Missing Shades of Grue

"there's too many philosophers in Washington"

"there's too many Bushes in Washington"

Remarks by the President at Georgia Victory 2006 Rally

I stumbled across the Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad yesterday. A popular poet in Iran during the fifties and sixties, she died at age 32 in a 1967 car accident. She was born in a middle class family, studied painting and sewing, and later film. In 1963 she wrote and directed the film The House is Black. Her work is remarkably emotional given the constraints of Iranian society in the time in which she wrote. Notwithstanding those constraints, she was both feminist and social commentator. In the example below, I particularly appreciate her refusal to tie love to social conventions.

Conquest Of The Garden

That crow which flew over our heads
and descended into the disturbed thought
of a vagabond cloud
and the sound of which traversed t
he breadth of the horizon
like a short spear
will carry the news of us to the city.

Sometimes a guy smoking a big cigar is a big dick, and sometimes he is just a guy. Here's a big dick, which you would have to be to attack Michael J. Fox for his campaign ad in support of candidates that support stem cell research. One might have concerns about stem cell research, but surely it's clear that Fox is sincerely concerned about the research--and for good reason. Maybe Limbaugh is off his meds, or maybe he's just exploiting one person's tragedy to call attention to himself. But in any case, he's not just a guy smoking a cigar.

I think, therefore I am. I think not. It turns out that I don't exist. This comes as news to me, but I'm not about to argue with the internet, or the US Census Bureau.There are 53,944 Rudys and 480 Garnses. But no Rudy Garns. I knew I was insignificant, but this hurts. On the other hand, if there were a number of Rudy Garnses, how many of them would be me?

How Many of Me - Census Search

Terry Eagleton reviews Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion. He is bothered by Dawkin's religious devotion to attacking religion.

Apart from the occasional perfunctory gesture to ?sophisticated? religious believers, Dawkins tends to see religion and fundamentalist religion as one and the same. This is not only grotesquely false; it is also a device to outflank any more reflective kind of faith by implying that it belongs to the coterie and not to the mass.

Eagleton argues that Dawkins doesn't fairly portray religion, that he doesn't understand religion properly, and so presents a strawman, a radicalized version of religion, to be rejected. But Eagleton's own notion of God and Christianity, which he thinks should excape Dawkin's diatribe, is highly stylized and in need of clarification.

For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is. Nor is he a principle, an entity, or ?existent?: in one sense of that word it would be perfectly coherent for religious types to claim that God does not in fact exist. He is, rather, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever, including ourselves. He is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing. God and the universe do not add up to two, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects.

In what sense is God a person? What is it to be a condition of possibility? What is the answer to why there is something rather than nothing? Eagleton's religion has many of the same goals as Dawkin's strawman.

Salvation for Christianity has to do with caring for the sick and welcoming the immigrant, protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not a ?religious? affair at all, and demands no special clothing, ritual behaviour or fussiness about diet.

It strikes one that all the positive elements of Eagleton's Dawkins-proof Christianity can be achieved without the cloak of religious belief, ritual, or mythology. Would Dawkin's object?

LRB | Terry Eagleton : Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

How can someone as far removed from reality as Joe Fischer be expected to responsibly hold public office? From the Community Recorder:

Fischer said Kentucky law should not protecting a person's sexual orientation from employment discrimination.

"It's OK to fire someone if they're gay," Fischer said. "I favor the current laws as they stand now. Sexual orientation shouldn't be a protected class. The classes protected now; race, gender and religion, are protected because they can't be changed. Obviously, people can change their sexual orientation, some psychologists have said so."

Fischer, who also works as a corporate attorney, said homosexuals haven't been the target of discrimination.

"Historically, homosexuals haven't been discriminated against like women and blacks. They haven't suffered."

Can we fire legislators who are so clearly misinformed and hateful? People can change their sexual orientation? The American Psychological Association clearly endorses the conclusion that sexual orientation is not a choice. And even if it was a choice, should someone be fired because of their sexual orientation? How about party affiliation? How about religious beliefs? And then there's the ridiculous statement that gays have not suffered workplace discrimination. One doesn't have to look far (a history book? a newspaper?) to see how homophobic America has been and continues to be and how those attitudes take a toll in the workplace.

Linda Klembara's response is also reported.

"I'm an Episcopalian and very religious," Klembara said. "My religious faith would never allow me to condone prejudice against any group of people. My belief is, when the Lord told us to love one another, he meant it. I wouldn't want anyone fired because they were gay."

A noticeable difference in tone and tolerance. I would add only that one doesn't need to be religious to see there something hateful and morally wrong with Fischer's position. In fact, it's Fischer's misdirected religious commitments that he uses to support his blantant bigotry and hateful political agenda. Hello American Taliban. Using religion to make moral points is obviously not working. But that's politics.

UPDATE: "...race, gender and religion, are protected because they can't be changed"?? One can change gender with the right effort, but surely one's religion is not a permanent condition. What could Fischer be thinking here?

And "Obviously, people can change their sexual orientation, some psychologists have said so." How about "Obviously, people cannot change their sexual orientation, some psychologists have said so." Psychologists say lots of things; we should have independent reason to trust their veracity beyond the fact that they confirm what we want to believe. (See the APA link above.) With logic like this, would you want Fischer for your lawyer, or representative, or even neighbor?

Hat tip to BluegrassReport.org

All Things Considered (NPR) had an interesting story on autism.

A growing number of scientists believe autism may be caused by a lack of coordination in the brain.

"Some people think that autism is a disruption of social function," says Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "But I think it's much more widespread. It's a disruption of many kinds of behaviors that require good cortical coordination."

NPR : Autistic Brain Has Difficulty Coordinating

V.S. Ramachandran makes a few brief comments on consciousness at Seed Magazine.

I suggest that a new set of brain structures evolved during hominid evolution, turning the output from more primitive sensory areas of the brain into what I call a "metarepresentation." I think they edited, enhanced and packaged sensory information into more manageable chunks, used for juggling symbols and language. And most important, they made the link to meaning--whereby the sensory objects we perceive evoke multiple parallel implications in our minds. For example, an apple has potentially infinite nuances of meaning for humans, such as baking, keeping the doctor away, tempting Eve. But for a lemur, apple has no "meaning"; it's simply identifiable as food.

I believe the anatomical structures involved in creating this metarepresentation include the inferior parietal lobule, Wernicke's language comprehension area and the anterior cingulate cortex. Find out how these structures perform their job and we will have figured out what it means to be a conscious human being.

One has to wonder whether the apple looks like or tastes like something to the lemur despite the fact (if it is a fact) that it has no meaning.

Seed: On My Mind: V.S. Ramachandran

I came across this phenomenon recently and shared it with my classes.

A new study in a British medical journal finds a link between the relative length of a woman's index and ring fingers and her athletic prowess.

The story I stumbled across claimed that the relative length of the ring finger was a function of the amount of testosterone washing through the system in the first pre-natal surge.

in 1998, British researcher John Thomas Manning suggested that the difference between male and female digit ratios stemmed from prenatal exposure to the hormones testosterone and estrogen. If the digit ratio -- which is established by the time a fetus is 9 weeks old and remains constant throughout a person's life -- reflects the level of that exposure, Manning reasoned, then it might serve as a marker for other conditions -- including predisposition to many diseases -- thought to be affected by prenatal hormone exposure.

But recent twin studies apparently suggest to some scientists that it's due mostly to the influence of genes.

Studying twins allowed his team "to look at the relative influences of genes and environment on finger ratios," Spector wrote via e-mail. "We found that 66 percent of the differences between people were due to genes -- i.e., heritable -- with no real influence of common or womb environment."

According to Spector, his study confirms that digit ratio is important in reflecting females' athletic prowess -- a finding already established among males. But, he wrote, "The twin study casts some doubt on the original testosterone in utero theory, as we would have expected to see an effect of the fetal environment influencing our twin studies. Our results suggest genes and not hormone levels are the predominant force in shaping sporting potential, and finger length is just a marker."

And then there is the question on what all this means. Maybe nothing.

Finger Forecasts - washingtonpost.com

A wondefrful list of online philosophy videos can be found at A Brood Crumb.

Bored by movies, and don't feel like reading a book? You can watch philosophical and other interesting videos on web.

Online videos of philosophical lectures ? A brood comb

Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Lindsay M. Oberman recently published an article in Scientific American ("Broken Mirrors: A Theory of Autism") in which they discuss the possibility that mirror neuron dysfunction and a distorted salience landscape may be implicated is autism disorders. They conclude:

Our two candidate theories for explaining the symptoms of autism--mirror neuron dysfunction and distorted salience landscape--are not necessarily contradictory. It is possible that the same event that distorts a child's salience landscape--the scrambled connections between the limbic system and the rest of the brain--also damages the mirror neurons. Alternatively, the altered limbic connections could be a side effect of the same genes that trigger the dysfunctions in the mirror neuron system. Further experiments are needed to rigorously test these conjectures. The ultimate cause of autism remains to be discovered. In the meantime, our speculations may provide a useful framework for future research.

Both hypotheses are interesting. I particularly like the suggestion that genes malfunctioning early in the developmental schedule might trigger a cascade of neural dysfunctions that lead to the symptoms of autism. Identifying the array of dysfunctioning neural mechanisms is an essential steps in tracing back the root causes of autism and related disorders.

Mixing Memory posts a discussion of an unpublished paper on autism and television ("Does Televsion Cause Autism?"). I've heard of a proposed link between increased television viewing and increased incidence of autism, but I haven't pursued it. But someone is looking into it, apparently. Here's the MM overview:

One of the explanations for the increase in the incidence of autism spectrum disorders over the last few decades is that the genetic predisposition requires some sort of environmental trigger, and that the prevalence of this trigger has increased during the period that has seen an increased incidence of autism. Waldeman et al. hypothesize that television is that trigger.

Why do they pick television? They list four reasons, which, when taken together, suggest television as a candidate for the environmental trigger. The reasons include the fact that television viewing has increased among children over the last few decades (due largely to increased access to cable television), the connection between television watching and ADHD, and behaviors consistent with television watching among "at risk" infants. That's only three, right? I saved the last for a sentence of its own, because once again, it's just odd: autism rates are extremely low among the Amish, who don't watch any TV at all (you have to have electricity to watch TV).

But, of course, lot's of things are correlated with the increased incidence of autism. We really need some story about how TV viewing would be or could be a trigger for the disorder. Increased TV viewing is also part of the contemporary onslaught of a more complex and highly stimulated lifestyle that developing children experience. I've seen nothing that isolates TV from all the other sources of overstimulation we might consider. (And even my suggestion the overstimulation mght be involved is only a hunch!)

UPDATE 10/21/06: The TV/Autism article ("A Bizarre Study") was discussed in Time this week with the appropriate skepticism.

Could there be something to this strange piece of statistical derring-do? It's not impossible, but it would take a lot more research to tease out its true significance. Meanwhile, it's hard to say just what these correlations measure. "You have to be very definitive about what you are looking at," says Vanderbilt University geneticist Pat Levitt. "How do you know, for instance, that it's not mold or mildew in the counties that have a lot of rain?" How do you know, for that matter, that as counties get more cable access, they don't also get more pediatricians scanning for autism? Easterbrook, though intrigued by the study, concedes that it could be indoor air quality rather than television that has a bearing on the development of autism. On a more biological level there's this problem, says Drexel Univeristy epidemiologist Craig Newschaffer: "They ignore the reasonable body of evidence that suggest that the pathologic process behind autism probably starts in utero" ? i.e., long before a baby is born.

Salon has posted an interview with Richard Dawkins, whose latest book The God Delusion presents a rather scathing attack on religion. There have been a number of books challenging the reasonableness of religion lately, probably a reaction in America to the current administration's abuse of religious zealotry for political ends. Dawkins is unrelenting. I can appreciate his efforts, but I doubt his tone will take him very far. This passage isn't so bad, however.

What is so bad about religion?

Well, it encourages you to believe falsehoods, to be satisfied with inadequate explanations which really aren't explanations at all. And this is particularly bad because the real explanations, the scientific explanations, are so beautiful and so elegant. Plenty of people never get exposed to the beauties of the scientific explanation for the world and for life. And that's very sad. But it's even sadder if they are actively discouraged from understanding by a systematic attempt in the opposite direction, which is what many religions actually are. But that's only the first of my many reasons for being hostile to religion.

Salon.com Books | The flying spaghetti monster

Check out this campaign ad against Jim Walsh, who voted against federal funding for stem cell research. Is he a doctor? Is he a scientist? No. He's a politician trying to please his base, imposing religious beliefs (from which flow his/their unreflective moral values) on the rest of us. One of the better campaign ads I've seen. There are versions used against other unreflective moralistic politicians as well.

Our Cog Neuroscience group is reading the Baron_Cohen book on autism, in which he makes a concerted effort to distinguish between male and female brains. I'm skeptical of his thesis that autistic children are largely high systematizers and low emphathizers (primarily males). I don't see that being systematic and being empathetic are opposed in the manner he suggests. High emphathizers (primarily females, he suggests) seem to me to be very systematic in their approach to understanding the mind (emotions) of others and in analyzing social relationships. My hunch is that it is the animate-inanimate distinction that plays into autism-like disorders: in an effort to systemize and understand the behavior of other things, does the child distinguish living/thinking things, which lend themselves to one kind of nonmechanical explanation about their behavior (the intentional stance), from nonliving/nonthinking things, which lend themselves to more mechanical explanations (the physical stance)? Here's a study that lends some support to my hunch.

Young children with autism appear to be delayed in their ability to categorize objects and, in particular, to distinguish between living and nonliving things, according to a breakthrough study by researchers at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. The paper has been published in the Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities and the results could provide a cognitive explanation for one of the characteristics of autism: the inability to recognize the goals and motivations of others.

You can read more about the study atScience Blog: Crucial deficit in children with autism.

In the latest NYRB John Searle reviews Nick Humphrey's new book Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness. I haven't read Humphrey's book yet, so I won't comment on the content of Searle's review. He concludes:

It seems to me Humphrey makes a fundamental error from the beginning. He thinks that the solution to our problem has to be in the form of an equation, mind = brain, rather than in a causal account. Why should we make this assumption? There are lots of explanations in science and philosophy that are not in the form of equations. In fact, equations are rather rare in biology. Think of the germ theory of disease or the theory of evolution. What we are interested in, in these cases, are causal mechanisms, not equations. What causes disease symptoms? What is the causal account of the evolution of human and animal species from simpler forms of life? And now, what causes consciousness?

I'm still waiting to see what Searle's "brains cause qualitative subjectivity" explanation looks like.

The New York Review of Books: Minding the Brain

The New Yorker is presenting a video of Steve Martin's interview with Roz Chast. Both are very funny. We don't get to see Steve Martin play stright-man very often. And we don't get to see Roz Chast much at all.

The New Yorker: Steve Martin Interviews Roz Chast

Stephanie Bird has written a nice introductory article on the current state and significance of neuroethics.

If we recognize that the neurobiological events that lead to higher brain function and behavior result from complex interactions of genetic and environmental factors, it is unreasonable not to acknowledge the potential role of these factors when we assess responsibility. They ought to be considered. Among the challenges for neuroethicists will be to help us decide the degree to which various factors should be considered and to help us understand how we should conceive of personal autonomy. As a society, we must continue to discuss and debate the appropriate role for new neurobiological findings in determining culpability. With so much at stake, it is clear that we need to proceed with caution and with our best judgment when it comes to incorporating neuroscience into decisions regarding when individuals should be held accountable.

Science & Spirit

Some links to interesting papers on neuroprosthetics can be found over at Neurodudes.

Gualtiero Piccinini asked whether the mind is in the head. We were not to consider questions of content, but only whether so-called mental states, processes, or systems could be understood to extend beyond the biological nervous system. Amazingly 11 of 17 respondants got the wrong answer.

Brains: Extended Mind Poll