Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Oct 30, 2005 16:57:34 GMT -4
How about this: You remove the cube from my brain and keep the cells alive in a tank in your laboratory. You sew me back up and send me on my way. When you stimulate the cube in your lab into the anger pattern, do I then suddenly feel angry wherever I happen to be? I think these examples illustrate some of the problems with trying to reduce "anger" to some sort of distinct, well-defined entity or process inside the person. There have been some neurology experiments along those lines: chiefly involving the co-operation of people who've had accidents that damaged various areas of their brains. What seems to fall out is that areas of the brain appear to have distinct functions that can be disrupted by damage, but overall there is a degree of redundancy, with other areas of the brain able to learn to take over all or part of the load. Obviously, the degree to which this happens varies in each case: there is still an awful lot for us to learn about how our minds work: should be fun ;D
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Oct 30, 2005 22:22:55 GMT -4
Let's say you guys built a starship and sent me off to the Andromeda galaxy 2 million light-years away. After coming out of cryogenic sleep, somebody triggers my cube of neurons back in the lab on Earth into the anger pattern. Do I suddenly feel angry?
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Oct 31, 2005 6:13:22 GMT -4
Unless Roger Penrose is correct that some quantum effects are responsible for consciousness etc, then I'd say definitely not ;D
Mind you, I don't think that you could isolate such a cube of neurons in the first place: such localised brain functions appear to be specific components of what we do/feel, most activities involve quite widely separated areas of the brain (at least AFAIK)...
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Oct 31, 2005 13:11:57 GMT -4
Unless Roger Penrose is correct that some quantum effects are responsible for consciousness etc, then I'd say definitely not
Mind you, I don't think that you could isolate such a cube of neurons in the first place: such localised brain functions appear to be specific components of what we do/feel, most activities involve quite widely separated areas of the brain (at least AFAIK)...
What interests me most in these types of discussions is how people talk about consciousness and the metaphors they come up with as they struggle to explain the matter. Oscillations in the brain have been popular in recent research. The fuzziness offered by quantum mechanics seems to attract a lot of theorists. QM is physical, yet sufficiently vague, uncertain, and mysterious to be an ideal match for many people's conception of consciousness. Somebody sent me this quote:
In these types of discussions I find that most people assume that there are distinct referents to terms like "anger", "consciousness", "mind", "perception", etc. and when they can't find it in the visible world, they assume it must be somewhere they have not seen yet or cannot see such as in the brain or in the spirit world. (Note the pattern here. It is prevalent in conspiracy theories, which seek a cause that is hidden from view.)
I like to take them at their word and offer something distinct and well-defined to be the referent of the word. Hence, with turbonium, I suggest cobalt as something a scientist might find that occurs only when people are angry and never anytime else. You might pick up a rock off the ground that contains cobalt, but to say the rock is angry somehow doesn't seem right. It seems as if you narrowed your focus too much and missed anger completely. (However, if the rock growled at you, you just might take a moment to reconsider the matter.)
I offered the example of the cube of neurons with a distinct brain process to be the home for anger, but based on your comments, it sounds like you would prefer it if the anger were spread out more. I suspect that most people prefer anger (or any aspect of consciousness) to be something physical and potentially understandable, but complex enough to be just beyond current comprehension. In these discussions, people often present their theory of consciousness and then turn it over to science to prove true "one day".
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Oct 31, 2005 14:55:38 GMT -4
I suppose I'd say you could feel angry so long as you had enough neurons doing whatever it is they do... I get the feeling that my signature line may be recursively true ;D
I don't know if you've ever come across anything by Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart, but they put forward some interesting ideas in The Collapse of Chaos, not the least of which is the concept of Ant Country: named for Langton's Ant; a simple computer simulation that follows a small set of extremely basic rules and yet produces complex and one might almost say purposive patterns. Beween the various top-down and bottom-up explorations of the mind, there is a lot of this Ant Country.
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Post by turbonium on Nov 5, 2005 7:48:16 GMT -4
You open up my head and sever any connection going to or coming from the from the 3 mm cube of anger neurons in my amygdala and you then hook up your electrodes to it. When you stimulate the cube to oscillate in the anger pattern, do I then feel angry?
I would say yes. The neural activity is what illicits the anger response. We can already cause involuntary physical and emotional responses by stimulating the cortex at specific locations. Brain damage to certain areas can cause permanent states of depression, fear, etc. We are all affected by changes in our brain's "wiring", whether there is an emotional trigger or a physically imposed trigger for those changes.
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Nov 6, 2005 10:05:48 GMT -4
I would say yes. The neural activity is what illicits the anger response. We can already cause involuntary physical and emotional responses by stimulating the cortex at specific locations.
Yes, we can, but those experiments are done on neurons that are still connected to the rest of the brain, body, and environment. In my thought experiment, I cut all the connections to anger cube of neurons. I am purposely isolating the cube because I want to see if the notion of anger as a distinct entity or brain pattern makes any sense. So, we have the cube isolated from the rest of the brain, and we have it stimulated into the anger pattern. How is it that I am angry? To make the point clear, let's sever your anger cube and put it in a tank in the apollohoax.net lab and put my anger cube in a second tank. When your cube is stimulated into the anger pattern, why are you the one that becomes angry, and when my cube is stimulated, why am I the one that becomes angry? How do the cubes make the right person angry?
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Post by turbonium on Nov 9, 2005 2:40:53 GMT -4
In my thought experiment, I cut all the connections to anger cube of neurons. I am purposely isolating the cube because I want to see if the notion of anger as a distinct entity or brain pattern makes any sense
Certain entities are only measurable, or "existent" within distinct media. For example, sound waves do not "exist" in a vacuum or outer space, unlike electromagnetic waves. Within our atmosphere, these mechanical waves are measurable and do "exist". As well, anger as a distinct entity may only "exist" or be measurable as "anger" within the living organism itself, but not external of it. The Earth and it's surrounding atmosphere could be considered another "body" where sound exists as an entity, but does not exist isolated outside of that body
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Nov 9, 2005 18:11:31 GMT -4
In regards to my question about how is it that I am angry because a cube of neurons in a tank is oscillating in a particular pattern, are you suggesting that anger might propagate through the entire body?
As well, anger as a distinct entity may only "exist" or be measurable as "anger" within the living organism itself, but not external of it. The Earth and it's surrounding atmosphere could be considered another "body" where sound exists as an entity, but does not exist isolated outside of that body
OK, so there is a physical medium, air, that can move in particular patterns. Building on this view, why should anger be restricted to being inside the body? Let's say you come home late one day and your wife starts hollering at you and throwing pots and pans at you for missing the supper she worked so hard to cook. There are physical media here: Her body, your body, the pots and pans, the air through which they fly, the cold supper in the trash. These too move and interact in particular patterns. Can't we say that anger is an aspect of all that patterned activity?
Scientists could certainly measure it. They could, for instance, measure how fast she throws the cookware at you and thereby come up with a measure for how angry she is.
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Post by turbonium on Nov 9, 2005 21:21:11 GMT -4
OK, so there is a physical medium, air, that can move in particular patterns. Building on this view, why should anger be restricted to being inside the body? Let's say you come home late one day and your wife starts hollering at you and throwing pots and pans at you for missing the supper she worked so hard to cook. There are physical media here: Her body, your body, the pots and pans, the air through which they fly, the cold supper in the trash. These too move and interact in particular patterns. Can't we say that anger is an aspect of all that patterned activity?
Scientists could certainly measure it. They could, for instance, measure how fast she throws the cookware at you and thereby come up with a measure for how angry she is. If it was my wife throwing the cookware, it would severely test the limits of a radar gun's maximum speed measurement!! ;D
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Post by iamspartacus on Dec 14, 2005 6:10:48 GMT -4
In the hundreds and thousands of years before written history humans had an oral tradition of storing and passing on information. Such wisdom as, “don’t go over that hill else you will be eaten by monsters (ie. the neighbouring tribe)” or “don’t eat the glow-in-the-dark mushrooms because they’ll kill you” prevailed.
People who ignored these warnings and did go over the hill or ate the mushrooms would voluntarily take themselves out of the gene pool. Can you see where I’m going with this? Maybe over time this would predispose humans to adopt belief in things told to them as a survival strategy. The stronger you believe, the greater your chances of survival.
Humanity may have evolved to accept things without evidence. This may range from traditional faiths in a supreme being to one million Americans believing that they have been abducted by aliens. Arthur Conan Doyle believed in fairies. There seems no limit to what humans will believe.
Of course there are always mutations in genetic inheritance. I think I must be one because I have no predisposition towards belief at all. I am a rationalist and require evidence before I accept something. In fact, I don’t believe in anything that requires belief!
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Dec 14, 2005 22:22:47 GMT -4
Maybe over time this would predispose humans to adopt belief in things told to them as a survival strategy. The stronger you believe, the greater your chances of survival.
Humanity may have evolved to accept things without evidence. This may range from traditional faiths in a supreme being to one million Americans believing that they have been abducted by aliens.
It might also be a case that the survival strategy is not so much believing things without evidence, but in seeking explanations for what occurs. We explain things by applying what we know to what we don't know. Take gravity, for example. We know that you can apply a force to something by, say, tying a rope to it and tugging on the rope. Gravity feels very much like a force tugging on objects we hold, but we do not see anything doing the tugging. It is natural to think that there must be something invisible between the Earth and the object, perhaps something ropelike, that is doing the tugging. Hence, gravity is often thought of as a distinct entity--a "force"--in its own right.
The survival advantage of always trying to explain things that we will learn genuine knowledge over time.
Another advantage of that explanation for gravity, even if it is not quite right, is that it serves as a "placeholder" for a better explanation that may be developed later. Talking about gravity as a force that acts at a distance can be a useful way to introduce children to the concept and to get them to note an aspect of the world they may not have paid much attention to before.
Have you ever been to a magic show like David Copperfield's? One thing I notice is that most everybody in the audience has an explanation for how the tricks were done. "Oh, he has a secret twin brother." Or, "he uses electromagnetic fields to fly all over the stage like that." Nevermind that if Copperfield really did use electromagnetic fields, he wouldn't need to do it in the context of a magic show. He could stand up before scientists and engineers and say, "I am now going to fly the entire breadth and height of this stage using electromagnetic fields." That audience would be far more astounded by the feat!
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Post by JayUtah on Dec 20, 2005 14:18:54 GMT -4
This inexplicable urge to explain what one sees is why eyewitness testimony of accidents and other impromptu occurrences ranks fairly far down the credibility list for investigators. It's not that they believe people are lying. It's that human nature causes people to fill in the gaps and fit their observations to what they subsequently believe happened.
This is a well-studied phenomenon. The methodology generally revolves around staging an event that subjects don't expect, then taking their statements afterward. It's then compared against objective records of the event. Then in the variable portion, you "color" people's statements by asking leading questions, e.g., "How loud was the bomb?" rather than "How loud was the noise?" Or you can arrange for them to have been in a certain context before the stimulus.
But that's a tangent. What is odd about these candidate explanations is that they are generally far more complicated than what really goes on. Magic tricks almost always rely on dirt-simple mechanical or perceptual principles. I just helped design an apparatus for the famous "Metamorphosis" trick to be done as part of a play running on the East coast next year. The trick is dirt-simple: there's a hidden panel in the box through which people crawl in and out.
The skill involved is how to hide the panel. Just because you see the head of a fastener, for example, doesn't mean there really is a fastener there and that it goes all the way through that material into the next piece as you would normally think. But you don't need complicated setups like electromagnetic fields or identical twins. You just need a few simple gimmicks and a well-developed understanding of how people go from observation to belief.
The other great example drawn from magic is the nested barrier theory. The magician is handcuffed, then placed in a bag with the top tied shut, and then in a box with the lid fastened. Then the box goes into some dire circumstance giving the magician only a brief time to escape. The audience believes that each new barrier presents an additional challenge to the escape, and to have done it in so short a time is miraculous. Again, the belief is wrong despite the observation.
As soon as the magician is in the bag he can begin working on extrication from the handcuffs or straitjacket. And as soon as he is in the box, he can start working on untying the bag. By the time the box is in the water or up on the stilts or whatever, all the magician has left to do is go through however he's gimmicked the box. But the majority of the audience still believes he has to get through all that.
And since most of the Metamorphosis-type tricks involve changing places, the assistant just applies the same policy in reverse. Just because you haul the bag out of the box doesn't mean she's already got the handcuffs back on inside of it.
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Al Johnston
"Cheer up!" they said, "It could be worse!" So I did, and it was.
Posts: 1,453
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Post by Al Johnston on Dec 20, 2005 15:19:04 GMT -4
There's an interesting book available entitled Hiding the Elephant by Jim Steinmeyer that gives a history of stage illusions involving the use of mirrors...
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Post by Joe Durnavich on Dec 20, 2005 17:30:34 GMT -4
This is a well-studied phenomenon. The methodology generally revolves around staging an event that subjects don't expect, then taking their statements afterward.
And these subjects are always surprised when they find out, say, that somebody's shirt they described as being white is really black. There is a related phenomenon going on here called Change Blindness or Inattenional Blindness. Subjects are shown, for example, a video of people tossing a basketball around and they are instructed to count the number of times the ball is passed. Sometime during the event, somebody in a gorilla suit will show up in the middle of all the ball tossers. The subjects will often not notice the gorilla guy even though he is in the middle of their field of view. They are often quite surprised afterwards when they are shown the video again with the guy pointed out.
Gorillas seem to be popular with this demonstration. Sometimes the gimmick will be a gorilla shows up in the midst of actors arguing in a play. One might think that maybe we are just blind to gorillas, but sometimes the test involves watching a video where a playing card changes color, and subjects will often not realize that happened even though the card is in their field of view.
Some researchers were surprised by these results because it was believed that the gorilla or the playing card must be in the subject's "consciousness" somehow and at the very least if they didn't notice the gorilla, they might remember it when prompted afterward. What these results suggest, however, is how little of the environment we actually see without realizing it. Our impression is that we take in the full detail of a scene, which, I think, is why we are often so confident when testifying to an event. I don't think our minds fill in the gaps, but we certainly do when we are describing the event. I think we get the impression of seeing everything because we do not notice the gaps, that is, we do not see what we have not seen.
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