as i sit here in class wishing that Miller would become as awesome a professor as he is a person, but accepting that, tragically, this will never be...
5. Oh Steven Pinker, how I treasure you...
Pinker thinks grammar development is a support for non-selectionist theories of language development. He says that grammar is more complicated than it need be for the purposes of hunter gatherer lifestyle, with which I agree. However, I also think that when grammar/language was in initial stages of evolutionary development, it was probably exactly as complicated as it need be for that purpose. I like to think of the late H. s. sapiens as still being hunter-gatherers, and that as our hunting skills evolved to become more complicated, so did our language. This being said, I don’t think that the present complexity of language is an argument against the contribution of natural selection to language development. It’s just as conceivable an idea to me that just as our hunting skills suffer from a severe deficit inflicted by our obsession with making our lives easier and our physical selves more lazy, so has language diverged from being purely a survival tool into… well, Sheharazade on steroids. Then again, some of us have become so exotically lackadaisical with language that it's also become somewhat useless as a tool of any sort.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
empty thoughts IV
4. Whyyyyyyy is it obvious that because autistic children have an impairment in only a particular type of reasoning that one type evolved separately from the other? Explain to me how this is in any way a solid framework to make this broad of a conclusion with any certainty.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
empty thoughts III
3. Fiona Scott and Simon Baron-Cohen conclude that the deficit in autism is due to an impairment of psychological reasoning, as opposed to logical or analogical reasoning. This seems to suggest a deficit in “mindblindness,” not Gestalt perception, as addressed by the article. Because mindblindness is defined by Baron-Cohen in another article as an inability to be aware of what is in another person’s mind, it becomes a separate issue from Gestalt perception entirely. The logical and analogical tests demonstrated that autistic children can reason with representations of representations, and identify relation between relations, which suggests that their perceptive grouping is intact, which is clearly not the case. I don’t get it.
The authors say that their evidence shows the deficit to be due to m-representation; the inability to represent and agent’s attitude toward something. They do not speak of which of their results support this, but continue to say that autism is more likely due to the child’s inability to represent mental states...metarepresentation? What is this jump they are making to conclude that this is an impairment of psychological reasoning? It makes more sense to me that an inability to represent mental states would reflect a deficit in analogical reasoning.
I would have appreciated a more direct response to their three main hypotheses. Speculating the three intelligence paradigms of logical, analogical and psychological reasoning were a strong approach to the question of whether autistic children are impaired selectively in psychological and not in non-social tasks. However, I think the importance of their conclusions was missed, and their discussion generally lacking, and did not address the relation of their various tests to their hypotheses... Neither do they definitively support or object to Cosmides’ theory which is the title of their paper. It seems that since Scott and Baron-Cohen concluded that social intelligence has evolved separately from non-social intelligence, they would discuss Cosmides’ theory that intelligence evolved to solve social problems.
so basically, my disappointment reflects that which I typically hold toward psychology papers... pity.
The authors say that their evidence shows the deficit to be due to m-representation; the inability to represent and agent’s attitude toward something. They do not speak of which of their results support this, but continue to say that autism is more likely due to the child’s inability to represent mental states...metarepresentation? What is this jump they are making to conclude that this is an impairment of psychological reasoning? It makes more sense to me that an inability to represent mental states would reflect a deficit in analogical reasoning.
I would have appreciated a more direct response to their three main hypotheses. Speculating the three intelligence paradigms of logical, analogical and psychological reasoning were a strong approach to the question of whether autistic children are impaired selectively in psychological and not in non-social tasks. However, I think the importance of their conclusions was missed, and their discussion generally lacking, and did not address the relation of their various tests to their hypotheses... Neither do they definitively support or object to Cosmides’ theory which is the title of their paper. It seems that since Scott and Baron-Cohen concluded that social intelligence has evolved separately from non-social intelligence, they would discuss Cosmides’ theory that intelligence evolved to solve social problems.
so basically, my disappointment reflects that which I typically hold toward psychology papers... pity.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
empty thoughts II
2. “The ability to categorize is what makes it possible to use previous experience to guide the interpretation of new experience, for without categorization, memory is virtually useless” (Jackendoff 1987).
What kind of function would memory have if it were not categorized? Would memory be retrievable, and in what form? There must be some evolutionary reason to have uncategorized memory, because before memory could become associative, it makes sense that it would have begun with a single category with all information lumped together…
What kind of function would memory have if it were not categorized? Would memory be retrievable, and in what form? There must be some evolutionary reason to have uncategorized memory, because before memory could become associative, it makes sense that it would have begun with a single category with all information lumped together…
Sunday, February 3, 2008
empty thoughts I
1. one of the keystone deficits of autism is the inability to filter visual/auditory stimuli into hierarchical importance. evolutionarily speaking, i wonder what it is about “goal-, ancestral- and expertise-derived criteria” that is lost on these victims. a way in which autistic people cope with this lack of filtering is to focus obsessively on a single thing to override all the other stimuli they cannot make sense of at once. why do they preferentially focus on inanimate objects (banging head against the wall, counting toothpicks, etc.) when animate objects are more crucial for survival? Is there support for the counter hypothesis (“no mechanisms for deploying attention to animate objects”)?
*New et al 2007. Category specific attention...
*New et al 2007. Category specific attention...
Friday, January 4, 2008
israel
For those who have asked about my experience in Israel, and for those who were there. I did not share my feelings with everyone during our last night together in Tel Aviv – these are what they would have been had I the energy to compose them or the gumption to share them at the time. You will notice redundancies in the explanation of my state of being… for that I make no apologies.
…
I had no expectations preceding this trip. Now I’m sitting down in quiet for the first time after returning to the United States and realizing that reflecting on ten days of Israel is a relatively overwhelming and exhausting endeavor, both emotionally and philosophically. People I have spent as little as a day with have contributed profoundly to the shade of my perceptions of the world and what I’m doing in it. Places I have stood for as little as an hour. Places I have stepped and waded. Stone I have kissed.
The adventure was inaugurated by the 50-some sleepless hours which wrapped up finals week, and an immediate two-day whirlwind tour of New York, and after those four days alone my body might have appreciated a brief coma. Unfortunately for my body, I do not experience rejuvenating slumber on planes. However, given the circumstances of ten hours airtime, I learned not only to force several twenty minute intervals, but to overcome my fear of being sucked out of the plane by the toilet. I am now entirely invincible.
The Negev desert, after a solid 3 hours sleep at the Sde Boker kibbutz, was profoundly gorgeous. In a place where the salt and drought of the soil let almost nothing live, I woke up from whatever crude lethargy I was in. The climb, the hike, the height… every time I looked up from my feet my chest swelled with this nearly indigestible energy. I have salvaged peace of being in the ocean, and under forest canopies, but I have never felt a restoration like this. We hiked for only three hours in Machtesh and I knew how the Jews could feel alive in the desert for so long.
Camping that night in the Nahal Tze’elim, and following a particular talk around the last red coals of the bonfire with the few of us who were still awake in the wee hours, I took in exactly with whom I had embarked on this adventure. We were all here at some manner of turning point in our lives looking to re-grasp a piece of internal transience, or looking to determine our connection to Zionism or Judaism or the pluralistic nature of Israel. I was not alone in the Ignostic/Taoist tendencies of my Judaism which struck me both awkwardly and comfortably – a state of belongingness that I can define no better than that. Further still I was not alone in my unconditional fascination and love for the world, and for the family to which we (this Taglit group), however distantly, attach ourselves; the Jews. I feel as though all 40 of us realized this very quickly about one another during our introduction (or return, for some of us) to Israel.
Waking up to our first daylight exposure to the Negev cliffs leading to and around the isolated plateau of Masada was bombarding. This was a place where lived and died the extremist remnants of the Zealots in rebellion of the Roman Empire. And in the footsteps of both our ancestors and their enemies we tread. How fitting and somewhat sardonic that at the foot of this great plateau, beneath the ruins of what was once a supposedly great splinter of civilization lay the Dead Sea… in which we had floated earlier in the day and quite sufficiently dehydrated ourselves prior to a sun-beaten hike up the roughly 700 stone stairs of Masada’s Snake Path. Brilliant. Looking out over the desert below brought up much of the same waves as did hiking in Machtesh the day before. At 4 in the afternoon there was complete quiet atop this mountain. It was a panorama made dynamic by the presence of the wind. It was like hearing the ocean crash and roll out in the middle of the desert, and it was this collision that took me off the ground. It would have been the first peak on the seemingly endless emotional rollercoaster of this experience, but, if I’m being honest, the ruins of ancient civilizations, no matter their historical significance, typically mean very little to me in and of themselves. Yes, I can imagine these walls in their completeness. Yes, I can fathom a society functioning on this desert plateau and fighting for their faith against armies four times their numbers. I can even appreciate their fates… but I find no belongingness here. Ruins are the foundations of the stories of everyone’s people; they don’t raise personal connections or emotions for me. Perhaps were I an architect…. And if String Theory is correct and the tenth dimension reveals that all life is connected by some physical thread then I should regret this feeling but I excuse myself because… well, frankly String Theory is a little beyond me and even if it supports itself I am terribly skeptical that it would claim to reach through both space and time. As what seems now as if a matter of course, but at the time was a surprising blow, this changed for me in Jerusalem.
The Old City. The Kotel. Shabbat. If I think for too long about what happened to me that evening I exhaust myself and begin to invite a seizure-like hysteria in my brain. I have no spiritual tie to the Wall – it did not invoke tears, nor did it excite a strong religious rising. What did happen was a surging appreciation, and an overwhelming wave of respect and admiration for what this 60 feet of stone represents. It may have been brought on by placing a note in the crevice of two stones accompanied by prayers from countless others. It may have been provoked by the dancing, singing and celebratory activities into which we were invited so naturally by the other women on our respective side of the Kotel. It may have been the eventual retire to the steps of the site to observe the continuance of activities in which I had briefly participated, and to remove myself from the magnitude of what I had just experienced. Irrespective of the hierarchy of influence these events held, my person was unfolded and exposed to itself, and for some reason, this ruin – this strip of stone which is the center of such incredible holiness – inspired a belongingness that I had previously decided was possible only in the presence of loved ones. This was a family. The Jews. From every place of residence, from every class of religious practice. There was a love here not particular to Orthodox Judaism, or even Israelis. This place and this Shabbat celebration were a toast to life.
The market did me in. I stood in the middle of a bustling intersection and knew that I would be back in this place, inevitably. You get a feel for where you can live in a functional manner by the way the surrounding pace rubs you. I’ve got the Kibbutzim Sasa and Lotan in mind (*Sasa is the original community which started the Anne Frank Haven for multicultural integration and education of foster youth in the Galilee, and Lotan does Ecodesign).
I don’t know that I can fairly address Har Herzl. There is a particular mental indigestion from which I’m still unable to recover. The symbolism of Israeli architecture itself is outstanding, let alone the presence it created for political leaders, Zionist progressives and Israeli soldiers of every rank and victims of terrorism. Herzl’s lone grave at the top of the mount looks down to Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial) as if his memory accrues some anthropomorphic responsibility to hold the hand of the legacy of so many millions of anti-semitic deaths. The symbolism of the rise of the Holocaust’s devastation to a successfully declared state of Israel does not escape notice. Neither are headstones formed after pillows, personal garden beds or identical epitaphs among soldiers lost for peaceful and unifying significance. The disquieting glare of spaces waiting to be filled strikes eerily in the terrorist victims memorial, and echoes more discretely but no less unnerving in the tunnel dedicated to civilians including young children. There was no sense of patriotism in this place for me, because it is a word that includes a degree of willing blindness. What could be felt in this cemetery was a love seemingly booming through stone from every grave on the mount for this infant country and its father. All founders of societies pursue a place through which to recover from some manner of oppression. All soldiers of war are, seemingly, strongly unified in their passions toward the land and ideas to which they give themselves. What felt different here was the quietude of pride, and the bellow of familial strength.
Golan Heights and Tel Aviv were rescuing in both wonder- and alcohol-induced capacities… respectively. As these were the final extravaganzas of the trip, they made me stop myself and wish that I had been more appreciative the people around me. We got to the Ben Gurion airport and started to say good-byes and I realized that in as much as the ten day whirlwind tour of the country had created and insatiable craving for Israel, I had developed the same sentiment toward our group. I had not recognized it.
…
Our flight from Boston got into PDX around 2am Pacific today. At 3am my mother was wide awake at the creak of my suitcase on the floor of the entryway – I leave the details of the reception to the imaginations of those who have met her. I had a breakfast meeting with my lab four hours later and you bet your ass I am still on East Coast time. Of course, they asked about Israel before the subject of Charlie’s recent grant acceptance was even mentioned. I had attempted in the four hours prior during which I did not sleep to compile some sort of short-winded capitulation. Even as it was during that time that I started writing this sentiment, I failed miserably to convert it to speech. So now that I have actually finished regurgitating my thoughts, and have thoroughly convinced myself that language is not the primary vehicle of thought no matter what Donald Davidson says, I can say this: it was remarkable in the way that only peculiarly profound things can be.
My thanks and love to all of those who made it what it was.
…
For those familiar with my situation prior to the events of this winter, and/or who have known me all my life, you can more immediately understand the particular enormity of this trip for me. Ask me who I am. It might blow your mind. Or not… depending on how well you know me already…
…
I had no expectations preceding this trip. Now I’m sitting down in quiet for the first time after returning to the United States and realizing that reflecting on ten days of Israel is a relatively overwhelming and exhausting endeavor, both emotionally and philosophically. People I have spent as little as a day with have contributed profoundly to the shade of my perceptions of the world and what I’m doing in it. Places I have stood for as little as an hour. Places I have stepped and waded. Stone I have kissed.
The adventure was inaugurated by the 50-some sleepless hours which wrapped up finals week, and an immediate two-day whirlwind tour of New York, and after those four days alone my body might have appreciated a brief coma. Unfortunately for my body, I do not experience rejuvenating slumber on planes. However, given the circumstances of ten hours airtime, I learned not only to force several twenty minute intervals, but to overcome my fear of being sucked out of the plane by the toilet. I am now entirely invincible.
The Negev desert, after a solid 3 hours sleep at the Sde Boker kibbutz, was profoundly gorgeous. In a place where the salt and drought of the soil let almost nothing live, I woke up from whatever crude lethargy I was in. The climb, the hike, the height… every time I looked up from my feet my chest swelled with this nearly indigestible energy. I have salvaged peace of being in the ocean, and under forest canopies, but I have never felt a restoration like this. We hiked for only three hours in Machtesh and I knew how the Jews could feel alive in the desert for so long.
Camping that night in the Nahal Tze’elim, and following a particular talk around the last red coals of the bonfire with the few of us who were still awake in the wee hours, I took in exactly with whom I had embarked on this adventure. We were all here at some manner of turning point in our lives looking to re-grasp a piece of internal transience, or looking to determine our connection to Zionism or Judaism or the pluralistic nature of Israel. I was not alone in the Ignostic/Taoist tendencies of my Judaism which struck me both awkwardly and comfortably – a state of belongingness that I can define no better than that. Further still I was not alone in my unconditional fascination and love for the world, and for the family to which we (this Taglit group), however distantly, attach ourselves; the Jews. I feel as though all 40 of us realized this very quickly about one another during our introduction (or return, for some of us) to Israel.
Waking up to our first daylight exposure to the Negev cliffs leading to and around the isolated plateau of Masada was bombarding. This was a place where lived and died the extremist remnants of the Zealots in rebellion of the Roman Empire. And in the footsteps of both our ancestors and their enemies we tread. How fitting and somewhat sardonic that at the foot of this great plateau, beneath the ruins of what was once a supposedly great splinter of civilization lay the Dead Sea… in which we had floated earlier in the day and quite sufficiently dehydrated ourselves prior to a sun-beaten hike up the roughly 700 stone stairs of Masada’s Snake Path. Brilliant. Looking out over the desert below brought up much of the same waves as did hiking in Machtesh the day before. At 4 in the afternoon there was complete quiet atop this mountain. It was a panorama made dynamic by the presence of the wind. It was like hearing the ocean crash and roll out in the middle of the desert, and it was this collision that took me off the ground. It would have been the first peak on the seemingly endless emotional rollercoaster of this experience, but, if I’m being honest, the ruins of ancient civilizations, no matter their historical significance, typically mean very little to me in and of themselves. Yes, I can imagine these walls in their completeness. Yes, I can fathom a society functioning on this desert plateau and fighting for their faith against armies four times their numbers. I can even appreciate their fates… but I find no belongingness here. Ruins are the foundations of the stories of everyone’s people; they don’t raise personal connections or emotions for me. Perhaps were I an architect…. And if String Theory is correct and the tenth dimension reveals that all life is connected by some physical thread then I should regret this feeling but I excuse myself because… well, frankly String Theory is a little beyond me and even if it supports itself I am terribly skeptical that it would claim to reach through both space and time. As what seems now as if a matter of course, but at the time was a surprising blow, this changed for me in Jerusalem.
The Old City. The Kotel. Shabbat. If I think for too long about what happened to me that evening I exhaust myself and begin to invite a seizure-like hysteria in my brain. I have no spiritual tie to the Wall – it did not invoke tears, nor did it excite a strong religious rising. What did happen was a surging appreciation, and an overwhelming wave of respect and admiration for what this 60 feet of stone represents. It may have been brought on by placing a note in the crevice of two stones accompanied by prayers from countless others. It may have been provoked by the dancing, singing and celebratory activities into which we were invited so naturally by the other women on our respective side of the Kotel. It may have been the eventual retire to the steps of the site to observe the continuance of activities in which I had briefly participated, and to remove myself from the magnitude of what I had just experienced. Irrespective of the hierarchy of influence these events held, my person was unfolded and exposed to itself, and for some reason, this ruin – this strip of stone which is the center of such incredible holiness – inspired a belongingness that I had previously decided was possible only in the presence of loved ones. This was a family. The Jews. From every place of residence, from every class of religious practice. There was a love here not particular to Orthodox Judaism, or even Israelis. This place and this Shabbat celebration were a toast to life.
The market did me in. I stood in the middle of a bustling intersection and knew that I would be back in this place, inevitably. You get a feel for where you can live in a functional manner by the way the surrounding pace rubs you. I’ve got the Kibbutzim Sasa and Lotan in mind (*Sasa is the original community which started the Anne Frank Haven for multicultural integration and education of foster youth in the Galilee, and Lotan does Ecodesign).
I don’t know that I can fairly address Har Herzl. There is a particular mental indigestion from which I’m still unable to recover. The symbolism of Israeli architecture itself is outstanding, let alone the presence it created for political leaders, Zionist progressives and Israeli soldiers of every rank and victims of terrorism. Herzl’s lone grave at the top of the mount looks down to Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial) as if his memory accrues some anthropomorphic responsibility to hold the hand of the legacy of so many millions of anti-semitic deaths. The symbolism of the rise of the Holocaust’s devastation to a successfully declared state of Israel does not escape notice. Neither are headstones formed after pillows, personal garden beds or identical epitaphs among soldiers lost for peaceful and unifying significance. The disquieting glare of spaces waiting to be filled strikes eerily in the terrorist victims memorial, and echoes more discretely but no less unnerving in the tunnel dedicated to civilians including young children. There was no sense of patriotism in this place for me, because it is a word that includes a degree of willing blindness. What could be felt in this cemetery was a love seemingly booming through stone from every grave on the mount for this infant country and its father. All founders of societies pursue a place through which to recover from some manner of oppression. All soldiers of war are, seemingly, strongly unified in their passions toward the land and ideas to which they give themselves. What felt different here was the quietude of pride, and the bellow of familial strength.
Golan Heights and Tel Aviv were rescuing in both wonder- and alcohol-induced capacities… respectively. As these were the final extravaganzas of the trip, they made me stop myself and wish that I had been more appreciative the people around me. We got to the Ben Gurion airport and started to say good-byes and I realized that in as much as the ten day whirlwind tour of the country had created and insatiable craving for Israel, I had developed the same sentiment toward our group. I had not recognized it.
…
Our flight from Boston got into PDX around 2am Pacific today. At 3am my mother was wide awake at the creak of my suitcase on the floor of the entryway – I leave the details of the reception to the imaginations of those who have met her. I had a breakfast meeting with my lab four hours later and you bet your ass I am still on East Coast time. Of course, they asked about Israel before the subject of Charlie’s recent grant acceptance was even mentioned. I had attempted in the four hours prior during which I did not sleep to compile some sort of short-winded capitulation. Even as it was during that time that I started writing this sentiment, I failed miserably to convert it to speech. So now that I have actually finished regurgitating my thoughts, and have thoroughly convinced myself that language is not the primary vehicle of thought no matter what Donald Davidson says, I can say this: it was remarkable in the way that only peculiarly profound things can be.
My thanks and love to all of those who made it what it was.
…
For those familiar with my situation prior to the events of this winter, and/or who have known me all my life, you can more immediately understand the particular enormity of this trip for me. Ask me who I am. It might blow your mind. Or not… depending on how well you know me already…
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
supervenience of subconsciousness
“It is clear that there is no more of a conceptual entailment from biochemistry to consciousness than there is from silicon of from a group of homunculi…. So consciousness fails to logically supervene on the physical.”
Chalmers is suggesting that consciousness can't be reduced to a physical structure or property because the silicon model of neural circuitry is functionally identical to biochemical neural circuitry, yet the silicon model can't exhibit consciousness. This is an assumption that silicon and neural circuits are identical... but I would contend that there is a “conceptual entailment from biochemistry” that provides a physical property on which consciousness may very well supervene.
The difference between a silicon and neural circuit is plainly that the former is closed and the latter is open... such that the electrical flow of messages through each respective circuit may occur in the same phenomenological fashion, but not the same physical fashion. Namely, when circulating an electrical signal, a closed circuit releases energy only in the form of heat, whereas an open circuit releases energy as mostly Gibbs free energy with the ability to do work, and very little heat. A silicon circuit is not self propagating, namely, through its path it meets only with resistors and inductors which cause it to dissipate heat. However, a neuronal signal is self propagating, and free energy in its environment is both consumed and produced by that process. This, of course, is assuming that energy and heat are physical properties on which consciousness might supervene. Since the free energy has the capacity to perform work, and heat does not, the neural circuit is the one with the ability to support consciousness.
Because free energy is undefined aside from its ability to do work, it is possible that this particular physical property is the medium through which neural structure and consciousness are connected. Therefore, I propose that the changes in free energy that occur during electrical signal propagation in a neural circuit may be the physical cause of consciousness. Free energy, being the physical difference between a neural and silicon circuit, would explain consciousness arising in one and not the other, and provide a physical property to which consciousness might be reduced.
But all this... is written out of fear. If humans manage during my lifetime to find the physical matter of consciousness such that we can replicate it... my soul will crumble, and my fascination with the human condition will suffer a dreadful, murderous demise. As a neurochemist, I need for there to be some manner of correlation between biochemistry and consciousness. As a mind, I need for that matter to be untouchable, and irreplicable.
Chalmers is suggesting that consciousness can't be reduced to a physical structure or property because the silicon model of neural circuitry is functionally identical to biochemical neural circuitry, yet the silicon model can't exhibit consciousness. This is an assumption that silicon and neural circuits are identical... but I would contend that there is a “conceptual entailment from biochemistry” that provides a physical property on which consciousness may very well supervene.
The difference between a silicon and neural circuit is plainly that the former is closed and the latter is open... such that the electrical flow of messages through each respective circuit may occur in the same phenomenological fashion, but not the same physical fashion. Namely, when circulating an electrical signal, a closed circuit releases energy only in the form of heat, whereas an open circuit releases energy as mostly Gibbs free energy with the ability to do work, and very little heat. A silicon circuit is not self propagating, namely, through its path it meets only with resistors and inductors which cause it to dissipate heat. However, a neuronal signal is self propagating, and free energy in its environment is both consumed and produced by that process. This, of course, is assuming that energy and heat are physical properties on which consciousness might supervene. Since the free energy has the capacity to perform work, and heat does not, the neural circuit is the one with the ability to support consciousness.
Because free energy is undefined aside from its ability to do work, it is possible that this particular physical property is the medium through which neural structure and consciousness are connected. Therefore, I propose that the changes in free energy that occur during electrical signal propagation in a neural circuit may be the physical cause of consciousness. Free energy, being the physical difference between a neural and silicon circuit, would explain consciousness arising in one and not the other, and provide a physical property to which consciousness might be reduced.
But all this... is written out of fear. If humans manage during my lifetime to find the physical matter of consciousness such that we can replicate it... my soul will crumble, and my fascination with the human condition will suffer a dreadful, murderous demise. As a neurochemist, I need for there to be some manner of correlation between biochemistry and consciousness. As a mind, I need for that matter to be untouchable, and irreplicable.
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