Missing Shades of Grue

From Michelle Malkin yesterday:

The clairvoyants at the Associated Press have already released their report on the Bush speech, written in the past tense--a speech which isn't scheduled to happen until 8pm EST tonight.

Amazing!

FORT BRAGG, N.C. - President Bush on Tuesday appealed for the nation's patience for "difficult and dangerous" work ahead in Iraq, hoping a backdrop of U.S. troops and a reminder of Iraq's revived sovereignty would help him reclaim control of an issue that has eroded his popularity.

In an evening address at an Army base that has 9,300 troops in Iraq, Bush was acknowledging the toll of the 27-month-old war. At the same time, he aimed to persuade skeptical Americans that his strategy for victory needed only time--not any changes--to be successful.

"Like most Americans, I see the images of violence and bloodshed. Every picture is horrifying and the suffering is real" Bush said, according to excerpts released ahead of time by the White House. "It is worth it."

It was a tricky balancing act, believed necessary by White House advisers who have seen persistent insurgent attacks eat into Americans' support for the war--and for the president--and increase discomfort among even Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Not so amazing if excerpts were released ahead of time. What is amazing is that Bush can keep the confidence of the American people by rehashing old slogans and repeating the same bullshit about the connection between the war in Iraq and the war on terror.

So, after the speech Malkin summarizes:

834pm EST. Real-time reaction. Just finished watching the speech with my kids. Good speech. Important messages:

-We're winning.
-We have more work to do.
-America is grateful to the troops...and so is the commander-in-chief.

Amazing! (How nice to be engaged in a war you can enjoy with your kids.)

Michelle Malkin | REPORTING BUSH'S SPEECH...BEFORE HE DELIVERS IT

Mario Coumo, in today's NYT, recommends a strategy for Bush on stem cell research:

To extricate himself from an untenable position, the president should start by following the successful pattern established in other areas of dealing with the clash of religious and political questions, including the law concerning abortion. The right of true believers to live by their own religious beliefs will be guaranteed: no one will be compelled to use stem cell research or its products, just as no one will ever be compelled to have an abortion. And the nation will respect the right of believers to advocate for changes in our civil law that correspond with their own view of morality.

But our pluralistic political system adopts rights that arise out of consensus, not the dictates of religious orthodoxy; and if such rights are adopted - approving abortions or financing stem cell research on leftover embryos - they will be the law of the land, even if religious dissenters, through their tax dollars, end up helping to pay for things that they find anathema. Every day Americans who abhor the death penalty, contraceptives, abortions and war are required to pay taxes used in part for purposes they consider offensive. That is part of the price we pay for this uniquely successful democracy.

Of course, this is a reasonable response. But it presupposes that Bush and the religious conservatives value a pluralistic political system. Unfortunately, they identify such systems with moral relativism, as does the Pope. Respect for a diversity of values and acknowledgement of nuanced moral distinctions are not part of their worldview, and unreflective religious articles of faith are considered equivalent to reflective moral conclusions. Coumo is properly suggesting that a wider consensus is important when deciding matters of public policy. But that reverses the order of things for the religious conservative, who insists that religious belief dictates morality, which then dictates public policy.

Not on Faith Alone | New York Times

David Brooks is now rummaging through his basement to find something to write about. And so this morning's opinion piece sounds a longing for a past that Brooks has placed in storage (but should have tossed out earlier).

If you read Time and Newsweek from the 1950's and early 1960's, you discover they were pitched at middle-class people across the country who aspired to have the same sorts of conversations as the New York and Boston elite.

The magazines would devote pages to the work of theologians like Abraham Joshua Heschel or Reinhold Niebuhr. They devoted as much space to opera as to movies because an educated person was expected to know something about opera, even if that person had no prospect of actually seeing one.

The newsweeklies would have six-page spreads on things like Abstract Expressionism. There was a long piece in 1956 in Time, for example, about the Kitchen Sink School of British painters, as well as analyses of painters who are not exactly household names, like Charles Burchfield and Stanton Macdonald-Wright.

That doesn't happen today. And it's not that the magazines themselves are dumber or more commercial (they were always commercial). It's the whole culture that has changed.

Patricia Churchland review Michael Gazzaniga's new book, The Ethical Brain, in the latest edition of American Scientist.

At a time when intellectuals may feel cowed by the heavy hand of the fervently religious, it is a relief to see that Gazzaniga neither shies away from controversial opinions nor waters them down so as to offend nobody. At the same time, he is respectful of moral convictions that do not line up with his own. His opinions are delivered not as dogma but as part of an ongoing reflection and conversation, in which seeing all sides of a moral problem is itself regarded as a moral achievement.

An overview of Gazzaniga's argument can be found in his Scientific American Mind article (with Megan Steven), "Neuroscience and the Law." Gazzaniga argues that "the brain is determined, but the person is free" and that responsibility is not a neurobiological property, but instead a "human construct" that should be considered in a social context. In the Scientific American article he writes

Neuroscience will never find the brain correlate of responsibility, because that is something we ascribe to people, not to brains. It is a moral value we demand of our fellow rule-following human beings. Brain scientists might be able to tell us what someone's mental state or brain condition is but cannot tell us when someone has too little control to be held responsible. The issue of responsibility is a social choice. According to neuroscience, no one person is more or less responsible than any other person for actions carried out. Responsibility is a social construct and exists in the rules of the society. It does not exist in the neuronal structures of the brain.

But Churchland is concerned about the "dualistic legal fiction" of the determined brain and free (responsible) person. Her objection is that neuroscience is not irrelevant to questions of guilt or innocence.

...although responsibility is assessed in a social context, the capacity to learn social norms and the capacity to act in accordance with them are matters of individual brain function. It is precisely because an important difference exists between a normal brain and the brain of someone who is seriously demented or unreachably deluded that such people are not considered responsible for crimes they might commit. Moreover, judicial institutions rely on threat of punishment to deter. The late maturation of the prefrontal cortex (with reference to neuronal density, synaptic density, dendritic length and myelination) means that the brains of mature adults are critically different from those of young children?which almost certainly accounts for the child's more modest ability to appreciate the consequences of his or her choices and to resist temptation.

I haven't finished reading the Gazzaniga book myself yet, but it looks to something I should consider for either my class next fall or for the CNS discussion group.

American Scientist Online | Brain-Based Values

In experiments at Duke University, rhesus monkeys were able to match the number of voices they heard with videos representing the same number of animals making calls.

The finding indicates that numerical perception is truly an abstract concept and not just a function of a particular sense, said the researchers.
...
In their experiments, the researchers played rhesus monkeys the sound of natural "coo" calls made by unfamiliar monkeys, either with two or three animals making the calls. At the same time they gave the monkeys a choice to look at video images of either two or three monkeys. The researchers found that the monkeys overwhelmingly chose to look at video images that matched the number of monkeys they were hearing. This result is consistent with previous studies that both animals and infants tend to look preferentially at a visual stimulus that matches the sound they are hearing.

The tests were done with either two or three non-rhesus monkeys making calls. The subjects viewed videos of two or three animals and showed a preference for videos displaying the same number of call-makers as calls heard. So representations of the number are more abstract, not limited to a single sensory modality (what was seen or what was heard).

What about human infants?

According to Jordan, their research team is planning future studies that will use the same experimental design to explore whether human infants have the same cross-modal numerical ability. "The experiment with monkeys has given insight into the evolutionary origins of cross-modal number representations," Jordan said. "And studies with infants will tell us whether this ability applies to infants before they have acquired language."

It would also be interesting to know--with monkeys and with infants--what the limits of cross-modal representation are and how they develop. Can human keep track of more voices/faces than monkeys? And does the skill develop similarly in both?

Monkeys understand numbers across senses | Science Blog