words after relatively little training (very little for the infants, about two minutes in fact). It got me thinking again about the papers I read this summer.

First off, if monkeys really do derive grammar through the same mechanisms that humans do, that's just... weird. Even if monkeys have a language, they don't use human speech, and the fact that they can somehow figure out human speech is very interesting. If so, I think it would mean that they have figured out the phonology of our language far faster than we figured out the phonology of theirs. Somehow human language is hardwired into monkeys, while monkey is not hardwired into humans.

The other thing that I found interesting was the application of probabilstic learning to animals. I find it hard enough to believe that humans learn based on Bayesian conditional probabilities (or at least it can be modeled well with them), so going further to apply that to monkeys seems crazy to me.

Assuming, however, that monkeys do have language, and that the rules for the derivation of their own languages are conditionally probabilistic the way that they are for us. What would that mean?

I'm not sure exactly. I know it puts the Catholics uncomfortably closer to animals on the soul food-chain. I know it takes away the special character of humanity as opposed to animals. I'm not sure about its cognitive implications.

So really this post has no point except that I am thinking about this, and it's interesting. I think people should perform more cognitive experiments on monkeys. If monkeys have the probabilistic architecture for language acquisition, it doesn't seem an unreasonable leap to assume that they may have other similar Bayesian architectures.

ontology is self-referential

My philosophy of mind professor proposed the following exhaustive "ontological scheme":
1. Substances (physical objects, souls/spirits(mind), mixed
2. Properties (states, qualities, features, kinds, characteristics, etc)
3. Sets/classes (pure and impure, ie numbers)
4. Time
5. Space
6. Events (actions)
7. Propositions (meanings of sentences)

So I have several arguments against both this particular scheme and the idea of ontological schemes in general (Aristotle was both very helpful and very detrimental in this respect). First of all, my professor didn't really explain exactly what his qualifications for independent catagories were (I feel like philosphy explanations are infinitely regressive), but it seems to me that there should be some kind of qualitative difference between categories that at least attempt to be fully independent (like arguably if you combined categories 5 and 6 into spacetime, that is an entity pretty independent from the rest of the categories) and categories that are obviously dependent (the event category is very dependent on space and time).

Some of the issues I have were actually brought up in class. One of the posited definitions of "event" was event x=event y if x and y have the same cause and effect. Then someone pointed out that that was impossible to analyze, as causes and effects are events as well. Thus the definition becomes very self-referential. Similarly, another posited definition was event x=event y if x and y occur in the same space at the same time. That, of course, invokes the idea that events are dependent on space and time, which makes it seem to me at least that there must be a way to derive the category "events" from the other categories, thus making it unnecessary for an exhaustive scheme (but not necessary inaccurate; I'm not sure how extra information is treated). At any rate, there is some hierarchal difference between spacetime, a free-standing category, and events, a dependent category. In linear algebra at least dependent statements can be shown to be equal after enough linear transformations and combinations. I don't think applying linear algebra to philosophy is necessarily helpful, but you never know. :-P

I also found it interesting that the scheme itself is a member of the 7th category, or propositions. More self-reference. If a schemata describing everything exhaustively is a member of only a small subset of everything, is it really exhaustive? It's definitely one of those strange loops I was rambling on about earlier, that's for sure. Also, the category of sets of self-referential, because Godel showed that set theory contains no axiomatic truth; everything is defined or contained in some other element of set theory.

Numbers are also an interesting point of debate. Supposedly numbers are a part of the set category because they are composed of sets of empty sets (pure sets). But weren't they also made up by human people to describe the world? So why are they not part of the propositions? Also, all of substance in terms of physical objects can be organized into interlocking sets, so that makes the sets category kind of eat the substance category, which was supposed to be freely standing.

What I think is that all of the elements of this ontology or any ontology are dependent and self-referential such that they are they are all variant transforms of a single recursive non-truth. They are all isomers, and their very existence began with the thought that there are isomers... it is all so circular.

While I think it is useful to ontologically look at things like science with logic and lists (like Aristotle), as it is selecting one realm and assuming its at least self-independence (ie it may be part of a more holistic world, but if we assume that it is just a part of a whole and look at it as if it is the entire hypothesis space, we can look at it as a totally internally-consistent, independent system), I think it is not useful to attempt to describe all of reality. Everything is so convoluted, so dependend and repetitive and looping and stuck within itself, that really any attempt ends up where it started.

And that, that single idea that every idea is really the same infinite idea looping and looping and looping again, transforming itself into so many faces but really at heart just that same idea, an idea that has no axiomatic truth and thus is itself dependend on nothing but itself, and thus is impossible to deem absolutely true or false (this idea speaks only in relatives), is the problem with philosophy. And the fact that I have this idea that that is the problem with philosophy may very well just be another element, another self-referential face of that same idea, but I don't believe that, I see a way out.

Philosophy, though, is a loser's game. Any one can win or lose, because in philosophy any one can perceive and create any kind of "truth," but it is all unanchored and the next man will say he is losing while he still imagines himself a winner. Philosophy takes something whole (the world, life, humanity, science) and breaks it down into tiny parts for analysis. What the analysis reveals though is that there is no glue, there was never any consistent glue holding everything together. There are only loops and paradoxes. So what it takes apart, it cannot put together again. Thus no philosophy can project a world as beautiful as the world we feel.

I think that I have been approaching this idea by a lot of different angles over the past six months, always arriving at some form of this conclusion (it is the idea that fuels my religious faith). But I think it's really important. I think it's the crux of everything. It is the pineal gland that connects philosophy, science, and spirituality.

one of the last of the great

So this has to be the end of my random diatribes. Organic chemistry beckons me with its bent arms.

I have been noticing for quite some time that nobody subscribes to the Cartesian mind-body theory these days. In my neuroscience class, we are told that it is believed that the mind maps entirely to the brain (ie cognitive neuroscience is a continuous, not a discrete, connection between two identical realms differentiated only by mode of representation). In my philosophy of mind class we are told present day philosophers who have modernized the mind-body problem no longer agree with Descartes.

Well, having read the discourse on methods and meditations or whatever that book is called, I don't think it's right to dismiss Descartes so quickly. Granted, part of my agreement with Descartes stems from my religiosity (I think a lot of religious and spiritual sects would agree far more with Descartes than with modern philosophers and neuroscientists). However, I believe that the reasons for not shafting Descartes go deeper than my own personal opinion about religion.

There is a reason religion still exists. Nobody has been able to scientifically disprove religion because religion claims to disprove science. It is its own kind of strange loop. Religion has the hierchal advantage that Godel requires for a complete proof. However, as the human brain at least is just a product of the science spirituality claims to transcend, only the human spirit has the status necessary to contemplate religion/spirituality, being the stuff of a higher realm. This has enabled the debate between religion and science to be futile. Science can prove all it wants that religion is scientifically impossible, but those proofs are based on inadequate premise. You can't prove something about the entirety of A from observation of B when B is just a subset of A. This already obviously touches on Descartes.

The reason we must not throw out Descartes is our own rational ignorance. We may have a spiritual capacity to transcend science and logic, but we don't have a rational capacity (as the rational mind is arguably a product of science). Thus we have insufficient data to disprove Descartes, or even deem his theory any less likely than theories that are more consistent within the scientific realm. Proving the existence or nonexistence of the soul is something that neither philosophy nor science can really attempt at the moment (or, in my opinion, ever).

So while I slave away to learn the details of neuroscience, cognitive science, and philosophy, and all of those details at this technological school point towards a more scientifically accepted solution to the mind-body problem, I think it is absurd and logically wrong to just throw out Descartes, and because I find his theory more consistent with the realm in which science is just a subset, I see no reason that my professors should continue to harangue me about my opinion. All of their arguments and argumentative tools are two dimensional while I cling strongly to a three dimensional idea.

So I remain one o the last of the great admirers of Descartes. And now I *really* have to pay more attention to organic chemsitry.

loops

Thought for the day:
I think this is probably a stupid observation or question, but it's kind of running in my head.

I was thinking about the song we used to sing, or rather that they used to sing at the end of every Lambchop episode (and man I did love Lambchop): "This is the song that never ends/ it goes on and on my friends/ some people started singing it not knowing what it was/ and they just kept on singing it just because/ this is the song that never ends/ it goes on and on my friends..."

And of course there are more conventional examples, like strange loops:
"The following statement is true: the previous statement was a lie." If the first statement is true, the second statement is true, so the first statement is false. If the first statement is false, the second statement is a lie, so the first statement is true. Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.... to infinity and beyond!

These are things that are infinitely looping that have a definite beginning. You progam them into your computer, hit run, and it never ends. There is input to a system but no output, because the system mechanisms are infinite.

So that's all well and good for a computer program, but my question is, can things that are infinite really have a beginning? It seems like they can at least in the terms that someone begins to sing the lambchop song one day, and he never stops, or someone writes up a program and presses run one day, and it never stops. Both depend on some starting action that happens on some arbitrary day in the scheme of things.

Say we have this universe that is governed by some force we call time that is based somehow on some arbitrary direction of entropy. So we are all created from nothingness with the universe's birth; somehow we're created from nothing, and we never end. So if we never end, and the universe is always changing, there are theoretically an infinite number of possible states for us. But what about the state that precluded our first state? How can we begin, suddenly, as a certain state, in a universe whose states are governed by fluctuations in previous states? It's like we drop out of the sky into an organized system, but that system cannot include our existence. And then what? Then our small minds can comprehend the workings of our infinite existences, and thus can comprehend infinite, but our small minds were created by something without the system, and thus cannot comprehend something, and thus either cannot comprehend infinity, or can only comprehend an infinite subset of infinity (yay Cantor).

I don't really know what I'm saying... I really should be thinking about organic chemistry and bonding orbitals, not the creation of an infinite system and the idea that infinity is not all encompassing. But alas.

Les Miserables

Just to set the tone, I loved this book. I loved how epic it was. I loved that Hugo gives us a detailed description of absolutely everything, so I feel like I know this Paris of the 1800's and the people that inhabited it. I think that is my favorite aspect of his writing. A lot of people aren't fans of the long digressions into nonessential things like the history of Waterloo, but I think it paints a more complete picture, and it makes Hugo unique. The only thing I really didn't like about the writing was the repitition of "there are times when..." or some permutation thereof. Perhaps it wouldn't be as noticable in 400 pages or so (in fact I think that I didn't really get annoyed with it until after that page mark), but after 1200 it can drive you quite insane. It is similar to my annoyance with Tolstoy always describing Vronsky's strong, white teeth in "Anna Karenina." Seriously, after the twelve millionth time, it gets a bit old.
But all in all, my rating of the writing is two thumbs up.

On a non-related note, I think the title is quite misleading. This is really a happy, powerful book about the resiliency of the human soul and the ability of the individual to rise triumphant despite terrible extenuating circumstances. It is written about those in poverty, both spiritual and monetarily, and there is one obscure reference towards the poor I think as being called "les miserables" somewhere in the middle of the book. It seems to me, however, that what Hugo is trying to get across is that circumstantial poverty doesn't matter, and that even poor people, given that they have a moral compass, can know the extent of happiness. Valjean is the embodiment of Horatio Alger monetarily, yet he faces conflict within. So it seems to me that "les miserables" aren't necessarily those made miserable by society, but those made miserable by their own depravity, which isn't always imposed by society.

As for the characters... well some of them were really annoying to me. Perhaps the most annoying was Cosette, maybe because of the way Hugo wrote her. It is obvious that she isn't a feminist character, but it seems Hugo is almost over-emphasizing her "womanly" characteristics (where "womanly" at the time meant oblivious of important things, innocently capricious, and stupidly obedient). An example of this is the line that says something like "Cosette thought Marius had gone insane, and so she obeyed him." Seriously, that line is in the book, towards the end. Watch out for it. So as compared to other writers of the time, Hugo doesn't really create many empowered female characters. However, my favorite character in the book was arguably an empowered female. Eponine's character is best displayed when she dresses up as a boy. Throughout the book (when she's alive anyway), she remains the sole female character with the strong qualities of Hugo's male characters.

Moving on though, Marius really annoyed me because he was so stupidly in love. I think he is supposed to be kind of the hero (next to Valjean), but he never proves himself to me. I think Hugo's young hero is perhaps meant to be contrasted to Valjean though. A central theme of the book is the contrast between youth and old age, and the contrast between Marius and Valjean most vividly shows this. Marius is young, disillusioned, passionately in love and lust, obsessed with idealistic symbolism rather than realities, while Valjean has seen reality as harsh as it can get, and he is very street smart so to say, bearing not passionate, idealistic love, but just a realistic devotion towards others and Cosette.

While the revolutionary insurrection seems to be cast in a positive light by Hugo, I find it interesitng that Marius and his friends, who are all young and caught up in ideas rather than realities, are implicated in such a senseless struggle whereas Valjean, who is largely nonpolitical, is the character with the most concrete and realistic conflict. Other characters have conflict with surrounding events, whether it is politics or circumstances preventing love affairs, but Valjean's sole conflict is his own soul, and I think that Hugo uses Valjean to show that true wisdom comes not from the solvency of external clashes, but rather from the annealing of the opposition in the heart (or at least a peace with the opposition).

I got from the book that you can have whatever circumstances in your life that you want, or even the most confusing moral storm in your heart, as long as you find what you love in life and morally dedicate yourself to it, you can be happy.

I know this post is very unorganized so maybe I will fix it later, but for now this will have to do.

Summation: awesome book.

Idealism is a dying art

The self I am from two years ago, living in some other four-dimensional matrix of time and space, would read this post with disgust and sadness, but so be it, sometimes we change this way.

I have been thinking a lot about idealism versus realism, which is more functional in the world, which is futile in the end. I used to be so stubbornly an idealist that all of my notions of the world were these constructs like castles in clouds, no ladders to reach them. I wanted world peace, flawless communism, shared spirituality, ubiquitous compassion, environmental consciousness, individual enlightenment, synergistic society, moral entertainment, and the death of the corporation, hierarchical government, and hell. All of those things still sound quite nice to me, but honestly, in this day and age, does it seem realistic, or even remotely plausable, that we are on our way towards world peace, or flawless communism? No. Thus while perhaps the world needs its dreamers to come up with far-fetched ideas so people still have decency and hope, these kinds of dreams are futile and non-functional.

The other extreme, however, is equally detestable, which is the extreme of cynical resignation. So the world sucks, the government is corrupted, the environment is poluted, crime is still high, unemployment rampant, selfishness abounding, poverty common, stratification horrendous etc etc etc. Oh, well, that's the way things are now, and given the realities of the human spirit, honestly what more can we expect? NO. I hate that view. It's so limiting. I don't believe the human spirit can envision qualities it can never possess. Placing that bound on the human spirit only actualizes the bound itself. If you believe that a man does not have it in him to be fundamentally good, you become a man that doesn't have it in him to be fundamentally good.

So idealistic dreamers are useless, and cynical settlers are uselses. That leaves Aristotle's Golden Mean (which really is the most subjective concept ever, but I'll ignore that): people with a sound concept of reality, yet a sincere desire to improve that reality and a firm believe that improvement is possible.

So my opinion about social change has changed. Originally I thought we should always aim high, never make concessions. I viewed everything very deontologically. Now, I see that deontology and utilitarianism are not always harmonious on the real world, and that when they conflict in terms of social structure, it is necessary somtimes to choose utilitarianism, because what is the aim and function of a social structure but to benefit as many people ase possible, even if it isn't by taking a step towards the idyllic utopia?

For instance, the global economy today is largely governed by capitalism. The idealist response to this is to vehemently protest that capitalism by strapping yourself to Wallstreet or something and poof magically everyone suddenly realizes how great communism or at least a more distributed, socialistic wealth would be and immediately changes the system ingrained by thousand of years of practice and fundamental properties of the human nature perhaps endowed by survival of the fittest from the very first. I'm sure that scenario seems highly plausible to you. It is the action I would have advocated a few years ago, being a staunch believer that ever social action had to be consistent with these magical social ideals.
However, the practical yet hopeful response to capitalism is to work within the system and use the characteristics of capitalism to ameleorate social problems and build sustainable constructs that distribute wealth. Examples of this are microcredit and economic sanctions to prevent human rights abuses. As much as I disagree with the capitalistic nature of the global economy, I must admit that it's not going anywhere, but there are still a lot of features of the economy that provide loopholes for change. In a world that is so invested and dependent on this economy, there is always stick and carrot methods for creating change. And microcredit is a very creative way of using the monster that stripped so many of any hope of wealth to actually go back and create some wealth. It seems dirty, in a way. It surely isn't completely morally consistent with economic ideals. But it works.

See, this is my long-winded main point. You can apply this idea to any social structure or problem today. Idealism is necessary for ideas, but only approaches made within the system work. We can't overthrow the system of human nature, and we can't overthrow the system of human government or economy. But we can work within it to mold it. We can change the parameters of its container, and wait to watch it fill the new space. So maybe I have grown up and abandoned my innocent childlike ideas of change. In some ways I really have become the adult that I disliked back then. But this works. And we don't have a lot of time to fix things. There is not time for that perfect world.

environmentalism

I will confess that while I have always cared a great deal about humanitarianism, I really couldn't have cared less about environmentalism. I think this was because I didn't see the effects of ignoring it at all. My parents recycled and bought organic food, but I didn't really understand at all why it would make that much of a difference if I turned the heat up or left the lights on or threw away my plastic bottles.

I think that while you are in college, you are probably the most ecologically friendly you will ever be (for most people). My carbon/eco footprint is significantly lower than it was in high school. But I'm starting to care more. I have avoided organic food because it is so much more expensive, and money conservation is very important in college. Now I understand that there are more globally important things than conserving money, and buying more expensive things is sometimes not a bad thing, if they are better for the environment.

Actually, being in college has made me far less wasteful. There is something about being completely accountable for your own actions that makes you more aware of the effect those actions have on you and those around you. It was easy to waste food my parents bought with their money, much less easy to waste food I bought with my (really their) money. I am more aware of how senseless it is.

It's too bad that things are so stratified so that people in America are living as if there are eight worlds while people in Africa are living as if there's only an acre. It's also too bad that people that are trying to reverse that are getting labelled as crazy liberal hippie green folks. I can't decide if it is good or bad that being "green" is currently a fad for college age kids. It's probably a good thing, because then we have to at least pretend we know something about the environment if we want to be cool.

So while I didn't use to be that interested in environmentalism, I'm changing my mind. I'm realizing that the crazy liberal hippies are really the only sane people, because everyone else is behaving as if somehow the earth is going to be amazingly fertile forever and ever when really there is so much evidence that it is dying because of how we are treating it. Everyone else (me included) has their eyes shut to actualities, and relies perhaps too much on scientific progress coming up with solutions that allow our hurtling expansion to continue. I guess people are acting as if they can defy population dynamics. There is a human carrying capacity, and while endorsing this crazy, industrialized society has temporarily inflated it, it really can't last for long, and then what will happen? As the Black-Eyed-Peas say in what may be the best song every, "we've only got one world, one world, that's all we've got, one world, one world."

Why is it suddenly normal to behave as if we have an infinite number of worlds, and radical to observe reality? We in America have just maybe always been privileged with the ability to ignore things as they actually are. We live in this dreamworld, and as we dream, those that are aware of the problems are madly trying to build solutions so as not to awaken us from our dreams. But our dreams are getting so extravagent that the solutions being madly built are not big enough to sustain them, and soon everyone is going to have to wake up to the idea that they have been living this nice dream while parts of the world have been awake in a nightmare.

My parents don't believe in global warming. But really, honestly, even if you concede the global warming point (which I'll confess global warming is rather imminent), there are so many other things that will also destroy us that are really undeniable.

I'm sure a lot of parents were annoyed at having to endure a political message while watching "Happy Feet" and especially "Wall-E," but honestly, I think that if things don't change, the world will go the way that Wall-E went. Science and industry destroy us, and they are the only saviors we have. We destroy this world and wait patiently for the spaceship that will take us to the next.

So I think that now that I am realizing this, and caring a bit more, I will read some "green" books and see what I can do to quit contributing to this madness.

attempt at secularly analyzing gay marriage

This post will focus on analyzing this article, which is an article by the LDS church supporting ammendments in California and other states defining marriage as between a man and a woman. Because I believe the article makes an admirable attempt at being secular, and because my viewpoint, as confused as it is, has always been secular on this issue, I'm going to try to deconstruct this secularly without really talking about religion. That said, I am LDS, so this topic is confusing and close to heart for me, and my best friend is gay and hoping to marry and have children with her girlfriend, but struggling also with religious implications, so I have a very clear window into either side of the issue. For my religious conscious, I will pray about this article, but for my intellect and civil opinion, I will analyze it.

Okay. So my view before I read this article was that civil marriage between gay couples had no conflict with religion. I believed that the choice to allow gay marriage within its own walls and within its own members was wholly the choice of the church, but that the right to the civil definitions of marriage was wholly a legal, not a religious, right. I know that there is occasionally a bleeding between morality and legality, since it is safe to assume that a lot of laws are at least superficially based on moral codes (and I think that people can't really argue that that is at least partially true), and I know that even our forefathers like Jefferson who wrote the letter to the Danbury Baptist Church, a letter I have read, had a lot of overlap between state and religion going on (there is the argument that ceremonial deism, like having "in God we trust" on the currency, proves that we don't really have a separation of church in state; but I think that falls into the difference between religion and morality, because when currency was first designed, I think the belief in God was fairly universal, and the differentiation came in further details). But I believe that while today there is mostly a consensus on some fashion of universal morality, there is no consensus on the details that dictate religion, and the differentiations between religions in a country that is united by a single legal code make it obvious that overlapping religion and state (although not necessarily morality and state, because they really are different in our country at least) is a bad plan. And I think that churches for the most part know that, and I know the LDS church knows that So gay marriage was a prettty clearly legal issue to me before I read this article. Let the government recognize the civil marriage, and let the church define the religious marriage. It preserves the individual moralities unique to particular religions, and it also preserves the separation between church and state. However, reading the article has confused things a bit for me. Perhaps they are not as black and white as I was hoping.

So I'm just going to go through the major points of the article and try to de-jumble my thoughts. The article starts of pretty religiously by explaining the LDS church's opinion, but I believe it continues to try to argue a more logical rather than moral approach. The first interesting point that I think it brings up is child development's necessity for gender diferentiation in parents. They cite a few people, but I'm sure, given the debate going on today, that it would be equally easy to find experts arguing the other side as well, so I don't think the quotes really help the argument much. However, while I have thought about this point before, I confess I hadn't thought about it much since I viewed this issue as so strictly an issue of legal rights. Perhaps, though, it is useful to think about social implications, as this article does.

I think that obvious arguments against this are just individual differences between every person and every couple that makes some kind of rule of obvious gender roles in marriage pretty hazy. In some marriages, the father works, and it some the mother works, and in some the mother is the stoic less emotional one, and in some the mother is, and those kinds of immediate differences I think are available in people of the same sex too. However, I admit that there is a biological difference between men and women that is the general rule in most cases. There are some apparent personality differences that come from both the biological addition of the genes on that different chromosome, and in the societal climate of gender (which is slightly degenerating, but there are still some pretty clear gender divisions in society). So I concede that it's probably true that having parents of both chromosomes is necessary, if not biologically, at least in society today. A lot of that depends, though, on incomplete reserach and evidence of the balance between nurture and nature. So while any kind of evidence supporting this point in the article is incomplete, it is at least a valid possibility that the point is true.

Also, along the lines of social problems, I'm a very strong believer in a close family being integral to changing the dissintegration pattern of love in today's world. I think the best way to change the filth in the world is to strengthen the family. In a society that makes it difficult now, and will probably always make it difficult, considering people's strong opinions, for a family with two parents of the same sex to have all of the benefits of stability that the traditional family has, it makes sense to me that families based on this crumbling ground, through probably no fault of their own but more just the nature of people and society, may start out with more problems in familial stability. Not to say those can't be surmounted, but in a world in which we are quickly losing so much, it may not be fair to bring a child into that kind of tumultuous situation, all religious ideas concerning that set aside. It may not seem fair to deny people legal rights just based on the fact that they are discriminated against the way African Americans were once discriminated against, and the ability to raise children may seem like a basic human right, but I don't really have a strong opinion on that, and I'm just remarking about the need for familial stability in this day and age that may not come from that.

It also seemed like the article was not suggesting that any other legal rights be denied same-sex couples. I'm not sure of all of the extra rights that come with marriage as opposed to just being a couple, but it seems like this issue these days is a big more on the grounds of the rights of same-sex couples to the recognition that their relationship has the same value as a heterosexual relationship. And while the government can grant them that piece of paper, I don't think it will change any of the people that have always been against this's minds, and thus maybe there isn't that much of a difference between the already provided rights and that extra piece of paper.

The most interesting thing I thought the article said, though, was that legalizing same-sex marriage would actually detereorate separation of church and state rather than uphold it. I didn't really see that coming, and I find it intriguing. They talk about religious organizations like adoption agencies and schools being forced to adopt children into same-sex families or provide housing for same-sex couples, and I agree that this kind of legislation is just another way of the government stepping over that line between church and state. While not allowing gay marriage legally because of the moral opinion of churches seems a violation of church and state to me, this is a different issue. This is the issue of not allowing gay marriage not because of some unique moral opinion of churches (although that is obviously part of it for the LDS and many other churches), but rather because doing so would provide more of a deterioration of religious and legal freedom than not doing it. *That* to me, seems like the most valid secular argument this article, or any church, could make. I don't think it's right for the government to force religious organizations to follow the legal definition of marriage, and doing so violates my very reason for believing that gay marriage should be allowed in the first place (ie that it is entirely a legal and not a religious matter). So I really think that this is the most valid point this article makes, and it is an argument that has no plea to the moral opinions of the LDS church, just to the rights of any church to practice freely, and it makes me understand more, whereas I didn't before, why my church, a church that believes in separation of church and state, is opposing a seemingly solely legal ruling.

I am not quite as convinced by the argument in this article about changing school curriculum. That doesn't seem to be an infringement on the right of religion at all. Let schools teach that homosexual marriages deserve all of the same respect as heterosexual marriages. That doesn't seem to be any different from what the article was earlier advocating in the form of tolerance. That doesn't mean that parents can't teach their children that it's morally wrong. School teaches kids that it's legally perfectly fine to smoke when you are eighteen (even if it may be stupid) and drink alcohol when you are 21, and drink caffeine like coffee or tea throughout. The school teaches that it's legal to have sex when you are in high school, that it's okay, just as long as you use contraception. It would be wrong for the school to teach any differently, because then they would be teaching a moral opinion instead of a legal fact. So while the LDS parents can teach their kids not to drink alcohol or caffeine or smoke or have premarital sex ever, it's not an infringement or wrong at all for the school to teach that these things are legally permissable. It wouldn't really be any different in schools taught that same-sex marriage was legally permissable. So this argument doesn't really convince me at all.

Ok, so that's my secular opinion of this article. As I am caught between a lot of confusing ideas, I don't really have a moral opinion at the moment, but I can at least assess the arguments the church makes that are clearly logical rather than spiritual arguments, since my logic concerning this issue can't really get confused the way my spiritual opinion can, fortunately (I guess). So I couldn't tell you what my moral opinion of this article, this is my secular opinion.

Honestly, every time I see the agony my best friend is going through (she was raised Baptist, raised to believe it's wrong to be gay, and her family is still very much of that opinion), I just thank God that I'm not gay, or that I don't think I'm gay (whichever it is), becuase I have no idea how I would deal with that.