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.