Consciousness

NPR had an interview with Alison Gopnik, author of "The Philosophical Baby" which went into more detail on the child/adult brain difference.  Here's Gopnik on the evolutionary advantage of the difference:

"one of the puzzles is that we have a much longer period of childhood than any other species. And I think even really devoted moms like me occasionally think, oh, why can't we be like those cats that just toss them out after a couple of months? It turns out that if you look across the animal kingdom, that long period of immaturity is correlated with intelligence and flexibility. And if you think about it for a minute, it kind of makes sense. If your strategy is to learn as much as you can about the world - and that really seems to be the human strategy - then that's a great strategy. It's the reason why we can exist in all sorts of environments, including outer space. But it has one big disadvantage, which is, you don't want to be sitting there when the charging mastodon is coming toward you and saying, hmm, what tool would be most effective for dealing with this mastodon? You want to have a period in which you can do all that learning that you're going to put to use as an adult. So one of the things I say is, it's like babies are the R&D department of the human species. Evolution seems to have solved this problem by giving us a division of labor where the young creatures get to learn and imagine and think of possibilities. And then us old creatures take what we learned as children and actually put it to use."

Interview with Alison Gropnik

NYTimes article on similar research

I don't have the time to read the connected articles, but...

I think it's important not to idealize any particular period in our brain's development - so I appreciate that in this post there's a focus on the benefit of both "young" and "mature" brains.

And the fact of the matter is that even those categories don't adequately classify the learning process.  What's amazing about the human brain is its flexibility.  Its ability to move from one state to another and adapt to the situation. 

I'm not sure if this study is really teaching us anything new.  It just seems like a repackaging and valuation of stuff we already know.

Yes, what I really liked about the interview with Gopnik was the way she talked about the two kinds of thinking as each having their own advantages and how the extended period of childhood in humans as opposed to other mammals, coupled with this information about the child brain as the research and development phase, could have evolutionary benefits.  The earlier essay--the first one I posted from the Globe--also made clear that the "child" brain isn't limited to children--so these aren't rigid categories.  I think it said that jazz musicians, for instance, when improvising, access similar parts of the brain that children use fairly routinely.

I think most of it does fall into a different valuation--for instance in one study, children and adults are shown two cards and are told to ignore the one on the left.  Adults cannot then remember the one on the left while children do.  In the past this has been seen as a defect in children's focusing ability.  But another study puts a different spin on the same thing--the study where adults and kids are told to focus on the passing of a ball from one group to another--but while the ball is being passed, a person in a gorilla suit also appears.  The adults don't notice the gorilla and the children do.

There were a couple of things that did seem new to me:  one was a finding that babies under a year old had an understanding of number, could add/subtract, and could understand probability.  The other was that in the past babies were seen as having less activity in the brain, of being less aware of their surroundings (I remember my pediatrician saying this to me--that this is why babies could sleep through loud noises).  One immediate consequence of the finding that they actually have more neural activity and are actually hyperaware compared to adults is that in the past babies were often not given anesthesia (they couldn't feel pain, or felt less).  Now it's thought they actually need more anesthesia to dull pain than adults.

Jaz, I've never read Ricard's book, but what struck me was the comment: "we can change the world because of our compassion for others and our desire to end hatred and bring happiness even to those we don't like."

My most intense (personal) moments of happiness occurred immediately after I helped another person. Didn't matter how grand or miniscule the help. Based on this focus group of one, I agree with Ricard. What is daunting is that to "change the world" requires critical mass of people behaving in a similar (compassionate) manner. Unfortunately, only a few men or women in history have had the strength and resolve necessary to move the masses to such heightened behavior. But changing the world can also mean change MY world - and I try to let that credo guide me.

reason 1 - Getting to see you again, Stip, ol buddy ol pal :-)

Yeah, I completely agree with you--so we can double the focus group numbers there.  ;-) There was an article in the paper today about a research study that proves the exponential part of the reaction--in a word, that happiness spreads to at least 3 degrees--a friend of a friend of a friend.  Some of the details were really interesting too.  So that's reason numero dos.

New Reason to be Happy

And reason number 3--it reminded me of the Ian Dury song :-) hilarious video of a bollywood dance number set to Dury's song here. 

"A bit of grin and bear it.  A bit of come and share it." 

Coming back to one--it's really good to see you.

... on all of that, especially reason #1. 

Good to see you, Stip!

An article in the paper today giving an overview of some of the research connecting cognition and the body, particularly movement: Mind/Body.

I realized as I was trying to decide where to post this link that I've posted other thoughts or links to articles about very related ideas before, but in several different places.

Comment under Sociology on the book The Meaning of the Body by Mark Johnson.

Forum Topic on Mirror Neurons.

Right on, jaz.  A distinction must always be made between the admonishment to overcome fear and the desire to deny it completely.  They aren't the same thing.  The emotion of fear is real and valuable and must be understood.  It must not be prevented from being heard in the halls of one's consciousness, but nor ought it be allowed to govern there.

Overcoming dualism is the only way to achieve this balance, in my view.

The only way to overcome fear is with faith.  In terms of dualism, in my view, one must appreciate the unity of mind and body and not feel "damned" because of the perceived war between one and the other.  This advice means different things to different people, of course.  To the Buddhist, for example, it means learning that there is a greater unity beyond "mind" and "body" and that pain in the body only comes from one not understanding this fact.  To the Christian, it is a matter of accepting the reconciliation God has wrought through Christ, sending the Holy Spirit to sanctify believers, leading them in ways of righteousness and thereby bringing the desires of their bodies in alignment with the holy desires of their hearts and minds.  To the Humanist, it may involve the more mundane approach of simply recognizing that, in point of fact, the mind and body are NOT separate entities, but one entity that ought, therefore, to be able to exist as a harmonious whole in its own right, even if one feels only discord within oneself.

To think of the self in any way other than whole and unified is to think of it as fractured and broken.  Even worldviews that insist the self starts out this way promise that it need not (and, indeed, cannot) STAY this way.  The answer offered in all cases is that one must believe, sometimes in spite of contradictory emotional evidence, that the whole is reality.

Well, depending on the context... "overcoming" it might be the right thing to do.

Now we're just talking about the appropriate time to use certain words when...

But of course, on that point I'm forced to defer to you, in principle... since I have made use of your superior editorial skills in the past.

You make me giggle sometimes, you know that? Don't defer to me, though, it makes me feel uncomfortable when people do that.

I was asked once if I'd rather be an accomplished comedian or an accomplished intellectual.  I was instructed to write my answer down while a good friend of mine was asked which one I picked.  My friend said, "Well, I know he'd rather be an accomplished comedian, but he probably thinks he'd do more good as an accomplished intellectual, so I think that's what he wrote down."

My friend was right.  And from that point on I gave up on being an accomplished intellectual.

I made you giggle.  My work here is done.  

In the context of the decision-making styles of Pres. Bush and the two Presidential candidates, this article by Jonah Lehrer (Proust was a Neuroscientist) talks about the pitfalls of either the intuitive/emotional style (Bush and McCain) or the deliberative/rational one (Obama).  The conclusion about how to integrate the two is that the reflective approach is best applied not to the problem but to oneself--metacognition, or thinking about how one thinks.  That advice reminded of what I had just been reading about the impact of the "story-teller" part of the human brain on our ability to adapt to new circumstances, and the evolutionary advantages of that over natural organizations that don't have that directional capacity.  

One other factor in making good decisions: surrounding oneself with advisers willing to take contrary positions to one's own (and of course listening to them :-)).

"The next decider"

A companion piece on decision making--an interview with Philip Tetlock whose research shows that expertise seems to make no impact on the ability to correctly predict a future event in one's field.  He does distinguish between two types of experts though: "Foxes" he says are experts who take into account multiple points of view (dovetails with info. about advisers above) and are able to increase their predictive success rate to 60%, while "Hedgehogs" are ideologues who base their prediction on a single story or perspective--their predictive success is about the same as a coin toss.

"Expertise is overrated"

I've come a bit further by reading the Wikipedia entry on the Quantum Zeno Effect.  If a quantum state is measured, it's probability of being A or not A collapses.  Let's say it collapses into A.  Then when it is measured again, it again can collapse either into A or not A.  But "its probability of collapsing into state [not A], after a very short amount of time t, is proportional to t², since probabilities are proportional to squared amplitudes, and amplitudes behave linearly. Thus, in the limit of a large number of short intervals, with a measurement at the end of every interval, the probability of making the transition to [not A] goes to zero." (Wikipedia)

I don't understand the point about probabilites being proportional to squared amplitudes and that amplitudes behave linearly.  Again, I think I'm lacking the mathematical foundation--but I generally see what he's getting at which is pretty neat.

I take this paragraph to essentially be summing up the article:

"The form of the quantum laws naturally accommodates a dynamical breakpoint between the cause of a willful action, which is not specified by the theory in its present form, and the effects of such an action, which are specified by the theory.  Consequently, our conscious choices can consistently be treated as empirically specified consciously controlled input variables, in accordance with the experimental protocols, just as they are in the realm of atomic physics, with the effects of these free choices specified by the laws of physics. That is, the physical effects of our consciously chosen inputs can be described in terms of physics-based rules for these effects themselves, without needing to say what caused these choices to be what they are: in the quantum treatment the causal connection via the laws of physics is not from the cause of the conscious choice to the effects of that choice, but rather directly from the conscious choice itself to its physical effects."

It seems like he's saying here that we don't need to worry about the cause of choices because quantum physics renders choices axiomatic.

How is this the case? Well, here's what I think the author is getting at...

We're all familiar with flipping a coin.  Every time you flip a coin you have the same probability of it coming up heads or tails -- a 50% chance of it being one or the other.  Even if you've already flipped 10 "heads" in a row, the next flip being heads is still a 50% probability.  However, the "Law of Large Numbers" tells us that over a huge number of flips, it will be clear that you're coming up heads half the time and tails have the time no matter how long your runs of one or the other are in the short-term.

Now... we also know that the quantum realm operates on probabilities.  If a given quantum experiment is determined to end a certain way 50% of the time, then over a suitably large number of trials precisely half the time the experiment will end that certain way.

OK... so let's imagine a soup of chemicals that have the potential of interacting in a feedback kind of way... say, amino acids.  Now imagine some quantum process operating within that soup (say, a 50% probability process) where, by chance, there's a long string of "heads" results... meaning the effect of the process in the short-term persists for an extended period of time (while in the long-term it will still be "off" 50% of the time).  Imagine that this short-term persistence allows for chemical processes in the soup to become more cyclical and robust.  Perhaps this is the emergence of the first cells.

Then imagine a very simple organism that, naturally, competes with its neighbors.  One day, a quantum process within the cell has a long string of "heads" results and the persistence of the process allows it and a few other hardy specimens to survive a wave of toxic chemicals that sweeps by.

One can quickly imagine the survival value of organisms that can, through somewhat "mechanical" effort, generate these persistent quantum states themselves rather than just being lucky when the right state matches the current situation.  The first organisms that could freely locomote would have been the first organisms to "deliberately" move to more desirable states and thereby have an active impact on the world.  From that point... well, consciousness was practically inevitable eventually!

I'm certain I'm completely butchering this person's ideas, but I think I'm at least in the ballpark.  The point of it all is that quantum weirdness teaches us that action is part of the bedrock of our physical universe so it shouldn't surprise us when we observe intentionality in the creatures that emerged from that physical universe.

The author is quite right to point out that this isn't such a new idea, but others outside of physics have built upon it since the days of William James.  James' ideas allowed George H. Mead (in the 30's) to embrace "emergence" as a mechanism in social psychology, which eventually inspired Carl Couch (in the '70's) to lay the foundations of true sociology.

I do have a question after reading... the "bottleneck" that's referred to in the article... does a more flexible bottleneck result in a more agile mind? Does a relative lack of a bottleneck lead to the existence of autistic savants?

And… I have to say… I loved the expression "logically flabby".

GC, what you are describing was what I thought was the coolest part of the article which was its explanation for the emergence of consciousness.

But the mechanism of consciousness--I did think that he was saying there was a causal relation of mind/brain that could be explained by Quantum Physics (whereas it could not by Cartesian dualism). As in this passage: "the physically described action associated with the consciously intended probing action by the agent is a mathematically described action on the brain of that agent. The psychophysical causal connections thereby become mind-brain causal connections."

And what I couldn't get was the "holding action" produced by rapidly repeated moments of intention ("effort") on probability. I took those rapidly repeated moments to be the linearity that produces the "bottleneck." And because effort precedes in that linear way--if effort is expended somewhere else (like tapping the foot)--results on an IQ test will go down (that's the experiment by Pashler I think). In what way did you think lack of bottleneck might be connected to being an autistic savant?

Isn't he saying, though, that the psychophysical connections are parallel to the mind-brain connections? Not really causally related to each other?

The bottleneck he refers to, if I understand it correctly, would seem to me to produce the benefit of preventing the conscious mind from being overwhelmed by the computational details of the unconscious.  People whos minds work like calculators, I'd guess, are either able to dilate this bottleneck at will or else the bottleneck is in a permanent state of dilation, making them able to tell you immediately how many matchsticks have fallen on the floor but rendering them challenged when attempting to attend to "higher level" social perceptions.

I think I have a different understanding about what he's saying about causality and about the bottleneck. In the quotation you cited earlier, the one in which he is saying we don't know the cause, I think he's referring to the cause of the choice--we don't know what, if anything determines the choice. But I think he is saying that quantum physics does offer a way of making a causal connection between choice (the mind) and the physical mechanics of choice (the brain).

"This feature overcomes the main objection to Caresian dualism, which was the lack of any understanding of how a person's mind could have any effect upon that person's brain." (7)

And then the bottleneck I took not as something between the unconscious and conscious, but between the conscious intent and it's enactment.

Ah, yes yes yes.. you're quite right... it's choice he's saying that we don't know the cause of.  Sorry... I was suffering from "level confusion" there.

Jukin,

Where are these fools! You are no simpleton--and I've seen plenty evidence of your smarts. I haven't made my way through it either yet. And the philosophy--it's like anything else--it's what you're used to and what you've had some practice with, plus some academic stuff is just dense in a kind of cliquish way. Like you've got to know the secret handshake and speak the weird jargon to get in.

And kit-kat, you are most welcome--think this is kinda up your alley.

I'm gonna need a quiet space of time myself to go through it--I just think it's intriguing the way lots of different fields are blurring together and getting connected right now.