Watermark

Thinking about thinking, the brain, mind, and consciousness

So. I've been on a brain binge lately, watching NOVA; NOVA scienceNOW; Closer to Truth; and Through the Wormhole. The magic of DVR's – I can rewind and watch, again, the challenging bits. There are a lot of those. 

I have an idea. It's an idea from an untrained mind, but it's still an idea. I'm going to tell you the idea first, and then give the arguments that led me here. 

IDEA: 

I think that consciousness is not an illusion, it's real. I mean real in a material sense. 

I'm thinking that consciousness is a force of nature, like gravity (another mystery) or time (even murkier.) It doesn't belong to us; it has nothing to do with us, really. It is not personal. 

It's not an entity. It is not Truth or Beauty or Love. It's no more aware of us than we are of any single molecule in our eye. It's probably not aware at all.

 

[Click the photo for full credits and larger sizes at flickr.]

 

ARGUMENTS:

• At birth, an infant has almost no memory, only what could have been recorded since the brain developed the ability to record, a few weeks at most. She has no speech, no language (which some believe is required for thought) and no sense of herself as different or separate from the rest of the world. Still, we look into her eyes and we believe that she is conscious. 
• Some of us, through trauma or disease, lose ourselves. You may have known someone like this. She has lost her memories. She does not know what year it is, where she is, who you are, or even who she is. She has lost her ability to speak; perhaps she has lost language altogether. Still, we believe she is conscious. 
• Evidence accumulates that everything we think we are is a product of the brain: perceptions, thoughts, feelings, memories, and ideas (including this one.) Our entire sense of self appears to be an organically generated illusion, and can be significantly altered by damage to the brain. When the brain dies, so do we. 
• Buddhists would agree with this, I think. They argue that what we think we are is ephemeral. Thoughts and feelings come, and go. They pass. Along with the material elements that make up our bodies, and brains, thoughts and feelings change. They are not what we are. 
• This leads to the suspicion that continuity is an illusion. Neither our mental nor our physical selves are, in fact, continuous. What persists seems to be DNA and, possibly, some deep personality structure that filters how we perceive the world. Or not. 

Still, one thing that we agree on, continuously, is that consciousness (whatever it is) exists, or seems to. I think I am conscious, and I think you are, too. 

But maybe we aren't conscious. Maybe consciousness is in us, or we are in it. It's out there, as impersonal as gravity, pulling and pushing at us in some indefinable way. It's here, whether we are here or not. 

Maybe it's that undiscovered (or unrecognized) thing that will reconcile the Standard Model and Quantum Mechanics. Maybe it has something to do with entanglement, or strings. 

Or maybe not. Would any of this be testable, I wonder? If a scientist took the idea seriously that consciousness might be real, and measurable, could she devise experiments to find it? 

How crazy is this idea?

 

Creative Eccentrics/ Eccentric Creatives

A classmate brought this article (Scientific American: The Unleashed Mind, by Shelley Carson) to the Creativity class I'm taking. It explains so much!

 

 

Oh, you want to read it? Try these, or click the images to go to flickr for larger views (and credits), or just go read the entire article. I highly recommend it.

 

 

 

Charlie Rose: A sadly superficial show on Human Sexuality

Last night, I watched a Charlie Rose program on Human Sexuality. It was, mostly, boring. This was not, in fact, a program on Human Sexuality; it was a program on adult heterosexual intercourse and human male erectile dysfunction.

I'm seldom bored by Charlie Rose, even when I expect to be. This time, I didn't expect to be. But these doctors and researchers sat around the oak table and spoke in abstractions, in generalities.

There was no discussion of sexual orientation; no discussion of how/why it is that some have a high sex drive, and others do not. No doubting of the accepted view that erectile dysfunction and lack of desire is a problem -- an individual problem, now possibly treatable. No awareness, that I could discern, that it's possible that not everyone must be highly sexually active to be whole, to be happy. No suggestion that one might be highly sexually active, and happy, with oneself.

No wondering whether the demand for Viagra and its companions might indicate something other than a collection of individual problems -- except for a mention that male obesity can contribute to this problem. No astonishment expressed that such a large segment of a civilized population can't seem to get it up.

When Charlie asked what problem, what answer, these specialists would most like to discover in the next five years, only one -- and tentatively, a bit defensively -- said she would like to understand sexual violence. Rape, molestation. She -- with many caveats -- quotes the statistic that 25% of college women report experiencing an attempted or completed rape -- and suggests this might be worthy of attention. She says that we have some research and assistance for the victims of these crimes. By implication, she suggests we would do well to look more closely at the perpetrators.

They continue around the table, with no comment -- and apparent discomfort -- at her observation.

They talk about the brain, about the organ, about vascular disease. They all confess that we know almost nothing about human sexuality.

Where was the zoologist, to discuss sexuality in the other animals; to tell us whether rape is common among them; to tell us whether adult males of other species are in the habit of sexually using immature members of their species? They hid from us for decades the prevalence, in other species, of homosexuality and same-sex pair bonding; what else do they know? (I'm not even certain zoology is the right speciality for this -- but Charlie should know.)

Where was the anthropologist, to discuss sexual practices in other cultures; the prevalence, or lack of, prostitution and sex with children? To talk about pair-bonding, and what connections it seems to have, or not have, with sexual behavior? Where was the three-dimensional model, to show us how all this -- desire, behavior, propensity -- intersects with culture and physiology and psychology?

Mostly, they acknowledged how little they know, but brushed past the most provocative questions. Were they trying to be serious? Were they trying to not titillate? One of the very first points made in the program was how rare a serious discussion of sexuality is in our culture.

Well, then. Let's have it.

My Nerd Score

Via Shelley I found ScienceBlogs (gee, thanks, more must-read) and via them I found this quiz, which they are all (OK, many of them) in a very macho competition, taking:

 

Why is my score so low? Well, because I got all the science questions wrong, that's why. Except In E=MC2, what does C stand for? C is the speed of light.

I'm pretty sure. I watch public television.

And I don't have enough RAM on my laptop. And I don't have enough gadgets. Or rather, not the right kind of gadgets.

Oh, and also, there was a girl-picture to react to, but no boy-picture. What's up with that?

Actually, I scored higher than I expected.

Good thing I have no woundable macho ego.

This has made me recall my most intense regret: that I did not study science and math through high school and college. That, in my day, girls were not expected to do so, and my passion for the subjects was not strong enough to overcome my compliance.

Once, in a dream, I saw a fourth spacial dimension. I experienced it. I hesitate to put it this way, but it was ... awesome.

If a physicist had that dream, might it have offered some clue to the workings of the universe? I haven't even the language to articulate it.

I can't do the math.

A Laugh for a Rainy Day

Directly from davenetics:

The Fishing Link

According to this story scientists have found “fossils of a 375-million-year-old species of ancient fish found north of the Arctic Circle [that fills] an evolutionary gap in the transition between water and land animals.”

They still haven’t been able to find any evolutionary link between the rest of us and Kansas.

Thinking is hard work

Whew! First, from 3 Quarks, there was this, and then this, and then I asked (only half-joking) if they were joking, and Abbas Raza promised a plain-language explanation -- and kept his promise. So now there is this, from Cosmic Variance. I have read it, and the comment thread, and my head is full (I feel all this pressing against the inside of my skull) but I think I -- maybe -- almost -- understand.

I used to imagine a course I would love to take: Physics for Poets. I don't mean, exactly, a dumbed-down physics -- though I realize this would be somewhat unavoidable -- but physics explained in comprehensible language. I think Sean Carrol could teach that course. So could Erin.

There's an idea -- in your spare time, you two could get together and teach the rest of us physics! A pleasant online diversion. I suppose we should have a philosopher in there, too. Any volunteers?

I have tried over and over to read Stephen Hawking's first book, A Brief History of Time, pencils and highlighters to hand, but I've never made much progress; and each time I try, I have to begin again at the beginning. Everything I learned from previous readings seems to fall out of my brain.   

And you can see why this is so difficult for me. I passed, but I shouldn't have. Seven out of ten? Certainly not an A+.

 

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 7/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

This humiliating experience via Burningbird. So much for joining Mensa.

Now I feel compelled to disclose that I did quite well on my GRE's. OK, not so well on the math part, but very well on the verbal. And the year I took it they were trying out a logic section (did they keep that, I wonder?) and I aced that. I not only aced it, I loved it.

So I really should be able to get this. No?

Good News

The Internet fosters social contact

A Pew report issued Wednesday, supports the idea the use of the Internet expands social contact:

The Pew Internet and American Life Project also finds that U.S. Internet users are more apt to get help on health care, financial and other decisions because they have a larger set of people to which to turn.

Further rebuking early studies suggesting that the Internet promotes isolation, Pew found that it “was actually helping people maintain their communities,” said Barry Wellman, a University of Toronto sociology professor and co-author of the Pew report. 

The study found that e-mail is supplementing, not replacing, other means of contact. For example, people who e-mail most of their closest friends and relatives at least once a week are about 25 percent more likely to have weekly landline phone contact as well. The increase is even greater for cell phones.

“There’s a certain seamlessness of how people maintain their social networks,” said John Horrigan, Pew’s associate director. “They shift between face-to-face, phone and Internet quite easily.”

Meanwhile, Internet users tend to have a larger network of close and significant contacts — a median of 37 compared with 30 for nonusers — and they are more likely to receive help from someone within that social network.

It does worry me just a little that even the nonusers network of close and significant contacts is quite a bit larger than my own. Introversion has its downsides.

Via The Power of Many

We don't have to remember everything

According to an Editor's Summary at Nature:

A study of brain activity in subjects performing a task in which they were asked to 'hold in mind' some of the objects and to ignore other objects has revealed significant variation between individuals in their ability to keep the irrelevant items out of awareness. This shows that our awareness is not determined only by what we can keep 'in mind' but also by how good we are at keeping irrelevant things 'out of mind'. This also implies that an individual's effective memory capacity may not simply reflect storage space, as it does with a hard disk. It may also reflect how efficiently irrelevant information is excluded from using up vital storage capacity.

Well, that explains it.

Via wake up!

And most importantly:

Poetry is good for your health

That, at least, is the premise of studies currently under way for the Arts Council and the Department of Health. One study, published a couple of years ago in the journal Psychological Reports, suggested that writing poetry boosted levels of secretory immunoglobin A. Another, undertaken by a consultant at Bristol Royal Infirmary, concluded that poetry enabled seven per cent of mental health patients to be weaned off their anti-depressants. Poetry, it seems, is not the new rock'n'roll, but the new Prozac. [...]

OK, so the rest of the article isn't quite so promising. Still, I'm practicing belief in the unlikely, remember?

Via Dumbfoundry

Late Night Thinking

I look and look for my notes on a lecture (years ago) by Pattiann Rogers; then realize that even if I find them, there is no certainty that my notes accurately reflect what she said. What I remember is:

• Science is the new religion. It is what we believe in, even when we do not understand it. Do we understand, in our minds, in our bodies, why the airplane does not fall from the sky? Still, we step onto it.
• It is the poet's responsibility to -- explain? elucidate? give voice to? -- the religion of the time. We are failing.

Karen Armstrong's point, in The Battle for God, that:

• The fundamentalist error is to treat mythos ["a mode of knowledge rooted in silence and intuitive insight which gives meaning to life but which cannot be explained in rational terms"] as logos ["rational, logical, or scientific discourse"]
• The secularist error is to think that logos is all there is

Is mythos not the poet's role? So we are to, somehow, imbue logos/science with spirit? But science is spirit -- no? -- attention to the real, passion -- and sometimes, too often, cruelty without cause.

Can we study, learn, attend, without dissecting?

Who can look at the Hubble photographs, and not feel awe? not see spirit?

Oh, the same person who looks at a chickadee, or a grasshopper, or a stone, and does not see it.

So the poet must say:  look!  see!  -- a greater poet than I am.  An Emily.

I have wanted a non-gendered pronoun, so that I could speak of a creature (rampaging raccoon) whose gender I do not know, without denying its personhood, without making it an it -- but instead, I should be infusing the it pronoun with personhood, with spirit. For the teaching- stone is an it -- the mountain, the river, the garden --

-- & I will break the stone, weed the garden, dam the river, eat the raccoon (the cow, the chicken, the salmon) -- even though -- while -- acknowledging it is a person -- it is in-spirited --

because I am not consistent
because I am not logical
because I am not moral?
because I am an animal?

[is "it" a pronoun?]

Haiku and the Double Helix| What I Am Thinking About

From New Perspectives Quarterly:

The role of the scientific imagination in shaping the world to come is today uncertain as the great leaps forward . . . have revived old doubts and raised new fears about the human condition under the regime of reason. . . science is under attack both from religious extremists on the right who argue stem-cell research violates the sanctity of life as well as from "post-intelligent intellectuals" of the academic left who view science not as the discovery of objective reality through observation, but as a "social construction."

Collisions

Originally from the Daily Irrelevant, reBlogged by bev on September 24, 2004

Click image for animated version -
slow download, but worth it

If you think Earth is a mess, consider the turmoil in the constellation Hydra, where astronomers have spotted two monster galactic clusters slamming together in one of the biggest collisions ever recorded . . . this particular violent merger . . . could help scientists learn more about how galaxies and everything in them developed in the early universe.

When one's life seems to be a series of collisions, it is helpful to have some perspective.