Archive for the ‘Mental Irrationality’ Category

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Neural Bottleneck Found That Thwarts Multi-tasking

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Science Daily — Many people think they can safely drive while talking on their cell phones. Vanderbilt neuroscientists Paul E. Dux and René Marois have found that when it comes to handling two things at once, your brain, while fast, isn’t that fast.

“Why is it that with our incredibly complex and sophisticated brain, with 100 billion neurons processing information at rates of up to a thousand times a second, we still have such a crippling inability to do two tasks at once?” Marois, associate professor of Psychology, asked. “For example, what is it about our brain that gives us such a hard time at being able to drive and talk on a cell phone simultaneously?”

Researchers have long thought that a central “bottleneck” exists in the brain that prevents us from doing two things at once. Dux and Marois are the first to identify the regions of the brain responsible for this bottleneck, by examining patterns of neural activity over time. Their results were published in the Dec. 21 issue of Neuron.

“In our everyday lives, we seem to complete so many cognitive tasks effortlessly. However, we experience severe limitations when we try to do even two simple tasks at once, such as pressing a button when a visual stimulus appears and saying a word when a sound is presented. This is known as dual-task interference,” Dux, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Psychology, said. “We were interested in trying to understand these limitations and in finding where in the brain this bottleneck might be taking place.”

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Dawkins, Darwinism, Reductionism, Emergent Properties and Causality

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

A friend of mine sent me an article today to read. It is an excellent article by Richard Dawkins – well worth reading. It is called What Good Is Religion and you will find it here: ➡

If the possible intersection of Dawkins, Darwinism, Reductionism, Emergent Properties and Causality intrigues you, then I encourage you to follow the arrow link, above, now and read Dawkins’ piece. It’s not too long – about four pages worth. Then come back here and press on with the rest of this post because this is a commentary on his article.

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An excellent and interesting read. Dawkins has certainly become a foremost spokesperson for what one might term ‘hard-Darwinism’. His explanation of why religion survives – that it goes along for the ride when nature selects children who automatically believe the wisdom of their elders, makes a lot of sense. Or, in other words – it sounds good. But, let’s be cautious here because there is also a deep truth around that for any given set of facts or observations, there can be many equally plausible sounding explanations.

But, in general, I liked the article. If I had quibbles, they would be two:

At one point, Dawkins quotes Steven Pinker to buttress a point he’s trying to make:

…it only raises the question of why a mind would evolve to find comfort in beliefs it can plainly see are false. A freezing person finds no comfort in believing he is warm; a person face-to-face with a lion is not put at ease by the conviction that it is a rabbit.

This is a bogus example, to me, because it only works so long as you stay within the domain it provides for you. But that domain is unrealistic. Our experiences are made of of both the concrete and the abstract whereas his example involves just concrete observables. And our minds are certainly capable of evolving to find comforts in abstractions which we are unlikely to be able to prove false. The very question of God’s existence is, I believe, not provable one way or the other so it is an abstraction and an unprovable one. Now if people prove fitter, as they complete to survive, because they’ve chosen to embrace this abstraction, then surely the tendency to embrace it will be conserved in their progeny.

My second quibble is that Dawkins seems to be an unrepentant reductionist. In the last 20 years, science has changed from being utterly dominated by reductionist thinking to a having a new and general perception that reductionism and complexity/emergent properties are just two equally valid and alternative ways of looking at the world around us. Whereas one studies how to take it apart, the other looks into how it assembles together.

To wit, when Dawkins goes on about chicken pecking orders, he disparages stable groupings of chickens as good Darwinian subjects because they are a group-level phenomenon. But, isn’t a stable group of chickens, as he describes them, an emergent property and aren’t emergent properties conserved? If the individual tendencies of chickens to respect stronger chickens and to dominate weaker chickens aggregates into an emergent property that we call a Stable Group of Chickens and that stable group yields more eggs and thus contributes more genes to the pool, then why should we discriminate against it? He wants to reduce everything down to Darwinian minimums but emergent properties all up and down the scale of biological complexity are conserved.

Why should this tendency towards a reductionist Darwinism have been conserved in Dawkins’ brain?

Well, perhaps the problem with run-away reductionism is that it wants to reduce nature’s causality to the kind of causality we humans can understand easily which is basically sequential logic like if A then B. But, nature has no such limits or notions. Its causality flows freely – be it down sequentially logical chains of cause and effect or up through emergent properties and everywhere in between through every form of parallelism or sequentiality. This natural ‘everything is happening at once and affecting most everything else as it does’ way of being, which nature manifests, is extremely difficult for humans to comprehend, describe or quantify so we are constantly coming up with tremendous oversimplifications and then reifying them into pictures of how things work that we feel are good – because we can understand them. Dawkins would like it to be simple – with one explanation to dominate them all. But nature doesn’t care what Dawkins wants and goes where it will. As difficult as it may be, we need explanations that model nature – rather than reflect our shortcomings.

– research thanks to Alan T.

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Book Review – Blindsight by Peter Watts

Thursday, January 11th, 2007

This is a book review – of sorts. I’m not going to tell you anything other than that I love this book. And I’m going to give you an excerpt. Read it and make up your own mind….
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You invest so much in it don’t you? It’s what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it’s what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it’s for?

Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you’ve forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterward, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody’s told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial.

Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity’s already half way down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self “chose” to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary – almost an afterthought – to the homunculus behinds your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: It reads the summary and it sees that hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other.

But ‘s not in charge. You’re not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn’t share living space with the likes of you.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively Human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that’s what sentience would be for – if scientific breakthroughs didn’t spring fully formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night’s sleep. It’s the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it.

Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

Don’t even try to talk about the learning curve. Don’t bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there’s no other way? Heuristic software’s been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You’re stone Age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt – denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents.

Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can’t see both aspects of the Necker cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That’s a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You’re always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It’s the next logical step.

Oh, but you can’t. There’s something in the way.

And it’s fighting back.

* * *

Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains – cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes ever-more computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.

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– from Blindsight by Peter Watts

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Free to choose?

Saturday, December 23rd, 2006

Modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will

In the late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?

His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose to the idea of free will. The instinct of the reasonable observer is that organic changes of this sort somehow absolve the sufferer of the responsibility that would accrue to a child abuser whose paedophilia was congenital. But why? The chances are that the latter tendency is just as traceable to brain mechanics as the former; it is merely that no one has yet looked. Scientists have looked at anger and violence, though, and discovered genetic variations, expressed as concentrations of a particular messenger molecule in the brain, that are both congenital and predisposing to a violent temper. Where is free will in this case?

Free will is one of the trickiest concepts in philosophy, but also one of the most important. Without it, the idea of responsibility for one’s actions flies out of the window, along with much of the glue that holds a free society (and even an unfree one) together. If businessmen were no longer responsible for their contracts, criminals no longer responsible for their crimes and parents no longer responsible for their children, even though contract, crime and conception were “freely” entered into, then social relations would be very different

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EXPERTS WANT TIGHTER CONTROLS ON NANOTECHOLOGY

Thursday, November 30th, 2006

– It is one of the signature attributes of mankind that as we’ve used our intelligence to bull our way to dominance of the planet and the biosphere, that we’ve repeatedly underestimated the effects of our actions on the world around us.

– Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring was, perhaps, our first major wakeup call in this regard. Today, the world’s soil, streams and oceans swarm with chemicals of all sorts that have no analogues in the natural world and are, in many cases, having unexpected and damaging effects on the planet’s biological forms – including us.

– Reviewing Kurt Vonnecgut’s 1963 book Cat’s Cradle in which in introduced us to the hypothetical Ice-Nine is instructive at this point as we embark on releasing larger and larger numbers of nanotechnlogical materials into the natural environment and, once agin, assuming that all will be alright. An amazing assumption that we seem to make over and over again so that caution will not get in the way of profits.

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WASHINGTON (AFP)—Nanotechnologies pose real threats to health and the environment and need prompt testing and oversight, but government and industry are moving slowly on the issue, scientists and environmentalists said.

Speaking after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency took its first step to regulate a nanomaterial–near atomic-sized particles of silver being used as pesticide in products from shoes to a washing machine–experts told AFP that nanotechnology is already producing materials that can harm the environment and human health.

“There are some very serious concerns about potential health consequences,” said Patrice Simms of the U.S. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“We know next to nothing about their potential health effects,” said Simms.

Nanotechnology is the creation and use of materials barely larger than atomic in scale, measuring usually between one and 100 nanometers. A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter, and a human hair is roughly 80,000 nanometers in width.

At that size–small enough to pass through cell membranes in the body–many materials can take on physical and chemical properties not seen in their larger forms, giving them uses never imagined before.

A Washington-based group, The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, has catalogued 356 products already using nanotechnology, including “breathable” bedsheets, lighter, stiffer golf clubs, skin care creams, computer chips and antibacterial socks.

The technology also promises more substantial “miracle” uses, from health applications like cancer treatments, to drinking water filtration systems for poor countries, to longer-life batteries.

But materials at that size may also pose dangers when they are inhaled, ingested, absorbed through the skin, or spread through nature by wind and water, scientists warn.

“Something different happens when you begin to work at a very small scale,” said Andrew Maynard, chief science advisor at the Project on Emerging Technologies.

“We know that a lot of materials like asbestos and particles affect the health because of their shapes and sizes as well as their chemistry.

“It’s reasonable to assume that some of these new materials are going to do the same thing,” noting that there are a number of new nanomaterials in filament form, like asbestos which causes lung disease.

The problem is that both industry and the government have assumed the existing regulatory framework for chemicals and other materials is adequate, Simms pointed out.

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Cat parasite may affect cultural traits in human populations

Thursday, August 3rd, 2006

A common parasite found in cats may be affecting human behavior on a mass scale, according to a scientist based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

While little is known about the causes of cultural change, and biological explanations often stimulate social and scientific debate, a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey published in the August 2 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biology, indicates that behavioral manipulation of a common brain parasite may be among factors that play a role.

“In populations where this parasite is very common, mass personality modification could result in cultural change,” said study author Kevin Lafferty, a USGS scientist at UC Santa Barbara. “The geographic variation in the latent prevalence of Toxoplasma gondii may explain a substantial proportion of human population differences we see in cultural aspects that relate to ego, money, material possessions, work and rules.”

Although this sounds like science fiction, it is a logical outcome of how natural selection leads to effective strategies for parasites to get from host to host, said Lafferty. Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite of cats, both domestic and wild. While modern humans are a dead-end host for the parasite, Toxoplasma appears to manipulate personality by the same adaptations that normally help it complete its life cycle. The typical journey of the parasite involves a cat and its prey, starting as eggs shed in an infected cat’s feces, inadvertently eaten by a warm-blooded animal, such as a rat. The infected rat’s behavior alters so that it becomes more active, less cautious and more likely to be eaten by a cat, where the parasite completes its life cycle. Many other warm-blooded vertebrates may be infected by this pathogen. After producing usually mild flu-like symptoms in humans, the parasite tends to remain in a dormant state in the brain and other tissues.

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