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.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, September 29, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
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)
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.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
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.
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.
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