Some links and an extended repost on awareness

Something that still baffles me, the idea of different learning styles is simple rubbish that we feed teachers. Also, see my earlier complaints.

A good, long article on CRISPR and the future of gene editing.

A cool overview of neural networks and deep learning technologies.

  

And Jef Yakst at The Scientist gives a good overview of neural genesis in adults.

At Neuropatch, Janet Kwasniak has a piece on letting go of the magic of consciousness.

Conscious Awareness

We are “aware” that we are here, that we are humans, that we live on earth, and that that man over there wishes me to pay him money. We are part of a complex social, national, and family web. We form representations and models of these different relationships of our world and our selves. When we need one of those representations or some facet of information, we can turn our attention on it, and it will readily be there. “This is who I am. I live in the United States.”

None of this awareness is going to transcend a robot that represents its self as being at “this location on the factory floor, in this position on the assembly line.” If the robot senses/represents, “I am out of screws, roll to far wall and get more,” however such robots will do that, it will have awareness in a similar way that any of us humanrobots do at this moment. When we form the representations/thoughts that “I am out of food; need to go to store,” the representations and sensations we are aware of provides a great deal of information. This includes information and representations such as the location of the car, to the hunger in our body, to the place of the store.

The kind of awareness (vast representational stores) that adult humans have surpasses what higher animals, babies, and what our new robots have. As in the previous post, we have representational stores in abundance about our selves and our relationship to external events. We have such in ways that lesser "conscious" entities do not have, such as a chimpanzee or IBM's Watson. There is good reason to believe that language acquisition allows adult humans to have this kind of widespread and consistent information about our selves and the world.

But this high level of awareness, the vast informational stores about self and world, is not consciousness as often defined. It certainly is not qualia as often brought in. As explained in previous posts, your representational structures for seeing red are unique. No one else has quite the exact representational or informational repertoire as regards particular shades of red, and also do not have the bodily processes like feelings/emotions that will hang onto any particular shade. The person who played Big Bird for a long time will have representations and bodily attitudes (feelings of pleasure from remembrance) towards that particular shade of yellow in a way far different than anyone else. This should not be a bewildering fact. The only way to get a creature to represent and respond to a certain shade of color in the exact same away as another individual is to create that exact individual.

That there is a great deal of overlap in our representations and bodily responses to a shade of color, just goes into the fact that we share the same general sensory mechanisms and share a great deal of environmental and developmental structures. So, many of our representations and emotional responses will be similar to other humans, even if each of us has certain unique differences. Also, it is not surprising that we are walled off from imagining the basic representational repertoires of other beings, such as the representational structures of a dolphin.

Though language and other brain aspects (attention span, e.g.) gives humans information in quantities greater than a roach, greater than a capuchin, and greater than a robot, there is not some level of awareness where we have now woke up and “know that we exist.” Language does allow for self-representations and self/world representations that means that we represent our selves in widespread, globally countable ways.

The moral of this story is that humans do not have some property of awareness or consciousness that is outside information, generally speaking. Humans do not access awareness any more than a Google car will represent another "car over there." We of course do have a slightly different kind of “awareness,” but that is only because we represent a vastly greater store of information. Yes, like self-driving cars, we “see that car over there” and will avoid it, while at the same time (or within quick succession) representing that “I really need to get home” or that “This ice cream I bought from the store is going to taste great.” In this sense, we are informationally far richer than a dog, a baby, or likely a Google Car. For clarity, even if we program all of wikipedia into possible representational structures of the Google car, it may surpass us in total information and access and use of total information, but there may still be something to be said about continuous ego space relations that humans come to inhabit. That is, there may still be something to be said about the kind of narrative, bodily, homeostatic, and centralized sensory content that humans constantly represent about their selves. That information is both vast and centrally focused, so to speak. Perhaps we enjoy this in ways that we will not find useful to put into Google cars. Despite that kind of centralized self representation that we create, it is still just an information structure, and not some kind of awareness property or some kind of consciousness property that we have now tapped into.

Just as we eliminate consciousness as some property that emerged in animals and humans, we will stop seeing awareness as some property of the world. We understand, generally speaking, what baseline sensory content is, and we understand how nervous systems will represent, routinize, and draw future inferences about external environments. As those nervous systems ramp up, even into human knowledge, there is not going to be reasons to see consciousness or awareness as arising. We are representing the world out there in vast ways, both in our brains and in our theories, but such representations and knowledge do not transcend information or relational aspects to reach some different kind of representation. We do not reach a state of awareness that surpasses that of any other type of external representing structure. In this sense, humans do not become aware of their external world in a way different than IBM's Watson was aware of a Jeopardy! clue. We just happen to be programmed with a wider and more encompassing representational structure.  

Graziano in the Atlantic

Here is a short piece in the Atlantic by Michael Graziano, who I have talked about before. Also see Michael Smith's take on the piece at Self Aware Patterns. At the Atlantic there are 600 comments on the piece, so Graziano's brand of eliminativism rankles a few feathers. A few thoughts on the article:

In general I follow Graziano's thinking. He claims that we misconstrued the qualities of white light because of the information we took in of it. It seemed white, so to speak. Likewise, he claims, we have developed poor concepts about consciousness because of the limited information ("consciousness) that presents itself to us, to our other self-reflecting, self-perceiving aspects. And thus we endlessly get really bad conceptions about that entity that we have labeled consciousness, including that it is something outside of information or representation.  

I do wonder at the idea that “this is the way consciousness seems to us.” By the time of, say, Locke, Kant, Descartes, or later in 20th century batty-qualia-philes, it becomes difficult to claim that we are forming our ideas about what our consciousness is by just searching our inner world. Obviously, the Greeks, given that they were the first formalizers, transversed some ground rather naively. Perhaps their analyzing of their own consciousness was rather unadulterated, so to speak. But certainly any later thinker has already been thoroughly fed societal and philosophical conceptions about their “consciousness” as they go in search of knowledge about such. Or in Graziano's terms, their reflecting on the information of their consciousness already has included in it information about what consciousness is supposed to be, along with other endless ideas about the general working of the world.

Now, maybe most of that historical lead-up to any particular theory will be inundated by any individual's conscious experience, and this leads to the continuous poor interpretation of that information, given the general structure of that relationship (transparency, for one).

However, I do wonder if a few different turns, perhaps a lucky strike of ten obvious Phineas Gage-like cases in the 17th century, would have led to a vastly different analysis of what consciousness is. Even without 20th century instruments, perhaps all the explanations and posits of “what consciousness is” may have been very different. Maybe we never come close to postulating a hard problem in the manner that we have done, or think that this subjective versus objective divide is so much a problem.

And speaking of subjectivity, which a lot of people espouse as a guard against scientific pontification on consciousness and qualia, see some of those 600 comments, I still find it a confusing mess.

The exact arrangement of the atoms/molecules of any given tree may be necessary to explain that tree's interaction within an environment. Think of thoroughly exploding a tree. To explain where every part of that tree ends up requires (I assume) a very particular (subjective?) analysis of that exact arrangement. The fact that such a singular analysis, given that this is the only exact arrangement of these particles in the world, is necessary to explain the future of these particles, seems banal to me. But it also seems like we are not doing anyone any favors by talking about the subjectivity of the tree as opposed to the objective way those particles will play out. There is no reason to divide the world into subjective and objective. What science aims for is a general analysis of why a thing happens. Say, why, generally speaking, all those tree parts will end up where they will. If humans care about exploding a particular tree in a certain way to send those parts to exact spots, they will have to particularize that tree. Hence engineering.

Following a Graziano like account above, I find people arguing over this about consciousness or first person subjectivity to be baffling. There is often this claim that the first person world is private and therefore science cannot measure it. Or that consciousness and qualia resides in a first person realm and science resides in a third person, and therefore the two shall not ever mix. This only has significant weight if you have posited some realm of consciousness that holds information in a way outside the way other materials, say computers, hold information. Let's say a computer runs a program with influence from external components. Yes, in order to measure everything that that computer engages in, you will have to provide a full account of the internal structure of that computer. But that should give you the full “subjectivity” of that computer. The same has to hold for brains, unless you posit some mental realm, some consciousness or qualia-like entity that is beyond science.

As in my previous parlance, if an experience you have is just information, it will be a unique representational structure. Only you are representing the information of “John, in NYC, my dog Shaggy is on the floor, I am reading the Huffington Post.” That is a very particularized set of information, and it is subjective in that sense. But there is no reason to think that information is outside of science anymore than information in the computer that you are reading this on has a unique array of information, or whose RAM is processing an unique array of information. In order to predict the exact behavior of that computer, or explain all its qualities, we will have to know everything about that particular object. That is just particularization, which is a form of subjectivity, I suppose, but only in a rather banal sense. People who think subjectivity or the first person means something different have not convinced me that there is something useful there. Of course, agreeing with Graziano, I believe they are likely to still be holding some poorly conceptualized idea of what consciousness is.

So, the idea that there is a subjective realm and an objective realm that science is going to have a difficult time parsing still baffles me.  

Metzinger's Model

I am working on another rehash of eliminating our concept of consciousness. 

Meanwhile, here is an enjoyable excerpt from Thomas Metzinger's the Ego Tunnel. Also, see his latest Edge.org answer.

We are Ego Machines, natural information-processing systems that arose in the process of biological evolution on this planet. The Ego is a tool— one that evolved for controlling and predicting your behavior and understanding the behavior of others. We each live our conscious life in our own Ego Tunnel, lacking direct contact with outside reality but possessing an inward, first-person perspective. We each have conscious self-models— integrated images of ourselves as a whole, which are firmly anchored in background emotions and physical sensations. Therefore, the world simulation constantly being created by our brains is built around a center. But we are unable to experience it as such, or our selfmodels as models. As I described at the outset of this book, the Ego Tunnel gives you the robust feeling of being in direct contact with the outside world by simultaneously generating an ongoing “out-of-brain experience” and a sense of immediate contact with your “self.” The central claim of this book is that the conscious experience of being a self emerges because a large portion of the self-model in your brain is, as philosophers would say, transparent. 

We are Ego Machines, but we do not have selves. We cannot leave the Ego Tunnel, because there is nobody who could leave. The Ego and its Tunnel are representational phenomena: They are just one of many possible ways in which conscious beings can model reality. Ultimately, subjective experience is a biological data format, a highly specific mode of presenting information about the world, and the Ego is merely a complex physical event— an activation pattern in your central nervous system.

And here is a refurbish of an earlier post by me (Moving Towards Eliminativism):

Following above, I am going to try my hand at denying “consciousness,” at least as some fundamentally new property or object. I am going to try to reduce it to something simpler and say that it is nothing above that analysis. For more on ontology and reduction see my previous post on John Heil, who lays out similar key ideas.

I am essentially going to reduce consciousness to a rapid process of (self-)monitoring, (self-)representing, and action (of the self). But all of those states in a non-conscious, non-unified way. Some of those processes are self reflective. Consciousness here is the “what-it-is-like” conception. It is feels and redness. It is the presentation of sensation “as it pops up before one's self.” (That last part is tricky because there is no adequate way to say “it presents itself to itself,” or simply “it is,” neither which is quite right). I aim to deny that it is actually a property, actually a thing.

First, let us accept something. The book on the table is not actually a book. The book-qua-book has created no new properties in the world, I assume. If it does something to some person/brain/being, other than what physical objects usually do, that will be because of that person’s representation of the symbols. But if there is a new, emergent property in that representation of the book, that property is in the brain (which is the question we are asking about), and is not in the unique structure of atoms as regards the book and the properties that book manifests.

[Aside, similar to “Does the computer know how to play chess?”, the relational aspect of the letters of a book, thus atomic arrangement, should be seen within the span of human cultural creation. Thus, the relational aspects of those atoms formed in letters allows additional humans to take in that information and build a tool shed. From single-cells, the process of evolution, sensory development, human brain development, and then cultural development has created “letters” that cause robust activities in the world. That is the manifestation of the relational aspects of atoms of letters and the whole story of epistemology.]

Back to representation and to consciousness. The chess computer or Watson can represent and create "intentional" structures in the world without the arising of consciousness or of new emergent and non-reducible properties (see previous post on Deflating Consciousness). An amoeba can “represent” and create self-beneficial action as it regards the sun or saltwater, again without consciousness or seemingly emergent properties. The idea being here that evolution put, say, early bacteria into a structure that sensed (perhaps represented) external environments, and did things because of those perceivings. Biology is chemistry is physics. If something emergent has happened in the universe at that time, it is no more usefully emergent than the first creation of hydrogen atoms. The structures of the behavior readily falls from the structures of the world.

Carrying on, animals got more complicated in sensing and representing their world. Again, this is what evolution does. Animals with more complex sensory systems and informational parsing structures increased in number because those modifications were useful in their environment. In humans, our representations reach a point where we had enough internal representations of our selves at the center of a modeled world, that we also modeled that we exist, that "I" experience.

My thesis here is that such representing in higher animals, such that represents and organizes behaviors and even “thoughts” around external and internal events, is doing so in what we are calling a conscious way. But this “consciousness” is actually nothing. The rapid presentation of representational structures, as arising from sensory information along with emotional effects, presents and circles around a representation of the animal, including tons of representations of the self, of an I at the center of the world, aided by linguistic explosion. But this is not actually a different process than the particular makeup of the rapid representational structures. It simply is that very fast run-through of those countless representations. There is not some central unified vision or property within that representation. If an animal represents that a predator is near, those representations are mixed with (really inseparable from) chemically induced sensations and feelings. A new property or object has not emerged of a non-reducible quality, of consciousness. This probably parallels Antonio Damasio a bit (see the Self Comes to Mind and The Feeling of What Happens), except I am more dismissive of consciousness as a robust phenomenon.

Likewise, human consciousness has a greatly expanded self-awareness. That is, it has representations and a model (and occasional representation of that model) of "I," my self, at this computer, at this date in time, at this place in the universe. But this is merely a representational sequence, and there is no "qualitative feeling" to it.

However, the “what-it-is-like” is special. Any complex representation (or maybe series of representations) is a singular representation unlike anything else in the world. But that does not mean it is an emergent property, unless we want to say that the unique atomic structure of "that rock" is emergent. Nor is it non-reducible. The representation is cashed out in its micro-structures which have been ordered that way by evolution and the history of this individual. If a representational schema plays cool functions in the world, allows you to do badass things with that trombone over there, it is because that is what evolution does. It puts material together in cool ways that can further manipulate the world for their own benefit. But this is always reducible to the physical level which was put in its cool situation by historical accident. So nothing emergent or new was created, except in some banal sense.

But consciousness is something. Sure, just as this book is something . . . because we represent it “as something.” But we are humble about what that book is: an interesting structure of material. We do not claim it is emergent or non-reducible. Mental properties are the same. Yes, they are processes. Yes, consciousness is a state of the world (a structure of atoms in the brain organized in an interesting way). Consciousness is no more an object or a process than water going from complete solid to complete gas is a process. Or better, than the computer going from the 1^st move in a chess game (with an external “opponent” occasionally moving a piece) to the last. Consciousness is not different than that computer process, except that we have a great many more representations of our selves at the center of a modeled world, representing our selves as the feeler of emotions and pains, and so on.

In humans, the rapid presentation of images and concepts and ideas creates an additional representation of a being at the center experiencing such, but that representational process does not literally create (me or I). The postulated central representation does not experience anything any more than the computer experiences a chess move. Consciousness as property or non-reducible conception does not exist, except again in the unique sense of individuality (there is nothing exactly like that set of atoms or that exact process of representations). Only you are representing the room you are in, a few body cues, a few memory insertions, and this exact sentence at this exact time. That representation is unique, and in certain ways non-reducible. In order to get all the exact processes that are you and your immediate environment, we would have to reproduce just that entire environment.

To drive the point home, there is not some point in time where an updated self-driving car will represent world/self in such a numerous way that it is now beyond representation and has entered consciousness. Those representations do not morph into “global awareness,” they merely present another aspect of the world that is, perhaps, re-represented by a future brain process. They do not reach a state of experiencing or consciousness. However, human consciousness may have a representation of self/world, that because of linguistic blossoming, far surpasses anything that a chimp or a Homo Neanderthal or a 2-year-old or an advanced self-driving car will represent.

According to this naive representer.

Links

Two good posts by Larry Moran at Sandwalk. One on the number of proteins created by genes in humans and the other on the cost of creating a new gene within an animal or species. The answers (cheating) are about 20,000 genes and not that great, according to the analysis.

Ed Yong explores more exotic sensory systems. This time he presents the mantis shrimp's ability to see polarized light. And then he presents how salmon and bullfrogs are able to switch their visual sensitivity to a different range on the electromagnetic spectrum, in order to see infrared.

Scott Bakker has a piece on Michael Graziano and his attention becomes consciousness proposal.

Michael Smith at Self Aware Patterns says we will eventually have a scientific theory of consciousness.

Lastly, Martin Rees claims if we ever find aliens they will have transitioned to an existence as robotic machines.

A Nietzschean Morning

The Christian should be far more fearful of the atheist than of the devil worshiper. Those who worship the devil confirm several important conceptual elements of the Christian world. First, that there is such a thing as the Devil, and consequently God. The devil worshiper then confirms the human faculty of choosing good over evil. The devil worshiper confirms our capacity to choose that which is Holy.

The atheist just laughs at all this nonsense. And destroys every last vestige of Christian doctrine. 

Some links. And the fulfillment of our telos.

More on genes and origins at Aeon.

Ed Yong, who is on fire with some good articles, has a piece on the 3-D structure of chromosomes.

Also Ed Yong on the electric eel. Exotic sensory systems are good gateways into how evolution proceeds and the diverse life forms and neuronal systems that can be created.

Ken Weiss on the unknowables of Biology. 

Two articles on free will. Greg Caruso has a new blog at Psychology Today. Jerry Coyne responds to his first post.

This New Yorker article, "The Strangers in Your Brain," about the expression of transposon genes in neurons, is rather fascinating. An aside on the article, Clancy brings in a study about measuring the behavior of genetically identical mice. I always find this study to be underwhelming. I read it as they released ten mice into the same cage or environment and then measured their behavioral programs. They then point to the expression of vast differences of behavior in genetically identical mice. It is underwhelming because once you release identical creatures into an environment together, you are already gearing up for significant behavioral differences. For instance, say we have bad tasting water over here. Well, the first mouse, by chance, goes and tastes it. His identical sibling is slightly behind and watches him (his facial expressions). These identical siblings just had a significantly different “environmental” experience. When you have multiple beings together, and they are not perfectly mirrored somehow (if such is possible), then you are already gearing up for a “significantly different environment” between them. That is, you quickly lose the idea that these identical creatures were released into the “same environment.” Now, if you release identical mice into their own banal environment, and you see significant behavioral differences, that may be more informative, but you would still have a great many confounds. 

____________________

Though it's a bit obsolete now, John Oliver had a good segment on the Canadian elections, urging people not to vote for the Conservative candidate Harper.


And lastly, humans have now fulfilled the purpose they were put on this planet to fulfill: Star Wars.

Humans, Nature/Nurture, The Future

An enjoyable article about cognitive enhancement and a changing social world has encouraged some parallel thoughts by me. The article, "Brain Gain" by Nayef Al-Rodhan, goes through possible social changes as we move into the ability for cognitive enhancement. He is mainly worrying about how cognitive enhancement will drive inequalities into even further extremes than today. 

My story below is not really a response to the article, more a side rant, but there is something a bit off in the article. This has to do with a belief by Al-Rodhan that going forward into ever greater enhancement of our cognition by medicine, that we will not eventual make significant alterations to social institutions. If our social dynamics stay the same, say nationalistic, highly-capitalistic social structures, then his worries make sense. But also, as he highlights, as societies in general come to accept a physicalist notion of the brain/mind, there should be changes to how we in general view human social encounters, such as agency. Having acknowledged that we should and will have different views of humans and the social beliefs surrounding humans, he turns back to standardizing our psychological and social beliefs of today going into the future. He assesses the impact of cognitive enhancement within societies and psychologies that look like our's today. If he is right and most people come to accept physicalism in the future, then the kind of psychological and social straight-jackets that make inequality such a given today, hopefully may change in the future. 

There is some reason to think a mechanization of the human means changes to our social beliefs and institutions, as we come to understand our psychologies and emotions to greater extents. I think our naive, folk psychologies and beliefs are one of the things that have us reifying the present order, the present gross inequalities. So, if he is right and people come to accept the "mind/brain identity thesis," then there is also reason to think we will deal with inequality and general societal structures differently in the future. Fears about cognitive enhancement only exacerbating inequality will therefore be shortsighted.

Or maybe Bernie Sanders will solve all our inequality problems before then.


A Different Self

Stories that disrupt our view of selves and our view of humanity.

We can imagine 2000 years in the future, the following procedure: A fetus is developed rather normally. We have standard DNA/epigenetic structure, perhaps slight cognitive enhancement, but still very much human.

Then at birth, we prepare the baby to become a half-mile wide, planet hopping space ship. We remove all limbs, and plug peripheral nerves into ship sensors and into thrusters and flaps. We carefully remove the eyes and ears and plug those sensory systems into new “eyes.” These can be sensory systems that see a great range of the electromagnetic spectrum, and plug other visual nerves into instrument converters that feed the brain with other information, about radiation for example. Our newborn human, our slightly enhanced brain, is now learning to govern the motion and sensory systems of the ship. Where brains once navigated through the body, they now govern a ship-body, that is hooked into their body/brain. For the most part, we can still imagine this brain as running through many of the thought processes of us today, including of the representations that it has of its self. We can allow it to still run on emotions, if we want. He could still have desires, fear, and doubt. He could still have many of the characteristics that we see in us today, at least within our brain/minds.

These kinds of thoughts remind us of several things. There is not some endpoint to evolution that was “Human.” There is not an endpoint that looks like our selves today, of us living in an updated, but still rather “normal” social environment. The above story is not an abomination to humans, because nature cares nothing for this false essentializing of the “human” or of the “environment.” All evolution did was end up with a DNA structure like the one that sits inside our cells, and that gives rise to the general body morphology, under certain given conditions, that we see in us today. Importantly, nature was not trying to create a “human” that lives in a standard earth and “pack-societal” environmental. Our DNA may have developed within such processes, but there was not some desire of evolution that humans/DNA remain within those environs.

Furthermore, there is not some genuine self sitting within our DNA just waiting to emerge into existence. Pretty much any kind of characteristic can be grossly changed given a radically different environment. Many of those characteristics can be radically changed through normal social environmental changes that we are capable of today (such as creating a monosexed society). Even today we can radically change, with certain environmental tweaks, the characteristics of our sexuality, our introversion/extroversion, and our general social institutional structures, such as the heterosexual monogamous matrix. As we get pills and oxytocin sprays (or something actual effectual), who knows the kinds of even more subtle changes we can make to the expression of our DNA in our bodies, even within a rather standard environment.

A cheap shot, but you should hit over the head anyone talking about expression of their true self. We can give better descriptions of our selves than that. There are interesting tales to tell about how our DNA becomes what we are. Those stories are only coherent if we keep different environmental, different social structures firmly within grasp. Stories about why we are the way we are will require a rich combination of genes and environment. When we de-essentialize the human condition, when we de-essentialize our selves, we can begin to tell the interesting stories about why we are the way we are.


No, a half-mile wide semi-human controlled spaceship is not an abomination to nature, to humans, or to our selves. We did not create some monster. There are no monsters.

More and CRISPR links

Gene editing:

Carl Zimmer has a must read on CRISPR pigs in the New York Times. He has a very quick video introduction to CRISPR here.

And for those scared of GMO foods, you should read this on CRISPR editing of plant genomes. For me, I say we need to shut the whole thing down right now, before people start editing human genomes.

Human ancestors:

At Why Evolution is True, Matthew Cobb has a good piece on the geographic spread of Neanderthal genes. From Nature, a finding of Homo sapiens teeth in China puts humans there earlier than thought.

Other links:

Scott Bakker has a short piece on mental functions. 

And a newer blog, Just More Philosophy, has many posts about ending much of philosophy, and telling philosophers to do more science. 

 

Links: Brain, Genes, and Cancer

At Aeon, Joe Hibbert on the difficulty of repairing the brain. At the Brain Blogger, a new study shows how we can purposefully destroy your dendrites that are important to a given memory. 

CRISPR and the promise of editing our genomes is hot right now. Sara Reardon relays how the "Gene-editing record smashed in pigs." Ed Yong, in the Atlantic, gives a bit of a shrug at the news that this will help us create transplantable pig organs, though he says it is testament to the power of CRISPR. 

Also by Ed Yong, the search for unique human genes.

Turning to cancer research, Carl Zimmer relays new studies about why elephants may not get cancer that often, despite that they have a great many replicating cells. Ken Weiss, at the blog The Mermaid's Tale, suggests that the elephants cancer fighting activity might be mostly useful only to the elephant's biology. 

Banning Niqabs

Three links on a problem that is baffling to almost all. And to those who it is not baffling, they are wrong:


Adam Gopnik, "Freedom and the Veil"

Peter Watts, "Squirrel!" (which is more a rant about contemporary Canadian politics)

Zunera Ishaq, "Why I intend to wear a veil at my citizenship ceremony"



These articles are about Canada's struggles at the moment, but they are of course pertinent to many countries, including the United States. The personal rebut by Zunera Ishaq is a few months old but it is moving. If you try to ban a piece of clothing for the good of another adult individual, you are almost guaranteed to have good, intelligent rebuttals saying "how dare you try to save me from my own rational, well-thought out choices." Our only move, for those who think burkas and niqabs are bad ideas, is to say that no, you are making a bad choice that you are not aware of. You are not aware of how drastically you are being oppressed by that face covering. Which is of course why you are almost guaranteed to get push back when you institute such banning of clothes. On a similar note, such a counter-move should have force within the marijuana debate, and it does to some degree, but the wearing of dress has a lot less need for excision than the possibility of brain-altering and life-altering drugs. 

The New Yorker article gets a couple of things wrong. Foreign women may wear a head covering in Muslim countries. Many times this is because it is the law or because of social evisceration. Conversely, as a society, we should not care about abnormal dress from foreign visitors, or socially ostracize such wearers. Obviously, we do have laws against public nudity but that is pretty much the minimum. As a good liberal society, and as an educated one, we should learn to shrug at dress, at least as far as aesthetics or social norms are concerned. That should be the hallmark of an enlightened society. Perhaps we try to fit into the norms of another society, but that does not mean we should embrace any kind of norms (of dress) in our own country.

We of course do enforce norms, but that is, generally speaking, at local levels. As a society we embrace pink mohawks as well as suits-and-ties, but that is not because we embrace either. We embrace a liberty of dress and style, at least at the widest level. Legally, we should embrace any manner of dress within wide limits, and for the most part we do. Socially and interpersonally we should see beyond whatever aesthetics tickle us and whatever social norms and experiences have shaped us. To cast judgment on others for dress is either an empty aestheticization, or its a power move of social normalization. Many of us, want little to do with the latter. I am more than willing to accept that you are a member of our society, and someone I do not mind having a conversation with or standing in line next to, even if you happen to like wearing green socks. That fact should have no impact on who you are as a person. Now, obviously, if you wear a t-shirt that says “I embrace Neo-Nazism,” I probably will not want to have a conversation with you, but that is because you are likely advertising a personal worldview that will clash with mine. We can and do read such underlying pretexts into dress, but little should hang on it. And certainly nothing that has us banning such dress itself. In the end, we need to rid the world of neo-Nazis, not t-shirts.

So, no, we do not embrace some normalized dress within our country and we should laugh at those who engage in such. And we should call Iranians, and others, idiots for not being more reflective of dress, social norms, and the development of aesthetic tastes.

This gets to another difficult part. There is oppression and social manipulation through dressing demands within certain Christian and Orthodox Jewish institutions. The argument over the niqab is often over the erasing of the face, but the line between it and the simpler head covering of some Christians, Muslims, and Jews is empty. They are clearly made of the same cloth. They all aim, for the most part, to desexualize females for fear of males.

Arguments against face coverings almost always slide into some (strange) belief about the sanctity of seeing another's face. But this claim, and the claim that it is some given cultural and social norm to see the face of another, is rather empty. There is not some society-wide special right or need to see the face of another in most interpersonal transactions. The article by Ishaq shows that such reasons are specious. There are of course certain needs for identification purposes that may be demanded. People should be forced to remove veils in such instances, which of course we can do respectfully. Ishaq agreed and cooperated with such.
Some general, all-purpose ban is not warranted for the reasons of “seeing the face,” and it is not warranted because of homogeneity of culture. It is not warranted.


Contrarily, the general wearing of niqabs or head scarves should be done away with. It is steeped in an absurd treatment of females as part of a larger structure of parallel institutions and norms of behaviors. That larger structure exists in many Muslim countries, as well as in any country or culture until recent times. Those larger cultural structures, which the niqab is part of, are being carried by Muslims into new countries. But we have a history, at least in the United States, at shrugging at these kinds of things when they exist in Mormon culture, Jewish culture, and other Christian cultures, as well as in many other groups. We are slowly undoing all sorts of inequities that were established in our cultures, including in character developments that blind people to the non-reflection of the social culture upon which they are built. But, for the most part, we are doing it in a liberal way and in an organically developing way. Where equality must be enforced, such as schooling, we do not allow cultural exceptions. But, for most of cultural practice and character development, we let individuals and families make their own way. School and cultural exchanges will push most individuals and groups into taking social stances and character developments that many of us regard as important. To illegalize niqabs while shrugging at organizations that deny females the right to hold positions of power (for unnecessary reasons) is to make an unnecessary, illiberal move. All sorts of institutional and cultural inequities should be removed, and for the most part they eventually will be removed through our reflecting on them, as well as through standard social dialectical movement.

Links

Ken Weiss at The Mermaid's Tale has a good article on unraveling Mendel's legacy.

Babel's Dawn, an interesting blog on language by Edmund Blair Bolles, has a piece on the flow of information. He is responding to a book by Nick Lane called the Vital Question which focuses on energy needs within cells. Also, see Bolles next post criticizing sloppy language when describing cognitive features.

Ed Yong on comparing DNA mutations in neurons.

An enjoyable rundown of where it is possible we will find life in our solar system.

Lastly, at BBC Earth, an article by Melissa Hogenboom on human development. The article explores how Homo sapiens outlasted Neanderthals, Denisovans, and Homo floresiensis (the hobbit people). She speculates, following others, on the possibility that Homo sapiens genetically developed characteristics that made them more socially adept creatures. She points to art, symbolism, and jewelry of early Homo sapiens as compared to the Neanderthals. I think it is difficult to separate some of those factors. If Homo sapiens gained greater language processing facility, then they may have created more complex social structures. But to say that these are strictly social developments may be a misinterpretation. For example, if dogs developed greater language abilities, for any variety of reasons, there social and pack natures may take a very different kind of look. This may be beneficial to the survival and dominance of canines, but it may not be the reason for those characteristic changes. Given canines or any species of hominin, many changes are likely to bleed into slightly different social interactions or into different kinds of clans and clan interaction. If you were to slide an irresistible taste for moon rocks into human genes in some way, then tomorrow you may have a massive trade in moon rocks and cultish groups that form around such consumption. So, certainly such a change would have social impact, and such a change may lead to greater or lesser flourishing of those people, but such a change is not strictly social in nature. Given that humans are social and reflective creatures, pretty much any change to human genes would mean changes to human social structures. 

Links

Jay Joseph at Mad in America has another good take on the state of behavioral genetics.

Jesse Prinz gives a good interview on social constructionism at Philosophy Bites (~20 minutes long). Also, see his book Beyond Human Nature which has some parallels to a lot that I write about on this blog. He has a more dense tome on consciousness, The Conscious Brain, which opened my eyes to a few things. He espouses an attended intermediate level representational theory (AIR) for consciousness. On social constructionism, see my post on gender and sexuality.

Coel Hellier at Coelsblog has a good post on morality and why subjective morals are the best we can hope for. I say discard moral language altogether and discuss the kinds of worlds and selves we can create and build. We can then shrug at those people who say, "That's all I ever meant and mean by morality!". Likely, they still wish to reproduce unnecessary discourses, and we should be wary, from a practical standpoint, of what they are sneaking into such discourses.

Joachim Krueger at One Among Many recounts some of the wrangling over the dual system model of cognitive processing. This is the fast versus slow thinking within Daniel Kahneman's work Thinking Fast and Slow.

More technical, an article by Steven Frankland and Joshua Greene on how the brain can form infinite meaning from infinite possible sentences.

At the cognitive level, theorists have held that the mind encodes sentence-level meaning by explicitly representing and updating the values of abstract semantic variables in a manner analogous to that of a classical computer. Such semantic variables correspond to basic, recurring questions of meaning such as “Who did it?” and “To whom was it done?” On such a view, the meaning of a simple sentence is partly represented by filling in these variables with representations of the appropriate semantic components.. . . Here, we describe two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments aimed at understanding how the brain (in these regions or elsewhere) flexibly encodes the meanings of sentences involving an agent (“Who did it?”), an action (“What was done?”), and a patient (“To whom was it done?”).

How footprints came to have knowledge about feet

Epistemology:

Brain/minds of adult humans are shaped by nature and experience to fit well into the world. Their models, representations, and response patterns do things unlike any object before. But this does not mean we need to posit that there is a world of knowledge and a world of objects.

It is like looking at a footprint and wondering how the footprint knows the shape of the foot that it represents. This is of course an idiotic way of looking at footprints. We are comfortable with the idea that a footprint was structured by the foot that previously landed in it. Such a foot left endless information traces on the dirt, ones that are relational to the foot itself. We should understand that brains are the same way. With our internal models and representations, our brains reflect many useful facts or facets of the world. They relate to the world in useful ways, and in ways that allow them to do remarkable things. But the story about brains and what they know, our epistemology if we must, should be seen similar to the epistemology of the footprint. They have been impressed by endless informational and relational structures about the world. This happens in neuronal assemblies similarly to the foot's physical indentations of the dirt.

We were fooled into thinking our epistemology was some category different from ontology because our first thoughts on the subject happened during fallow times. The story of human knowledge is merely the story of imprinting, whether through evolution or learning. As we deflate epistemology, we deflate knowledge. We take a mixture of pragmatic, eliminativist, deflationary, and realist accounting of the relationship between our knowledge and the world. By knowledge here we include both the structures within a brain and also our science and general beliefs. The real here may eventually come in where we are truly footprints of sand. Of course, it is questionable that our beliefs about knowledge were meant to be seen merely as such [see Rorty for much of this].

Our brains are limited however. They were not well designed to accurately reflect a large score of complex information about the world. The foot of universal knowledge was not meant to form a useful footprint on the brain. Our brains were designed to be flexible enough to take in enough information for surviving and thriving within our ancestors environment. That is (one reason) they cannot be imprinted with endless facts like Watson. It is why we imagine more easily particle behavior instead of wave behavior. If we were aware electron-bodies, we may be just as easily to be impressed by information about waves (given underlying evolutionary need for recognizing such behavior as atomic creatures). 

In the end, we are the only significantly aware object in the world. We have great impressions of worldly information, and we have it in a more usable and more self-reimpressing manner than any object we have seen elsewhere, including the robots we are now making. Our status, however mighty, does not pass mere impression. 

Links and a bit more on conscious awareness

Two informative podcasts:

Pete Mandik and David Pereplyotchik at Spacetimemind trying to discuss pain but break into a far cooler argument about the reality of our scientific theories, or our ability to know what is really out there. Also see their earlier exchange.

Neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux gives a good interview at Roger Dooley's Brainfluence podcast. There is a transcript attached if you would rather read. Joseph Ledoux has a new book out on anxiety. Here is a passage which touches on my consciousness rant below. Ledoux says that the brain's baseline behavioral response to danger is different than the feeling of fear itself:

The person has all of those things together in their conscience mind, but when you take these things apart in the brain what we see is that the threat detection system is separate from the system that gives rise to conscience feeling. If that same person were in the lab and I presented those stimulus subliminally, so the person didn’t know the stimulus was there, it had no conscience feeling of fear of anything else in response to that stimulus, and yet the person’s heart is beating, their muscles are tensing and so forth. Their brain has detected and responded to a stimulus that they don’t know even exists. There’s no feeling involved. The amygdala is lit up light a lighthouse in the brain when you present those stimuli either liminally or subliminally, but that’s not what causes you to feel fear.

The conscience feeling of fear is a cognitively constructed process involving the highest centers of the brain. For example, the prefrontal cortex and areas like that, that put together the fact that the amygdala is activated and it’s causing the brain to be highly aroused, and chemicals are coming from the body back to the brain. All of those things are happening. The amygdala is contributing in an indirect way, but the conscious feeling of fear is the representation that all that stuff is happening as a result of the amygdala activation together with the fact that you see there’s a stimulus there that you know from memory that is threatening. You may also retrieve personal memories of having been threatened by that stimulus, say it’s a snake. All of that comes together as an immediately present state of mind that we all fear.

Other links:

Scott Bakker discusses neuroscience threatening art

Karen Neander at Philosophy of Brains on content pragmatism, a poor solution to the problem of intentionality

If you liked that, see Alex Rosenberg's eliminativists take on intentionality

Lastly, NOVA on PBS had a good video on Homo Naledi



Conscious Awareness

We are “aware” that we are here, that we are humans, that we live on earth, that that man over there wishes me to pay him money, that we are part of a complex social, national, and family web. We form representations and models of these different relationships of our world and our selves. When we need one of those representations or some facet of information, we can turn our attention on it, and it will readily be there. “This is who I am. I live in the United States.”

None of this awareness, again, is going to transcend a robot that represents its self as being at “this location on the factory floor, in this position on the assembly line.” If the robot senses/represents, “I am out of screws, roll to far wall and get more.” (however such robots will do that), it will have awareness in a similar way that any of us humanrobots do at this moment. When we form the representations/thoughts that “I am out of food, need to go to store,” the representations and sensations we are aware of provides a great deal of information. This includes information and representations such as the location of the car, to the hunger in our body, to the place of the store.

The kind of awareness (vast representational stores) that adult humans have surpasses what higher animals, babies, and what our new robots have. As in the previous post, we have representational stores in abundance about our selves and our relationship to external events. We have such in ways that lesser “conscious” entities do not have, such as IBM's Watson or a chimpanzee. There is good reason to believe that language acquisition allows adult humans to have this kind of global awareness about our selves and the world.

But this high level of awareness, the vast informational stores about self and world, is not consciousness as often defined. It certainly is not qualia as often brought in. As explained in previous posts, your representational structures for seeing red are unique. No one else has quite the exact representational or informational repertoire as regards particular shades of red, and also do not have the bodily processes like feelings/emotions that will hang onto any particular shade. The person who played Big Bird for a long time will have representations and bodily attitudes (feelings of pleasure from remembrance) towards that particular shade in a way far different than anyone else. This should not be a bewildering fact. The only way to get a creature to represent and respond to a certain shade of red in the exact same away as a certain individual is to create that exact individual. That there is a great deal of overlap in our representations and bodily responses to a shade of color, just goes into the fact that we share the same general sensory mechanisms and share a great deal of environment and developmental structures. So, many of our representations and emotional responses will be similar to other humans, even if each of us has certain unique differences. Also, it is not surprising that we are walled off from imagining the basic representational repertoires of other beings, such as the representational structures of a dolphin.

Quick hit on Consciousness

See my previous posts: Thoughts on Consciousness and Moving towards Eliminativism

There is no consciousness. We represent things. We represent our selves, worldly objects, and more complex (~abstract) ideas. The robust representations that are quickly presented in our brain do not give rise to a separate entity, “consciousness.” Those representational processes only give rise to more and more complex representations. This includes representations that we are mapping the world and our selves, representations that show we are in the process of representing. 

If some definitions of consciousness only mean this, then so be it, but consciousness does not have ineffability and bizarre properties, say of the Chalmers-Nagel-Qualia kind. Our “consciousness” may be ineffable in a similar way that the only true representation of the United States is something that is exactly the United States. Any representation or map of the United States necessarily leaves off some kind of information (say the direct relationship between Nebraska and the moon of Io). There is a uniqueness to all of our programming, just as there is a uniqueness to all individual computers (assuming a minimal number of programs and word processing usage). If my computer looks inside its self, represents its self, it will be a unique representation. So, in that way we are unique and ineffable. Our representations (my deflated consciousness) are special in that way.

When I say our consciousness is only representation, I mean representation similarly to the idea that your computer right now is representing something. Or in the way that a Roomba (a computerized vacuum cleaner) will represent the world, so that it does not bump up against a vase, or in that it represents that “it can take up no more dust particles." The machine that is our brain/mind, including its forays into deep philosophical projects, never transcends those simpler kinds of representing processes. What it does do is have a whole lot more of them, and represents a self at the center of the world, at the center of action. It represents that self's immersion in social rules, in social relationships, and so on. But no single representation or series of representations (I am sitting here typing) moves beyond the more bare-boned representations of the Roomba.

The most important representations: "I am here. On earth. In the year 2015. There are many countries and mine is the United States. I exist . . . "

I see this as eliminativism of the concept of consciousness. Michael Graziano (The Social Brain, and his Aeon article) makes similar sorts of claims, and he struggles with whether he is presenting an outright elimination of consciousness or not. What has been called consciousness encompasses many things, so what remains under my best understanding of our world representing and modeling includes some of those things previously encompassed in definitions of consciousness. However, there has been too many claims that pit consciousness as something different and above representing and modeling that it is easier just to say we are eliminating consciousness as a robust concept. After this, we now can give a good accounting of brain/minds as they represent and interact with the world. We do so without claiming that some property of consciousness emerges. Though, with that said, creatures that represent the world in the complex ways we do obviously gain abilities that minimally representing forces would never achieve. Evolution can build cool structures like monkeys. It will not create the structures of many objects we see in modern society, at least it will not do so rather directly. So, some kind of accounting for what these more complex representational processes (adult humans) do that more modest representing processes (say bats) do not do, is still needed.

See also:

Stanislas Dehaene, Consciousness and the Brain

Douglas Hofstadter, I am a Strange Loop

Michael Graziano, The Social Brain

Thomas Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel

Links and a prelude to Cryogenics Post

Links:

Larry Moran at Sandwalk has a good take on scientific realism and philosophy. Also see his previous take on what kind of knowledge that philosophy dwells in. The answer (mine but also Moran's) is that we should see and define science broadly, and see good philosophy as being an arm to asking appropriate questions within such a realm. And that philosophy that spends endless time talking about god, or the possibility of god directing evolution, or of all of the logical moves of schmess (very similar to chess), really is not important. Similar to the NFL symposium on "What constitutes pass interference?". At least it is not important as regards arriving at our best understanding of the world in general, as opposed to more mundane things like figuring out how to play schmess well or delineating pass interference.

In the Guardian, Robotic Hands. See the video and the birth of Darth Vader. Posthumanism is upon us.

Two videos on consciousness. A new one at the Economist, features just enough Dan Dennett to counterbalance the Chalmers' position.

And a better, older video by Nicholas Humphrey.

Cryogenics

"The False Science of Cryonics" by Michael Hendricks is just a bad article all around. The comments underneath make most of the points I make below. The article had an ax to grind, but I've been meaning to write on this. 

My following post on cryonics will be more substantive and mostly a different track than the worries below. I more shrug at the idea of cryonics, and mostly that is because we have to deflate what consciousness is and the intrinsic value of any given consciousness. With that said, it is a bit of shrug, since also, there is nothing wrong with trying to make our conscious selves last as long as we can. But I will get into that later. Here are some of the bizarre excerpts from the MIT article. 

Synapses are the physical contacts between neurons where a special form of chemoelectric signaling—neurotransmission—occurs, and they come in many varieties. They are complex molecular machines made of thousands of proteins and specialized lipid structures. It is the precise molecular composition of synapses and the membranes they are embedded in that confers their properties. The presence or absence of a synapse, which is all that current connectomics methods tell us, suggests that a possible functional relationship between two neurons exists, but little or nothing about the nature of this relationship—precisely what you need to know to simulate it.

That is a nice summary of what we know now and what it looks like we will be able to achieve in the near future. But the dream of waking up one day hinges on the in-principle whether science could figure out that relationship between neurons (and the bigger picture). I am not sure he gives us good reason to think why in-principle we could not be able to do such in the future. Trying to speak of the in-principle as viewed from our standing on the ground today is the bizarre move, but we will get to that.

That means that any suggestion that you can come back to life is simply snake oil. Transhumanists have responses to these issues. In my experience, they consist of alternating demands that we trust our intuition about nonexistent technology (uploading could work) but deny our intuition about consciousness (it would not be me).

Many transhumanists do not hold that intuition. And they do not care so much about the “same as me” idea. And instead take a more deflationary and appropriate stance towards me-ness. (Again see the comments below the article)

No one who has experienced the disbelief of losing a loved one can help but sympathize with someone who pays $80,000 to freeze their brain. But reanimation or simulation is an abjectly false hope that is beyond the promise of technology and is certainly impossible with the frozen, dead tissue offered by the “cryonics” industry. Those who profit from this hope deserve our anger and contempt.

This article hinges on “promise of technology” to be a useful intuition. This argument is that our best present beliefs about what we will discover point to the idea that recovering information from these frozen neurons will be futile. But this is of course idiotic. Because those kind of conjectures can be very empty. Especially if we are talking about brain science 1500 years in the future, to go rather long. No, you may not wake up in a decade. And at first blush it is troubling that I will not wake up tomorrow. But the intuition usually holds, that as long as I wake up, I will be happy. That is what I want.

His worry may be germane if you have some wildly false hope that cancer will be fully cured in three days, because you know we have lots of people working on it and it seems eminently solvable. Then in such a case you have a poor belief in the “promise of technology.” But it seems a really stupid thing to say that humans will not have reached an exoplanet in 1,000,000 years in the future because current technology does not seem promising towards such. Anyways, it is a baffling argument. He might as well be Nostradamus. 

The main point here is that if you care about waking up one day in the future, just as you care about waking up in the morning, which we do not begrudge people wanting, then the only way that will be possible is through freezing. Even if it happens that the cryonics of today did not adequately preserve those connections or allow future scientists to reconfigure them, it is still the only chance. And it is becoming at least a little more plausible every year, both with knowledge acquisition and also with preservation techniques.

To go pragmatic, it may greatly help those scientists of the future if they had a good overview of who you are as a person. Say, especially, the language you spoke. We also cross over into the dangerous (or burdensome) identity talk. Since chocolate and vanilla are so ubiquitous a thought and desire structure, it may be relatively easily to “see” in your neuronal structures that you, your self, enjoy vanilla over chocolate and create that in you. Also, at this present moment you may have an inkling, a hint of a preference for oregano versus thyme, but it is a rather narrow memory and desire without as many representations. If scientists of the future fail to see “that connection,” they may just plug one in. Or if they don't give you a preference for oregano or thyme (even though one did exist) in your brain, if forced to choose a preference, you may conflate a desire preference from whatever limited knowledge they happened to encode about thyme and oregano in you.

The interesting thing (or not so much) may be that most of us would not practically care if such a trivial detail is not perfectly lined up. If somebody (or simply your brain/body) were to erase that desire preference while you slept, it may be rather uninteresting to you, something that you would shrug at. And you would not see it as a destruction of your self. And the far more important thing to you may be just that ~you~ wake up in the morning or in the future and have generally the same thoughts as before, even if a few things are slightly off.

Another point, on recreating “you” in silicon, is that if scientists had a good diary or video of “who you are,” I would think scientists would be greatly aided in putting you back together again. They would not need to recreate the exact wiring, but merely the general preferences and desires. And your body would tick on. If you go far enough in that direction many of us may get upset and say, hey, "that is not me”. Though, many of us also shrug at the thought that we could have selves that care slightly more for punk rock than classical jazz, and still see the basics of our selves in some more durable and lasting characteristics, instead of rather trivial or happenstance preferences. 

As one commenter put it, this article was both bad philosophy and bad science.