A short history of human civilization

Contains some gore and genitals. May not want to maximize this if at work.

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The stupidity of dignity

Via EvolutionBlog, an article on the stupidity of dignity, which is a much-needed topic to discuss.

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The problems with phenomenology

Sorry about the lack of posts for a week. I've been under stress.

In philosophy club Saturday, we discussed whether the scientific method was a method which produces most truth.

I argued that it was about the best thing we've got, and we can't understand what it's like to be anything else - for example, to use the classic philosophy of mind example, we can't understand what it is like to be a bat . We cannot echolocate, we do not have very good hearing, and we cannot fly.

Phenomenology examines first-person experiences. I think phenomenology is going to be stuck between what we learn of consciousness in the next decades and the fact that you cannot reproduce an individual's experience because it is so complex at the moment. We have a limited ability to reason logically which is constrained by our perceptions.

So can we in fact know what it's like to be a bat? Well, there are two factors in this:

- the bat's neurological milieus
- the bat's experiences

Generalizing from one bat to all bats is dangerous; there are different species of bats, and each one has different abilities. For example, a hawknose bat does not know what a vampire bat's perception of blood is, and within species, I suspect one bat does not know how exquisitely satisfying another bat's recent meals were.

The research by Tristan Bekinschtein, whose work I have cited before in this blog, deals with consciousness in patients with 'disorders of consciousness' - dementia, PVS and Alzheimer's. His research seems to suggest that there are significant impairments in affective cognition and theory of mind in such individuals (for those of you who don't know what theory of mind is, here is a Wikipedia article that describes it extremely well.)

This does not seem to mesh with how philosophers define consciousness, though, which is to say, they don't limit it to simple awareness of the self and of one's environment.

Subjective experience, by definition, is how we perceive a thing. Now, in my studies of neuroscience, our perception of something first goes through our sensory system. To use a complex example from my own experiences, say you are at a party, you are sober, and you are sitting next to someone who is drinking a beer. Your senses are not impaired, so you perceive the situation as accurately as possible. You smell the alcohol, see the color of the bottle, and see the person who is drinking it. The visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile, possibly gustatory, proprioceptive, nociceptive, and thermoceptive aspects of the situation all trigger certain responses in your sensory system. These varied responses are compared to your previous experiences, whether you have experienced it firsthand or heard about it.

You know, I think this can be best summed up in one angry sentence: Philosophy uninformed by science is sophistry.

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Why philosophy of mind is an utterly pointless discipline

I'm going to draw some fire for this one.

tl;dr: LET NEUROSCIENTISTS STUDY THE BRAIN, PLEASE. YOU PHILOSOPHERS CAN GO BACK TO YOUR KANT AND HUME AND DESCARTES (AND KEEP YOUR BLOODY DUALISTS), WE'LL KEEP TO OUR RAMON Y CAJAL AND HODGKIN AND HUXLEY, THANKS.

Philosophy of mind is an utterly pointless discipline.

Philosophy in general irks the hell out of me in several ways; it looks for things that have really been only rationalized to exist by philosophers and haven't been proven to exist any other way (which makes them sound like fundamentalists of some theistic religion and frankly makes me not take them seriously at all); I can think of too many philosophers whose only source of proof was the logical assumptions made by their brains. Ethics, logic, and thought experiments are great, but postulating about things such as mathematics and the mind makes philosophers look like remoras of the intellect.

Consciousness is an especially contentious thing - David Chalmers, for one, has this silly notion of 'qualia', which are 'the way things seem to us'. These are, according to Chalmers, ineffable, intrinsic, private, and directly apprehensible in consciousness. Say you see a red cup which contains beer. Chalmers says that 'redness' is a quale of the cup, as is the 'brownness' of the beer or the 'liquidness' of the beer or the 'truncated conicness' of the cup.

These phenomena are easily explainable by the fact that the chemicals which compose the plastic and the beer reflect the colors red and brown, and that beer exists at room temperature in a liquid state (since it is mostly water) and that the plastic was poured into a mold and hardened that way, since it is solid at room temperature. The reason we see red and brown is the fact that human eyes are designed to see those colors. This is how the electromagnetic spectra reflected by these substances looks to our eyes and how our eyes process them. If we were dogs, we would see shades of gray, and if we were bees, we would see some funky purple stuff. The reason we have those colors is that that is what people have called them over time, and, well, we can't do much about the electromagnetic spectrum, that's just the way it is and there's no 'why' to it. There is essentially no 'why' to the most basic aspects of existence.

Also, this 'zombie' thing: If zombies were physically similar to us, they would be conscious. Consciousness is a physical property which exists because of our neurophysiology. There is no supernatural woo-woo explanation to it, and any supernatural woo-woo assumptions are about as good as saying there's a big flying teapot on the other side of the universe. (OBVIOUS CONNECTION TO THE ABSURDITY OF THEISM FOR THE WIN)

The Chinese room experiment is about the only plausible thing I have ever seen come out of philosophy of mind; for the answer as to why this is plausible, see Developing Intelligence.

...AAAAAAARGH.

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A thought

Nature is not so much a majestic righteous force as it is an enigmatic and amoral opportunist. And morality is based on evolutionarily advantageous behavior.

Thoughts on morality?

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On sanity

My friend Chris has a great post on sanity. My take on his post is that sanity is an entirely subjective thing and that what is really needed is maturity, which a great many adults do not have.

Most of you who read this have probably gathered by now that I think about 99% of people are insane, and in this particular little post I'm going to talk about it.

Insanity, that is.

What seems to pass for insanity these days is a number of things: limited perspective, bias, mob mentality, and any number of other stupid things which make people idiots but are unfortunately part of humanity.

For example, the Scientologists - make no mistake, they are a cult, and I think Anonymous is the best thing that has ever happened to the poor people they abuse - have fooled a whole lot of people into joining them. Most low-level Scientologists, what the Scientologists would call 'non-OT' or 'OT-I' or 'OT-II', don't know anything about the organization and simply say what the organization tells them to say. They are labeled insane frequently, and indeed, they act kooky, but one has to consider the fact that they're under a very complex form of control and that their problem is one of ignorance and being belittled and hoodwinked by Midget Miscavige and his cabal.

By the way, folks, go to the sites www.enturbulation.org, www.xenu.net, www.whyaretheydead.net, and www.youfoundthecard.com - I absolutely implore you, educate yourselves about the abuse that these people perpetrate. They're worse than the fundies, in many respects, and I didn't even think that was possible until I learned about what THESE assholes do. This atheist blogger says 'Go Anonymous!'

Also, politicians tend to be full of it. Chris's post has a lot on this.

Evolutionarily, humans are social animals. Our brains, particularly our limbic systems, are wired for certain behaviors. Mob mentality arises from this, since it is evolutionarily advantageous for a group to act the same way in certain situations, and so is a child listening unconditionally to its parents, since more often than not, parents have their child's best interest in mind. Religion arose out of humanity's discomfort with the unknown; atheism is the provenance of we who are more comfortable with it and prefer accuracy. I do not know about whether there are neural correlates to being susceptible or not susceptible to herd behavior, but the differences are usually extremely pronounced.

I wonder if we could postulate about the 'evolvedness' of human brains - are the more logical brains more advanced on the evolutionary spectrum? Greta Christina made a post about atheist morality vs. theist morality that makes a good point - our morality is largely hard-wired by evolution.

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Philosophy of Mind by Jaegwon Kim

As a neuroscience major reading this book, I kind of felt a little bit like this book was meant more for laypeople.

I'm currently borrowing this text from a friend - Chris, my good friend and also the president of our campus atheist society and organizer of our campus's philosophy club (of 'The Uncredible Hallq' fame). I was curious about what philosophers of mind had to say about things they probably hadn't done any research about.

Descartes was an idiot about the mind. Dualists = fail! Presupposing that the mind is separate from the body fails to answer the question of 'So where is the mind, then?', and claims the mind is a separate entity. It is very simple common knowledge that the mind is simply a bunch of cognitive functions. His list of arguments:
'I am such that my existence cannot be doubted. My body is not such that its existence cannot be doubted. Therefore, I am not identical with my body. Therefore, the thinking thing that I am is not identical with my body.'
Is it just me, or does this remind me of the argument of someone who is dissociating?
'My mind is transparent to me - that is, nothing can be in my mind without my knowing that it is there. My body is not apparent to me in the same sense. Therefore, my mind is not identical with my body.'
First of all, transparency of mind is only achieved when one knows oneself, and one can have things in their mind without being completely aware that it is there at a point in time. Also, this statement smacks of ignorance of anatomy.
'Each mind is such that there is a unique subject who has direct and privileged access to its contents. No material body has a specially privileged knower - knowledge of material things is in principle public and intersubjective. Therefore, minds are not identical with material bodies.'
Again, incredibly bad logic and a twisting of the definition of knowledge.
'My essential nature is to be a thinking thing. My body's essential nature is to be an extended thing in space. My essential nature does not include being an extended thing in space. Therefore, I am not identical with my body. And since I am a thinking thing (namely a mind), my mind is not identical with my body.'
... okay, now this just smacks of really bad logic. A child can figure out the fallacies and bad connections in this shit. I'm almost tempted to stop pointing out the flaws and just make fun of this, because the flaws in these arguments should be readily accessible.
'If anything is material, it is essentially material. However, I am possibly immaterial - that is, there is a world in which I exist without a body. Hence, I am not essentially material. Hence, it follows (with the first premise) that I am not material.'
Ho ho ho, now dualism is getting into things that haven't been proven to exist. Smacks a bit of religiosity to me.
'Suppose I am identical with this body of mine. In 1995 I existed. In 1995 this body did not exist. Hence, from the first premise, it follows that I did not exist in 1995. But this contradicts the second premise, and the supposition is false. Hence, I am not identical with my body.'
This requires a definition of existence. The general fact that we exist for more than seven days is generally accounted for by a continuity of mental processes and biological processes - not every cell is replaced at one time. Bad definition of existence.
'Suppose I am identical with this body of mine. Then, by (NI), I am necessarily identical with this body - that is, I am identical with it in every possible world. But that is false, for (a) in some possible worlds I could be disembodied and have no body, or at least (b) I could have a different body in another possible world. So it is false that I am identical with this body in every possible world, and this contradicts the second line. Therefore, I am not identical with my body.'
One of my problems with modern philosophy, and part of why I tend to stay the hell away from any part of it that doesn't appear to be well-informed by science, is that it postulates about 'possible worlds'. Look, folks, there is no possible other world that we know of. Postulating another possible world is like assuming there's some sort of deity, and that's just bad science. Russell's teapot.

Bluntly put, I do not respect dualists.

The rest of the book makes me wonder whether this Dr. Kim has read much in the way of neuroscience texts.

I give it maybe three stars.

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First post.

This is a blog about neuroscience, atheism, philosophy, neurotheology, transhumanism, and lots of things.

I am currently studying neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

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