History is a tricky business

Figuring out what happened–mere who, what, where, and when, forget about why–can be a tricky business. The Sand Creek Massacre is a case in point. We know when, late in 1864, and who, but figuring out where has proven tricky. You'd think that would be obvious and easy, and no doubt it was back in, say, 1865 or 1866, but come a century later and it's all a muddle. Tedra Osell reviews Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek, which is about figuring out the where. She calls it " a complicated and beautiful narrative about narrative, a series of connected and interwoven stories about history and histories."

From the review:

It turns out that history—the official American version, at least—had also lost touch with the descendants of Sand Creek’s victims, members of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, who not only knew where the site was but had formal committees dedicated to memoralizing what had happened and visiting the site. This sets up the major, but by no means only, conflict in creating a new memorial: federal representatives, including scholars at state universities, members of the National Parks Service, and state and federal legislators decide that an extensive search and new memorial is called for. The Indian tribes on whom they call for help, however—represented primarily by Laird Cometsevah (chief of the Southern Cheyenne) and Steve Brady, head of the Northern Cheyenne Crazy Dogs society and Sand Creek Massacre Descendants Committee—are suspicious of the federal government. They are also amused by the feds having “lost” the site. Despite their suspicions, they agree to help “find” it and cooperate in establishing a National Historic Site because, as it happens, the tribes are pursuing reparations that had been promised but not fulfilled, and they hope that establishing a federally-recognized site will further that process.

Homunculus Talk about the Brain Doesn't Work

Colin McGinn takes on Ray Kurzweil:

Contemporary brain science is thus rife with unwarranted homunculus talk, presented as if it were sober established science. We have discovered that nerve fibers transmit electricity. We have not, in the same way, discovered that they transmit information. We have simply postulated this conclusion by falsely modeling neurons on persons. To put the point a little more formally: states of neurons do not have propositional content in the way states of mind have propositional content. The belief that London is rainy intrinsically and literally contains the propositional content that London is rainy, but no state of neurons contains that content in that way—as opposed to metaphorically or derivatively (this kind of point has been forcibly urged by John Searle for a long time).

See this old post on Silly Talk about the Brain  Pleasure Centers for  more discussion of such silly talk.

What I think is that this is very tricky business, talking of "states of neurons" vs. "states of mind." I'm inclined to think that we can talk about states of neurons without reference to the world in which an organism lives. But, to talk of states of mind, we must include the world in which the organism lives.

Interning in the Creative Class

Smells like indentured servitude:

The recession has been no friend to entry-level positions, where hundreds of applicants vie for unpaid internships at which they are expected to be on call with iPhone in hand, tweeting for and representing their company at all hours.

“We need to hire a 22-22-22,” one new-media manager was overheard saying recently, meaning a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year.

Was Wittgenstein Right?

And was he a de facto pluralist?

Writing the The New York Times, Paul Horwich boils Wittgenstein down to this:

Philosophical problems typically arise from the clash between the inevitably idiosyncratic features of special-purpose concepts — true, good, object, person, now, necessary — and the scientistically driven insistence upon uniformity. Moreover, the various kinds of theoretical move designed to resolve such conflicts (forms of skepticism, revisionism, mysterianism and conservative systematization) are not only irrational, but unmotivated. The paradoxes to which they respond should instead be resolved merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes of perverse overgeneralization from which they arose. And the fundamental source of this irrationality is scientism.

But aren't there matters that cannot be resolved by the sciences, matters of ethics and aesthetics, for example? It's not at all obvious to me, for example, that philosophy has anything particularly interesting to say about consciousness, nor, for that matter, that the various sciences have it nailed down, but how to live one's life: Is that not a cause for concern? Must we not think about that?

See: Facing Up To Relativism and Unity of Being.

Neuroscience in the Popular Press

From The Guardian:

Psychologist Cliodhna O'Connor and her colleagues investigated how brain science was reported across 10 years of newspaper coverage. Rather than reporting on evidence that most challenged pre-existing opinions, of which there is a great deal, neuroscience was typically cited as a form of "biological proof" to support the biases of the author.

This is often a circular argument because studies typically compare groups based on identifiable differences and then look for how this is reflected in the brain. But what defines a person, experience or action as different is the totality of the thing itself, not just the workings of the brain. The "biological proof" argument makes about as much sense as saying that you have confirmed that pancakes and pizzas "really are" different because you have chemically analysed the ingredients. It's only in rare circumstances where two things appear to be identical that a biological analysis will be the deciding factor in confirming whether they differ or not.

Direct Brain-to-Brain Communication in Rats?

Reported in the NYTimes:

In an experiment that sounds straight out of a science fiction movie, a Duke neuroscientist has connected the brains of two rats in such a way that when one moves to press a lever, the other one does, too — most of the time.

The neuroscientist, Miguel Nicolelis, known for successfully demonstrating brain-machine connections, like the one in which a monkey controlled a robotic arm with its thoughts, said this was the first time one animal’s brain had been linked to another.

The question, he said, was: “Could we fool the brain? Could we make the brain process signals from another body?” The answer, he said, was yes.

He and other scientists at Duke, and in Brazil, published the results of the experiment in the journal Scientific Reports. The work received mixed reviews from other scientists, ranging from “amazing” to “very simplistic.”

I note that it wasn't simply a matter of sending signals from one brain to the other. Some learning was involved. You can find the original research HERE.

Long-Distance By Train

From New Orleans to Los Angeles by train, and interesting story in the NYTimes:

The cliché, familiar to air travel, of the nosy passenger who makes pestering conversation with his seat partners does not exist on the long-distance train. On the Sunset Limited, everybody is nosy, and no one seems to mind. There are several reasons for this. While it might be socially uncomfortable to speak with a stranger during a short trip, the scale seems to tip for trips longer than six hours, at which point it becomes significantly more awkward not to speak to your fellow passengers. Besides, if you’re taking a 47-hour train ride in 2013, you probably have an unusual reason for doing so. Train stories are much richer, more emotionally pitched, than airplane stories. And the train offers the possibility of cheap therapy: there’s ample time to relate your entire life story to a stranger, and you can do so in confidentiality, because you’ll never see the stranger again.

This kind of encounter is further encouraged by the tendency of Amtrak conductors to seat long-distance passengers next to each other, even if the next car contains 20 rows of empty seats. This policy is designed to keep rows open for passengers who board at later stops, but sometimes those anticipated passengers never materialize. The two communal cars also tend to encourage interaction: the Sightseer Lounge has open seating and is especially busy after lunch, and in the dining car, the host will combine any groups smaller than four people with strangers in order to fill every booth. Groups also coalesce at stations like Beaumont and El Paso in Texas and Tucson and Maricopa in Arizona, where the train stops for cigarette breaks. And at longer stops, like the nearly three-hour wait in San Antonio, passengers often venture out into the city together, heading to Denny’s for a midnight meal or to Alibis’ Sports and Spirits bar. Nobody on a long-distance train is ever really alone.

Chef Watson

IBM's Watson has graduated from Jeopardy. Yes, there's medical diagnostics, business analytics, and the like, but there's also baking.

In San Jose, I.B.M. plans to serve the assembled analysts a breakfast pastry devised by Watson, called a “Spanish crescent.” It is a collaboration of Watson’s software and James Briscione, a chef instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan.

I.B.M. researchers have watched and talked to Mr. Briscione as he works, selecting ingredients and building out dishes. Watson has read those notes, 20,000 recipes, data on the chemistry of food ingredients, and measured ratings of flavors people like in categories like “olfactory pleasantness.”

Watson’s assignment has been to come up with recipes that are both novel and taste good. In the case of the breakfast pastry, Watson was told to come up with something inspired by Spanish cuisine, but unusual and healthy. The computer-ordered ingredients include cocoa, saffron, black pepper, almonds and honey — but no butter, Watson’s apparent nod to healthier eating.

Then, Mr. Briscione, working with those ingredients, had to adjust portions and make the pastry.

“If I could have used butter, it would have been a lot easier,” said the chef, who used vegetable oil instead.

Sympathy for the Other

Glenn Loury and Harold Pollock discuss the value of literature as a way to understand peoples lives different from your own:

An acrobatic machine

Here's an amazing video. Two quadracopters toss a pole back and forth:

What's a quadracopter? A small flying vehicle propelled by four spinning propellers. Once one quadracopter has tossed the pole, the other one has 0.65 seconds to calculate the pole's trajectory and get itself in place to make the catch, after which it must, of course, balance the pole.

You can find an explanation HERE.

Physics is in trouble: Restart!

Microelectronics pioneer and Caltech emeritus professor Carver Mead says that physics has failed to deliver on the revolution that started early in the 20th century.

Much more work needs to be done to restart that revolution, Mead said, with the goal of explaining in an intuitive way how all matter in the universe relates to and affects all other matter, and how to explore those interrelationships in a way that isn't "buried in enormous piles of obscure mathematics."

That physics is in trouble has seemed obvious for some time. What to do about it, not so obvious. But more or the same doesn't seem sensible.

"Modern science started with an idea that was really given to us by Galileo," he said. "The idea was the isolated experiment. You took something and you very carefully sheltered from all the influences around, and then you were seeing the fundamental physics of that object."

That methodology, he said, served science well and led to tremendous advances. "But now it's holding us back from a deeper understanding of how the universe works."

Here's the passage that got my attention:

Einstein, of course, was mightily influenced by what the ex–patent clerk called Mach's Principle, which Mead explained as the proposition that "the inertia of every element of matter is due to its interaction with all the other elements of matter in the universe."

We haven't fully followed that investigative road, Mead said. "Instead what we've done is we've treated isolated objects as if all their attributes were just given us, and [we] haven't asked where they came from," he said "Things like the inertia of an object, the rest energy of an object, the velocity of light — all those things. We have a list of fundamental constants that we're not allowed to ask where they come from.".

What I'm wondering is this: Is much of the intractable strangeness of contemporary physics an artifact of the process of breaking matter into the smallest possible isolated units, as though any of them ever existed or could exist in isolation?

Music and Movement

A precis of "Music and movement share a dynamic structure that supports universal expressions of emotion" by Beau Sievers, Larry Polansky, Michael Casey, and Thalia Wheatley (PNAS 2013 110 (1) 70-75):

Music and movement have long been linked through metaphor, but whether they share a common structure across disparate cultures remains largely unknown. To determine how music and movement are related, Beau Sievers et al. (pp. 70–75) developed a computer program to generate simple piano melodies and an animated bouncing ball, both controlled by the same statistical model. The authors then recruited 50 US college students, separated them into two equal groups, and asked one group to vary the position of slider bars on a computer screen that controlled five piano melody–related attributes—rate, jitter, direction, step size, and consonance—to reflect different emotions, such as “angry,” “happy,” “peaceful,” “sad,” and ”scared.” The other group performed the same task, but the slider bars varied equivalent attributes of the ball’s movement in relation to the same emotions. By and large, the authors report, individuals who used music to express an emotion set the slider bars to the same positions as those who expressed the same emotion through movement, suggesting that music and movement share an expressive code. When a modified version of the experiment was run among villagers in L’ak, a culturally isolated tribe in northeastern Cambodia, the authors found that the features of emotional expression through music and movement are similar across cultures. According to the authors, unraveling the universal features of music might help researchers uncover why and how music originated. — P.N.

H/t Mark Changizi.

You can find the full article HERE (PDF) at the website for the Wheatley lab.

How It All Works and the Problem of God

Thomas Nagel has recently published a slim volume, Mind and Cosmos, that's kicking up a fuss because it apparently gives and aid comfort to creationists, though Nagel himself is an atheist. I've not read the book myself, but I've read a bit about it. Here's a few paragraphs from an article in The New York Times about the controversy:

Mr. Nagel’s depiction of a universe “gradually waking up” through the emergence of consciousness can sound oddly mystical — the atheist analytic philosopher’s version of “spiritual, not religious.” And even some readers who admire Mr. Nagel’s philosophical boldness see a very fuzzy line between his natural teleology and the creator God of theists like the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga (who reviewed Mr. Nagel’s book favorably in The New Republic, throwing more red meat to his detractors).

In his conclusion Mr. Nagel declares that the present “right-thinking consensus” on evolution “will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” But few of his colleagues seem to see much sign that a radical paradigm shift is imminent, let alone necessary.

“It’s perfectly fair game for philosophers to say scientists are wrong about stuff,” Mr. Sober said. “Everything depends on whether the arguments are good.”

Here's the opening paragraphs of Plantinga's review:

ACCORDING TO a semi-established consensus among the intellectual elite in the West, there is no such person as God or any other supernatural being. Life on our planet arose by way of ill-understood but completely naturalistic processes involving only the working of natural law. Given life, natural selection has taken over, and produced all the enormous variety that we find in the living world. Human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects through and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort. At bottom, what there is in our world are the elementary particles described in physics, together with things composed of these particles.

I say that this is a semi-established consensus, but of course there are some people, scientists and others, who disagree. There are also agnostics, who hold no opinion one way or the other on one or another of the above theses. And there are variations on the above themes, and also halfway houses of one sort or another. Still, by and large those are the views of academics and intellectuals in America now. Call this constellation of views scientific naturalism—or don’t call it that, since there is nothing particularly scientific about it, except that those who champion it tend to wrap themselves in science like a politician in the flag. By any name, however, we could call it the orthodoxy of the academy—or if not the orthodoxy, certainly the majority opinion.

Let's push that a bit. Scientific naturalism presents us with a world view in which the existence of life and consciousness are very very unlikely converging on impossible. Yet, self-evidently both life and consciousness exist. ANY attempt to reconcile such existence with such theory is bound to be VERY strange.

Artificial Retina

From the NY Times:

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved the first treatment to give limited vision to people who are blind, involving a technology called the “artificial retina.”

With it, people with certain types of blindness can detect crosswalks on the street, burners on a stove, the presence of people or cars, and sometimes even oversized numbers or letters.

The artificial retina is a sheet of electrodes surgically implanted in the eye. The patient is also outfitted with a pair of glasses with an attached camera and a portable video processor. These elements together allow visual signals to bypass the damaged portion of the retina and be transmitted to the brain.

Pigeon Navigation: The sound of distant waves

Pigeons live in a different world, from The Economist:

Pigeons form a far richer picture of the world than a person can manage, through three senses unavailable to humans: an instinctive ability to navigate by the sun, an ability to detect magnetic fields that provides them with an inbuilt compass, and an ability to hear infrasound. But if local conditions mean they cannot hear their destination, they are as lost as a driver whose satnav has suddenly failed.

H/t Tyler Cowen.