Slate and Saletan Are Messing With Your Mind

Want to blow your brain today? Help Slate out with their historical retrospective here (it’s short and a cool way to remember bits of history you’d forgotten about). Then read Will Saletan’s outstanding and extensive discussion of the science of memory. I’m suddenly feeling very PKD.

The Horror of Dementia

A brutal exploration of what Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s dementia can wreak upon a person and the people trying to care for them:

“[Nancy, Andrea Gillies' mother-in-law] had one foot through the looking glass and she couldn’t make those two worlds – dementia reality, and normal life – gel at all,” [Andrea] Gillies says. “It was really quite science fiction in a way. Complete strangers coming into the house and saying ‘How are you today? Shall we go and have a walk?’ Obviously your reaction is going to be ‘What are you talking about? I’ve no idea who you are.’ She would awake in the morning not knowing who the man in the next bed was and she was afraid. Strangers would come into her bedroom and hand her clothes she had never seen before.”

The raw horror of Alzheimer’s is laid out by Gillies in this sharp examination of the comprehensive disintegration of her mother-in-law’s brain and sense of self. “If I had to pick one catch-all descriptor for Nancy’s life in the last few years it would be misery. Profound misery, unceasing and insoluble. She knows that something is wrong, very wrong, but what is it?” she writes. “Every day for her is spent in an ongoing quest to put things right.”

I just hope Terry Pratchett can make his case before the end.

Artificial Brains are Still Far from Plausible

Cold water in the lap of anyone hoping for the Singularity sometime this century:

The simulations of Modha and Markram are about as brain-like as one of those plastic brains that neuroscientists like to keep on their desks. The plastic brain has all the parts that a real brain does, it’s roughly the same color and it has about as many molecules in it. OK, say optimists, the plastic brain doesn’t actually perceive, emote, plan or decide, but don’t be so critical! Give the researchers time! Another analogy: Current brain simulations resemble the “planes” and “radios” that Melanesian cargo-cult tribes built out of palm fronds, coral and coconut shells after being occupied by Japanese and American troops during World War II. “Brains” that can’t think are like “planes” that can’t fly.

In spite of all our sophisticated instruments and theories, our own brains are still as magical and mysterious to us as a cargo plane was to those Melanesians. Neuroscientists can’t mimic brains because they lack basic understanding of how brains work; they don’t know what to include in a simulation, and what to leave out. Most simulations assume that the basic physical unit of the brain is the neuron, and the basic unit of information is the electrochemical action potential, or spike, emitted by the neuron. A typical brain contains 100 billion cells, and each cell is linked via dendrites and synapses to as many as 100,000 others. Assuming that each synapse processes one action potential per second and that these transactions represent the brain’s computational output, then the brain performs at least one quadrillion operations per second.

Computers are fast approaching this information-processing capacity, leading to claims by artificial-intelligence enthusiast Ray Kurzweil and others that computers will soon not just equal but surpass our brains in cognitive power. But the brain may be processing information at many levels below and above that of individual neurons and synapses. Moreover, scientists have no idea how the brain encodes information. Unlike computers, which employ a single, static machine code that translates electrical pulses into information, brains may employ many different “neural codes,” which may be constantly changing in response to new experiences.

Thank you, John Horgan, for saying something that makes sense. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider A.I.s as thought experiments or understand how intelligent robots will alter our labor systems or consider the fact that our minds will likely be enhanced/augmented by minor bits of tech within the next fifty years – those ideas are still critical to developing a better system of ethics and law than we have now. What Horgan’s point does mean, however, is that the whole discussion of the Singularity and CEV and all that other nonsense is about as ethically significant as worrying about time-travel or terraforming. The technology too many steps removed for us to make reasonable guesses or assumptions, so it’s best to focus on the immanent issues instead.

Bad Habits

You know how right when you get your bad habit under control, you let yourself indulge just a little bit as a reward and, BAM, you’re off the wagon? According to the SciAm, that’s because your brain is over estimating how much self-control you actually have. Northwestern researchers tested this on a group of smokers:

“Restraint bias offers insight into how our erroneous beliefs about self-restraint promote impulsive behavior,” says lead author Loran F. Nordgren of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. “It helps us to understand puzzles in addiction research such as why recovered addicts often relapse after they have broken free of withdrawal symptoms.” The lesson? When you’ve made progress avoiding your indulgences and that little voice in your head tells you it’s okay to start exposing yourself to temptation again­—ignore it.

Monkey Thought

Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale, talks about monkey minds:

Body Dysmorphic Disorder Alters the Brain

UCLA researchers believe it could be a result of an altered, dysfunctional, or damaged visual processing center:

Now researchers at UCLA have determined that the brains of people with BDD have abnormalities in processing visual input, particularly when examining their own face. Further, they found that the same systems of the brain are overactive in both BDD and obsessive-compulsive disorder, suggesting a link between the two. The research appears in the February issue of the journal Archives of General Psychiatry.

“People with BDD are ashamed, anxious and depressed,” said Dr. Jamie Feusner, an assistant professor of psychiatry and lead author of the study. “They obsess over tiny flaws on their face or body that other people would never even notice. Some refuse to leave the house, others feel the need to cover parts of their face or body, and some undergo multiple plastic surgeries. About half are hospitalized at some point in their lifetimes, and about one-fourth attempt suicide.”

What triggers BDD is largely unknown, as is the strength of the connection between BDD and environmental factors like bullying or sexualized pop culture. The important take away here is that the BDD brain stops perceiving reality the way a typical person would; a BDD sufferer literally sees themselves differently in the mirror than the rest of us. What is frightening is that because we largely don’t know what triggers the shift, be it genetic predisposition or  a self-reinforcing mental state or something else entirely, is that we don’t really know how to cure it.

BDD is particularly troubling because it is based in the part of the brain that deals with normative judgments, meaning that, by and large, the problems of which it is hyper-aware are almost entirely socially constructed. Even if the problem is rooted in a physical or chemical problem, the norms selected by society are what become over-amplified and dangerous. It is very troubling and very sad, because it seems that regardless of what the standards of beauty are, those with BDD believe they do not live up to them and take dramatic measures to try and correct the problem. I hope research like what is being done at UCLA helps us at least understand the mechanism so that we can work to mitigate its effects.

["Why the mirror lies" - Science Daily]

Kasparov and A.I.

Garry Kasparov, the famed chess master who was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue, on chess, A.I., and the human mind. I was caught in particular by this creative idea:

In what Rasskin-Gutman explains as Moravec’s Paradox, in chess, as in so many things, what computers are good at is where humans are weak, and vice versa. This gave me an idea for an experiment. What if instead of human versus machine we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in León, Spain, and we called it “Advanced Chess.” Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.

["The Chess Master and the Computer" - NY Review of Books, h/t MR]

The Overmind of Avatar

James Cameron’s Avatar really is as good and as awful as everyone says it is. The visuals are eye-melting and captivating. The plot is hackneyed. Charlie Jane Anders, Annalee Newitz, and George Dvorsky cover nearly every point worth covering and strike the perfect tones in their review/critiques. All three, however, left out one problem with the film that drove me crazy: the sentient ecology of Pandora. Spoilers follow.

Both Dvorsky and Anders briefly mention this curious aspect of the Pandora ecology:

Dvorsky – Okay, some credit where credit is due. Given that the story is, whether I liked it or not, a Gaianist treatise, I did appreciate how Cameron achieved the sense of interconnectedness between the characters and Pandora. The ability of the Na’vi to link with other animals in a symbiotic fusion was very cool, as was the ability to upload conscious thought through the very fabric of the planet.

Anders – The Na’Vi are animalistic and in tune with nature, and they’re good-hearted in direct proportion to their simplicity. They worship a mystical world-mind and its messengers, magic happy tree spirits that connect them to their ancestors — through their magical native-people hair. (Their tree/ancestor religion turns out to have a scientific basis, to be fair.)

Early on in the very long Avatar, we are given clues that everything on Pandora is literally connected. All the animals possess neural connection jacks (appendages that end in tiny, tentacle-like exposed nerve endings) that allow Na’vi to mentally command their mounts, effectively domesticating a creature in a matter of seconds. The plant life is shown to have similar properties, both by the actions of the Na’vi (who connect their exposed dendrites to dangling vines) and by the observations of human scientists. The human scientists, lead by Dr. Grace “Sigourney Weaver” Augustine, suspect that all the plant life on Pandora is connected the way neurons in the brain are connected, with certain trees acting as ganglion or memory banks. Over the course of the film, we are confronted with the possibility that the flora is involved in a kind of biological cloud-computing.

If the system were merely passive, something the Na’vi were taking advantage of, Cameron’s neglect his own ecological neurology concept would be forgivable. But it isn’t. Pandora is possessed by a spirit, Eywa, that exists within this planetary network. Grace, before her death, acknowledges the reality of Eywa. Furthermore, Eywa demonstrates some form of active decision making, in that she must be asked to defend herself at the behest of the Na’vi and then answers that request in the form of total ecological rebellion against the human incursion. So not only is Pandora a planet-wide neural network, it is also, apparently sentient.

This thing is called a "Hammerhead Titanothere"

And yet the biggest payoffs we get from a sentient planet in the film are hammer-headed rhinos bashing through exo-suits (an admittedly awesome payoff) and a mind-transfer from paraplegic human body to lithe, Na’vi body for Jake Sully. I am aware of how cool those two things are, but when they are done by a sentient planet with an external, independent (?) biosphere, one begins to realize things are able to get way more awesome than hammer-headed forest rhinos fighting robots (I can’t believe I wrote that).

Imagine the following: halfway through Avatar, Dr. Grace Augustine and her forgettable team of boffin-stereotypes discover that just as the plants on Pandora exhibit features similar to a nervous system, the animal life exhibit features similar to an immune system. Perhaps they discover that, in one of the Pandoran creatures, the immune system works not by identifying and destroying the invading disease, like a human’s; instead a Pandoran immune system captures and reprograms individual disease agents and turns them into double-agents. Just a few double agents weaken the disease sufficiently to allow the immune system to obliterate it. No antibodies, but a few conversion agents get the job done. Instead of a disease giving a creature an auto-immune disorder, the creature’s immune system gives the disease an auto-pathogenic disorder. Extrapolate that to the Na’vi and their benevolent acceptance of just a few humans into the fold. What if Jake Sully’s entire magical conversion experience was really an immune response from Pandora itself?

And that’s only one crazy idea I came up with just now. How a sentient ecological system would respond to an invading species or what kind of thoughts it would think are questions that I wanted Avatar to ask, but it didn’t. My only consolation is that James Cameron is definitely going to make a sequel and when he made a sequel to Terminator, it was better than the original in almost every way. Keep your fingers crossed for Avatar 2: The Eye of Eywa.

The Substrate of Consciousness

Athena Andreadis’ article in h+ about the transhumanist fear of biology in general and their underestimation of just how complex and powerful biological systems is deliciously blunt:

And it came to me in a flash that many transhumanists are uncomfortable with biology and would rather bypass it altogether for two reasons, each exemplified by these sentences. The first is that biological systems are squishy — they exude blood, sweat and tears, which are deemed proper only for women and weaklings. The second is that, unlike silicon systems, biological software is inseparable from hardware. And therein lies the major stumbling block to personal immortality.

After an interesting start, Andreadis wanders off into the territory of questioning other aspects of immortality and makes more than a few errors in logic. To more fully consider her argument, we need to understand how the mind/consciousness can be understood in relation to the brain/body.

Among futurists, there seem to be three options for how a person’s consciousness exists in relation to the physical mind.

1. Software: A person’s active consciousness, personality, and memories can be downloaded onto a different substrate, such as a computer hard-drive or other digital memory source.
2. Hardware: A person’s active consciousness, personality, and memories reside in the brain’s physical substrate of neurons. The mind is emergent from this organic matrix and inseparable.
3. Embodied: A person’s active consciousness, personality, and memories reside in a brain that is interwoven and inextricable from the body in which it resides. When you lose a hand, it’s not just your body that changes, you as a person change.

Andreadis discounts option one as an impossibility or, if anything, a process that results in a mental clone that would become different the moment it attained consciousness. I agree with her, if “mind uploading/downloading” is possible at all, in any way, is not a method for immortality. The rest of her article moves between interpretations two and three, using one or the other as it fits her argument. Mostly that’s fine, for her purposes hardware and embodiment are generally the same.

The problem with Andreadis’ article is that this is actually an argument against immortality, not, as it seems initially, an analysis of the complexities of keeping the mind alive indefinitely. Most frustrating is Andreadis’ reliance on the flaw that doesn’t assume “perfect method,” when discussing the ethics of an argument. When she critiques constructions of the brain “in silico” that is, in an artificial body or with artificial neurons, there might be a loss of “pingbacks” and/or “empathy.” This argument is equivalent to saying, “manned flight won’t work because what if we build a plane with wings that fall off or aileron cables made of silly putty?” It presumes a level of technological ineptitude that is ridiculous for ethical considerations. When arguing the ethics you do not say, “Thing X is unethical because a broken or incomplete version of thing X would cause problems Y and Z.” That isn’t an argument, it’s a technique and a distraction.

Even more frustrating, and particularly disappointing from Andreadis, who is eyeballs-deep in transhumanist lit, is her final paragraph, which repeats tropes of the anti-immortalists that have been readily rebutted.

Instead of refuting or critiquing the rest of Andreadis’ argument, I’d just like to forward my own. For a moment, let’s forget all the other enhancements and modifications transhumanists and technoprogressives support and posit, and instead just consider keeping the mind healthy and alive indefinitely. Based on the current trends in science, I largely think that the human body can be maintained indefinitely through purely organic/biological means. The problem is aging, and Aubrey de Grey has me convinced we can take steps to fix or at least slow those problems. Furthermore, I believe progress will be so slow in that field that societal norms and our relationship with life expectancy will adjust to prevent the societal upheaval or existential ennui Andreadis fears.

As for the hardware/embodiment issue, I would still posit that mind transplantation is possible if three criterion are met. If any one of these is impossible, I would argue ethical brain transplantation is impossible.

1. A brain can be severed from one body, taken out, and placed into another (either organic or artificial) without any degradation in brain matter and with all connections necessary for immediate function (blood circulation, involuntary muscle control, immuno-suppression) working.
2. Embodiment happens slowly in a controlled environment. Senses would have to be eased back “on,” control of the body would have to occur in stages, like recovering from paralysis. I imagine body transplantation would happen this way automatically, given the complexity of the re-wiring going on, but if not, it would probably need to be induced.
3. There are extant methods to ensure the legal personhood of a transplanted mind does not alter from body to body. Rights stem from the consciousness and personhood of the mind, not the physical substrate or its body.

In addition to these, there are the obvious requirements of consent on behalf of the transplantee and that the new body is not the result of some other crime (really Athena? de facto murder? No vat-grown or robotic bodies came to you as a possibility?). Number two is likely to be the most overlooked, but Andreadis’ emphasis of the mind’s link to the body is correct. A contiguous consciousness is already adapted to a changing body (aging, injury, exercise, operations, etc), but something as traumatic as a brain transplant would be, well, something with which a mind might need a bit more time.

But ideally, the transplant wouldn’t be necessary, because we’d be able to maintain our bodies as they are, preventing aging internally through a variety of biological modifications to the wetware of the human being, from the DNA up.

Gender and Mental Differences

An IEET poll result:

I have a lot of qualms with this poll. I know it was done in good faith, but the IEET’s take on gender has always been slightly, mmm… irksome.  They write an essay on postgenderism on one hand and then, in reference to the poll question “If you could have a personal robot that did just one thing, what would it be?” post an image like this:

I just kind of shake my head at this sort of stuff now; I know it isn’t malicious and it isn’t worth the effort to work myself into the tizzy necessary to really get upset.

This poll on what IEET readers say about gender is really worth some further analysis, mostly because it’s split in such an interesting and, well, even way. If you round the numbers, you get a quarter of respondents going full bio, a quarter going full society, and half saying a mix, even if they don’t know what the mix is. Given the materialist critique underpinning Dvorsky and Hughes white paper Postgenderism, I would have guessed at least half of the poll takers would have gone with “mostly from biology.”

Anywho, the poll seemed as good excuse as any to put my thoughts on the matter out there. I’d love to sit down and just deconstruct the hell out of the question – which begs so many questions of its own I wouldn’t even know where to start – but instead I’ll just take it at face value and address the “spirit” of the question: how closely related are biological sex and performed gender? If one is born female/male, how much does that influence one’s feminine/masculine behavior?

In short: I have no idea. There is almost no way to test this concept empirically and, if there is, it hasn’t been done on a large enough scale or with enough rigor to merit serious scholarly attention. There are simply too many variables and a control sample is damn near impossible. All we have are anthropological comparisons of cultures and those provide tenuous connections at best. My intuition, however, is that all of biological influences combined (from actual genetic code up through average phenotypic expression), account for less than a third of male/female behavior as such.

In particular, the question is focused on mental processes (the specific, redundant mention of “emotions” is odd, given that emotions are a mental process, but I digress) so in that consideration, I would argue less than 5% biological influence. Again, I have zero evidence to back this up, besides lived experience. Then again, that’s better than some crap science you see out there, so I’ll trust my instincts. The thing is, I have met so many people with so many varied ways of behaving, that to say “females generally act X way and males generally act Y way” would actually be more difficult and more confusing. The less influence biological sex one grants over people’s behavior, the more actual, observed behavior makes sense.

Mental processes are so heavily influenced by environment, life experience, and nuanced fluctuations in genetics that even identical twins have very different mental lives and behaviors, despite growing up with similar parents and the same genome. On the other side of the coin, opposite sex siblings, tend to have lots of similar behaviors and personality dispositions that are reflective of their parents’ behavior and personality. In both examples, the influence of genetics, both in general and the possession of an X or Y chromosome, seem to have far less influence than the social and environmental factors in a person’s life.

In that sense, I’d say the answer to the question is that the “apparent mental differences” between males and females are the result of observer error. As much as we are conditioned to perform within social norms, we are conditioned to observe based upon them, hence the tenacity of norms and their powerful influence. Sex is one of so many variables that it becomes largely inconsequential in a survey of genetic influences on conscious personality.