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.