Crash Blindness in an Inveterate Apple User: A Case Study

This paper is fantastic. Abstract:

“We report a brief case study of Crash Blindness in a long-term user of the Macintosh computers. The patient (LB), an otherwise normal, healthy adult, shows an almost complete blindness to software crashes on Macintosh computers. The degree of the pathology appears to correlate with the version of the operating system. An MRI shows an atypical lesion in the right frontal cortex, which is the only neurological pathology. A comparison is made with other operating systems to show the specificity to the Mac OS. The findings are discussed with respect to theories of software ‘Holy Wars’.”

Check out the lesion :-)

Hackers take on Scientology

This is amusing.

Yet more on consciousness

“Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenon; it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it.”

—Stuart Sutherland in the International Dictionary of Psychology (1989)

(Hat tip: Tom.)

Hot off the press: consciousness not epiphenomenon

According to Stuart Hameroff:

“… evidence suggests backwards time effects occur in the brain.  Quantum entanglement apparently depends on seemingly backward time effects which, as unconscious quantum information, can potentially rescue consciousness from the unfortunate position of illusory epiphenomenon.”

From Hameroff’s latest, The brain is both neurocomputer and quantum computer, in Cognitive Science [pdf].

What do you make of this?

Petition against Scientology

Just found this petition:

Without compromise to freedom of thought or expression, the teachings and beliefs of Scientology, Dianetics and science-fiction writer L Ron Hubbard must never be legally be accepted as a religion – regardless of any recent EU decision to the contrary.

We consider the ‘Church’ of Scientology is an exclusive business venture that by prohibiting access to scientifically-proven psychiatric therapy and medicine is effectively enslaving its believers.

You know what you have to do.

God, love, etc

I’m having an interesting email exchange with a colleague about life and love, etc. We I seem to be converging on reiterating the idea that often it doesn’t make sense to ask if a concept exists but rather what properties someone’s variant of a concept has. “Love” and “God” are labels for something; people don’t invent names for no reason, so the correct question is whether two people mean the same thing when they use the word “love”. By “meaning” here I mean a very organic set of feelings as well as linguistically expressible stuff. I can see how this extends to God. So the question is again not whether a god exists, but rather what properties someone’s conception of God has. But still even here you could imagine that someone’s God concept could be horrendously self-contradictory. Schopenhauer argues quite convincingly that one concept of a Christian God is unacceptable:

“… According to this doctrine, then, God created out of nothing a weak race prone to sin, in order to give them over to endless torment. And, as a last characteristic, we are told that this God, who prescribes forbearance and forgiveness of every fault, exercises none himself, but does the exact opposite; for a punishment which comes at the end of all things, when the world is over and done with, cannot have for its object either to improve or deter, and is therefore pure vengeance. So that, on this view, the whole race is actually destined to eternal torture and damnation, and created expressly for this end, the only exception being those few persons who are rescued by election of grace, from what motive one does not know. … Putting these aside, it looks as if the Blessed Lord had created the world for the benefit of the devil! It would have been so much better not to have made it at all.”

I can’t recall if Schopenhauer takes the last step and declares the existence of the god he describes impossible, and in general who’s to say that a worst case characterisation is not true. The same can be said of love, and occasionally one hears mention of the impossibility of “true love”, or how it’s all “just” the action of various polypeptides, or how it just evolved to trick us all into reproducing, etc. These ideas could be correct.

One problem with discussing this stuff is perhaps solvable by making explicit the different ways psychological things are described in general. I like the idea of personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. So at the personal level you focus on feelings, people are in control of their actions, you focus on what it means to be a person, holistically. At sub-personal levels of explanation, upon which the personal level is built I suppose, you can talk about what influences (in a strong determininistic sense) behaviour and feelings. It’s crucial to make clear at what level of explanation one speaks to avoid making category mistakes (and more importantly to avoid making others miserable).

To elaborate further, I imagine it will never be the case that a therapist would sit a client down and say:

“Ah you’re depressed today. Well we inhabit a deterministic universe so a set of experiences beyond your control has caused you, together with genetic predispositions, to feel the way you do and to behave the way you have, including, thankfully for you, your inevitable decision to come to me today where I will (because of my life history and genome) tell you what I’ve just told you and begin a set of interventions where I’ll make you believe you’re in control of what you’re doing but actually that belief, that feeling of conscious choice, is just an unavoidable epiphenomena resulting from the deterministic but random process of evolution which brought us all here.”

This could, on some level, be a true characterisation of what’s going on, but the problem is that we feel we are in control regardless of what the physics says, and our language, including word-emotion relations, evolved accordingly. Back to love again, many of us have a pure and beautiful notion of love which comes mainly from feelings and can’t adequately be put into words and certainly cannot be adequately expressed by any (necessarily sub-personal) scientific theory.

This reminds me of empirical work. Laing, Phillipson, and Lee’s (1966) book Interpersonal Perception is on the very subject of trying to determine empirically if two people have a shared set of ideas about each other. They use questionnaires with questions like:

How true do you think the following are?

1. She understand me
2. I understand her
3. She understands herself
4. I understand myself

How would SHE answer the following?

1. “I understand him”
2. “He understands me”
3. “I understand myself”
4. “He understands himself”

How would SHE think you have answered the following?

1. She understand me
2. I understand her
3. She understands herself
4. I understand myself

The idea is that by comparing people’s answers you can predict stuff about their relationship. I imagine this sort of thing could be helpful to determine if two people or a group of people have compatible notions of love, God, life, the universe, and everything. But perhaps the more natural way to discover such things is the good old traditional technques of meeting people and having a wee chat…

More on religion and reasoning

Found some responses over here to an earlier post.  Some randomly chosen comments:

• “within the constructs of any decent form of logic, and within any reasonable scientific framework, god does not exist and pretending he does is stupid and corrupts that framework.”
• “On the topic of Leprechauns I’m agnostic.  The true believers of Leprechauns can’t be upset at me, because I still believe it’s *possible* Leprechauns exist. And of course, the a-leprechaunists can’t take issue with me because I don’t *really* believe in them.”
• “If it is *obviously* false, then it is demonstrably false, and you should have evidence to *prove* it is false. There is no evidence that the earth was created 4,000 years ago. BUT there is plenty of evidence that it was created 4 billion years ago, proving the first assertion to be false.”

I love reading these sorts of debates: more evidence, I reckon, of reasonable individual differences in reasoning!

Editing God from the bible

There are some fun bits in the bible.  I’d like to collect them together and add the result to English Lit courses.  For instance:

“… the lips of an adulteress drip honey and her tongue is smoother than oil, yet in the end she is as bitter as wormwood, as sharp as a two-edged sword. Her feet tread the downward path towards death, the road she walks leads straight to Sheol. She does not mark out the path to life; her course twists this way and that, but she is unconcerned.” (Proverbs 5:2-6)

(I love honey.)

Should we rid the mind of God

The video of the debate between Alister McGrath, Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University, and Peter Atkins, Professor of Chemistry at Oxford University, is now online over here.

Religion and reasoning style (updated)

The atheists I have spoken to seem to believe that argumentum ad ignorantiam is a valid inference rule. Roughly it says that if there is no evidence for p, then p is false. Some other athiests, on the other hand, believe that there actually is evidence against the existence of a God.

Agnostics, on the other (third?) hand, seem to believe that if there is no evidence for p, then p is “unknown (at this time)”. They also seem to argue that there’s something funny about the “God Exists” proposition, for instance bringing it closer to the Christian notion of a God would make them more likely to flip to false. I claim.

I’m intrigued now if people’s religious views are associated with how they interpret reasoning tasks. There’s a little questionnaire called the Characteristics and Beliefs Inventory (CABI) which seems to ask all the right questions. See e.g. Meyer and Chow (in press?) for an example of its use.  This could be combined with a battery of tasks which have multiple interpretation.