Posted on 05/05/2004 11:31:33 PM PDT by tpaine
In Nature vs. Nurture, a Voice for Nature
By NICHOLAS WADE
Who should define human nature? When the biologist Edward O. Wilson set out to do so in his 1975 book "Sociobiology," he was assailed by left-wing colleagues who portrayed his description of genetically shaped human behaviors as a threat to the political principles of equal rights and a just society.
Since then, a storm has threatened anyone who prominently asserts that politically sensitive aspects of human nature might be molded by the genes. So biologists, despite their increasing knowledge from the decoding of the human genome and other advances, are still distinctly reluctant to challenge the notion that human behavior is largely shaped by environment and culture. The role of genes in shaping differences between individuals or sexes or races has become a matter of touchiness, even taboo. A determined effort to break this silence and make it safer for biologists to discuss what they know about the genetics of human nature has now been begun by Dr. Steven Pinker, a psychologist of language at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a book being published by Viking at the end of this month, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature," he seeks to create greater political elbow room for those engaged in the study of the ways genes shape human behavior. "If I am an advocate, it is for discoveries about human nature that have been ignored or suppressed in modern discussions of human affairs," he writes.
A principal theme of Dr. Pinker's argument is that the blank slaters — the critics of sociobiology and their many adherents in the social sciences — have sought to base the political ideals of equal rights and equal opportunity on a false biological premise: that all human minds are equal because they are equally blank, equally free of innate, genetically shaped, abilities and behaviors.
The politics and the science must be disentangled, Dr. Pinker argues. Equal rights and equal opportunities are moral principles, he says, not empirical hypotheses about human nature, and they do not require a biological justification, especially not a false one. Moreover, the blank slate doctrine has political consequences that have been far from benign, in Dr. Pinker's view. It encourages totalitarian regimes to excesses of social engineering. It perverts education and child-rearing, loading unmerited guilt on parents for their children's failures.
In his book he reproaches those who in his view have politicized the study of human nature from both the left and the right, though in practice more of his fire is directed against the left, particularly the critics of sociobiology. They have created a climate in which "discoveries about human nature were greeted with fear and loathing because they were thought to threaten progressive ideals," he writes.
He accuses two of them — Dr. Richard Lewontin, a population geneticist at Harvard, and the late Dr. Stephen J. Gould, a historian of science — of "25 years of pointless attacks" on Dr. Wilson and on Dr. Richard Dawkins, author of "The Selfish Gene," for allegedly saying certain aspects of behavior are genetically determined.
And he chides the sociobiology critics for turning a scholarly debate "into harassment, slurs, misrepresentation, doctored quotations, and, most recently, blood libel." In a recent case, two anthropologists accused Dr. James Neel, a founder of modern human genetics, and Dr. Napoleon Chagnon, a social anthropologist, of killing the Yanomamö people of Brazil to test genetic theories of human behavior, a charge Dr. Pinker analyzes as without basis in fact.
With this preemptive strike in place, Dr. Pinker sets out his view of what science can now say about human nature. This includes many of the ideas laid out by Dr. Wilson in "Sociobiology" and "On Human Nature," updated by recent work in evolutionary psychology and other fields.
Dr. Pinker argues that significant innate behavioral differences exist between individuals and between men and women. Discussing child-rearing, he says that children's characters are shaped by their genes, by their peer group and by chance experiences; parents cannot mold their children's nature, nor should they wish to, any more than they can redesign that of their spouses. Those little slates are not as blank as they may seem.
Dr. Pinker has little time for two other doctrines often allied with the Blank Slate. One is "the Ghost in the Machine," the assumption of an immaterial soul that lies beyond the reach of neuroscience, and he criticizes the religious right for thwarting research with embryonic stem cells on the ground that a soul is lurking within. The third member of Dr. Pinker's unholy trinity is "the Noble Savage," the idea that the default state of human nature is mild, pacific and unacquisitive. Dr. Pinker believes, to the contrary, that dominance and violence are universal; that human societies are more given to an ethos of reciprocity than to communal sharing; that intelligence and character are in part inherited, meaning that "some degree of inequality will arise even in perfectly fair economic systems," and that all societies are ethnocentric and easily roused to racial hatred. Following in part the economist Thomas Sowell, he distinguishes between a leftist utopian vision of human nature (the mind is a blank slate, man is a Noble Savage, traditional institutions are the problem) and the tragic vision preferred by the right (man is the problem; family, creed and Adam Smith's Invisible Hand are the solutions).
"My own view is that the new sciences of human nature really do vindicate some version of the tragic vision and undermine the utopian outlook that until recently dominated large segments of intellectual life," he writes.
With "The Blank Slate," Dr. Pinker has left the safe territory of irregular verbs. But during a conversation in his quiet Victorian house a few blocks from the bustle of Harvard Square, he seemed confident of dodging the explosions that have rocked his predecessors. "Wilson didn't know what he was getting into and had no idea it would cause such a ruckus," he said. "This book is about the ruckus; it's about why people are so upset." "It's conceivable that if you say anything is innate, people will say you are racist, but the climate has changed," he says. "I don't actually believe that the I.Q. gap is genetic, so I didn't say anything nearly as inflammatory as Herrnstein and Murray," the authors of the 1994 book "The Bell Curve," who argued that inborn differences in intelligence explain much of the economic inequality in American society.
Despite his confidence, Dr. Pinker is explicitly trying to set off an avalanche. He compares the overthrow of the blank slate view to another scientific revolution with fraught moral consequences, that of Galileo's rejection of the church's ideas about astronomy. "We are now living, I think, through a similar transition," he writes, because the blank slate, like the medieval church's tidy hierarchy of the cosmos, is "a doctrine that is widely embraced as a rationale for meaning and morality and that is under assault from the sciences of the day."
Dr. Pinker is not the fire-breathing kind of revolutionary. He has a thick mop of curly brown hair, edged respectably with gray, and a mild, almost diffident manner. A writer for the Canadian magazine Macleans described Dr. Pinker, who was born in Montreal, as "endearingly Canadian: polite, soft-spoken, attentive to what others say." Teased about this description, he notes that Canadians also gave the world ice hockey. Born in 1954, he grew up in the city's Jewish community, in the neighborhood described in Mordecai Richler's novel "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz." He was caught up in the debates of the 60's and 70's about social organization and human nature, but found his teenage anarchist views of the nobility of human nature dealt a sharp empirical refutation by the Montreal police strike of 1969; in the absence of authority, Montrealers turned immediately to lawlessness, robbing 6 banks and looting 100 stores before the Mounties restored order. Trained as an experimental psychologist at Harvard, Dr. Pinker took up the study of language and became convinced that the brain's linguistic ability must rest on built-in circuitry. This made him think other faculties and behaviors could be innate, despite the unpopularity of the idea. "People think the worst environmental explanation is preferable to the best innatist explanation," he says.
Dr. Pinker first became known outside his specialty through his 1994 book "The Language Instinct," an approachable account of how the brain is constructed to learn language. He followed up that success with "How the Mind Works," in which he shared his enthusiasm for the ideas of evolutionary psychology. "The Blank Slate" further broadens his ambit from neuroscience to political and social theory.
Like Edward O. Wilson, who began as a specialist in ants and mastered ever larger swaths of biology, Dr. Pinker has a gift of summarizing other specialists' works into themes that are larger than their parts. Synthesisers are rare animals in the academic zoo because they risk being savaged by those whose territory they invade. "Everything in the study of human behavior is controversial, and if you try to sum it up you will ride roughshod over specialists, so you've got to have a strong stomach," Dr. Pinker said.
The critics of sociobiology caricatured their opponents as "determinists," even though few, if any, people believe human nature is fully determined by the genes. Could Dr. Pinker's description of the Blank Slate similarly overstate their views? He says he shows at length how critics like Dr. Lewontin have made statements that "are really not too far from the collection of positions that I call the Blank Slate," with Dr. Lewontin and others having even written a book called "Not in Our Genes."
Though Dr. Pinker believes the politics and science of human nature should be disentangled, that does not mean political arrangements should ignore or ride roughshod over human nature. To the contrary, a good political system "should mobilize some parts of human nature to rein in other parts." The framers of the Constitution took great interest in human nature and "by almost any measure of human well-being, Western democracies are better," he says.
Dr. Pinker believes that human nature "will increasingly be explained by the sciences of mind, brain, genes and evolution." But if political and social systems should be designed around human nature, won't that give enormous power to the psychologists, neuroscientists, and geneticists are in a position to say what human nature is?
"It's a game anyone should be able to play if they do their homework," he says, "so I hope it wouldn't become the exclusive province of a scientific priesthood."
Well, I guess if you can't get past page 4 of his 2000 article then there's no way you'll take a look at his 4/30/2004, 40 page article linked in post 81. Sigh...
The whole subject is fascinating to me - and the sidebar research has been productive as well. I've bounced from Stapp to quantum computing and quantum information theory and now am looking at some of the alternative theories. Very interesting, all of it!
The advancements you summarized all sound wonderfully interesting and I hope you remember to let us know when they are published so we can follow-up.
With the possible exception of the third item you mentioned, all are models or simulations of the mind (or physical brain as some would prefer.) I have never seen you try to apply what you have developed here to sociological cause/effect and solutions. I don't believe you ever would without considering the big picture! Pinker, on the other hand, does and that is why I will always see him as an ant in a coke can trying to read the label.
Getting back to Stapp for a moment...
IMHO, Stapp's description of the quantum "rippling effect" [my term] of the mind not only makes better sense for what we humans actually experience (mental effort, memory, theorizing, qualia, etc.) than the epiphenomenon description - it also goes much further in explaining collective conscious behavior in nature. Bees, ants, penguins, muskox, fish and the ilk frequently act as one against environmental conditions, threats and opportunities.
Which brings me to my last point...
Have you researched or theorized at all on the information content of the cosmos or the possible origin of information in biological systems? Or why information (by measurement) seemingly violates the speed of light (non-locality, Bell's inequalities at distance)?
My time is limited, and by page 4 it seemed relatively clear that the utility of the paper was going to be very limited. If I read everything posted on arxiv I'd never get anything done. :-) I would point out that a lot of dubious papers (usually revolving around someone's pet theory) get published to arxiv with little in the way of peer review. There is a lot of good stuff there, but also a bit of crap as well. That paper appears to be one of the aforementioned "pet theory" papers.
Actually, one of the very best collections of concise cross-referenced descriptions and widely peer-reviewed critiques of theory in science and math is wikipedia. Technically excellent, well written, and well maintained. While I don't use it very much, I do use it as a reference more and more. I've never found a significant error anywhere on it.
With the possible exception of the third item you mentioned, all are models or simulations of the mind (or physical brain as some would prefer.) I have never seen you try to apply what you have developed here to sociological cause/effect and solutions.
I would describe it more as deriving a computational model of intelligence from first principles in mathematics, rather than doing a top-down "this is my model and now I'll see if I can shoehorn the math to support it" which unfortunately has been the traditional approach. That the final mathematical results appear to map remarkably well to what we know of biology is very nice, but it was not the goal nor is there a desire to make the math fit biological or sociological models. For me personally, I view sociology as something like a third-order side-effect of more fundamental processes, and therefore unimportant to the questions I'm interested in, although at some level what I'm interested in probably has some important ramifications with respect to sociology.
IMHO, Stapp's description of the quantum "rippling effect" [my term] of the mind not only makes better sense for what we humans actually experience (mental effort, memory, theorizing, qualia, etc.) than the epiphenomenon description - it also goes much further in explaining collective conscious behavior in nature.
Actually, I would assert Occam's Razor here. There is nothing that doesn't fall out of current models quite elegantly, and without invoking a quantum ripple effect. Qualia, theorizing, consciousness, etc all have very elegant and natural descriptions in non-axiomatic computation models in general, one of its strengths. In fact, I would not classify these things as epiphenomena at all -- they are necessary properties of intelligence in the theoretical abstract -- as you can't have the capability for one without the other.
The more we learn and prove in implementation, the stronger this assertion is.
Have you researched or theorized at all on the information content of the cosmos or the possible origin of information in biological systems? Or why information (by measurement) seemingly violates the speed of light (non-locality, Bell's inequalities at distance)?
Assuming the universe presupposes the existence of information. You can't have the existence of a computer in the abstract (which the universe is), without having some intrinsic amount of information. And once we have that computer, you need only the most miniscule of base algorithms (of which there are gobs) to generate all biological information. Information is not remarkable -- it is what our universe is -- and you could manufacture all biological information using nothing more than, say, SK combinators, with a large state space to play in. Biological information isn't special in any sense. The idea that it is seems a bit of anthropocentric.
I have never seen anything to suggest that information moves faster than the speed of light when using correctly rigorous constructions. It is not allowed in the mathematics, and physics has been unable to demonstrate anything contrary despite many attempts. Many things can happen faster than light, as long as no information moves faster than light per the strict definitions of such things.
There is little wiggle room here in practice as well: the Laws of Thermodynamics as we know them are dependent on this being true. If quantum mechanics allowed instantaneous information transfer over some distance, one would expect thermodynamics to disappear, at least in the math. You can bet against a lot of things in physics, much of which is probably wrong technically (which we'll figure out some day), but betting against thermodynamics seems like a fool's bet. To quote Einstein: "[Thermodynamics] is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts." I would agree.
You and those to whom you were replying are using the word "information" in a somewhat misleading sense. While the context indicates that you are addressing reality itself, and are including all aspects of reality, in an inclusive sense, reality does not become information, until it is put to use--that is, until it "informs". Now my point is not particularly important, except that speculating on such "information" as a force independent of other aspects of reality, is akin to some of the techniques that nihilistic faculty members have used for years to challenge student's belief systems. (For example, the question posed whether if a tree fall in the forest, and no one hears it fall, is there a sound of the tree falling. Of course, there is. Reality is not dependent upon human subjectivity.)
But none of this has anything at all to do with the question of the relative nature versus nurture components of the various aspects of human personality. It is abundantly clear, however you define reality or "information," that some people have vastly better abilities to observe it; some vastly better abilities to retain it; some vastly better abilities to use it analytically; and some vastly better abilities to move bulky parts of it around, than other people. And the four superior groups, that I have mentioned, are not necessarily comprised of the same people.
There is also, I verily believe, inherited "information" in the form of instinct, in most advanced forms of life. One of the themes in my fiction writing is that man no less than other creatures has an extensive instinct system in place, but that he has gotten out of touch with it, by reason of the over-dependence on verbal communication, etc.. But that is a whole other subject.
Getting side-tracked into a completely abstract discussion of the nature of perception itself, should not be reason to lose the point of the thread. In discussing the nature of perception, one should keep in mind that it is extremely unlikely that any two people have the same perceptual (or conceptual) abilities--although identical twins would come close.
By the way, some of the digressions do suggest another subject that would be very relevant to the theme of the lead article, and that is the comparative lack of reporting of the results of studies of electrical activity in the human brain. I know that there have been some group comparisons made, but do not recall seeing them reported in a usable format. You would think that those who claim an equality of human potential, would embrace such a means to test their theories--that is if they really believed those theories--which, of course, few really do.
William Flax Return Of The Gods Web Site
tortoise, I have to tend to a few things now but will come back later and review your reply in more detail. For now, I wanted to provide a bit of background information relative to your comment:
Here is the background information (emphasis mine):
NONLOCALITY GETS MORE REAL. "Bell's Inequalities," the set of mathematical relations that would rule out the notion that distant quantum particles exert influences on each other at seemingly instantaneous rates, have now been violated over record large distances, with record high certainty, and with the elimination of an important loophole in three recent experiments, further solidifying the notion of "spooky action at a distance" in quantum particles. At the Optical Society of America meeting in Baltimore earlier this month, Paul Kwiat (kwiat@lanl.gov) of Los Alamos and his colleagues announced that they produced an ultrabright source of photon pairs for Bell's inequality experiments; they went on to verify the violation of Bell's inequalities to a record degree of certainty (preprint at p23.lanl.gov/agw/2crystal.pdf). Splitting a single photon of well-defined energy into a pair of photons with initially undefined energies, and sending each photon through a fiber-optic network to detectors 10 km apart, researchers in Switzerland (Wolfgang Tittel, Univ. Geneva, wolfgang.tittel@physics.unige.ch) showed that determining the energy for one photon by measuring it had instantaneously determined the energy of its neighbor 10 km away--a record set by the researchers last year but now demonstrated in an improved version of the original experiment. (Tittel et al., Physical Review Letters, 26 October 1998.) A University of Innsbruck group performed Bell measurements with detectors that randomly switched between settings rapidly enough to eliminate the "locality loophole," which posited that one detector might somehow send a signal to the other detector at light or sub-light speeds to affect its reading. (Weihs et al.,Phys. Rev. Lett., website at http://www.uibk.ac.at/c/c7/c704/qo/photon/_bellexp/)
SUPERLUMINAL LIGHT PROPAGATION. Scientists at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton have performed an experiment in which the group velocity of a light pulse traveling through a special medium appears to be faster than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, without, however, violating the principle of causality or the theory of relativity. Such experiments have been performed before and have exploited the fact that a finite pulse of light is necessarily the sum of an ensemble of waves at different frequencies. One therefore speaks of a "phase velocity" for component waves and the "group velocity" for the pulse as a whole.
When such an ensemble enters a medium with a frequency-dependent index of refraction, interesting things start to happen. In a Harvard experiment last year, for example, the component light waves of a pulse passing through a Bose-Einstein condensate were affected in such a way as to yield a group velocity of only 17 m/sec (Hau et al., Nature, 18 February 1999).
Working in the other direction, manipulating the component waves in order to achieve a higher group velocity, is more difficult to establish since it usually occurs when the index of refraction is varying rapidly in a frequency range where the light is being absorbed by the medium; hence the light pulse can be severely distorted or attenuated, making it difficult to detect superluminal effects.
In the NEC experiment, by contrast, the medium in question, a cell filled with a gas of cesium atoms, does not absorb light at the crucial frequencies but actually enhances the light through a type of laser action; that is, the cesium atoms are promoted into an excited state and contribute to the light pulse when it travels through. Consequently the pulse shape is largely preserved even as the component waves interfere (through a process called anomalous dispersion) in such a way as to shift the pulse forward in time by a tiny amount, about 1.7% of the original pulse width, compared to the situation in which the cell is not present. According to the NEC researchers, "the peak of the pulse appears to leave the cell before entering it." This superluminal behavior does not contradict the principles of Einstein's relativity theory, but it might well encourage further discussion among scientists about how exactly to specify the onset of light signals. (Wang et al., Nature, 20 July 2000.)
Number 536 #2, April 27, 2001 by Phil Schewe, James Riordon, and Ben Stein
Last year, L.J. Wang and his colleagues at the NEC Institute reported that a composite wave pulse traveled with little distortion through a medium at a group velocity faster than c, without violating Einstein's theory of relativity, or the notion that cause precedes effect. (Update 495).
Sent into a chamber of specially prepared cesium atoms, the light pulse exited the chamber before the peak of the input pulse entered it. This can happen because the early part of the pulse, made of many component waves, contains all of the information in the wave. Once inside the chamber, the pulse is rearranged such that the peak reappears at a position a little farther ahead in the chamber. This causes the composite pulse to emerge from the chamber earlier than if it had been traveling through the chamber at the speed of c. Potential applications involve the possibility of shuttling along light waves faster in applications such as telecommunications and computers.
How to define and analyze the speed of signal transfer in that setup is a subject of a new paper by the same researchers, along with two other physicists: Peter Milonni of Los Alamos and Raymond Chiao of UC Berkeley (chiao@physics.berkeley.edu). They consider the effect that quantum noise, due in part to random spontaneous emission by the medium, has on the reliability with which a signal can be measured. The more one tries to push along the signal in the medium, the greater the number of noise-producing, signal-obscuring spontaneous emissions that occur, and any attempt to boost the signal's intensity to make it more detectable introduces delays such that the signal velocity always ends up to be less than c. Therefore, the signal velocity is defined operationally as an optical signal-to-noise ratio.
In summary, the researchers extended the special relativity speed limit of c for sharp wavefronts (which act like "on-off" signals), to that of a more realistic smoothly varying signal, based on a speed limit set by quantum fluctuations. (A Kuzmich et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 30 April 2001; text at Physics News Select.)
In classical physics, it was assumed that all events are caused by earlier ones according to the known laws of nature, culminating in Pierre-Simon Laplace's claim that if the current state of the world would be known with precision, it could be computed for any time in the future. This is known as determinism (see Causal determinism).
In modern physics, this notion has largely been abandoned. The discoveries leading to the theory of special relativity challenged the notion of an absolute measure of time, making it more difficult (and sometimes impossible) to state that some event A happened "before" another event B. The principle of locality is essentially an attempt to reclaim the sense of time ordering lost in the process, but this concept has in turn been challenged by developments in quantum physics. In particular, Bell's Theorem complicates the physical notion of causality by extending the set of events which can affect a physical measurement to a practically unmeasureable universe. Furthermore, all statements of quantum mechanics about observable events are probabilistic in nature, so that an absolute connection between a cause and an effect can never exist.
Despite these difficulties, causality remains an important concept in physical theories. For example, the notion that events can be ordered into causes and effects is necessary to prevent paradoxes such as the grandfather paradox, which asks what happens if a time-traveller kills his own grandfather before he ever meets his grandmother. Within special relativity, causality can be preserved by forbidding information from travelling faster than the speed of light. It is strongly suspected that general relativity also preserves causality and forbids agents from changing the past, although this has not been rigorously demonstrated.
While I understand the spirit of his law here, I do believe AA could very easily fall under the category of "running rough shod" over human nature. AA isn't a victim free progression.
Why has the Third Person of the Trinity been forgotten? Because he's not very "scientific." In other words, the Western Church has adopted science and education as its primary means of salvation, and has almost totally abandoned its own metaphysics. It may not seem like that to an outsider or atheist, but it is very obvious to one who's been inside the "system" and knows the history of the early church and its teachings.
This is a striking insight, Ronzo. It has the ring of truth to it.
You have my deep thanks for the historical perspective you bring to bear on church issues. If I can add something, I’d say the churches made their gravest mistake in opting to pursue, achieve, and finally wield secular power. This could only come at the expense of their spiritual mission.
Thank you so much for your fine essay, Ronzo.
Hello, tpaine! Sorry to be so tardy replying. WRT the above quote, I find myself mystified that you find Pinker’s thought complementary to our Constitution’s core principle of liberty. Indeed, I have reached the opposite conclusion.
You suggested you doubt Pinker has a “hidden major premise.” But I think there is one. I think his (undisclosed) initial premise is: absolute self-denial is good and necessary. Yet liberty cannot inhere in anything other than a “self.”
I notice that Pinker does not abjure his “self” – his homunculus as he disparagingly puts it – in favor of logical consistency with his theory.
You asked me whether I’ve read any of his books. The answer is, no I haven’t. Though I’ve browsed him in the stacks, I’ve yet to actually check him out of the library. The reason is, reading him gives me a bad case of “cognitive dissonance”: On the one hand, he is saying that there is no self or soul, that all a man is, in essence, is the epiphenomenal result of the activity of a machine -- his physical brain.
On the other hand, the strong, indelible presence of Steven Pinker as something quite real and distinguishable from Pinker’s brain makes itself constantly felt. One definitely senses the vivid presence of a self or “ego.” Yet his writings seem to be an attempt to demolish that concept. Still, he leaves us with puzzling questions on which his theory seems to cast no light. For instance, why would a physical brain choose to engage in scientific pursuits that are essentially non-physical and apparently extraneous to its normal functional needs? What supplies the motive? What is the mediating principle directing the physical system to explore what is essentially spiritual reality? How does the brain hook up with the external world in a way that creates meaningful information – and for what or whom is this information intended? How does the brain engage in self-reflection – which is the means by which we purportedly “fictional selves” locate ourselves in space/time reality and understand our values, purposes, and goals – when there is no self there to reflect? Left to its own devices, it seems to me the brain would just happily keep chugging along coordinating and maintaining the life functions of the organism for as long as it could. What could inspire it to reach to any larger task? Indeed, can it feel inspiration? Can it feel at all? Can it decide? Does it have free will? If it has “will” at all, then where is that located? How is that to be accounted for? Does it love? feel sorrow, joy, fear, etc.? Or covetousness, jealousy, lust for power, hatred, etc.?
What does it actually mean to say that “the brain decides?”
I get the distinct impression that this seemingly mild-mannered, soft-spoken and charming professor intends his theory to apply to all the rest of us, but not to himself. Clearly, Pinker gives himself “a pass” from selflessness.
And I think this is intellectually dishonest. To me, it is a prime example of ideological thinking, not science. And I would note the general tendency of all ideological thinking to drift into forms of tyranny of one type or another….
Pinker’s model seems best suited to the life of an insect colony – or of a totalitarian state. There is zero sense of the self in a colony of ants, bees, or termites. Their societies only “work” because all individuals are merged into a collective Self and are “ordered” by its needs. There is no liberty here – all is determined by the pattern of the colony’s rigid and unchanging social life.
I feel certain that you’d agree: This is no model for a truly human society, tpaine – one that respects the dignity and liberty of the individual….
Well my friend, this is all probably “as clear as mud.” But it’s the best I can do right now.
Thank you so much for writing. Please share your thoughts with me when you get the chance.
Hello RWP! I don’t know how many different ways there are to parse the above sentence. Since it seems to be written in English, one imagines there is really only one right way. And so I am perplexed. For the way I read it, not only are you not falsifying my basic argument – that the physical brain cannot carry out all the functions of consciousness, “unaided,” all by itself – but you seem to advance evidence tending to corroborate my position.
Your statement seems to note a great disparity of scale between the brain as a “classical object,” and the brain as executor of neural processing. There seem to be two time scales involved here, which are effectively incommensurate terms.
To put this matter another way, if the brain is “coming up short” six orders of magnitude what is needed to execute neural processing, then the brain must be getting a lot of help from somewhere else.
This is what I’ve been saying all along. So I assume I must have made an egregious mistake interpreting your statement. Please correct my understanding RWP?
Oh, I did notice that. I knew you weren't trying to state that information does in fact move faster than light. I was trying to emphasize that the apparent violation is of no theoretical consequence. It is qualitatively the same as the difference between a number so astronomically large that we can't fathom it and infinity. While they are "seemingly" the same, they have enormously different theoretical consequences.
With respect to causality and determinism, while it is almost certain that the universe is algorithmically finite (though possibly still infinite in size), it is not possible to observe that Laplacian determinism from within the universe. It follows then that some of what we will observe in physics will be very apparently non-deterministic in some fashion, since the apparent non-determinism has to be expressed somewhere. But the underlying determinism will write the rules of the system.
In my opinion, one of the basic conceptual flaws in human thinking is that we treat a great many things as deterministic and axiomatic in practice when absolutely nothing is perceivable as such in our universe. Knowing that something is deterministic is qualitatively different than being able to perceive the determinism.
The brain isn't coming up short at all. The difference between brain and silicon is not computational capacity, but memory latency (or more accurately, memory reference rate). In this one respect, there is obvious differences, mostly due to architecture. Unfortunately, latency matters a lot. This has been discussed extensively on cognitive science forums.
In which case, the brain is getting a whole lot of help from memory. And you suggest memory consists of brain "architecture." Is this architecture "self-reflective" in such a way as to make memory possible in the first place?
I feel sure Prof. Pinker's project must be "exciting" in principle; especially as it is seemingly bent on finding ways to falsify and thus overcome the planted experience of the human race over the course of decades of millennia by now.
Sad you should think so Betty. I find that his ideas compliment our Constitutions principles, that free men should follow the ruled of law, -- not be ruled by the morals of the majority.
WRT the above quote, I find myself mystified that you find Pinker's thought complementary to our Constitution's core principle of liberty. Indeed, I have reached the opposite conclusion.
And I asked you at #25 to explain why you have such a conclusion. No such luck I see..
You suggested you doubt Pinker has a "hidden major premise." But I think there is one. I think his (undisclosed) initial premise is:
' -- absolute self-denial is good and necessary. Yet liberty cannot inhere in anything other than a "self." --'
Where do you 'pick up' a mystifying premise like that? Pinker agrees with our constitutional principles of liberty. He is found of quoting Madison's political views as being close to his own.
I notice that Pinker does not abjure his "self" – his homunculus as he disparagingly puts it – in favor of logical consistency with his theory.
'Pinker doesn't deny his "self" in favor of logical consistency with his theory' ?
- What is that supposed to mean, Betty? - Are you choosing words for effect? -- Weird, meaningless comment, imo.
You asked me whether I've read any of his books. The answer is, no I haven't. Though I've browsed him in the stacks, I've yet to actually check him out of the library. The reason is, reading him gives me a bad case of "cognitive dissonance": On the one hand, he is saying that there is no self or soul, that all a man is, in essence, is the epiphenomenal result of the activity of a machine -- his physical brain.
More hype? -- I'm getting a bit of "cognitive dissonance" meself.
On the other hand, the strong, indelible presence of Steven Pinker as something quite real and distinguishable from Pinker's brain makes itself constantly felt.
One definitely senses the vivid presence of a self or "ego." Yet his writings seem to be an attempt to demolish that concept.
Hmmmm. Does one now.. I see no such presence.
Still, he leaves us with puzzling questions on which his theory seems to cast no light. For instance, why would a physical brain choose to engage in scientific pursuits that are essentially non-physical and apparently extraneous to its normal functional needs? What supplies the motive?
Curiosity?
What is the mediating principle directing the physical system to explore what is essentially spiritual reality?
Why do you characterize Pinkers as research being into "spiritual reality"?
How does the brain hook up with the external world in a way that creates meaningful information – and for what or whom is this information intended? How does the brain engage in self-reflection – which is the means by which we purportedly "fictional selves" locate ourselves in space/time reality and understand our values, purposes, and goals – when there is no self there to reflect? Left to its own devices, it seems to me the brain would just happily keep chugging along coordinating and maintaining the life functions of the organism for as long as it could. What could inspire it to reach to any larger task? Indeed, can it feel inspiration? Can it feel at all? Can it decide? Does it have free will? If it has "will" at all, then where is that located? How is that to be accounted for? Does it love? feel sorrow, joy, fear, etc.? Or covetousness, jealousy, lust for power, hatred, etc.?
What does it actually mean to say that "the brain decides?"
You seem to believe its "spiritual reality", I'd guess.
-- Pinker & millions of your non-religious peers are seeking non-mystical answers. - I'd say we need such answers, as todays world wide religious turmoil makes clear.
I get the distinct impression that this seemingly mild-mannered, soft-spoken and charming professor intends his theory to apply to all the rest of us, but not to himself.
Clearly, Pinker gives himself "a pass" from selflessness.
Really Betty? What do you base your impression upon? I've seen nothing so far that supports your rancor. Such rancor isn't like you Betty.
And I think this is intellectually dishonest. To me, it is a prime example of ideological thinking, not science. And I would note the general tendency of all ideological thinking to drift into forms of tyranny of one type or another….
Pot, -kettle. You too have an obvious ideology, Betty. We all do, to varying degrees. Religious ideology's "drift into forms of tyranny" just as much, perhaps more, than other forms, imo. -- And history bears me out.
Pinker's model seems best suited to the life of an insect colony – or of a totalitarian state.
Pure hyperbole. You've offered no support for such an opinion.
There is zero sense of the self in a colony of ants, bees, or termites. Their societies only "work" because all individuals are merged into a collective Self and are "ordered" by its needs. There is no liberty here – all is determined by the pattern of the colony's rigid and unchanging social life. I feel certain that you'd agree: This is no model for a truly human society, tpaine – one that respects the dignity and liberty of the individual….
Yep, ants, bees, or termites are no model for our society. -- Who said they were such? - Only you, just above.
Well my friend, this is all probably "as clear as mud." But it's the best I can do right now.
You got the 'mud' part right, kiddo. -- Thanks for your comments.
" -- it appears this wide distribution of activity is carried by quantum fields and routinely involves the principle of non-locality…."
RWP replied at #31:
" I find the idea of quantum fields having an important role in brain activity to be ludicrous on its face.
The decoherence times are too short; the couplings too large.
The brain is a classical object on time scales six order of magnitude shorter than the shortest time relevant to neural processing.
31 -- RWP
Now you reply:
To put this matter another way, if the brain is "coming up short" six orders of magnitude what is needed to execute neural processing, then the brain must be getting a lot of help from somewhere else.
Read RWP's answer at #31 carefully. -- I believe he is saying the brains processing times are six times ~shorter~ "than the shortest time relevant" to other known methods.
Makes sense to me that our brains need no "help" from a mystical 'ghost within' to function.
Thanks for 'splaining that to me, tpaine. It helps make sense of it. I expect RWP will concur?
But you still haven't explained how neural processing "knows" what it's doing. Especially since neural processing is a determined process in the sense that it simply executes the physical and chemical laws. It is, as it were, executing a program. Who or what wrote the program? Did the brain write it? If it did, then how did a mechanism under the control of the physical laws create something that is not physical? For a program is not a physical thing: It is a design.
Further, it seems to me there can be no knowledge absent a knower to know it. But you keep leaving that part out -- unless you mean to suggest that the brain is the knower. But again, there is a problem, the same one just sketched above. For knowledge is not a physical thing anymore than a program is.
I know that RWP disagrees that the brain participates in quantum fields, of which there are apparently many, each with its own characteristic particle and frequency. Quantum fields are understood to be universal in extent, spreading out as the Universe expands. By what principle can we say a physical system like the human brain is somehow isolatable, exempt from these fields which underlay and constitute universal physical reality?
Thanks for 'splaining that to me, tpaine. It helps make sense of it. I expect RWP will concur?
Beats me if he will. I don't pretend to be trained in the field.
But you still haven't explained how neural processing "knows" what it's doing.
How could I? See above.
Especially since neural processing is a determined process in the sense that it simply executes the physical and chemical laws. It is, as it were, executing a program.
So ~you~ imagine. Are trained enough in the field to say definitively?
Who or what wrote the program? Did the brain write it? If it did, then how did a mechanism under the control of the physical laws create something that is not physical?
Some scientists believe that at some point, enough 'memory' will start remembering itself, creating a form of conscientiousness. Odds are we shall soon find out.
For a program is not a physical thing: It is a design.
You don't think we can ever create computers capable of programing themselves? I'd bet we will.
Further, it seems to me there can be no knowledge absent a knower to know it. But you keep leaving that part out -- unless you mean to suggest that the brain is the knower. But again, there is a problem, the same one just sketched above. For knowledge is not a physical thing anymore than a program is.
Sorry betty, but that's too convoluted a comment to decipher. I suspect its just more 'sound good word-framing'.
I know that RWP disagrees that the brain participates in quantum fields, of which there are apparently many, each with its own characteristic particle and frequency. Quantum fields are understood to be universal in extent, spreading out as the Universe expands. By what principle can we say a physical system like the human brain is somehow isolatable, exempt from these fields which underlay and constitute universal physical reality?
I doubt there are very many people that have a specific clue to that comments meaning either.. Nice ring to it though.
Maybe you should try writing free verse, Betty.
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