CapitalistImperialistPig

I'm reading Christof Koch ( Consciousness: confessions of a romantic reductionist ) and James Joyce ( Ulysses ) right now and once again pondering the nature of consciousness. Joyce tries to reveal his characters more fully by means of his "stream of consciousness" method. I'm skeptical. If you have ever tried to turn the power of introspection onto your consciousness by asking "What am I thinking about right now?" I suspect that the answer you got was "What am I thinking about right now?" At least that's what I always get. Trying to remember what you were thinking about recently might be more fruitful, but, at least in my case, not by much. For me, at least, only a little of what comes to my attention seems to be words. The other stuff, sensory experiences, memories, and connections, needs to be translated into words to be described. Joyce is trying to transcend the limitations of the narrative description by translating these other f...

If a metaphor is a mapping from one conceptual domain to another, what are its properties?  In mathematics, the most interesting mappings are those in which preserve some structure, for example algebraic or differential structure.  Lakoff and Johnson haven't discussed this sort of mathematical notion - yet in the book anyway - but I suspect similar notions underlie our use of metaphor. Conceptual understanding is clearly a critical element of thought, and not surprisingly, it is tightly wrapped with metaphor.  One metaphor is seeing is understanding.  We often use the verbs interchangeably.  Here we are mapping the conceptual domain into the physical sense of sight.  Some properties of sight are faithfully replicated in the metaphor: seeing clearly, for example, means being able to distinguish and identify the parts of an image, and conceptual understanding is strongly analogous.  Other related visual metaphors abound - a "foggy memory" for example. ...

Lakoff and Johnson have a bone to pick with the traditional view of metaphor, much of which they attribute to Aristotle. Here is how they describe that traditional view: 1. Metaphor is a matter of words, not thought. Metaphor occurs when a word is applied not to what it normally designates, but to something else. 2. Metaphorical language is not part of ordinary conventional language. Instead, it is novel and typically arises in poetry, rhetorical attempts at persuasion, and scientific discovery. 3. Metaphorical language is deviant. In metaphor, words are not used in their proper senses. 4. Conventional metaphorical expressions in ordinary everyday language are "dead metaphors," that is, expressions that once were metaphorical, but have become frozen into literal expressions. 5. Metaphors express similarities. That is, there are preexisting similarities between what words normally designate and what they designate when they are used metaphorically. This is not an ac...

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy......................Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5 You probably know that the Prince of Denmark was not talking to or about Immanuel Kant - he hadn't been born yet. Despite the title, I'm not either. I have in mind the thought that we humans quite naturally sort things into categories. In their book, Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought , George Lakoff and Mark Johnson note that categorization is a fundamental characteristic of life. Every time an amoeba decides to move toward what it senses as food, or a bacterium turns on some enzymatic system in response to a change in local chemistry, it is, in effect, making a decision, characterizing or categorizing its environment. For creatures with brains and nervous systems, the categorization can be made more explicit. Our eyes, for example, have about a million sensory cells, but only 100,000 fibe...

Patricia S. Churchland was on Stephen Colbert's show the other day, flogging her forthcoming book: Touching a Nerve: Our Brains, Our Selves  .  Among other things, she told Stephen that his brain was rather like that of a mouse, and that he didn't have a soul.  I recall reading her book Neurophilosophy back when I was a student of artificial intelligence.  It had a nice discussion of the fundamentals or neuroscience, some confused thoughts on relativity, and the first use of the word "consilience" that I recall. She and her husband Paul Churchland are exponents of a school of philosophy called "eliminative materialism".   I have only a slight clue as to what that means, but I am generally sympathetic to the notion that our thoughts and behaviors have neural substrates.  They apparently go a bit further and argue that "folk psychology" with its theories of  mind, belief, and sensation is an obsolete theory about unreal objects, like the geocent...

Ken Rogoff became a chess grandmaster while still a teenager, but eventually concluded that he couldn't climb to the very top, so switched to economics, and is now a Harvard professor and one of the world's most influential economists.  Via Tyler Cowen, this Gideon Rachman financial times story from Davos , which is heavy on the chess. On Bobby Fisher, and praise: Rogoff’s real hero, however, was Bobby Fischer, the American chess champion of the 1970s. He remembers following the games from the famous Fischer-Spassky world chess championship in 1972, and being awed by Fischer’s play – “It was like seeing the hand of God at work; the originality, the simplicity.” He shakes his head in delight and amazement. Fischer even paid the teenaged Rogoff the compliment of analysing and praising one of his games in an article. But Rogoff did not let that go to his head. “I took that to mean that he knew I could never beat him. Because I knew he was hyper-competitive. I completely understo...

Among many mysterious questions is that of why some people tend to learn faster than others. We can (in part, at least) reduce questions of strength and speed to muscle mass, body mechanics, and physiology, but the intellect is more obdurate. Jonah Lehrer, writing at Wired reports a couple of hints. The Moser experiment is premised on the fact that there are two distinct reactions to mistakes, both of which can be reliably detected using electroenchephalography, or EEG. The first reaction is called error-related negativity (ERN). It appears about 50 milliseconds after a screw-up and is believed to originate in the anterior cingulate cortex, a chunk of tissue that helps monitor behavior, anticipate rewards and regulate attention. This neural reaction is mostly involuntary, the inevitable response to any screw-up. The second signal, which is known as error positivity (Pe), arrives anywhere between 100-500 milliseconds after the mistake and is associated with awareness. It occurs w...

...a born devil, on whose nature, nuture can never stick................W Shakespeare, The Tempest Simon Baron-Cohen, in his book The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty argues that most of what we call evil can be explained as a failure of empathy, and that further, empathy is a fundamental human trait, orchestrated in the brain by an elaborate set of neural systems comprising the empathy circuit. To that end, he musters fascinating case histories, psychological tests, and the results of neuroimaging and genetic studies. I found the case most convincing for certain extremely empathy limited individuals whose bad behavior seems closely tied to their apparent inability to understand how other think and feel, and usually, their own thinking. The situational cases of loss of empathy, whether due to social pressure, war, or extreme stress seem more problematic. A secondary, and in my opinion far more convincing case is made that psychology as a science has drastical...