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.