The very latest podcast, featuring part two of Jeffrey Schwartz's "The Mind and the Brain," is out at iTunes. As always, you may get IF podcasts on the front page of IdeaFestival web site or by taking take the podcast feed. If you're wondering, a brief description of the difference between the two the mind and the brain is here.
Wayne
SEED editor Jonah Lehrer, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, has written often and thoughtfully about the wonders of the human brain in his blog, Frontal Cortex, and in particular - my favorite topic - about how we as sense-making beings can - or cannot - know.
In his latest full length article, "New State of Mind," Lehrer again connects knowing to biology, describing research linking dopamine to pleasure and to a host of social behaviors that result, from simple disappointment to stock market bubbles.
Connecting pleasure to understanding is one reason play in general, and game design in particular, has emerged as a valuable economic and intellectual pursuit. He should really sit down at IF and have a long discussion with alternative reality game designer Jane McGonigal, who will also attend.
Read Montague is director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine, and collaborates with Peter Dayan of the Salk Institute. More than discovering the link between pleasure and understanding, current neurology goes further and demonstrates how we use the resulting that data to extend that understanding.
Lehrer:
The crucial feature of these dopamine neurons, say Montague and Dayan, is that they are more concerned with predicting rewards than with the rewards themselves. Once the cells memorize the simple pattern — a loud tone predicts the arrival of juice — they become exquisitely sensitive to variations on the pattern. If the cellular predictions proved correct and the primates experienced a surge of dopamine, the prediction was reinforced. However, if the pattern was violated — if the tone sounded but the juice never arrived — then the monkey’s dopamine neurons abruptly decreased their firing rate. This is known as the “prediction error signal.” The monkey got upset because its predictions of juice were wrong.
What’s interesting about this system is that it’s all about expectation. Dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based upon experience: If this, then that. The cacophony of reality is distilled into models of correlation.
"Models of correlation" are only a couple of sentences away from something else. On this reading, story takes those correlative values and arranges them in a meaningful way.
Story is the human-readable data we pull around our shoulders on a cold winter night when things haven't gone as expected. When the doctor has bad news. Or when we watch a loved one slipping toward the unknown.
Alternatively, it can map how we might overcome impossible odds to reach previously unattainable goals, or, thoughtfully conceived, take us to places and people that thrill and make life worth the living. Story can get the past wrong. But it can also get the future oh so right.
Wayne
As the X-Phi, or experimental philosophy, blog, Eric Schwitzgebel describes what he refers to as "the linguistic u-turn," a reference to the linguistic turn, suggesting that as a method of propositional analysis, analytical philosophy may be mortally wounded.
Thanks to an ability to bring data to bear on problems in philosophy, reasoning that relies exclusively on an a priori understanding of concepts has become increasingly irrelevant; experimental philosophers are busy reinforcing that point by tackling, with the aid of well designed experiment, our intuitions about culpability, responsibility and negligence, among many others.
Wayne
In the latest IF Conversation, Jeffrey Schwartz, psychiatrist, neuroscientist and author of The Mind and the Brain, describes the primary difference between the two. Hint: you're soaking in it right now.
Wayne
Responding in the transcript of a SEED salon featuring Tom Wolfe and the founder of The Law and Neuroscience Project, Michael Gazzaniga, to a question on the state of neuroscience, Wolfe recounts what another scientist had to say on the subject of what we really know about the human brain:
'The human brain is complex beyond anybody's imagining, let alone comprehension.' He said, 'We are not a few miles down a long road; we are a few inches down the long road.' Then he said, 'All the rest is literature."
Now I realize that a celebrated author like Wolfe would say that, but the remainder of the discussion is quite good, taking its cue from that remark as the two tackle literature, social standing, why, alone among our cultural achievements, speech should be celebrated, and the role of human narrative in defining and, in one amusing anecdote relayed by Gazzaniga, expanding ethical boundaries.
They also question whether or not an understanding of the relevant science, such as it is, renders the idea of free will obsolete. And in a welcome nod to the futility of that discussion, Gazzaniga gets to the heart of the matter by asking rhetorically, "free from what?"
Gazzaniga is the author of a brand new book on the science of the unique, as well as The Ethical Brain.
An edited video of the latest SEED paring is here.
Wayne
In its efforts to create a web-based "word processor for data," Swivel, as I've mentioned before, is on a mission to improve our collective numerical literacy, or our numeracy.
As missions go I think it's pretty cool.
For example, posting only two rules, it recently completed a business edition of its hosted software, permitting companies to manipulate and share their data in new ways. The rules? If you make your uploaded available to the public, Swivel is free. If want to keep it private and secure, you can pay. It actively shares tips for hacking its graphs. Journalists are making increasing of public data to make stories more compelling.
But if you like, as I definitely do, the conceptual bottom line, Swivel is simply taking advantage of what Wired recently called an end to theory. Raising the public's statistical literacy is one smart way to explore a new frontier. Wired:
The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.
At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn't pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right....
Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference this past March, Peter Norvig, Google's research director, offered an update to [statistician] George Box's maxim [that 'all models are wrong, but some are useful']: 'All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.'
Wayne
In addition to having a great book title, "A Farewell to Alms" from Gregory Clark, who is an economic historian at the University of California, asks an important question. To what extent does "culture" matter in economics? And if it matters, where does it come from?
Whether culture is mediated through social institutions or inherited through natural selection - as Clark suggests in his book - could make a very, very big difference to the future, according to Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman, who reviews the book here.
Wayne
What public policy suggestions might flow from the developing field of behavioral economics, the science of choice?
The central idea in this Freakonomics post about the book "Nudge," is that freedom of choice can be preserved even while public policy influences the decisions people make, that economic behavior can be altered for the better with certain well designed "nudges."
While at first blush the idea would appear alarming - authors Richard Thaler, Graduate School of Business, University of Chicago, and Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law, use the off-putting term "libertarian paternalism" - it would be more alarming to believe that choices aren't already influenced by numerous social and commercial cues. You and I are not rational. Moreover, armed with a growing body of research psychologists, game theorists and philosophers tell us that we are not nearly as transparent to ourselves as we'd like to believe. We are unaware in many cases why we do what we do.
Choice in the free-to-make-all-possible-choices sense does not exist. The Freakonomics post linked above interviews the authors, who discuss at some length how choice can be preserved in that context.
Although its subject matter may not touch on behavioral economics, IF is hosting a discussion of freedom that is open to the public. It's a free event and passes (you will need one) will be available beginning July 15. I hope to see you there.
Wayne
Because one of the sessions I am most looking forward to at the IdeaFestival is a panel discussion of freedom, this post, which I wrote two springs ago, seemed appropriate, particularly this today. I hope to see you in Louisville in September.
While I sat on the front stoop of the cracked and empty Presbyterian church at the Mays Lick Asparagus Festival last Saturday reading the Wall Street Journal, Roger Scruton surprised me with a piercing thought on thinking.
In his opinion piece he is critical of John Stuart Mill, the author of On Liberty, for draining his logic of emotional depth:
Mill suffered from the same defect as his father. He never understood that wisdom is deeper and rarer than rational thought. He never understood that the intellect, which flies so easily to its conclusion, relies on something else for its premises....
"Thoroughly Modern Mill" reminded me that thinking depends so much on emotion, and the best thinking, perhaps, on a depth of feeling - not the manic variety, mind you, but of red blood cells and heart valves, of the kind that proclaims its freedom, not with fences, but with a kind word or two. In Scruton's view, Mill's reaction against the prevailing and bloodless utilitarianism of the day simply replaced majoritarianism with minoritarianism.
Whether one buys that conclusion or not, Scruton knows something. He knows that we are binary beings, in possession of logic and biology, and that privileging one over the other eventually goes nowhere - or anywhere. Great art, useful insight, delightful discovery depends to a surprising degree upon our capacity to feel - whether revulsion or warmth - something toward the object of our thinking.
Wayne
Wikipedia: Utilitarianism, "On Liberty"
In his book Pulse, Robert Frenay says that life, among other things, is characterized by the use of energy and information to reproduce, adapt and advance. And I've always liked David Chalmers' suggestion that while "physics is information from the outside," consciousness is "information from the inside."
I thought of those when going through my feeds late last week. Philosopher of information Luciano Floridi takes those big ideas and extends them, suggesting that we're in a fourth information revolution, that rather than a biosphere, we live in an "infosphere."
According to Wikipedia, an infosphere
is an environment comparable to, but different from cyberspace (which is only one of its sub-regions, as it were), since it also includes off-line and analogue spaces of information. According to [Luciano] Floridi, it is possible to equate the Infosphere to the totality of Being. This equation leads him to an informational ontology.
I'm frankly not close to understanding why this might be so, but the idea couldn't be any bigger. Life becomes a property of information on Floridi's account, not the other way around.
Wayne
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