Category: neuroscience

Oy! LiveScience touts panpsychism as the solution to the hard problem of consciousness

November 12, 2019 • 11:30 am

Until I read this piece, I always thought that LiveScience was a rigorous science site. Indeed, most of it is, but here’s an exception: a paean to “panpsychism”, the view that everything in the Universe, from electrons to elephants—indeed, the Universe as a whole—has a form of consciousness. The author of the article is Philip Goff, a philosopher (now at Durham University) who makes a living touting panpsychism and whose views I’ve critiqued before. So I’ll try to be brief.

Goff’s thesis is that the reason we can’t solve the “hard problem” of consciousness—how neural impulses can be converted into subjective experience—is that we’ve been groping around in the wrong area: neuroscience.  The solution, he suggests, is to recognize the possibility of panpsychism.

Click on the screenshot to read the piece:

Now neuroscientists have pretty much accepted that consciousness is a product of the brain, for we can alter consciousness or eliminate it or even split it by various brain manipulations or psychological tricks. And we’re starting to understand the neural correlates of consciousness: the parts of the brain that give rise to subjective experience—”qualia”. But that is the “soft problem”, and doesn’t address how physiological and neurological processes produce the sensation of consciousness.  As Steve Pinker said in a superb popular article on consciousness in Time magazine:

The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

I do think it’s a genuine scientific problem, and I can hazily glimpse how it might be solved in the future, but right now it’s a mystery. And it’s a mystery that has buttressed a lot of woo, ranging from religion (“See, science can’t tell us everything. Sometimes you must invoke God”) to Goff’s panpsychism.

Here’s how Goff sets up the problem:

We have made a great deal of progress in understanding brain activity, and how it contributes to human behavior. But what no one has so far managed to explain is how all of this results in feelings, emotions and experiences. How does the passing around of electrical and chemical signals between neurons result in a feeling of pain or an experience of red?

There is growing suspicion that conventional scientific methods will never be able to answer these questions. Luckily, there is an alternative approach that may ultimately be able to crack the mystery.

Well, maybe science will never be able to answer the question, but that may mean that the problem is simply hard, or that its solution is so counterintuitive that, like quantum mechanics, our brains aren’t capable of grasping it. But it doesn’t mean that we need to invoke the numinous. Too many real empirical solutions have been overlooked in the past (lightning and disease, to name two) because a problem was hard, tempting people to punt to a woo-ish explanation.

Goff does the requisite invocation:

I believe there is a way forward, an approach that’s rooted in work from the 1920s by the philosopher Bertrand Russell and the scientist Arthur Eddington. Their starting point was that physical science doesn’t really tell us what matter is.

This may seem bizarre, but it turns out that physics is confined to telling us about the behavior of matter. For example, matter has mass and charge, properties which are entirely characterized in terms of behavior — attraction, repulsion and resistance to acceleration. Physics tells us nothing about what philosophers like to call “the intrinsic nature of matter”, how matter is in and of itself.

It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our scientific world view — physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.

I’m not sure, nor does Goff tell us, how panpsychism tells us what matter really is. All it seems to tell us is that all matter is conscious. He goes on:

It turns out, then, that there is a huge hole in our scientific world view — physics leaves us completely in the dark about what matter really is. The proposal of Russell and Eddington was to fill that hole with consciousness.

The result is a type of “panpsychism” — an ancient view that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of the physical world. But the “new wave” of panpsychism lacks the mystical connotations of previous forms of the view. There is only matter — nothing spiritual or supernatural — but matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter “from the outside”, in terms of its behavior, but matter “from the inside” is constituted of forms of consciousness.

This means that mind is matter, and that even elementary particles exhibit incredibly basic forms of consciousness. Before you write that off, consider this. Consciousness can vary in complexity. We have good reason to think that the conscious experiences of a horse are much less complex than those of a human being, and that the conscious experiences of a rabbit are less sophisticated than those of a horse. As organisms become simpler, there may be a point where consciousness suddenly switches off — but it’s also possible that it just fades but never disappears completely, meaning even an electron has a tiny element of consciousness.

This argument is bogus on its face. Make the same comparison with metabolism, coded replication (DNA), or any other behavior or characteristic of organisms. Those are not continuous with nonliving matter: a rock doesn’t replicate itself faithfully, or metabolize, or seek food. Surely a minimal requirement for consciousness is some kind of neuronal network. I may be wrong, but emergent properties can arise with a certain degree of complexity. Humans can use symbolic language, mice can’t.

I can’t be arsed to dig into all the links Goff cites, but saying that mind is matter doesn’t solve the problem of what matter is, for we still don’t know what “mind” is! And so Goff passes on to how every bit of matter is conscious.

What panpsychism offers us is a simple, elegant way of integrating consciousness into our scientific worldview. Strictly speaking, it cannot be tested; the unobservable nature of consciousness entails that any theory of consciousness that goes beyond mere correlations is not strictly speaking testable. But I believe it can be justified by a form of inference to the best explanation: panpsychism is the simplest theory of how consciousness fits into our scientific story.

While our current scientific approach offers no theory at all — only correlations — the traditional alternative of claiming that consciousness is in the soul leads to a profligate picture of nature in which mind and body are distinct. Panpsychism avoids both of these extremes, and this is why some of our leading neuroscientists are now embracing it as the best framework for building a science of consciousness.

I am optimistic that we will one day have a science of consciousness, but it won’t be science as we know it today. Nothing less than a revolution is called for, and it’s already on its way.

Yes, his theory is untestable, but I’m not sure it’s even the simplest theory. After all, you could voice a simpler theory that “consciousness was bequeathed to us by God”. Further, the idea of a continuum of self-awareness from humans to photons is not only hard to accept, but is supported by no evidence at all. Yes, you could say that photons have a different kind of consciousness, or are only dimly aware of things, as is a bacterium, but, as Christopher Hitchens said, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

In the end, Goff fails in his task of explaining how panpsychism solves the hard problem of consciousness; he just avoids the problem by asserting that everything is conscious. Consciousness is simply an inherent quality of all matter. But the hard problem remains. From where does that consciousness arise? What properties of matter produce a sentient atom?

Goff’s unfounded speculations don’t belong in LiveScience because they’re not scientific speculations, but a form of unsubstantiated woo. When he tells us how he knows that matter is conscious, then I’ll pay attention.

h/t: Bill

The biology of sex differences in human brains and behaviors: a new book on “neurosexism”

March 31, 2019 • 9:00 am

For a while now I’ve written the occasional post about claims that there are no evolved and genetically based differences between male and female behaviors, brains, or hormones. This claim is based not on science but on ideology, stemming from the fear that if you show differences between men and women in these respects, you will somehow justify a biologically based sexism: that women are inferior to men in some ways and thus can be treated as subordinates.

This “blank-slateism” has also been applied to differences between ethnic groups and is often used to dismiss the entire field of evolutionary psychology—for the same reasons. The ideological denialism of differences between any groups rests on the premise that difference equals inferiority and justifies unequal treatment and bigotry.

Well, leaving aside the possibility that genetically based trait differences may reveal better rather than worse performance of marginalized groups, the ideological dismissal of evolutionarily-based sex differences in brains and behavior is misguided. First, it’s based on the deeply problematic assumption that although differences between male and female bodies may well have evolved (most likely via some form of sexual selection), that cannot be true of the brain.

Yet there’s been equal time for divergent selection on both bodies and brains of males and females, so why did one (bodies) evolve sex differences and the other not (brains)? There’s no a priori reason to assume that brains are immune to divergent evolution, for sexual selection is based on female preference and male behavior, both of which presumably act through the brain. If bodily differences evolved by sexual selection, how can we rule out brain differences, especially those affecting sexual behavior? (The same holds if sexdifferences evolved by divergent natural selection.)

The answer to the ideological “sexes-must-be biologically-identical” argument is simple. We should, and must, give both sexes (and all ethnic groups) complete equality of opportunity as a moral principle—for such equality is the foundation of a good society. Average differences in behavior are just that—average differences—and do not justify differential treatment of individuals, whether their groups be based on sex or ethnicity.  Somehow the “blank slaters” can’t grasp that simple principle.

To be fair, blank-slaters base their ideology on biological determinism being used in the past by bigots to suppress groups, but let us remember that blank-slateism remains not science but ideology, an ideology that is not only biologically misguided but whose fears can be overcome by changes in morality. And, indeed, changes in morality are overcoming it. Steve Pinker has documented the increasing moral equality of the sexes in his last two books.

Still, blank-slateism with respect to male and female brains persists, most prominently in the books of Cordelia Fine, an Australian philosopher and psychologist who has made a career out of debunking the idea that men and women are biologically different. I’ve now read both of her books on this topic, Delusions of Gender and Testosterone Rex, and found them a mixed bag.  Fine is good at debunking bad research, as well as the implicit sexism of some researchers who work on brain biology, but is loath to admit, much less admire, the good research that’s shown differences in both brain anatomy and behavior between men and women. In other words, her books are not works of science but of tendentious ideology. (See here, here, here, and here for my posts on her claims.)

It is, in my view, a bit of a travesty—indicating the unscientific blank-slateism that has infected science—that Testosterone Rex won the Royal Society’s Insight Investment Book in 2017. At the time I called it “not a bad book, but a biased book. It’s not a judicious work of science, but a polemic.”

The same problems that plagued Fine’s books now appear to resurface in a new book by Gina Rippon that makes the same “no-difference-in-brains” claim: The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain, recently out in the UK and soon to be released in the US under the title Gender and Our Brains: How New Neuroscience Explodes the Myths of the Male and Female Minds. Wikipedia describes Rippon as “professor of cognitive neuroimaging at the Aston Brain Centre, Aston University, Birmingham.”

Despite ample evidence for genetically based differences in male vs. female brain structure and behavior, the reviews of The Gendered Brain and interviews with Rippon have characterized the book as doing exactly what its title says: aiming to dispel the myth that there are average differences between male and female brains. (Those differences, by the way, may be and probably are be effected through hormonal influences on that organ, which may not produce obvious morphological differences, even though there is substantial evidence for such differences.) The book has received extremely favorable reviews in Nature and The Guardian, though the claims and uncritical approbation in those reviews raised red flags for me.

The review/interview in the Guardian, for instance, characterizes Rippon’s thesis as indicting socialization as completely responsible for sex differences in behavior. The “plasticity” argument is one common to biological ideologues:

The next question was, what then is driving the differences in behaviour between girls and boys, men and women? Our “gendered world”, she says, shapes everything, from educational policy and social hierarchies to relationships, self-identity, wellbeing and mental health. If that sounds like a familiar 20th-century social conditioning argument, it is – except that it is now coupled with knowledge of the brain’s plasticity, which we have only been aware of in the past 30 years.

My suspicion that Rippon’s new book (which I’ll read when it comes out in the U.S) is guilty of the same sins committed by Cordelia Fine, is awakened by the following review in Quillette. It’s by Larry Cahill, identified as “a professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine and an internationally recognized leader on the topic of sex influences on brain function.”

Click on the screenshot to read it:

I’ll give a few quotes from Cahill’s review, quotes that could apply to Fine’s works as well. The first paragraph pulls no punches in enumerating the book’s problems:

A book like this is very difficult for someone knowledgeable about the field to review seriously. It is so chock-full of bias that one keeps wondering why one is bothering with it. Suffice to say it is replete with tactics that are now standard operating procedure for the anti-sex difference writers. The most important tactic is a comically biased, utterly non-representative view of the enormous literature of studies ranging from humans to single neurons. Other tactics include magnifying or inventing problems with disfavored studies, ignoring even fatal problems with favored studies, dismissing what powerful animal research reveals about mammalian brains, hiding uncomfortable facts in footnotes, pretending not to be denying biologically based sex-influences on the brain while doing everything possible to deny them, pretending to be in favor of understanding sex differences in medical contexts yet never offering a single specific research example why the issue is important for medicine, treating “brain plasticity” as a magic talisman with no limitations that can explain away sex differences, presenting a distorted view of the “stereotype” literature and what it really suggests, and resurrecting 19th century arguments almost no modern neuroscientist knows of, or cares about. Finally, use a catchy name to slander those who dare to be good scientists and investigate potential sex influences in their research despite the profound biases against the topic (“neurosexists!”). These tactics work quite well with those who know little or nothing about the neuroscience. Here are some lowlights. . .

The “lowlights” include praising bad studies claiming to show no average differences between male and female brains, and misrepresenting good studies that do show such differences.

Here’s Cahill’s summary of the known science and of the book.

So are female and male brains the same or different? We now know that the correct answer is “yes”: They are the same or similar on average in many respects, and they are different, a little to a lot, on average in many other respects. The neuroscience behind this conclusion is now remarkably robust, and not only won’t be going away, it will only grow.

The book is downright farcical when it comes to modern animal research, simply ignoring the vast majority of it. The enormous power of animal research, of course, is that it can establish sex influences in particular on mammalian brain function (such as sex differences in risk-taking, play behavior, and responses to social defeat as just three examples) that cannot be explained by human culture, (although they may well be influenced in humans by culture.) Rippon engages in what is effectively a denial of evolution, implying to her reader that we should ignore the profound implications of animal research (“Not those bloody monkeys again!”) when trying to understand sex influences on the human brain. She is right only if you believe evolution in humans stopped at the neck.

And everyone who isn’t a sexist or a racist, and is objective about the data, eventually arrives at this conclusion:

After almost 20 years of hearing the same invalid arguments (like Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day” waking up to the same song every day), I have come to see clearly that the real problem is a deeply ingrained, implicit, very powerful yet 100 percent false assumption that if women and men are to be considered “equal,” they have to be “the same.” Conversely, the argument goes, if neuroscience shows that women and men are not the same on average, then it somehow shows that they are not equal on average. Although this assumption is false, it still creates fear of sex differences in those operating on it. Ironically, forced sameness where two groups truly differ in some respect means forced inequality in that respect, exactly as we see in medicine today.

What he’s referring to is the neglect of women in clinical studies of medical interventions or drugs, which often show different outcomes in men and women. That’s based largely on biology rather than socialization, and shows differences between the sexes in bodies and their physiology. The best guess is that our brains will also show differences, and to deny that a priori as a possibility bespeaks a profoundly unscientific attitude.

Is there evidence for libertarian free will? Part 1.

March 3, 2019 • 11:00 am

I’ll try to put up two posts on this topic today as a single one would probably be too long, falling into the TL; DR category.

About two weeks ago, kvetching about the Templeton Foundation’s incursion into and corruption of philosophy and biology, I wrote about Dan Dennett’s criticism of Templeton. This came up when Dan reviewed a book by Alfred Mele,: Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will (2014). At the end of his review, Dennett “threw shade” on Mele for taking so much money from Templeton. (Mele responded, of course). But because Dan liked the book, and it’s short (less than 100 small pages), I went ahead and read Free. I’m going to ignore Templeton here and concentrate on Mele’s book. I’ll just say that Mele’s conclusion, that contracausal free will may be pervasive, is clearly something Templeton would throw money at.

I wasn’t impressed with the book. Mele does point out a few alternative interpretations to experiments like Benjamin Libet’s which apparently show that some decisions can be predicted with accuracy of up to 80% by brain-scanning as far as ten seconds before the actor is conscious of having made a decision. Some of Mele’s criticisms are useful, while others are not. Mele’s main objection is that the real decisions we make are based on rational pondering and consideration, and these decisions are very different from the simple binary choices predicted by brain-scanning studies. To that I reply “so what”?

First, it’s possible that you can engage in complex reasoning before making a binary decision, and I can think of lab experiments that could see if those decisions could also be predicted by brain scanning. (It would be harder, since training the subject to do the experiment beforehand would be more difficult.) More important, “reasoning” and “cogitation” are just complex computer processes that go on at various levels in many species of animal, and why should those be independent of the laws of physics? The input may be complex, but the output is still limited.

Mele’s conception of free will in this case is similar to that of Dennett’s in Freedom Evolves: free will is the fact that when an agent arrives at the ability to ponder different scenarios, cogitate, and then make a “rational” decision, that process constitutes free will, regardless of whether (as Dennett believes), such decisions are purely deterministic. This is a form of compatibilist free will, in which “free will” is conceived as something that is perforce compatible with determinism. (By “determinism, I mean “obeying the laws of physics, including purely indeterministic phenomena like quantum mechanics”.)

But Mele actually considers two forms of free will. The one above he calls “modest free will”, defined as “having the ability to make—and act on the basis of—rational informed decisions when you’re not being subjected to undue force” (p. 78).

The other form, which is libertarian, he calls “ambitious free will”, requiring what he calls “deep openness”. In this form of free will, says Mele, “free agents have open to them alternative decisions that are compatible with everything that has already happened and with the laws of nature” (p. 79). This is clearly contracausal or “you-could-have-done-otherwise” free will.

Which one does Mele adhere to in his book? Well, it’s not clear, since he lays out different varieties at the outset, and the last paragraph of his book implies that science has refuted neither of the two versions described above. He’s wrong about “ambitious” free will.

Mele:

So, you ask, does free will exist? If you mean what I call modest free will, I say yes without hesitation. If you mean what I call ambitious free will, I say the jury is still out. In fact, this point about the jury is the main moral of this book. Scientists have most definitely not proved that free will—is an illusion. For all we know now, ambitious free will is widespread. If it isn’t, at least modest free will is.

That’s a pretty weaselly statement. What I would say is this: “For all we know now, ambitious free will—contracausal, you-could-have-done-otherwise free will is NOT widespread.” That’s because such free will requires violating the laws of physics in such a way that at a given point in time, with every molecule in the same place and everything leading up to a “decision identical”, you could have decided differently. Now the only thing that could create such different behavior is quantum mechanics, and we don’t know if quantum mechanics can even play a role in human decisions. And even if it can, that is not “free will” in the sense that an agent you, would be making the decision instead of an indeterministic movement of a particle.  If you are going to promulgate the idea that at a given point in time you can really make “alternative decisions”—decisions that you (rather than an errant electron) decide, then you are suggesting that humans can flout the laws of physics. This is magic.

While some people punt and say that you can have contracausal free will without flouting those laws, I don’t see how that’s possible. Such an attitude is profoundly anti-naturalistic given that are brains are made of molecules.  Compatibilist free will? “Yes”, of course, because you can define anything as free will so long as it doesn’t disobey the laws of physics. But the form of free will to which most people adhere is a contracausal free will, as surveys show. True, philosophers adhere to compatibilist free will, but I’m not so much concerned with what academic philosophers think about the topic than I am about what the average person thinks about free will. It’s just like I’m more concerned with what the average believer thinks about God than what Sophisticated Theologians™ like Karen Armstrong think about God.

But Mele’s “ambitious free will” does flout the laws of physics, and in that sense the jury, which is physics, has already decided against it. I am in fact surprised that Dan liked Mele’s book so much given that Mele leaves open the possibility of contracausal free will, something that Dan rejects.

There are other problems with Mele’s book as well. He uses as evidence for free will the fact that in some “identical” situations, such as Milgram’s famous “shock the subject” experiments, not everybody behaved the same way. Some people continued to up the fake shocks as the subject pretended to be in pain, while others desisted. In Zimbardo’s famous “prison experiment”, some of the guards were nasty to the prisoners, while others weren’t. As Mele argues:

If situations really did completely determine behavior, then everyone in the same situation would act the same way. But only some of the guards acted cruelly; others didn’t. This pessimistic view of decisions isn’t true to the facts.

Mele does this over and over again, ignoring the fact that the “situation” isn’t the same for everyone: the subjects have different genes, different life experiences, and had different experiences of the prisoners or subjects of these experiments. To say that determinism and a lack of free will predicts that everyone will act the same in an experiment is to evince shoddy thinking. And that, in fact, is the subject of the next post in this series, describing an experiment that Mele uses in his book to support “ambitious” free will.

Unlike Dan, I can’t recommend Mele’s book. It is tendentious, regardless of whether Templeton had a hand in funding the research (there’s a long and butt-kissy acknowledgement to the Templeton Foundation at the beginning). In fact, while reading it I felt that I was stuck in Fulsome Prison.

 

Matthew on The Infinite Monkey Cage

January 30, 2018 • 10:00 am

Matthew was too reticent to tell me that he appeared on yesterday’s Radio 4 episode of The Infinite Monkey Cage with Robin Ince and Brian Cox. The 30-minute episode is “The Teenage Brain”, and you can download it by going to the site below (click on the screenshot). Besides Matthew Cobb (professor of Zoology at the University of Manchester), we have Scottish comedian Rory Bremner and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist at University College London.

The topic:

 Stomping off to your bedroom, being embarrassed by your parents, wanting to fit in with your peers and a love of risky behaviour are all well known traits associated with our teenage years, exasperating parents through the ages. But new research into dynamic changes going on in the brain during these key years has revealed that it’s not just hormones that are responsible for these behaviours. Could a better understanding of what is going on during these formative years not only help teenagers themselves, but inform our education system and even help prevent many of the mental health problems that often begin during adolescence?

As usual, the show is a mixture of good-natured banter, comedy, and hard science:

h/t: Kevin

E. O. Wilson: confused about free will

January 12, 2018 • 11:45 am

An article in the September 14 Harper’s, “On Free Will (and How the Brain is like a Colony of Ants”), gives an excerpt from Wilson’s book released that year, The Meaning of Human Existence.  In the piece and the passage below, Wilson appears to be a sort of compatibilist, but I find his discussion so confusing that I’m not quite sure what he’s trying to say. But his message is pretty clear: we can act as if we have a kind of free will, and those who deny it are doomed to insanity and a “deteriorating mind”.  The main bits:

The power to explain consciousness, however, will always be limited. Suppose neuroscientists somehow successfully learned all of the processes of one person’s brain in detail. Could they then explain the mind of that individual? No, not even close.

. . . Then there is the element of chance. The body and brain are made up of legions of communicating cells, which shift in discordant patterns that cannot even be imagined by the conscious minds they compose. The cells are bombarded every instant by outside stimuli unpredictable by human intelligence. Any one of these events can entrain a cascade of changes in local neural patterns, and scenarios of individual minds changed by them are all but infinite in detail. The content is dynamic, changing instant to instant in accordance with the unique history and physiology of the individual.

Because the individual mind cannot be fully described by itself or by any separate researcher, the self — celebrated star player in the scenarios of consciousness — can go on passionately believing in its independence and free will. And that is a very fortunate Darwinian circumstance. Confidence in free will is biologically adaptive. Without it, the conscious mind, at best a fragile, dark window on the real world, would be cursed by fatalism. Like a prisoner serving a life sentence in solitary confinement, deprived of any freedom to explore and starving for surprise, it would deteriorate.

While Wilson admits earlier in this short piece that the conscious mind “cannot be taken away from the mind’s physical neurobiological system”, he’s not as firm about the physical/deterministic nature of free will as he is about consciousness.

Note in the second paragraph that Wilson cites “chance” in support of free will. If by “chance” he means “things that are determined but we can’t predict”, then that’s no support for the classic notion of free will: the “you could have chosen otherwise” sort.  If he’s referring instead to pure quantum indeterminacy, well, that just confers unpredictability on our decisions, not agency. We don’t choose to make an electron jump in our brain.

From what I make of the third paragraph, his message is that because we are a long way from figuring out how we make behavioral decisions, we might as well act as if we have free will, especially because “confidence in free will is biologically adaptive.” Yet there are powerful arguments that at bottom our decisions are based on physical circumstances. We don’t understand the complete physics of a billiard game, either, but we don’t pretend that the balls have free will in where they roll.

As for free will and confidence in it being biologically adaptive, well, that’s an assertion without evidence. I often ponder where our feeling of agency comes from, and have come up with three or four evolutionary scenarios in which our feeling of being agents who can make free choices could have given our ancestors a reproductive advantage. But these are all pure speculations, and none are testable. Wilson is simply wrong in asserting with confidence that our feeling of agency is known to be an adaptation.

Finally, I have no confidence in free will, even though, like all people, I feel as if I have agency. But if I think about it for a millisecond, I know that I could not do otherwise than what I do—nor can anybody else. Has that made me fatalistic, subject to a deteriorating mind? I don’t think so!  This is just the old argument, one made by Dennett and other compatibilists, that we need to believe in free will because without such a belief, society will fall apart. Well, that’s what they said about religion, too, but they were wrong. (Look at Scandinavia.)

I don’t deny for a minute that all of us feel that we make real choices, and could have made different choices. But feeling that and believing that it’s true are different matters. We can still feel that we have agency, but at the same time realize that we don’t—and society will survive.  It’s members will be like me, and though you may say that’s not such a good thing, I contend that a nation of determinists is not a nation doomed.

And now physics has decreed that I walk over to the South Indian Studies department to give a professor a book to take to my friends in India. The real Moby-Dick in a few hours!

h/t: Greg Mayer

Canadian conjoined twins share brain connection—and experience

November 10, 2017 • 1:15 pm

These 11-year-old conjoined twins, Krista and Tatiana Hogan, are joined at the head, and, not only that, share part of their brains. As The Walrus reports (in a somewhat hyperventilating article), they each have a brain, but there’s a neural bridge between the thalamus of each brain (the part of the brain that relays sensory signals and is important in consciousness). This apparently makes them share each other’s sensations, so that what one sees or tastes is at least partly shared with the other. When one body is tickled, the other twin laughs. There’s even a shared mental connection—some sharing of thoughts, and we can’t conceive of what that’s like. Nobody else in the world, nor any pair of twins, has this kind of cerebral connection.

They weren’t expected to survive, and even if they did they were expected to be in a vegetative state. They’ve defied those expectations, but aren’t in fantastic health: one has heart problems because she pumps blood to her twin’s brain, and they also have epilepsy and slowed intellectual development. Still, they’re doing pretty well given the situation.

Here’s a 45-minute CBC documentary made when the twins were seven: an absolutely fascinating look at a neurological anomaly, but also at the resilience of two girls in the face of an inoperable condition. They’ll be head to head for life. (If one of them dies, the other will follow shortly). It’s also a one-off opportunity to study the transfer of experience, but of course if you were the parent, or the girls, would you want them probed and examined by a bunch of scientists?

As The Walrus says, this raises questions about what “self” means, but that’s a bit of an exaggeration. The real question is “how is one’s sense of being a ‘self’ modified when your brain is connected to another brain?”

This is a great documentary, and if you have a spare 45 minutes, I recommend that you watch it. Seriously. Some might think they’d be grossed out by this, but give it a try. I was heartened and fascinated, and there’s a fair bit of science in there, too.

h/t: Allison

A philosophical catfight in the TLS: Dennett vs Papineau

August 3, 2017 • 11:45 am

Matthew called my attention to a series of pieces in the Times Literary Supplement (free online) in which materialist philosophers Dan Dennett (Tufts) and David Papineau (King’s College London) battle it out over a number of philosophical issues.

It began with a fairly negative review by Papineau of Dan’s newest book, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds, a book I own but haven’t yet read.  In the review, called “Competence without comprehension,” Papineau takes issue with Dan’s idea that consciousness is an illusion; with his notion that humans are unique among animals in being able to comprehend some of why they do what they do (i.e., running away from predators, which he thinks humans can “comprehend” but zebras cannot, for the latter react from instinct or a form of learning that doesn’t involve “comprehension”); and with Dan’s idea that memes are self-selecting units of culture that can spread independently of “the role of human understanding in cultural exchange” (I have to admit I don’t understand this last criticism). Papineau ends his review this way:

Dennett has done much over the years to show how fruitful this strategy [an appreciation for natural selection creating “designoid” features and a rejection of “greedy reductionism”] can be. But perhaps his good reductionism has its own blind spot. He might not be a greedy reduc­tionist but he is arguably a very grudging one. He is constitutionally disinclined to give credit to the powers of the mind, even when it is due. Throughout this book, he constantly plays down the ability of agents to knowingly manage their destinies, and instead portrays them as shaped by processes that unfold unthinkingly.

It is no accident that Daniel Dennett has gained such a wide readership. He is always fun to read. He has few equals at explaining complex topics, and his positive theories are never boring. But his public would do well to take those theories with a pinch of salt. They are by no means the latest scientific insights that he cracks them up to be. The real source of his views is rather a set of peculiar philosophical assumptions that he acquired more than half a century ago.

Well, Dan couldn’t let that rest, and so he and Papineau had a debate in a subsequent issue of the TLS, a debate that comprises a brief introduction by Tim Crane, the TLS philosophy editor, and then two rounds of back-and-forth letters between Dennett and Papneau.

I have to admit that even though this is in a popular book-review magazine, I find a lot of it either above my pay grade or about things that can’t be resolved. (Does a zebra understand why it’s fleeing from a lion? How can we know?). But I suspect that many readers who are more philosophically educated or inclined than I will enjoy the exchange.

But I do have an opinion on memes: I think they’ve added absolutely nothing to our understanding of culture. I’ve discussed some of my reasons in a book review in Nature, and since I wrote that in 1999 my opinion hasn’t changed. “Memetics” is a weak analogy to natural selection that adds nothing except tautology to our view of how human culture evolves. Memetics boils down to this: memes spread because they have properties that allow them to spread. The rest, and the important bit, are the reasons why some aspects of culture spread and others go extinct. You can analyze all that without ever mentioning the concept of memes.

But I digress again; here’s Dan’s widely viewed TED talk on consciousness, designed to show you that just because we’re all conscious doesn’t mean that we’re authorities on how it works. I have to admit that in the series of changing pictures at the end, I did really horribly spotting the changes.