dreamer_easy | Entries tagged with brains

... hey, that thing that superintelligent AIs will all converge on the same goals, and perhaps the same morality. This is just another way of saying "I'm smarter than everyone else, so my goals are the correct ones, my morality is the correct one", isn't it? (Come to think of it, it's possible to read this as the intended meaning of the title of 1963 Flannery O'Connor's story "Everything That Rises Must Converge", whose clueless hero is phenomenally smug.)

This comment is a dangerous sign of incipient hypomania.

"It is conceivable that optimal efficiency would be attained by grouping capabilities in aggregates that roughly match the cognitive architecture of a human mind…But in the absence of any compelling reason for being confident that this so, we must countenance the possibility that human-like cognitive architectures are optimal only within the constraints of human neurology (or not at all). When it becomes possible to build architectures that could not be implemented well on biological neural networks, new design space opens up; and the global optima in this extended space need not resemble familiar types of mentality. Human-like cognitive organizations would then lack a niche in a competitive post-transition economy or ecosystem.

We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.

-- Philosopher Nick Bostrom, quoted by Scott Alexander in a thought-provoking essay. My own thoughts are AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Fact-checking resources:

Reality Check from BBC News

bellingcat.com

New Nuclear Power Plants Are Unlikely to Stop the Climate Crisis (Scientific American, February 2022). "These plants take too long to build and bring online, and we don’t have that much time."

The 7 reasons why nuclear energy is not the answer to solve climate change (Heinrich Böll Stiftung, April 2021)

Scientists Say GMO Foods Are Safe, Public Skepticism Remains (National Geographic, May 2016). Is safety a red herring? "But the academy also found that GE or (genetically-modified organisms or GMO) crops didn’t increase those crops' potential yields, and they did lead to widespread and expensive problems with herbicide-resistant weeds." (emphasis mine). What's the point, then? (Potentially, nutrient content.)

Make extreme wealth extinct: it’s the only way to avoid climate breakdown (Guardian, November 2021) | Global rich must cut their carbon footprint 97% to stave off climate change, UN says (CBS, December 2020) "The richest 1% would need to reduce their current emissions by at least a factor of 30, while per capita emissions of the poorest 50% could increase by around three times their current levels on average."

Permaculture and the Myth of Overpopulation (Fr John Peck, January 2016). I know nothing of permaculture, but the points in this essay chimed with me. The reminder that this mess is not inevitable and that perhaps humans can and should survive was welcome.

Humans are hardwired to dismiss (coronavirus) facts that don't fit their worldview (LiveScience, July 2020). "Our ancestors evolved in small groups, where cooperation and persuasion had at least as much to do with reproductive success as holding accurate factual beliefs about the world. Assimilation into one's tribe required assimilation into the group's ideological belief system — regardless of whether it was grounded in science or superstition."

Mask-Shaming Won’t Work. Try These 5 Things Instead (Yes!, July 2020). Advice useful for any polarised debate.

Heightened susceptibility to misinformation linked to reduced mask wearing and social distancing (PsyPost, October 2020). "Reflective and analytical thinking" is our best hope.

How social media influencer tactics help conspiracy theories gain traction online (ABC, December 2020) Influences and conspiracy theorists are businesses out to make money, and do it through similar marketing strategies.

The new coronavirus and racist tropes (CJR, January 2020).

Cory Doctorow: Fake News Is an Oracle (July 2019). The problem of conspiracy theories in a world of conspiracies.

How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail (Scientific American, January 2017).

Are Americans as stupid as we seem on Twitter? (Forward, May 2020). On slogans.

How does your body respond to feelings of moral outrage? Depends on your politics (Neuroscience News, January 2020).

The Lazy Poor or the Entitled Rich? (Psychology Today, March 2020) "A psychological perspective on wealth, merit, and compassion."

Closed-minded cognition: Right-wing authoritarianism is negatively related to belief updating following prediction error (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review volume 27, 2020). Right-wing authoritarian views make it harder to change your mind given new evidence.

Supporters of religious violence are more likely to claim they’re familiar with religious concepts that don’t exist (PsyPost, August 2020)

The Root of All Cruelty? (The New Yorker, November 2017). What if, rather than dehumanising our victims, we see them precisely as human beings who are justified targets of our violence?

Furry Panic Is the Latest Dumb GOP Attack on Public Schools (Daily Beast, February 2022). Rumours about special treatment for furries etc in US schools are proxies for attacks on the more usual groups, and on schools themselves.

Science fiction, with a taste of the Twilight Zone: When You Die on the Radio by Adam R. Shannon.

And finally (image not mine):

Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’ (The Guardian, September 2021). Here's the part the Guardian removed (click to enlarge):

Are some of us destined to be dumb and is there anything we can do about it? (ABC, December 2021) How being highly intelligent can make you stupid -- because you're so good at rationalising.

South Dakota nurse says many patients deny the coronavirus exists — right up until death (WP, 17 November 2020)

I think I understand why.

Those of us living in the real world probably have a mental picture of what will happen when a COVID denier catches the virus (which we've probably wished on them). At last they'll admit they were wrong and we were right, they were stupid and irrational while we were intelligent and reasonable.

Which is weird, because we know beliefs like this aren't based on facts or logic, but other, more powerful, cognitive machines, like group membership and world view, supported by a fire hose of propaganda.

How long does it take to completely shift your world view? To not just admit you were wrong about one thing, but to discard most of what you believe, most of the ideas that have organised the way you think and act? Could you do it in the space of a few days, while sick and terrified?

No wonder these patients double down on their wrong beliefs. In a crisis, those beliefs are the tools you have for making sense of what's happening, for coping with it. Alongside that, there's the simple denial that any seriously ill person might feel -- the brain's lag in integrating new and enormous information.

Well, the patients stop abusing the nurses once they've been intubated. They get their comeuppance in the end, in death, or permanent injury. We have our moral victory. I think as human beings it's very hard for us to fight against an abstract thing, like a virus we can't see, like propaganda that sets the stock market above human lives: it's a hoax, get back to work. We need individuals -- flesh and blood human beings that we can deplore.

"That book [Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals] aimed its fire particularly at the prevailing belief of our time: that of the inevitably steady forward progress of humankind brought about by liberal democracy. When the book came out, as George W Bush was demanding 'regime change' in Iraq, it struck a particular nerve. In the two decades since, its argument that the advance of rational enlightened thought might not offer any kind of lasting protection against baser tribal instincts or environmental destruction or human folly has felt like prophecy."
-- John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

(I guess this is what the Dadaists understood about culture.)

ETA: lol, the next sentence of the interview is "Gray never bought the idea that his book was a handbook for despair."

Surely I can't be the first person to notice the use of the mirror test in The Mephisto Waltz (1971)?

I used to blog so much. These days I'm far more likely to read something off the Internet than I am to write something and add it to the collective babble. Here are some links I've found interesting.

The Economics Behind Grandma’s Tuna Casseroles (Bloomberg, 31 October 2015). I learned to cook by downloading recipes, mostly from the US, and this article explains a lot about them. Campbell's soup makes a simple casserole sauce. Add pineapple to whatever and it's called "whatever aloha"; add chili powder and it's "whatever olé". The 50s and 60s in the United States are always fascinating -- I think perhaps because the SF I read growing up dates from that exotic era of the atom, martinis, and advertising. (ETA: Q sent a link which expands on this: Creamed, Canned And Frozen: How The Great Depression Revamped U.S. Diets (NPR, 15 August 2016).)

There are no marching morons (Pharyngula, 8 May 2007). Those people! The ones who aren't as good as us! They breed like cockroaches! (See also: Examination Day by Henry Slesar, which traumatised me as a child - here's the 90s Twilight Zone adaptation, which adds a few extra terrible seconds to the ending. You can't breed intelligence out; you can only snip off individual flowers.)

The Cult of the Fantasy Pedestrian (Strong Towns, n.d.). The Fantasy Pedestrian always does the correct thing -- never crosses in the middle of the road, for example -- so there's no need to allow for human fallibility, or human vulnerability. Cf the reason there are ash trays in aeroplane bathrooms; better that a lawbreaker or idiot put their smoke out somewhere safe than that the whole plane burned.

Here's what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers (The Guardian, 25 August 2015). Since climate denial is propaganda, it's not surprising that scientific papers which contradict the consensus are guilty of deceptive methods like cherry picking and ignoring inconvenient physics. But perhaps the biggest giveaway that they're full of it is that every "contrarian" has a different explanation. (The Queen Katryca bullshit detector, you might say.)

If you're a sort of Lefty progressivy femo pinko something or other like me, you're used to people on "your side" swallowing plenty of factoids, dubious reasoning, and general bullshit. Apparently those to the right of that invisible central line are even more susceptible, as Why Are Conservatives More Susceptible to Believing Lies? (Slate, 9 November 2017) argues -- not because conservative folks are stupid or uneducated, but because they have a different style of thinking: for example, they trust authority more and are more resistant to new information. The article also talks about that crucial factor on and offline -- the way our beliefs make us part of a group. (Am I wrong in thinking that the propaganda with which we are constantly deluged mostly comes from the right?)

Epics and Monsters
Jack Graham's posting on Brecht's "Epic theatre" and Love and Monsters helped me better understand a performance of the Threepenny Opera I saw some years ago at the Opera House (thanks to Kyla) and made me ponder the meaning of the fourth wall in the era of the video blog.

Barriers to childhood immunisation: Findings from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children
Anti-vax conspiracy theories and the snake oil merchants who profit from them are a well-known menace to public health; but they are not the main reason why children in Australia miss out on vaccinations.

Seven ways to talk to anti-vaxxers (that might actually change their minds)
Listening to parents with respect, building trust, addressing their concerns.

The magical thinking of guys who love logic
My beliefs are rational, intelligent, logical, unbiased, objective, and factual. My enemies' beliefs are irrational, stupid, illogical, biased, emotional, and insane. Or, in other words, I'm not actually arguing, I'm just patting myself on the back over and over.

I'm reading Bird Brain by Nathan Emery, about intelligence in birds - tool-making, puzzle-solving, recognising themselves in mirrors. Birds' brains have evolved to do many of the same jobs ours have, but the architecture is different. Emery discusses the theories about how intelligence arises. The leading theory is that social animals need social intelligence to keep track of their relationships, to know what others are thinking and to deceive. This theory depresses me, because it suggests that bullying - which is, at core, about excluding someone from the group - will be a universal practice of intelligent species, wherever we find them.

But there are other theories. One is that spatio-temporal intelligence is needed to find food; an avian example is the scrub jay, which can remember not just where it has cached food, but also when the food was cached and who might have seen it being hidden. Another is that using and making tools to obtain food requires brain power. And finally, there's innovation: "the ability to produce novel behaviors or solve novel problems". All of these kinds of intelligence, social, spatio-temporal, tool-making, and innovation, might be at play in the smartest birds.

I don't know whether non-social intelligence could produce a species that's self-aware in the way that human beings are; my idea about that is that since we must model others' minds, we can therefore model our own minds. But if birds' brains have evolved their own structures for doing the same work as ours, maybe there are other paths to self-awareness and to the cooperation needed to build a civilisation. It's soothing - and also intriguing - to imagine a species, a culture, with the benefits of language and technology, but without social anxiety, without bullying, perhaps even without prejudice or war.

(I also watched the documentary "Beak and Brain". Originally from Germany, it includes a marvellous scene of a camera operator clambering across a steep, wet New Zealand hillside, hoping to get a shot of some keas. He loses his footing, slides down to land with a bump, and emits a very Kiwi "Ah, fahk". The keas do some sarcastic flying.)

There's no such thing as a male or female brain, study finds (Stat 30 November 2015). The study is: Sex beyond the genitalia: The human brain mosaic

Menopausal killer whales hold key to family's survival (ABC, 6 March 2015). Most animals continue reproducing until they die, so why do some animals undergo menopause - what's the evolutionary advantage? Research suggests it's because they support their descendants with their accumulated knowledge. (I've just imagined a whale having a hot flush and steam coming out of her blowhole.)

Inside a fading Chinese culture ruled by women (Washington Post, 12 July 2017). The matriarchal Mosuo.

Popular feminism in the digital age: How the personal has been made commercial (ABC, 1 September 2017). The vexed connection between feminism and women's magazines - between feminism and feminine culture, or femininity culture. The editor of Teen Vogue: "I can't tell you how many times I've been in the bathroom with another woman ... we feel we have nothing in common but we talk about a great lipstick shade or great hair ... and it's just this doorway for connection and for understanding and for dialogue." This is another experience I will never have.

I'm enjoying the very readable The Tale of the Duelling Neurosurgeons by Sam Kean, although I'm puzzled by the lack of duelling neurosurgeons. What keeps striking me, in Kean's tales of skull porridge gone wrong and what they tell us about how the brain works, is how specialised it is. It's easy to think of human intelligence as Intelligence, some sort of benchmark for all possible consciousness, and yet chunks of our brain are tuned to perceive the human face, and human hands. The most common "category deficit", where brain damage removes the ability to recognise just one type of thing, is an inability to recognize animals. OTOH perhaps all brains would evolve to detect something as basic and important as movement (apparently we can only see stationary objects by moving our eyes over them).

Also interesting: competing theories of synaethesia. The one I knew was that, as the brain is sculpted in childhood by the pruning of excess links, some of those links are accidentally left in place -- in my case, connecting letters, numbers, and music to colours. The other theory, which fits the effects of drugs like LSD, is that rather than being pruned out, the extra links are chemically inhibited; and that in a synaesthete's brain, those "underground channels" are not being inhibited.

Dolphins Don't Use Sentences: How Badly Executed Research has Created a False Narrative of Cetacean Communication (Why Animals Do The Thing, September 2016)

Breakthrough answers on rare disorder that delays children’s first word (Koolen-de Vries syndrome and the Makaton sign language)

World Media Struggle to Translate Trump’s Africa Insult

The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist (Bedouin Sign Language)

Why You Keep Mishearing That Taylor Swift Lyric (The Cut, November 2014)

The Woman Who Forgot the Names of Animals (The Atlantic, June 2014)

Lost for Words (The Atlantic, April 2016) "A disease called primary progressive aphasia gradually robs people of their language skills while leaving their minds intact."

Why do we forget our family members' and close friends' names? (ABC, May 2016)

Cutting through the clamor—how the brain helps us understand spoken words in noisy settings (medicalXpress, December 2016)

"... if we initially get a feeling of reward from an idea, we will seek to replicate the feeling multiple times. Each time, the reward centre in the brain, the ventral striatum and more specifically the nucleus accumbens located within it, is triggered, and eventually other parts of the instinctive brain learn to solidify the idea into a fixed one. If we try to change our minds, a fear center in the brain like the anterior insula warns us that danger is imminent. The powerful dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can override these more primitive brain centers and assert reason and logic, but it is slow to act and requires a great deal of determination and effort to do so. Hence, it is fundamentally unnatural and uncomfortable to change our minds, and this is reflected in the way our brains work."

— Sara E. Gorman and Jack M. Gorman, Denying to the Grave: Why We Ignore the Facts That Will Save Us

I think about this sort of thing often - a study which found that: "Participants who lacked control were more likely to perceive a variety of illusory patterns, including seeing images in noise, forming illusory correlations in stock market information, perceiving conspiracies, and developing superstitions." I'll have to look up the study to find out what "lacked control" means exactly, but I wondered if, outside the lab, having incurable chronic illnesses counts as "lacking control", and if that's related to my religious beliefs, which have a fair bit to say about sickness.

One of the main gods I worship is Sekhmet, the Ancient Egyptian goddess of plagues, whose priests were doctors. Sekhmet could dispatch her "messengers" to cause illness, but could also call them off (and other gods, such as the wonderfully named Tutu, could command them to desist). So she is the goddess of both sickness and medicine, both disease and treatment. You can't escape sickness, but help to cure it or to cope with it is available. This provides comfort and hope.

Or is this just the equivalent of a conspiracy theory - it provides an explanation and an illusion of control, and, conveniently, can't be disproved? Is this a religious idea, in the sense of faith, and how much a philosophical one? Does it matter whether, in some sense, it's objectively true?

Which said, darling Jonghyun is on board the Horned God's boat as he sails at the Solstice for the Summerlands, and I'll fight anyone who contradicts that statement.

Further evidence that all second languages are handled by the same bit of brain: I just typed the word "commensalism" - a term from biology, something like symbiosis - and mentally broke it down into the Latin "co", together, and the Korean "sal", to live - so "to live together". (It's all Latin: "co" "mensa" "to share a table".) I admit this is dull if you're not interested in neurolinguistics but I wanted to record it as a data point for posterity. :)

I'm reading a saddening but helpful book from 2005, Bipolar Disorder: Your Questions Answered, by Neil Hunt. It's meant for GPs but has plenty of info relevant to patients. It's sad because having an incurable, sometimes fatal illness is sad, and also because so many people (and their families, friends, and doctors) have struggled with this one. I have never forgotten a pamphlet which said "most people with mental illness suffer very much".

Anywho, it's a good refresher on both depression and hypomania (I have Bipolar II Disorder, where you don't get full-blown mania, thank goodness). For example: "... it is unusual to find a depressed patient who is sleeping well." Having trouble getting to sleep, waking frequently during the night, and what I call the "early morning wake-up call", where you wake up at ridiculous o'clock but can't get back to sleep - all too familiar, and compounded in my case by sleep apnoea and medication side-effects. (About a week ago I got so fed up with not sleeping that I reduced my recently increased dose of Epilim back down to 500 mg. Instant and almost total cure - though I'm having to take a little Xanax to get my sleep schedule nailed down again.)

"Depression tends to be the problem that dogs manic depressives in the long term... mild but persistent low mood is the commonest mood state that patients experience, so that on average bipolars can find themselves in a recognisably depressed mood state for a third of the time." This is what my shrink calls "sitting low". I believe my mood stabiliser, Epilim, prevents me from reaching my previous hypomanic highs, which I'd come to accept as a normal part of my life after decades; but I may be wrong about that, and it would be dangerous to stop the Epilim while I'm still taking an antidepressant, as multiple awful episodes of uncontrolled hypomania made all too clear.

Most recently we added Allegron to kill the depression that resulted from the hypomania that resulted from jetlag, but once it had done its job, I came back off it: my liver lacks the enzyme to break it down, so it was building up and up in my blood, making me tireder and tireder, giving me an incredibly dry mouth, and making me have odd, existential thoughts (it can provoke schizophrenia-like symptoms in some people). I'm having a DNA test to check the enzyme thing; I suspect it could explain my history of incapacitating sedation on various antidepressants.

Hunt describes a trap I've let myself fall into: doing nothing but work. "Many people who are depressed have brought their range of activities down to the bare minimum - 'just the grind' - and have stopped doing the things that brought pleasure to their lives." In my case that's reading books and watching movies for no purpose other than enjoyment. (I just read Christopher Isherwood's roman a clef Lions and Shadows for no reason other than that I enjoy his writing, and enjoyed the living hell out of it.) Getting my ass published overseas has become the consuming purpose of my life. It keeps me going when nothing else does, but as this last week showed, it can be a miserable 'grind' when I'm too exhausted or burned-out to attend to it. I need a better balance.

The book also mentions SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder - depression in winter, mania in spring. I think there may be a little of this in the mix: I associate the change of the seasons, spring and autumn both, with feeling "high". Though I no longer see God when I see bougainvilleas, which is a shame.

Fair bit more of the book still to go.

Muslims and Islam: Key findings in the U.S. and around the world (Pew Research Center, 9 August 2017)

How liars create the illusion of truth (Mind Hacks, 11 November, 2016). "Repetition makes a fact seem more true, regardless of whether it is or not. Understanding this effect can help you avoid falling for propaganda, says psychologist Tom Stafford."

I used to think Australia had no history of slavery. It becomes ever more obvious I was wrong. Queensland class action over unpaid wages for Indigenous people 'setting a national precedent' (ABC, 23 September 2016). | Blackbirding: Australia's history of luring, tricking and kidnapping Pacific Islanders (ABC, 17 September 2017) | Australians 'just starting to wake up' to historical South Sea Islander slavery: Jeff McMullen (ABC, 18 September 2017) | ETA: Slavery claims as seasonal workers from Vanuatu paid nothing for months' work (SMH, 27 March 2017)

Right-Wing Extremists Are a Bigger Threat to America Than ISIS (Newsweek, 4 February 2016) | Globally, terrorism is on the rise - but little of it occurs in Western countries (ABC, 17 November 2015)

Study shows discrimination interacts with genetics and impacts health (Medical XPress, 21 December 2016). The most striking, and I think heartbreaking, thing about this study is the finding that discrimination against your friends and family was more damaging than discrimination against yourself. | Research finds daily discrimination sickens African-Americans (Medical XPress, 21 December 2016)

Hard-wired: The brain's circuitry for political belief (phys.org, 23 December 2016) "Political beliefs are like religious beliefs in the respect that both are part of who you are and important for the social circle to which you belong... To consider an alternative view, you would have to consider an alternative version of yourself."

The Human Zoo: Documentary sheds light on stolen Aboriginal people 'treated as animals' (ABC, 28 January 2017). The horror of Indigenous Australians kidnapped and displayed as exhibits leaves me speechless.

I absolutely cannot work at the moment. My brain, which is used to non-stop writing, is completely confused - something like the feeling when the power goes out and you keep being surprised that things don't turn on when you flip their switch. This is the product, I assume, of coming off Zoloft and going onto Allegron. Never again will I doubt the existence of writer's block.

Reading other people's flaccid SF is always encouraging. Hell, I can do better than that. Or I'll be able to once the Allegron starts working.

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Dreamer Easy

Kate Orman

Entries tagged with brains

It's blue blue blue

A Disneyland with no children.

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The neurology of changing one's mind

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