Month: September 2014

Interestingly, one of the BHA’s “Thought for the Commute” posters is Peter Tatchell saying:

“The Beatles were right, All you need is love.”

I couldn’t agree more. One of my long-running threads here on Psybertron goes by the tag #whatsofunnybout (peace, love and understanding).

It’s at root behind my three rules of dialogue – (Respect, Respect and Respect, in the footnote here) – which I often use to counter “no-one has the right not to be offended” being naively interpreted as therefore I have every right to offend you. That right to offend lies with the court-jester (Steve Fry or Frankie Boyle say), the cartoonist-in-residence (Martin Rowson say) and the fool-of-the-parish (Dick the Dawk say), but general debate and dialogue proceeds by conversation built on respect for fellow man. An obligation to understand, interpret and agree before criticise or mock and/or attempt to persuade change in the other.

However, what I find ironic is that “All you need is love” is profoundly religious statement of faith in humanity being touted by humanists who run a mile screaming at comparisons with religion.

Of course there are many organised religions, theist or otherwise, where love of fellow man is at least an important component, and even a few where it is the core component, or sole aspect. Organised religions, particularly those with archaic traditions of authority and hierarchy, ultimately with omnipotent causal gods overall, have well recognised downsides. Downsides we want to keep well away from secular governance of society.

But it feels like throwing baby out with the bathwater, to reject the shared value of love, the religious value shared with many religions.

Drs Alice Roberts and Michael Mosely on BBC2 Horizon today 29th September.

Just rough personal notes here, whilst watching: Vive la différence, I usually say 😉

Hmmm. Nothing is “hard” wired. Some stuff is pre-wired, genetically and in foetal development, neurally and hormonally, and a great deal is infant developed by stereotypical “encouragement”, and a lot more is moulded by formal parenting and education, and even more is moulded by experience of the social / peer environment.

Roughly 5, 15, 30, 50 % contributions maybe (after Pinker), depending which specific traits you’re evaluating. Anyone can do anything equally well, but their innate propensities do start different, and these differences are re-inforced or de-emphasised.

So testing an adult human, will be a complex – pointless – situation, without an enormous amount of historical data to support the exercise. Also very hard to create totally controlled boundary conditions for testing pre-and-early-post-natals – a human individual is not to be seen as a repeatable experiment – macaque’s could be different.

Anyway there are real from birth differences – for GOOD evolutionary reasons. Equality of opportunity is one thing, but vive la difference is also important if we humans are to develop maximum value together.

Direct objective measures of physical brain differences can be highly misleading, because correlations between mental, behavioural and physical are complex patterned in many dimensions and levels. Many of the defining differences arise from the connective and permissive control mechanisms (hippocampus, corpus-callosum, etc) not size and wiring-symmetry of cortex, etc.

My most recent reference to this is the left-right brain difference between male and female – but remember left-right brain concerns not the jobs the halves do but the mechanisms that bring them into play in “mind”. The Gur input is important – left-brain analytical propensity to physical detail, exaggerated in males – and in the autistic. Note it’s the connections between the hemispheres, not the hemispheres themselves that are important. I see the Gur data supports the McGilchrist hypotheses. Women are typically “better connected” than men, though again there are developmental and plasticity mechanisms – causality is two way – and again the life of a human individual is not a repeatable controlled experiment.

Men are not “better” decision-makers unless your idea of a good decision is analytically objective. Women (archetypically) make decisions differently, though we can all learn better behaviour any number of ways. My thesis is that the difference, variety, is better for humanity, than having all our eggs in the one basket of one decision-making paradigm. But of course the more we understand the explanatory cause and effect model, from genes onwards the better equipped we are to make the political and ethical choices. The science may be incomplete, but it’s not really controversial.

The parentally-subconscious preference on how they see infant boy & girl capabilities is an interesting part of the 15% contribution – not seen that before. Parents can choose to avoid explicit stereotyping, but this sub-conscious effect could be important and culturally variable. But, as I say, I don’t see the gender differences as necessarily a bad thing, and it’s never a bad thing to know what they are. Vive la différence.

The two presenters eventually agree (actually they don’t, see post note below). Small but real genetic & infant biological development difference, huge socio-cultural plasticity. Stereotypes can be destructive, but archetypes remain valuable.

=====

[Post Note : Didn’t spot this piece based on the program at the time. Concludes with real differences, including the degree of left-right interconnection. Seems Mosley really did disagree with Roberts.]

Excellent episode of Start The Week. Not just Karen Armstrong on the links between religion and the history of life in general, including war, but more history of Baghdad, Islamic learning, culture and trade, and the evolution of the middle-east situation in general. Imperial dominance overtaking historical cultural leadership, leading to “humiliation” as a driver to violent frustration. We learn that despite Mesopotamia being the prehistoric cradle of civilisation, Baghdad itself is much newer dating from 700’s AD.

[Seeing Karen Armstrong speak at the Royal Institution on Wednesday.]

[Previously blogged about her back in 2010.]

[Post Note : Karen’s Grauniad article /essay to promote her book tour.]

[Post Note : and a CFI_UK response from Stephen Law.]

[Post Note : and an ex-Muslim perspective.]

Been reading  The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Jeffrey M Schwartz and Sharon Begley, at the suggestion of an exchange between Dave Morey and Harvey Taylor on FB.

Other than the two title topics being part of any complete brain-mind story, the only real connection between Neuroplasticity and Mental Force is that they are both aspects of science denied by mainstream science for many decades for which common sense and less-reductionist open-minds would recognise much supporting evidence. Most of the book is the authors’ narrative of the battle to generate support for the evidence already out there, as well as their own neuro-psychological experience, in the face of political resistance to good science.

For me it’s another book I could have (wish I had) written. The line of argument and all the sources are those I’ve been marshalling on the blog for 15 years, so in practice I skim read it, but would recommend it for anyone for whom the lines of thought are novel.

After kicking off with Terry Bisson’s Thinking Meat, there are 3 or 4 solid chapters on 20th century demonstrations of brain (cortical neurone rewiring) plasticity. Tough in gory detail for anyone squeamish who finds vivisection distasteful or morally questionable, but the Silver Spring macaques and human stroke survivors suffered more for longer than strictly necessary for our knowledge to become accepted. Ramachandran is referenced, and I’ve used the likes of Damasio, Sacks, Zeman, and others to provide the same stories. Not only does the “mind” learn, the brain re-wires itself according to real life experience of the individual, not just in its early development. The authoritative body-scientific learns to rewire itself much more slowly than human individuals. (3 generations or 80 years is my typical estimate, after Kondratiev.)

The second half of the subject matter kicks off with my 3 favourite quantum physics quotes from Bohr, Born and Heisenberg. These provide a lead-in to the relationship between the writer(s) and Henry Stapp, and the long relationship between them and the Chalmers et al Arizona / Tucson Science of Consciousness and Quantum Consciousness movement(s) – a resource I’ve plundered for much material previously. I must have seen the Schwartz and Begley names before, but not registered.

Finally, they cover Libet’s Volitional Brain. Unlike so many in the mainstream, they do not misinterpret Libet as evidence that free-will is non-existent, an illusion. Like Libet (and myself) they recognise that it points to a free-won’t view of how free-will really operates. In closing they join up Jamesian and Buddhist world-views with the science presented so far. The “quantum Zeno effect” whereby the mental really does supply “downward causation” on the physical. A clear antidote to the objectively-physical greedy-reductionists; free-will really does wield mental force over the merely physical.

A great reference work from my perspective, and as I say, a recommended read for anyone to whom the subject matter is new or mysterious.

[Post Note : will come back and gradually add internal links to all the existing blog references.]

Another interesting and typically honest down-to-earth Grauniad piece by Jon Butterworth, following on from a couple of weeks ago, he’s obviously had plenty of correspondence from two quarters. Scientistic types who find Bayes Theorem the thin edge of a statistical wedge, admitting subjectivity into their hallowed ground, and philosophical types (aka nut-jobs) using the chink to insert suggestions of alternative physics into Jon’s “standard model” domain. Against the scientistic types Jon is happy to point out the value of honesty when it comes to admitting Bayes; to the nut-jobs he says:

For example, as a writer and head of a physics department, I get quite a few unsolicited communications about new theories of physics, often involving Einstein having been wrong, or the Higgs boson actually being a macaroon or something. I have a prior bias here, based on the enormous amount of existing evidence. Einstein might have been confused about the cosmological constant on occasion, but given prior evidence it is highly unlikely that the whole thrust of relativistic mechanics is up the spout. Likewise, I personally have quite a lot of evidence that the Higgs boson is consistent so far with being the fundamental Higgs of the Standard Model, and inconsistent with the macaroon theory.

Well I’ve not been sending Jon any pet theories, but I do highlight two of Jon’s points:

(1) it is highly unlikely that the whole thrust of relativistic mechanics is up the spout.

(2) a lot of evidence that the Higgs boson is consistent so far with the Standard Model.

Firstly, that prior assumption, his bias,  has a massive impact on interpretation of new results. Perversely, Einstein was right, and there is a great deal of “non-inflation” evidence the standard model is way off the mark. Once that is more generally recognised, that prior assumption (1) is gone, totally.

Secondly, as I reported when I heard Jon speak on the latest LHC Higgs evidence, it is quite explicit that the increasingly significant (5-sigma plus) evidence is pointing to internal self-consistency of the incomplete standard model. (2) does doing nothing to prove the fit between the model and the real world, other than to reinforce the subjective impression in (1).

As well as Bayes, we need a little Godel here. Jon already highlighted last time, the need to look elsewhere. It is a wonderfully healthy situation to have an honest scientist thinking out loud in the mainstream press. Could save science form the scientistic extremists. Be even better if we could find Jon a philosophical type for similar dialogue, with mutual respect.

[Post Note : More on Bayes in science from the NYT –

“Statistics sounds like this dry, technical subject, but it draws on deep philosophical debates about the nature of reality,” said the Princeton University astrophysicist Edwin Turner, who has witnessed a widespread conversion to Bayesian thinking in his field over the last 15 years.

Countering Pure Objectivity

Woohooo – maybe more scientists will gradually see the need to respect and/or get to grips with philosophy?]

 

Public communications piece from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Laura Mersini-Houghton’s recent announcements (previously reported Bang Goes The Big Bang here):

“Physicists have been trying to merge these two theories — Einstein’s theory of gravity and quantum mechanics — for decades, but this scenario brings these two theories together, into harmony,” said Mersini-Houghton. “And that’s a big deal.”

And it does that by dispensing with black holes and singularities (and consequent inflation and dark-matter and dark-energy and many-worlds multi-verses), all the way back to the big bang. Stripping out the hacks and returning to (classical) common sense. (Hat tip to Rick on FB again- trawling the web for big-bang updates.)

That’s a big deal.

[Post Note : Obviously there are honestly sceptical responses to Mersini-Houghton, but so far no direct refutation, and I did notice one reference to Stephen Hawking having now agreed with her, over the non-existence of black-holes as singularities anyway. Need to collate other links.]

[Post Note : Oh, and how timely.]

Hat tip to @TiffanyJenkins for the link to this BBC Future Proofing episode on The Singularity.

(Holding post for now: Will miss tonight due to MeetUp engagement, but will review when I get to listen on iPlayer later.)

FYI – My prejudiced position is that all the talk about the impending Singularity is premised on a “too mechanistic” misunderstanding of the true computational nature of mind and intelligence. I say AI will be achieved when it evolves to be Real-I. (Need to dig up relevant blog links.)

Rough Notes whilst listening:

Computing power = smartness ? Hmmm.

Exponential human development – quartering time-base since homo-sapiens – OK. Predicts 2030-ish Omega point. If (that is IF) computers overtake human intelligence at that point, then by 2045 they will be billions of times more intelligent. Not sure computational power is the main driver of that cycle, but …

(Personally – I still believe in the three human generations timescale of technology development, ~80 year cycles in their actual effect on how humans live. Kondratiev / Kuhn etc. Interestingly 2030 is about the cusp of the next wave.)

Ray Kurzweil (now Eng Dir @ Google) – it’s about Language, the Turing Test. Zzzzz.

IBM “Watson” – “more” natural, sure. Anthropomorphic interactions (saying thanks), sure.

Humans do have advantages over robots – creativity, problem solving, emotional intelligence, dexterity, flexibility, etc. Doh! that’s what makes us humans as opposed to Accounting PhDs. Sure technology will automate the boring bits. Accounting however is a very complex human game – a million miles from arithmetic computation. Can’t see any robot playing “Tabletop” – the level-slipping analogies of creative problem solving.

Still (@24:10) only talking about “digital” computers and algorithms. Fast and accurate is not the point of human intelligence. Additive is the key – human intelligence will exploit ever more powerful tools.

(Interesting both presenters wrong in detecting human vs machine composed music. Second was clearly “formulaic” – metronomic – time-base-wise. Hard to prove now, proves nothing anyway, but I made the right choice. Not sure whether we were dealing with recordings or if both compositions machine-played?)

The Meta-aspects of humans, standing back to reflect on humanity. (Meta is the level-slipping in Tabletop.)

Ultimate conclusion is humanity – and human intelligence – is more than “machine” AI.

Agree. This is why I say AI can and will evolve, but it will only approach the intelligence of an intelligent life-form like humans, when it evolves to be an intelligent life-form itself. Real-I. (On evolutionary timescales.) Nothing special about humans here – any similarly intelligent life-form will do, we just happen to be the encumbents around here.

So long as AI workers have digital computers as their “computation” model of human brains (let alone minds) they’ll be severely hampered in getting AI to develop that way. Human intelligence does of course exploit “algorithms” to save time and brain power from the boring bits, free to do the creative “slipping”.

This is being reported everywhere. The irrelevance of CMB polarisation patterns relative to background noise and interference from space dust. No longer clutching at straws to support inflation-driven hacks to explain cosmic evolution since the big bang and, by rights, casting fresh questions over the nature of cosmic origins themselves. Here’s hoping common sense prevails, and good scientists ask the scientific questions. (Like Mersini-Houghton for example.)

Neatly summarised on FB by Rick Ryals:

If you project the expansion of the universe backwards without *pre-assuming* that you have to go all the way to an infinitely dense initial singularity in order to have a big bang, then inflationary theory becomes un-necessary as the most natural solution falls out… A universe with pre-existing volume had a big bang.

No more flatness problem, no more horizon problem… etc… duh.

Ironically, the same day UK science’s poster-boy is aired being interviewed by Jim Al Khalili in The Life Scientific, claiming he supports a multiple (parallel) “multiverses” view. [Text here – (*) even Schroedinger’s damn cat. Aaaaaggghhh!!!.] I do wish scientists would leave metaphysics to the philosophers, or at least (as Jim clearly does) acknowledge that some of the questions really are not in the realm of science. Why? Because if scientists actually did their real jobs, instead of playing stand-up politics with the media and their funding sources, they’d notice there is good scientific evidence for multiple sequential “universes” separated cyclically in time and furthermore, universes that don’t depend on the inflation hack. Nor do they depend on the brainless cop-out that if we can’t fit our flawed story to the cosmos as a whole, we’ll posit an infinity of possible universes where our politically-motivated guesses might just happen to be true in one of them. Scientists ought to have to pass some kind of test before being let loose with the kind of thought experiments used by philosophy. Stands to reason, dunnit?

As Haidt said (previous post) – science is untrustworthy because (too many) scientists spend their time playing-politics and issue-campaigning instead of doing science. Scientists are no more to be trusted than politicians or theologians, and only philosophers seem to appreciate that problem. Honest a-political scientists can of course understand the physical problem, if they put their minds to it, rather than their political defenses.

[(*) Post Note – literally many worlds, multiple parallel (independent) universes, is a thought experiment, nothing to do with physics – if the physics of two different worlds are related in anyway, they are part of the same world, possibly an inadequately explained part of the world, but the same world. Uncertainty of, or superposition of, multiple possible states in this world is a reflection of the difficulty agreeing explanations at the boundaries of physics knowledge about the world – unfinished work of physicists. Multiple universes in the sequential sense is something entirely different, cyclical aeons in the same world, same universe, but with (most of) history reset at each new big bang.

The mechanism is actually a lot easier to understand says Rick Ryals:

When you make a particle pair from vacuum energy you leave a real hole in the vacuum. This increases negative pressure and causes the vacuum to expand. The positive gravitational effect of the newly created massive particle offsets the increase in negative pressure so the “flatness” of the universe is fixed. Ripping out huge chunks of the vacuum structure to make particles with causes the vacuum to “thin” as tension between the vacuum and matter increases. Eventually this process will compromise the integrity of the forces that bind the universe and… BOOM… a universe with pre-existing volume has *another* big bang.

And, Neil Turok, betting against gravitational waves in Scientific American.]