There's a Way

The series of posts on the hazards of model-building has proven to be goat barbecue. The more TOF chews it, the more it swells in size. The next episode, covering various uncertainties regarding the choice of Xs and the model structure will be along Real Soon Now. But today in a paroxysm of sheer will-power we will discuss....

Will Power

TOFs Faithful Reader, who already experiences free will, will consent to follow along. Those who deny free will cannot help but follow along, as they are driven by external forces as the wind doth blow the fallen leaves of a darkling wood.

Aside: a puckish notion occurs to TOF. What if the will-denialists are right and they really do lack the intellective appetite? That is, while we-uns are metaphysical humans, they-uns are philosophical zombies? Much would be thereby explained; especially behaviors like the frequent repetition of identically-worded cant phrases, as we would expect to hear from creatures that possess imagination but not intellect. But this supposition requires much reflection, as it is contrary to dogma. Also, it is really mean.

Today's meditation is motivated by a comment by a frequenter of this site who goes by the monofrydian name of OneBrow, who has written:

Picking the Brain

In "Beyond the Brain," NYT op-ed columnist David Brooks makes the quotidian observation that mind is not brain.[1]  He is not the first to do so.  Searle, Kuhn, Lucas, and others have walked this ground before him.  He points out that:

1. One region of the brain will handle a wide variety of different tasks.  "As Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld explained in their compelling and highly readable book, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience, you put somebody in an fMRI machine and see that the amygdala or the insula lights up during certain activities. But the amygdala lights up during fear, happiness, novelty, anger or sexual arousal (at least in women). The insula plays a role in processing trust, insight, empathy, aversion and disbelief. So what are you really looking at?"
   

What's the Matter With Matter

A reader at the Auld Blogge on LiveJournal who goes by the caligosian name haunterofmists has engaged in an extended conversation on form, spinning off the orthodox reaction to Nagel's Darwinian heresy, the gist of his questions, like the fogs he haunts, appeared inchoate. Suspecting that the disagreement -- if there even was one -- was due to terminological slippage over the centuries, TOF will here endeavor to lay out as best he can his understanding of the nature of natures.

The first thing to note is that "natural" has taken on a fuzzier meaning in the Late Modern ages, encompassing something like "it happens to to physical causes."  The Late or Post Modern thus is unable to grasp why a baseball thrown by a pitcher exhibits unnatural motion while one falling off a shelf exhibits purely natural motion.  It has to do with "natures" as opposed to Nature.

More on Consciousness

Quote of the Week

Sydney Eddison recounts [a story] of the violinist Itzhak Perlman, who as a boy was struck with polio and who as a man must walk with the aid of leg braces and crutches:

At a concert on the night of November 18, 1995, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, one of the strings of his violin suddenly snapped during the performance. Stunned, the audience held their collective breath, expecting Perlman to stop and leave the stage. Instead, he paused, then continued playing — adjusting, creating, compensating as he went along, and when he put down his bow at the end of the concert, a mighty roar of applause filled the hall. When it had died down, he spoke to the audience: “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

+ + + 

The quote was found in this article that touches on consciousness. 

What is Consciousness?

At RENOvation, the World Science Fiction Convention held in Reno NV this past week, there was a panel with the title "What is Consciousness?"  The panel did yeoman's work without (as is customary at con panels) ever coming to a conclusion, let alone a consensus conclusion.  I was in the audience and did not participate, but a few points struck me afterwards. 

There were several initial attempts to define consciousness, though no one tried to define consciousness by negation in the obvious sense; viz., "whatever it is you have when you are not unconscious."  They seemed to get all mixed up with "sentience," "intelligence," "empathy," and so forth.  All these terms were used interchangeably by panelists. 

One of the participants proudly declared himself a materialist, but never specified of what material "consciousness" is made.  My theory is that it is made of the same 'material' as momentum, gravity, or reproductive fitness; viz., none.  Physics has been edging away from materialism for the past hundred years.  Quantum mechanics dealt it a deadly blow, leading Heisenberg to remark that "It has become clear that the desired objective reality of the elementary particle is too crude an oversimplification of what really happens."  IOW, materialism no longer accounts even for matter.  The preferred term is "physicalist." 

The Instrumentality of the Brain

Now and then peculiar stories come to light.  A friend of mine some years ago had been scheduled for bypass surgery, but when he went into the hospital, they found, mirabile dictu, that new arteries had grown creating a natural bypass!  A strange thing, but not (he told me) as uncommon as you might think.  Though it is probably not an eventuality upon you would want to rely.

Today's tale is of a boy who was born without half his brain.

When Chase Britton was 1 year old, doctors did an MRI, expecting to find he had a mild case of cerebral palsy. Instead, they discovered he was completely missing his cerebellum -- the part of the brain that controls motor skills, balance and emotions.

"That's when the doctor called and didn't know what to say to us," Britton said in a telephone interview. "No one had ever seen it before. And then we'd go to the neurologists and they'd say, 'That's impossible.' 'He has the MRI of a vegetable,' one of the doctors said to us."

Chase is not a vegetable, leaving doctors bewildered and experts rethinking what they thought they knew about the human brain.  

Chase also is missing his pons, the part of the brain stem that controls basic functions, such as sleeping and breathing. There is only fluid where the cerebellum and pons should be, Britton said.

Ultrasound showed the kid had a cerebellum during pregnancy; but it vanished along the way. 

But that is not the most peculiar thing.  He does breathe and he does sleep, even without a pons.  He managed eventually to sit up on his own. Next he learned to crawl, and push himself upright.  Now, he's learning to walk.  These are things he should have been unable to do without a cerebellum to provide balance, if certain metaphysical stances were true.  

Now, like new arteries growing, this might be more common than it sounds; but it raises a peculiar question.  Evidently, other parts of the brain, in the cerebrum or medulla, have been recruited to take over tasks for which no cerebellum or pons stepped forward.  But who did the recruiting?  Is it the Brain that does all this, or is it Chase Britton, using his brain?

IOW, might the Brain be like any other bodily organ, an instrument used by the organism?  We don't say that the stomach ate a meal or that the legs went to the corner store.  Yet, we credit the Brain rhetorically with all sorts of autonomous actions, perhaps because we are reluctant to consider whether there might not be something more than the Brain.  Perhaps we are top-down and not bottom-up, after all.

UPDATE: Codgitator trumps Chase with a middle-aged Frenchman, married with children and gainfully employed, who has virtually no brain at all.  OK, a sort of shell of a brain.  See the normal brain on the left, and the Frenchman's brain on the right.


As you can see, there isn't much there.  The wonder is not that he has an IQ of 75, but that he has any IQ at all, or any life, for that matter.  The condition is called Dandy Walker complex and is a genetically sporadic disorder that occurs in one out of every 25,000 live births.  There have been enough such cases that Dr. John Lorber published a 1980 article in Science titled "Is the Brain Really Necessary?" [PDF link].  Mr. Codgitator comments:

"[I]t is the whole person, as a dynamic formal agent, that integrates all such neural, skeletal, physiological, etc. operations into one stream of conscious rational agency." and that "the Self, is not in the brain! On the contrary: the brain is in the self!"  No Brainer

This Gödel is Killing Me

I really wish I could take credit for that pun; but no...
Some years ago, J.R. Lucas formerly a mathematician and philosopher of Merton College, Oxford, wrote in "Minds, Machines and Gödel" (and later in The Freedom of the Will) that Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems imply that mechanistic theories of the mind are false. 
Gödel's theorem states that any consistent system strong enough to produce simple arithmetic contains unprovable, though perfectly meaningful formulae, some of which we, standing outside the system, can see to be true.

Example: Consider the statement G: {This formula is unprovable-within-the-system}. 

• If G is false, then the formula is provable-in-the-system and G is true.  A contradiction.
• If G is true, then G is unprovable-in-the-system.

• If G is provable-in-the-system, then it is false; but if it is false then it must be provable; again a contradiction. 
• If G is unprovable-in-the-system, then G is true. 

Thus we see that G must be true and must also be unprovable-in-the-system

(It could be argued that G might be true and unprovable in a system S, yet provable in some larger system S*.  But then there must be a Gödel sentence in S*, and so on.)

Something Fishy

  
He's Dead Jim

The 18-inch-long Atlantic salmon lay perfectly still for its brain scan. Emotional pictures —a triumphant young girl just out of a somersault, a distressed waiter who had just dropped a plate — flashed in front of the fish as a scientist read the standard instruction script aloud. The hulking machine clunked and whirred, capturing minute changes in the salmon’s brain as it assessed the images. Millions of data points capturing the fluctuations in brain activity streamed into a powerful computer, which performed herculean number crunching, sorting out which data to pay attention to and which to ignore.

By the end of the experiment, neuroscientist Craig Bennett and his colleagues at Dartmouth College could clearly discern in the scan of the salmon’s brain a beautiful, red-hot area of activity that lit up during emotional scenes.

An Atlantic salmon that responded to human emotions would have been an astounding discovery, guaranteeing publication in a top-tier journal and a life of scientific glory for the researchers. Except for one thing. The fish was dead.  

Trawling the Brain

Ah, well, they managed to eliminate that error, but it did bring out one important notion.  Not the emotional lives of fish, but our peculiar tendency to equate things with their material entanglements. 

Less dramatic studies have also called attention to flawed statistical methods in fMRI studies. Some such methods, in fact, practically guarantee that researchers will seem to find exactly what they’re looking for in the tangle of fMRI data.

 In the great layer cake of science

it is always useful to distinguish between what is actually being measured and what that measurement is attributed to.  A famous example is the 1936 Literary Digest sample that measured the stated voting preferences of telephone owners and thought they were measuring the percentage of voters who would actually vote.  In fact, voters who did not own telephones also voted, and voted very differently from the phone owning voters.