The most powerful of human senses is vision. For this reason, it is perhaps not surprising that that some of the most powerful stories of the human condition conceived by human storytellers involve tales of blindness. King Lear is such a story.
Ironically, one of the greatest fictional stories of the human condition -- the Genesis story (chs. 1-3) --- connects The Fall, not to blindness, but to sightedness. As Robert Alter explains in his translation of Genesis, succumbing to desire and "lust," the primordial humans, Adam and Eve, ate the fruit of a tree ('that it was lust to the eyes and the tree was lovely to look at") in the Garden of Eden, "[a]nd the eyes of the two [Adam and Eve] were opened, and they knew they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves and they made themselves loincloths." Through sightedness, they acquired knowledge: by the word of the serpent, knowledge of good and evil. But that is not the entire story. Sightedness is a consequence of failing to observe a god's commandment ("You shall not eat from it, and you shall not touch it lest you die.") With their condition of sightedness, Adam and Eve are expelled from a world of perfection and forced to till the soil to survive in a world of imperfection and scarce resources. Generations of jealousy, murder, and deception ensue. Hence, The Fall.
King Lear flips the Genesis story. Lear is, like much of mankind, fallen. Among his catalogue of failings, he solicits flattery. One who flatters offers insincere praise. One who solicits flattery is arguably involved in a pleasing form of self-deception. And self-deception is a form of blindness, the condition of which Lear suffers. Soliciting flattery from his two eldest daughters, Lear is pleased, and rewards them with a share of his kingdom as he prepares to withdraw from ruling. His youngest daughter, Cordelia, offers him only a sincere expression of her undying love, but not flattery. Lear cannot see her genuine love. Because of Lear's blindness, Cordelia is expelled from Lear's kingdom and flees to France. We have Genesis inverted: Man expelled from god's kingdom because he failed to observe the commandment of a "superior" and consequently, he "sees"; generations of deception ensue his failure to please his superior; by contrast, in Lear, we have a man who controls a human kingdom suffers a blinding, deceptive condition in the form of self-flattery, and expels his daughter, who seems wiser in her young years than her elder father, from his kingdom because she fails to please her father.
The Earl of Kent endeavors to salvage the relationship before it is too late, but Lear tells Kent, "Out of my sight," and Kent responds, "See better Lear, and let me still remain the true blank of thine eye." But Lear cannot distinguish genuine love from insincere forms of adulation. Oblivious to the conspiracy of his family and others around him, murder and suicide follow. In Genesis, blindness is a blessing; in King Lear, it is a curse.
The parallel story within the story of the Earl of Gloucester features a father who cares for his bastard son and is deceived by his true son, Edmund, to believe that the bastard Edgar is out to kill him. Gloucester takes up the cause of Lear and is declared a traitor by Lear's eldest daughters and their husbands. One husband, the Duke of Cornwall, gouges out both of Gloucester's eyes, leaving him completely blind. Where King Lear is the blind victim of self-deception, Gloucester is the blind victim of another's deception.
For both of these "blind" elders, Shakespeare awakens them with their other senses. Gloucester is offered assistance by a man who has been a tenant on his properties. Gloucester rejects the aid, and the tenant explains, "You cannot see your way." Gloucester replies, "I have no way and therefore want no eyes. I stumbled when I saw." We never heard a similar admission from Adam in Genesis. Remorseful that he mistakenly believed his bastard son Edgar intended him harm, Gloucester adds, "O dear son Edgar, the food of thy abused father's wrath! Might I but live to see in thy touch, I'd say I had eyes again."
Lear later says to Gloucester, "Read," and Gloucester responds, "With the case of eyes?." Lear: "Oho, are you there with me? No eyes in your head nor no money in your purse? Your eyes are in a heavy case, your purse in a light, yet you see how this world goes." Gloucester: "I see it feelingly." Lear: "What, art mad? A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears. See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. . . . Get these glass eyes, And like a scurvy politician seem to see things thou dost not."
Sightedness leads the human condition to blindness, and to recover, survive and find justice we are compelled to rely on other senses -- touch, hearing, and feeling. Despite our blindness, we can still "see how this world goes." Gloucester dies, as do Lear's daughters, including Cordelia, one son-in-law, Cornwall, and Gloucester's son Edmund, and ultimately Lear succumbs. The survivors include Gloucester's bastard son Edgar, and the Earl of Kent, who successfully concealed himself from Lear and others in order to survive. There is no happy resolution here, but the decent characters who suffered not from blindness or self-deception do live to tell the tale.
So which is an affliction: sightedness or blindness? In Jose Saramago's novel Blindness, it is blindness that is an affliction and it is sightedness that is able influence justice and offer hope. The answer to the question will depend on the story an author wants to tell. For Shakespeare, blindness is likewise the affliction, but it is our other senses that enable us to see when our sight cannot. It should be no surprise that our greatest stories revolve around an appreciation and explication of the senses and feelings, which are at the core of our self. (See April 8, 2011 post (Damasio) and February 27, 2011 post (Hume)).
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Monday, August 15, 2011
James Gleick, The Information (2011)
If there is one book that touches so many of the posts in this blog, it is James Gleick's The Information. Covering much of the territory as the two books covered by the first two posts --- Seth Lloyd's Programming the Universe (August 17, 2009 post) and Charles Seife's Decoding the Universe (August 23, 2009 post) --- including the physical nature of information, the relevance of the laws of thermodynamics to information theory, as well as the exploits of World War II codebreakers and the story of information theory developed by Claude Shannon and others --- Gleick also covers the history of information storage and transmission from the beginning of recorded history to Google. And there is even a tip of the hat to John Banville's The Infinities, (see March 28, 2010 post, where I noted the novel's connections to Lloyd and Seife).
Much of The Information covers the history of the transmission of information from Sumerian times to the present. The media evolves from markings in the earth, to stone tablets, to paper wrapped in scrolls, to paper bound in book form, to rhythmic pulses of drums, to pulses of energy over electrical wire,to pulses of energy through the air. With Claude Shannon's revolutionary 1949 paper on a mathematical theory of communication, whose purpose was to address an engineering problem of "reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point," the way we look at information transmission changed. As described in the August 23, 2009 post on Charles Seife's Decoding the Universe, Shannon understood that information could be measured and quantized, which would enable him to determine how much information could be transmitted through a given channel of transmission. Semantics and meaning are irrelevant to this exercise, but the measurements were extremely useful in solving various communications problems associated with telephone communications at the time and has likewise been useful in developing greater bandwidth so more information is capable of transmission at a given time from one point to another. Shannon also understood that information was physical and was subject to the laws of thermodynamics just as other physical features of the universe, and particularly the second law pertaining to entropy. (See August 17, 2009 post). Shannon further addressed the problem of "noise" in the communication channel that corrupted or interfered with information in transmission, and a mathematical means for filtering out that noise to determine probabilistically that the information received was the same as the information sent.
I have previously complained that whoever said that entropy refers to disorder did the world a disservice. (See August 17, 2009 post), and Gleick confirms that much confusion has ensued over the centuries in our discourse over the "second law" of thermodynamics because of the way entropy has been characterized. For those looking for some clarity about the principle of entropy, Gleick is worth reading. As initially conceived, entropy was a measure of the unavailability of energy for work because of dissipation. It referred to a "thermodynamic condition," where previously separate hot and cold bodies (could be a liquid or gas) generated steam that could be converted to energy for work, but once the hot and cold bodies mixed, the mixture achieved a uniform temperature and the amount of energy in steam dissipated making it unavailable for work. The "thermodynamic condition" that previously existed was said to have "dissipated," and there was no more energy available for work. The phrase "disorder" entered the picture because the previous thermodynamic condition where hot and cold bodies were separated and were capable of generating energy for work was considered "orderly," and the homogeneous mixture that was not capable of generating energy for work was considered "disorderly." The second law of thermodynamics stands for the proposition that the universe "tends" to flow from the orderly to the disorderly. Ironically, the "orderly" was viewed as a "less likely" macrostate, and the "disorderly" was viewed as a "more likely" macrostate. Probability theory therefore enters this discussion, and what is more probable is a homogeneous state where we are less likely to find separate distinct states.
Shannon's insight was that entropy was relevant to all dynamic systems, not just thermodynamics. To the physicist, entropy is a measurement of uncertainty about the state of a physical system. To the information theorist, entropy is a measure of uncertainty about a message, where it is less clear that the message that was transmitted is the same as the message that was received. Ironically, notes Gleick, humans, contrary to physical laws, seem bent on curbing entropy, making the environment in which they live, more orderly. We build things; we compile; we categorize; we separate. As Schrodinger noted, living things feed on negative entropy. The second law contemplates a closed system, and earth is not a closed system. Life feeds upon energy and negative entropy leaking into the earth's system. Similarly, humans have proven creative in dealing with probabilities and discerning information from communications that are not certain in order to make messages more certain and information theory provides us tools to do just that.
In contrast to Seth Lloyd and Charles Seife's works on the same subject, Gleick spends more time chronicling the technological development of information transmission. As I read on, I found myself thinking about a different subject to which Gleick gives only passing attention: memory. The subject of memory has been a continuous visitor to this blog, (See posts of September 9, 2010, September 28, 2010, November 27, 2010, and April 8, 2011). We tend to think of memory in terms of an information storage device. A 500 page book stores two million bits of information. A computer's hard drive or a CD-ROM store vastly more bits of information. These devices do not store words or images. They store information that encodes for words or images, but they also contain an electrical means for retrieving those images and words that are encoded. Thus a system of retrieving memory is essential to memory, otherwise it has no utility. This is entirely consistent with the description of the human brain's "architecture of memory" as described by Antonio Damasio. (See April 8, 2011 post). By Damasio's reckoning, the architecture of memory he describes evolved because of storage capacity limitations on our ability to retain images of prior events. Instead of files of memories of images and words, memory is found in the connections between cells in the brain. (See post of November 27, 2010). Shannon's research influenced the development of cognitive psychology, Gleick reports, because it became useful in understanding the limitations on our capacity to receive and store information, short-term and long-term memory, pattern recognition, attention, and problem solving.
Gleick does briefly allude to another subject that has received attention in prior posts: the human mind's capacity for storytelling and providing an explanation for what we experience, along the lines described by Michael Gazzaniga in Human. (See May 22, 2011 post and June 12 and June 28, 2011 posts). Storytelling has to be linked to memory formation and retrieval. Recording information, --- on sticks, on walls of caves, whatever --- says Gleick, "served as aids to memory." Homer's poetry, composed and sung in a mnemonic meter, "served first and foremost as an aid to memory." I think storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memory, but the irony is that those same stories can lead to distortions of the memory we try to preserve. Information is corrupted and does not copy accurately.
We have heard about this same sort of phenomenon in the context of the genome. (See November 27, 2010 post). The ultimate information storage device is the cell. The cell stores genetic material --- genes --- each of which is comprised of bits of information. At some point in evolutionary history, the means for communicating the information stored in the cell through replication became possible. Information contained in one information storage device was moved to another information storage device. Gleick quotes George Gamow: "The nucleus of a living cell is a storehouse of information," adding that it is a transmitter of information from which stems the continuity of life. Gamow described the study of genetics as the study of "the language of the cells." Matt Ridley (see November 27, 2010 post) would agree. When biologists discovered redundancy in the codons of the cell, they realized it was nature's way of dealing with "noise" in the transmission of information by providing tolerance for errors in transmission.
At some point in human evolution, external storage of information became important for survival. Gleick describes some of the earliest known examples of external information storage --- Sumerian cuneiform tablets recording contracts, governance documents, and business transactions. Interestingly, these "documents" memorialize agreements --- matters of consensus between two or more persons. These forms of external information storage are undoubtedly significant to early economic and political socialization. Human development of external information storage devices is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. From tablets, to papyrus, to paper, to the construction of libraries, to film and vinyl media, punch cards, optical and magnetic media, and semiconductors. But external information storage did not begin with out species. As Holldobler and Wilson documented in the case of the social insects: certain ants secrete pheromones in soil for colony ants to follow leaders from the nest to food sources and back. (See post of November 4, 2009). Soil becomes an information storage device. Urination by animals sometimes serves a social purpose to mark territory. Trees, plants, and soil become an information storage device. But this merely confirms my point about storytelling serving as an aid to memory. Sometimes that storytelling is an accurate, but memorable account of what really happened --- and we call that non-fiction. And other times it is exaggerated and manipulated to make it memorable --- and we call that fiction.
I want to close with two quotes that Gleick recites that say a little bit about what this book is about. From Claude Shannon: "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning." As Gleick recounts, Shannon was not interested much in meaning, but just being able to determine that the information sent was exactly or approximately the same as the message received. And "approximately" was good enough for Shannon, because his mathematical algorithms would filter out the noise to provide a probability of what the information was that was sent. If this sounds like the quantum world that was described in Quantum (see previous post), well it is. And Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Godel's incompleteness theorem figure into information theory.
Gleick also quotes Seth Lloyd, whose book Programming the Universe, inaugurated this blog two years ago: "The more energy, the faster the bits flip. Earth, air, fire, and water in the end are all made of energy, but the different forms they take are determined by information. To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information." This is a statement about the physicality of information, a subject that I have alluded to many times over the past two years in various posts.
Much of The Information covers the history of the transmission of information from Sumerian times to the present. The media evolves from markings in the earth, to stone tablets, to paper wrapped in scrolls, to paper bound in book form, to rhythmic pulses of drums, to pulses of energy over electrical wire,to pulses of energy through the air. With Claude Shannon's revolutionary 1949 paper on a mathematical theory of communication, whose purpose was to address an engineering problem of "reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point," the way we look at information transmission changed. As described in the August 23, 2009 post on Charles Seife's Decoding the Universe, Shannon understood that information could be measured and quantized, which would enable him to determine how much information could be transmitted through a given channel of transmission. Semantics and meaning are irrelevant to this exercise, but the measurements were extremely useful in solving various communications problems associated with telephone communications at the time and has likewise been useful in developing greater bandwidth so more information is capable of transmission at a given time from one point to another. Shannon also understood that information was physical and was subject to the laws of thermodynamics just as other physical features of the universe, and particularly the second law pertaining to entropy. (See August 17, 2009 post). Shannon further addressed the problem of "noise" in the communication channel that corrupted or interfered with information in transmission, and a mathematical means for filtering out that noise to determine probabilistically that the information received was the same as the information sent.
I have previously complained that whoever said that entropy refers to disorder did the world a disservice. (See August 17, 2009 post), and Gleick confirms that much confusion has ensued over the centuries in our discourse over the "second law" of thermodynamics because of the way entropy has been characterized. For those looking for some clarity about the principle of entropy, Gleick is worth reading. As initially conceived, entropy was a measure of the unavailability of energy for work because of dissipation. It referred to a "thermodynamic condition," where previously separate hot and cold bodies (could be a liquid or gas) generated steam that could be converted to energy for work, but once the hot and cold bodies mixed, the mixture achieved a uniform temperature and the amount of energy in steam dissipated making it unavailable for work. The "thermodynamic condition" that previously existed was said to have "dissipated," and there was no more energy available for work. The phrase "disorder" entered the picture because the previous thermodynamic condition where hot and cold bodies were separated and were capable of generating energy for work was considered "orderly," and the homogeneous mixture that was not capable of generating energy for work was considered "disorderly." The second law of thermodynamics stands for the proposition that the universe "tends" to flow from the orderly to the disorderly. Ironically, the "orderly" was viewed as a "less likely" macrostate, and the "disorderly" was viewed as a "more likely" macrostate. Probability theory therefore enters this discussion, and what is more probable is a homogeneous state where we are less likely to find separate distinct states.
Shannon's insight was that entropy was relevant to all dynamic systems, not just thermodynamics. To the physicist, entropy is a measurement of uncertainty about the state of a physical system. To the information theorist, entropy is a measure of uncertainty about a message, where it is less clear that the message that was transmitted is the same as the message that was received. Ironically, notes Gleick, humans, contrary to physical laws, seem bent on curbing entropy, making the environment in which they live, more orderly. We build things; we compile; we categorize; we separate. As Schrodinger noted, living things feed on negative entropy. The second law contemplates a closed system, and earth is not a closed system. Life feeds upon energy and negative entropy leaking into the earth's system. Similarly, humans have proven creative in dealing with probabilities and discerning information from communications that are not certain in order to make messages more certain and information theory provides us tools to do just that.
In contrast to Seth Lloyd and Charles Seife's works on the same subject, Gleick spends more time chronicling the technological development of information transmission. As I read on, I found myself thinking about a different subject to which Gleick gives only passing attention: memory. The subject of memory has been a continuous visitor to this blog, (See posts of September 9, 2010, September 28, 2010, November 27, 2010, and April 8, 2011). We tend to think of memory in terms of an information storage device. A 500 page book stores two million bits of information. A computer's hard drive or a CD-ROM store vastly more bits of information. These devices do not store words or images. They store information that encodes for words or images, but they also contain an electrical means for retrieving those images and words that are encoded. Thus a system of retrieving memory is essential to memory, otherwise it has no utility. This is entirely consistent with the description of the human brain's "architecture of memory" as described by Antonio Damasio. (See April 8, 2011 post). By Damasio's reckoning, the architecture of memory he describes evolved because of storage capacity limitations on our ability to retain images of prior events. Instead of files of memories of images and words, memory is found in the connections between cells in the brain. (See post of November 27, 2010). Shannon's research influenced the development of cognitive psychology, Gleick reports, because it became useful in understanding the limitations on our capacity to receive and store information, short-term and long-term memory, pattern recognition, attention, and problem solving.
Gleick does briefly allude to another subject that has received attention in prior posts: the human mind's capacity for storytelling and providing an explanation for what we experience, along the lines described by Michael Gazzaniga in Human. (See May 22, 2011 post and June 12 and June 28, 2011 posts). Storytelling has to be linked to memory formation and retrieval. Recording information, --- on sticks, on walls of caves, whatever --- says Gleick, "served as aids to memory." Homer's poetry, composed and sung in a mnemonic meter, "served first and foremost as an aid to memory." I think storytelling evolved in part to preserve our memory, but the irony is that those same stories can lead to distortions of the memory we try to preserve. Information is corrupted and does not copy accurately.
We have heard about this same sort of phenomenon in the context of the genome. (See November 27, 2010 post). The ultimate information storage device is the cell. The cell stores genetic material --- genes --- each of which is comprised of bits of information. At some point in evolutionary history, the means for communicating the information stored in the cell through replication became possible. Information contained in one information storage device was moved to another information storage device. Gleick quotes George Gamow: "The nucleus of a living cell is a storehouse of information," adding that it is a transmitter of information from which stems the continuity of life. Gamow described the study of genetics as the study of "the language of the cells." Matt Ridley (see November 27, 2010 post) would agree. When biologists discovered redundancy in the codons of the cell, they realized it was nature's way of dealing with "noise" in the transmission of information by providing tolerance for errors in transmission.
At some point in human evolution, external storage of information became important for survival. Gleick describes some of the earliest known examples of external information storage --- Sumerian cuneiform tablets recording contracts, governance documents, and business transactions. Interestingly, these "documents" memorialize agreements --- matters of consensus between two or more persons. These forms of external information storage are undoubtedly significant to early economic and political socialization. Human development of external information storage devices is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. From tablets, to papyrus, to paper, to the construction of libraries, to film and vinyl media, punch cards, optical and magnetic media, and semiconductors. But external information storage did not begin with out species. As Holldobler and Wilson documented in the case of the social insects: certain ants secrete pheromones in soil for colony ants to follow leaders from the nest to food sources and back. (See post of November 4, 2009). Soil becomes an information storage device. Urination by animals sometimes serves a social purpose to mark territory. Trees, plants, and soil become an information storage device. But this merely confirms my point about storytelling serving as an aid to memory. Sometimes that storytelling is an accurate, but memorable account of what really happened --- and we call that non-fiction. And other times it is exaggerated and manipulated to make it memorable --- and we call that fiction.
I want to close with two quotes that Gleick recites that say a little bit about what this book is about. From Claude Shannon: "The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning." As Gleick recounts, Shannon was not interested much in meaning, but just being able to determine that the information sent was exactly or approximately the same as the message received. And "approximately" was good enough for Shannon, because his mathematical algorithms would filter out the noise to provide a probability of what the information was that was sent. If this sounds like the quantum world that was described in Quantum (see previous post), well it is. And Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and Godel's incompleteness theorem figure into information theory.
Gleick also quotes Seth Lloyd, whose book Programming the Universe, inaugurated this blog two years ago: "The more energy, the faster the bits flip. Earth, air, fire, and water in the end are all made of energy, but the different forms they take are determined by information. To do anything requires energy. To specify what is done requires information." This is a statement about the physicality of information, a subject that I have alluded to many times over the past two years in various posts.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Manjit Kumar, Quantum (2008)
A theme running through several of this year's posts is the role of human imagination in aesthetics, creating works of fiction, rewriting history, creating sacred texts, as well as in science, and the neuroscience that explains the biology of imagination. We tend to think that scientific research and analysis is all about uncovering what is "real," identifying objectively verifiable facts that are observable to our senses and are widely accepted as true. This is conventional wisdom, but human imagination plays a key role in uncovering what is real and is a core feature of scientific inquiry. Much of what scientific inquiry is directed at, particularly in physics, is the stuff we cannot see --- it is either too small to be detected by our senses, even aided by the latest technological tools that enable us to detect or observe the very small, or it is too far away (in either time or space) or too large to see or comprehend. Inquiry into the very small or the very distant begins with imagination, sometimes called theory, which is hopefully both internally consistent as well as externally consistent with the things we can observe. Consensus over theory typically does not always develop quickly, and it sometimes involves substantial disputes. In scientific inquiry, theory is typically followed by developing experiments that seek to confirm or disprove what the imagination has created. Sometimes those experiments take only a few weeks or months to confirm or disprove the theory; sometimes those experiments follow the development of the theory by decades. Manjit Kumar provides a peek into this process in his book Quantum.
At the beginning of the 20th century, physicists studying light, heat, color and electromagnetism realized that the physical world we think we actually see does not conveniently coincide with the physical world that we do not see. We see a beam of light or we feel the radiation of heat and we sense a continuous emission and absorption of light or heat. But is it continuous? The prevailing wisdom was that radiated energy was emitted as a continuous wave and that changes in heat, energy and color were believed to be explained by changes in the amplitude or frequency of the wave. Max Planck discovered that this was not possible. Energy either increases or decreases discontinuously, and, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Planck was forced to imagine that energy is released or absorbed in packets --- what he called "quanta." The reason we cannot see these packets is because the increase or decrease in energy occurs in very small steps (6.626 divided by one thousand trillion trillion), a number that is now known as Planck's constant. These steps are so small they cannot be observed. Experiments subsequently confirmed Planck's theory. A few years later, Albert Einstein extended Planck's conclusions to light in his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect: while light depends on wavelength and frequency, all electromagnetic radiation actually travels in a stream of tiny "light-quanta," later called photons.
Although the notion that at its most fundamental level reality was based on tiny atoms had been around since classical Greece, atomism was never seriously developed in science until the 19th century. Einstein and Planck's work accelerated modern atomic theory. During the first three decades of the 20th century, the basic structure of the atom and the behavior of electrons was close to being fully developed. Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr were hugely responsible for this work. Bohr introduced the idea that as an electron orbiting the atomic nucleus dropped from a higher energy orbit to a lower energy orbit, a photon (a quantum of energy) was released and spectral light is produced. This has been referred to as a quantum leap. Beginning with Planck and Einstein and developed further by Rutherford, Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Louis de Broglie and others, this concept of physical reality became known as quantum mechanics, as distinct from classical physics initially developed by Isaac Newton.
The subtitle of Kumar's book is "Einstein, Bohr, and the great debate about the nature of reality." The "great debate" ironically did not dispute the theory of quantum mechanics. Yes, there were debates along the way as the unexplained attributes of quantum theory were worked out, and one of those debates was whether quantum theory left any room for classical Newtonian physics. Another debate was whether physics was constrained to what could be known and observed. Emerging from the latter debate is Werner Heisenberg's now-famous uncertainty principle, which establishes that it is not possible to simulaneously measure two or more complementary variables --- in the case of an electron, its momentum and location. It is only possible to measure one of them accurately at a given point in time. And there have been further debates about the meaning or significance of uncertainty relations: does it mean that we can never predict causal relations? Or is the meaning of the principle confined to a problem of measurement? To Bohr, quantum mechanics took on a probabilistic character where "only the probability of a given outcome among a range of possibilities can be predicted."
The "great debate" was over the question of whether quantum theory was "complete." Bohr claimed that it was. Einstein had his doubts. Einstein believed that quantum mechanics was observer dependent, and that the act of measuring physical pheonemana interfered with our understanding of reality. In Einstein's view, reality was observer-independent --- yes, trees fall in the forest when there is no one around to watch them fall. From Einstein's perspective, a "complete" theory of physics should be able to describe reality without creating the uncertainty relations created by the observer of reality: physics ought to be able to explain causal relations without having to rely on probabilistic assessments over a range of possibilities, although later Einstein dropped his criticism on quantum mechanics' focus on probabilities. From the 1920s through the early 1950s, Einstein and Bohr politely and professionally debated the completeness of quantum mechanics and whether it truly described reality. The debate was never fully settled during their lifetime, nor has it been settled thereafter.
The difference between the two men was even deeper however. As Kumar explains, for Bohr quantum mechanics was not a description of reality. "There is no quantum world," Bohr declared. "There is only an abstract mechanical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." For Bohr, physics was an observer-dependent exercise aimed at explaining what we could about nature in our own terms. Einstein disagreed. He believed there was an observer-independent reality, and physics "has the sole purpose of determining what is."
Einstein, notes Kumar, never put forward his own theory about the nature of reality. He challenged Bohr, not with facts or data, but with a number of "thought experiments" that would purport to undercut an aspect of quantum mechanics. Bohr would parry with rebuttal that would undermine Einstein's thought experiement. These were mind games among bright men. Kumar describes a conversation between Einstein and Heisenberg, in which the former probed the latter about the philosophical foundations of his work:
"You assume the existence of electrons inside the atom," said Einstein, "and you are probably right to do so. But you refuse to consider their orbits even though we can observe electron tracks in a cloud chamber. I should very much like to hear more about your reasons for making such strange assumptions." Heisenberg replied, "We cannot observe electron orbits inside the atom, but the radiation which the atom emits during discharges enables us to deduce the frequencies and corresponding amplitudes of its electrons. Since a good theory must be based on directly observable magnitudes, I thought it more fitting to restrict myself to these, treating them, as it were, as representatives of the electron orbits." Einstein reacted: "You don't seriously believe that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory? It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens.
It is the theory which decides what we can observe."
This is a fascintating conversation. Kumar observes that 100 years earlier in 1830, Auguste Comte had argued that, "while every theory has to be based on observation, the mind also needs a theory in order to make observations." For Einstein, "A phenomenon under observation produces certain events in our measuring apparatus, which eventually produce sense impressions and help fix the effects in our consciousness." These effects, said Einstein, depend upon theories. Heisenberg appears to be taking the position of David Hume in the Treatise on Human Nature when he says "a good theory must be based on directly observable magnitudes." Hume wrote (see February 27, 2011 post), "Should it be demanded why men form general rules, and allow them to influence their judgment, even contrary to present observation and experience, I should reply, that in my opinion it proceeds from those very principles, on which all judgments concerning causes and effects depend. Our judgments concerning cause and effect are derived from habit and experience; and when we have been accustomed to see one object united to another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, by a natural transition, which precedes reflection [that is before we even seriously think about what we just experienced] and which cannot be prevented by it." Einstein, on the other hand, argues that it is a theory that decides what we can observe.
But what if the "theory" --- the means by which we explain our observations --- embraces probabilities? In other words, humans are capable of measuring directly some of our observations and "know" that measurement with relative certainty, but we cannot measure every observation and we are compelled to admit that we can only "probably" know what we have observed with respect to these other observations. Does this undermine what we can say is "real" or what we can claim is an objective reality? Even Hume appears to concede this limitation on our knowledge, and that probabilities are central to "beliefs." Would this not have been satisfactory to Einstein? Probably, says Kumar, who concludes that "Einstein accepted that quantum mechanics was the best theory available --- the only one which can be built out of the fundamental concepts of force and material points." But acceptance of quantum mechanics, for Einstein, was without prejudice to continue the search for the theory that explains everything, a theory that demystified the uncertainties that quantum mechanics was willing to leave unexplained. For Bohr, there was no reality beyond what could be observed and measured and there was no physical reality beyond what observation and measurement could account for. In this debate, Einstein clearly prevails. If Bohr prevails, we would never have spent millions of dollars looking for quarks, bosons, gluons, leptons, and smaller atomic units.
Imagination leads us into different directions. It can lead us closer to understanding and knowing a confirmable, accepted reality that we do not yet fully see, hear, smell, or feel because it is too small for our technologically-assisted senses to observe. It can also lead us to the realm of fantasy, fiction, and reinventing history. The "great debate" is a testament to imagination. Quantum mechanics powerfully explains physical pheonomenon in a way that has been confirmed by experiment. The "thought experiment" in science is nearly an exercise in pure imagination, not for the purpose of creating fantasy or fiction, but for the purpose of explaining what "is." Einstein understood that if the thought experiment is found wanting in the light of new experimental evidence, then the philosophical position it supports collapses with it.
At the beginning of the 20th century, physicists studying light, heat, color and electromagnetism realized that the physical world we think we actually see does not conveniently coincide with the physical world that we do not see. We see a beam of light or we feel the radiation of heat and we sense a continuous emission and absorption of light or heat. But is it continuous? The prevailing wisdom was that radiated energy was emitted as a continuous wave and that changes in heat, energy and color were believed to be explained by changes in the amplitude or frequency of the wave. Max Planck discovered that this was not possible. Energy either increases or decreases discontinuously, and, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, Planck was forced to imagine that energy is released or absorbed in packets --- what he called "quanta." The reason we cannot see these packets is because the increase or decrease in energy occurs in very small steps (6.626 divided by one thousand trillion trillion), a number that is now known as Planck's constant. These steps are so small they cannot be observed. Experiments subsequently confirmed Planck's theory. A few years later, Albert Einstein extended Planck's conclusions to light in his 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect: while light depends on wavelength and frequency, all electromagnetic radiation actually travels in a stream of tiny "light-quanta," later called photons.
Although the notion that at its most fundamental level reality was based on tiny atoms had been around since classical Greece, atomism was never seriously developed in science until the 19th century. Einstein and Planck's work accelerated modern atomic theory. During the first three decades of the 20th century, the basic structure of the atom and the behavior of electrons was close to being fully developed. Ernest Rutherford and Niels Bohr were hugely responsible for this work. Bohr introduced the idea that as an electron orbiting the atomic nucleus dropped from a higher energy orbit to a lower energy orbit, a photon (a quantum of energy) was released and spectral light is produced. This has been referred to as a quantum leap. Beginning with Planck and Einstein and developed further by Rutherford, Bohr, Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Louis de Broglie and others, this concept of physical reality became known as quantum mechanics, as distinct from classical physics initially developed by Isaac Newton.
The subtitle of Kumar's book is "Einstein, Bohr, and the great debate about the nature of reality." The "great debate" ironically did not dispute the theory of quantum mechanics. Yes, there were debates along the way as the unexplained attributes of quantum theory were worked out, and one of those debates was whether quantum theory left any room for classical Newtonian physics. Another debate was whether physics was constrained to what could be known and observed. Emerging from the latter debate is Werner Heisenberg's now-famous uncertainty principle, which establishes that it is not possible to simulaneously measure two or more complementary variables --- in the case of an electron, its momentum and location. It is only possible to measure one of them accurately at a given point in time. And there have been further debates about the meaning or significance of uncertainty relations: does it mean that we can never predict causal relations? Or is the meaning of the principle confined to a problem of measurement? To Bohr, quantum mechanics took on a probabilistic character where "only the probability of a given outcome among a range of possibilities can be predicted."
The "great debate" was over the question of whether quantum theory was "complete." Bohr claimed that it was. Einstein had his doubts. Einstein believed that quantum mechanics was observer dependent, and that the act of measuring physical pheonemana interfered with our understanding of reality. In Einstein's view, reality was observer-independent --- yes, trees fall in the forest when there is no one around to watch them fall. From Einstein's perspective, a "complete" theory of physics should be able to describe reality without creating the uncertainty relations created by the observer of reality: physics ought to be able to explain causal relations without having to rely on probabilistic assessments over a range of possibilities, although later Einstein dropped his criticism on quantum mechanics' focus on probabilities. From the 1920s through the early 1950s, Einstein and Bohr politely and professionally debated the completeness of quantum mechanics and whether it truly described reality. The debate was never fully settled during their lifetime, nor has it been settled thereafter.
The difference between the two men was even deeper however. As Kumar explains, for Bohr quantum mechanics was not a description of reality. "There is no quantum world," Bohr declared. "There is only an abstract mechanical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature." For Bohr, physics was an observer-dependent exercise aimed at explaining what we could about nature in our own terms. Einstein disagreed. He believed there was an observer-independent reality, and physics "has the sole purpose of determining what is."
Einstein, notes Kumar, never put forward his own theory about the nature of reality. He challenged Bohr, not with facts or data, but with a number of "thought experiments" that would purport to undercut an aspect of quantum mechanics. Bohr would parry with rebuttal that would undermine Einstein's thought experiement. These were mind games among bright men. Kumar describes a conversation between Einstein and Heisenberg, in which the former probed the latter about the philosophical foundations of his work:
"You assume the existence of electrons inside the atom," said Einstein, "and you are probably right to do so. But you refuse to consider their orbits even though we can observe electron tracks in a cloud chamber. I should very much like to hear more about your reasons for making such strange assumptions." Heisenberg replied, "We cannot observe electron orbits inside the atom, but the radiation which the atom emits during discharges enables us to deduce the frequencies and corresponding amplitudes of its electrons. Since a good theory must be based on directly observable magnitudes, I thought it more fitting to restrict myself to these, treating them, as it were, as representatives of the electron orbits." Einstein reacted: "You don't seriously believe that none but observable magnitudes must go into a physical theory? It is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens.
It is the theory which decides what we can observe."
This is a fascintating conversation. Kumar observes that 100 years earlier in 1830, Auguste Comte had argued that, "while every theory has to be based on observation, the mind also needs a theory in order to make observations." For Einstein, "A phenomenon under observation produces certain events in our measuring apparatus, which eventually produce sense impressions and help fix the effects in our consciousness." These effects, said Einstein, depend upon theories. Heisenberg appears to be taking the position of David Hume in the Treatise on Human Nature when he says "a good theory must be based on directly observable magnitudes." Hume wrote (see February 27, 2011 post), "Should it be demanded why men form general rules, and allow them to influence their judgment, even contrary to present observation and experience, I should reply, that in my opinion it proceeds from those very principles, on which all judgments concerning causes and effects depend. Our judgments concerning cause and effect are derived from habit and experience; and when we have been accustomed to see one object united to another, our imagination passes from the first to the second, by a natural transition, which precedes reflection [that is before we even seriously think about what we just experienced] and which cannot be prevented by it." Einstein, on the other hand, argues that it is a theory that decides what we can observe.
But what if the "theory" --- the means by which we explain our observations --- embraces probabilities? In other words, humans are capable of measuring directly some of our observations and "know" that measurement with relative certainty, but we cannot measure every observation and we are compelled to admit that we can only "probably" know what we have observed with respect to these other observations. Does this undermine what we can say is "real" or what we can claim is an objective reality? Even Hume appears to concede this limitation on our knowledge, and that probabilities are central to "beliefs." Would this not have been satisfactory to Einstein? Probably, says Kumar, who concludes that "Einstein accepted that quantum mechanics was the best theory available --- the only one which can be built out of the fundamental concepts of force and material points." But acceptance of quantum mechanics, for Einstein, was without prejudice to continue the search for the theory that explains everything, a theory that demystified the uncertainties that quantum mechanics was willing to leave unexplained. For Bohr, there was no reality beyond what could be observed and measured and there was no physical reality beyond what observation and measurement could account for. In this debate, Einstein clearly prevails. If Bohr prevails, we would never have spent millions of dollars looking for quarks, bosons, gluons, leptons, and smaller atomic units.
Imagination leads us into different directions. It can lead us closer to understanding and knowing a confirmable, accepted reality that we do not yet fully see, hear, smell, or feel because it is too small for our technologically-assisted senses to observe. It can also lead us to the realm of fantasy, fiction, and reinventing history. The "great debate" is a testament to imagination. Quantum mechanics powerfully explains physical pheonomenon in a way that has been confirmed by experiment. The "thought experiment" in science is nearly an exercise in pure imagination, not for the purpose of creating fantasy or fiction, but for the purpose of explaining what "is." Einstein understood that if the thought experiment is found wanting in the light of new experimental evidence, then the philosophical position it supports collapses with it.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Jose Saramago, The Elephant's Journey (2008)
A portion of the oeuvre of Jose Saramago revolves around themes of life and death. But even in the context of a novel like All The Names , about the custodian of national records of birth and death, the story is really about a person's life. And as we just saw in the previous post discussing The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, the story of the last nine months of a man's life and his conversations with another man who has just died, the story is really about relationships among the living. In Saramago's Death With Interruptions, death takes a holiday and the religious institutions are confronted with the prospect of real eternal life, leading the institution to realize that if we don't start dying again "we have no future."
The Elephant's Journey, Saramago's final novel, published two years before he died in 2010, is not as philosophically deep as his earlier novels, but this story of an elephant's journey from India to Lisbon to Vienna during the 16th century --- a historical event fictionalized by Saramago, because there is no detailed record of the journey that has been left behind --- ends in the death of the elephant two years after his arrival in Vienna. For Saramago, however, the elephant's death merely affirms life and our memory of life: the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, who received the elephant as a gift from King Joao III of Portugal, writes to the king to inform him of the elephant's death and states "that the inhabitants of Vienna will never forget [the elephant], for he had saved the life of a child on the very day he arrived in [Vienna]."
For Saramago, the measure of a life's journey is how well we "master the art of living" --- a phrase to be sure for which there will be more disagreements than agreements on the appropriate metric for this measure. In an entry in The Notebook (see September 28, 2010 post), Saramago writes about the Italian journalist Robert Saviano, who received death threats for having written a book denouncing the Camorra, a criminal organization. He says, "I think of Roberto Saviano whose head they would have on a plate, and I wonder whether one day we will wake up from the nightmare that is life for some many people, persecuted for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I feel humble, almost insignificant, faced with the dignity and courage of the writer and journalist Roberto Saviano, the man who has mastered the art of living."
Just a few nuggets from The Elephant's Journey worth quoting, and they connect to a theme about human creativity and storytelling that is reflected in previous posts, including the most recent post.
"It's hard to understand just why the archduke maximilian should have decided to make such a journey at this time of year, but that is how it's set down in history, as an incontrovertible, documented fact, supported by historians and confirmed by the novelist, who must be forgiven for taking certain liberties with names, not only because it is his right to invent, but also because he had to fill in certain gaps so that the sacred coherence of the story was not lost. It must be said that history is always selective, and discriminatory too, selecting from life only what society deems to be historical and scorning the rest, which is precisely where me might find the true explanation of facts, of things, of wretched reality itself. In truth, I say to you, it is better to be a novelist, a fiction writer, a liar." And thus is historical fiction. The Bible stories too --- the work of redactors, editors, and novelists, who must be forgiven for taking certain liberties because it was their right to invent and fill in certain gaps so that the sacred coherence of the story was not lost."
And finally, "People say a lot of things, and not all of them are true, but that is what human beings are like, they can as easily believe that the hair of an elephant, marinated in a little oil, can cure baldness, as imagine that they carry within them the one solitary light that will lead them along life's paths, even through mountain passes." Saramago, a master storyteller, knows that stories that defy human experience are not all true, like the conversation about Subhro's story about a cow that battles a pack of wolves told at that point in The Elephant's Journey, when the Portuguese are preparing to hand over their king's gift of the elephant to the Austrians. "[W]ho told you the story [about the cow and the wolves]? A Galician. And where did he hear it? He must have heard it from someone else, Or read it. As far as I know, he can't read. All right, perhaps he heard it and memorized it. Possibly, but I was simply interested in retelling it as best I could. You have an excellent memory, and the language in which you told the story was far from ordinary. Thank you, said Subhro, but now I would like to know which bits of the story remain unclear to you and failed to ring true? The first is that we are given to understand or, rather, it is explicitly stated that the struggle between the cow and the wolves lasted twelve days and twelve night, which would mean that wolves attacked the cow on the very first night and only withdrew on the twelfth, presumably having sustained some losses. We weren't there to see what happened. No, but anyone who knows anything about wolves would know that, although they live in a pack, they hunt alone. What are you getting at? asked Subhro. I'm saying that the cow wouldn't have been able to withstand a concerted attack by three or four wolves for one hour, let alone twelve days. So the whole story of the battling cow is a lie. No, the lie consists only in the exaggerations, linguistic affectations and half-truths that try to pass themselves off as whole-truths." Here, Saramago does not necessarily equate the novelist, the fiction writer, and the liar --- unless the novelist tries to pass his story off as "whole-truths." Tough words for some believers. But Saramago, as evidenced by the reaction to his The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, understood this.
The Elephant's Journey, Saramago's final novel, published two years before he died in 2010, is not as philosophically deep as his earlier novels, but this story of an elephant's journey from India to Lisbon to Vienna during the 16th century --- a historical event fictionalized by Saramago, because there is no detailed record of the journey that has been left behind --- ends in the death of the elephant two years after his arrival in Vienna. For Saramago, however, the elephant's death merely affirms life and our memory of life: the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, who received the elephant as a gift from King Joao III of Portugal, writes to the king to inform him of the elephant's death and states "that the inhabitants of Vienna will never forget [the elephant], for he had saved the life of a child on the very day he arrived in [Vienna]."
For Saramago, the measure of a life's journey is how well we "master the art of living" --- a phrase to be sure for which there will be more disagreements than agreements on the appropriate metric for this measure. In an entry in The Notebook (see September 28, 2010 post), Saramago writes about the Italian journalist Robert Saviano, who received death threats for having written a book denouncing the Camorra, a criminal organization. He says, "I think of Roberto Saviano whose head they would have on a plate, and I wonder whether one day we will wake up from the nightmare that is life for some many people, persecuted for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. I feel humble, almost insignificant, faced with the dignity and courage of the writer and journalist Roberto Saviano, the man who has mastered the art of living."
Just a few nuggets from The Elephant's Journey worth quoting, and they connect to a theme about human creativity and storytelling that is reflected in previous posts, including the most recent post.
"It's hard to understand just why the archduke maximilian should have decided to make such a journey at this time of year, but that is how it's set down in history, as an incontrovertible, documented fact, supported by historians and confirmed by the novelist, who must be forgiven for taking certain liberties with names, not only because it is his right to invent, but also because he had to fill in certain gaps so that the sacred coherence of the story was not lost. It must be said that history is always selective, and discriminatory too, selecting from life only what society deems to be historical and scorning the rest, which is precisely where me might find the true explanation of facts, of things, of wretched reality itself. In truth, I say to you, it is better to be a novelist, a fiction writer, a liar." And thus is historical fiction. The Bible stories too --- the work of redactors, editors, and novelists, who must be forgiven for taking certain liberties because it was their right to invent and fill in certain gaps so that the sacred coherence of the story was not lost."
And finally, "People say a lot of things, and not all of them are true, but that is what human beings are like, they can as easily believe that the hair of an elephant, marinated in a little oil, can cure baldness, as imagine that they carry within them the one solitary light that will lead them along life's paths, even through mountain passes." Saramago, a master storyteller, knows that stories that defy human experience are not all true, like the conversation about Subhro's story about a cow that battles a pack of wolves told at that point in The Elephant's Journey, when the Portuguese are preparing to hand over their king's gift of the elephant to the Austrians. "[W]ho told you the story [about the cow and the wolves]? A Galician. And where did he hear it? He must have heard it from someone else, Or read it. As far as I know, he can't read. All right, perhaps he heard it and memorized it. Possibly, but I was simply interested in retelling it as best I could. You have an excellent memory, and the language in which you told the story was far from ordinary. Thank you, said Subhro, but now I would like to know which bits of the story remain unclear to you and failed to ring true? The first is that we are given to understand or, rather, it is explicitly stated that the struggle between the cow and the wolves lasted twelve days and twelve night, which would mean that wolves attacked the cow on the very first night and only withdrew on the twelfth, presumably having sustained some losses. We weren't there to see what happened. No, but anyone who knows anything about wolves would know that, although they live in a pack, they hunt alone. What are you getting at? asked Subhro. I'm saying that the cow wouldn't have been able to withstand a concerted attack by three or four wolves for one hour, let alone twelve days. So the whole story of the battling cow is a lie. No, the lie consists only in the exaggerations, linguistic affectations and half-truths that try to pass themselves off as whole-truths." Here, Saramago does not necessarily equate the novelist, the fiction writer, and the liar --- unless the novelist tries to pass his story off as "whole-truths." Tough words for some believers. But Saramago, as evidenced by the reaction to his The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, understood this.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Jose Saramago, The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis (1984)
We write literary fiction that is often based on personal experience, and without hesitation we call it a work of fiction. We write literary fiction that is entirely a fantasy of the mind, and again we call this a work of fiction. We write literary fiction based on recorded history, weaving historical facts that are widely accepted and acknowledged to be actual fact with a story that has no basis in fact, and without hesitation we call this a work of fiction. Similarly, we write literary fiction based on recorded history, and we revise some of these historical facts so they no longer correspond to recorded history, and we still call this a work of fiction. Yet we also write literary fiction that weaves historical facts, revises historical facts, with stories that have no basis in fact, and the work is sometimes presented as gospel fact --- non-fiction. We sometimes call these works "sacred texts." The difference between fiction and non-fiction is blurred.
There is a book that has been on the top of the recent paperback best-seller lists for non-fiction. I have not read it, and so I am unqualified to discuss it. The book is entitled Heaven is for Real, and here is how it is briefly described on the New York Times best seller list: "A father recounts his 3-year-old son’s encounter with Jesus and the angels during an appendectomy." The "what the heck" question that must come to everyone's mind is how on earth did the Times decide to put this book in the category of non-fiction? This is fiction. We know it when we see it. Well, maybe that one sentence did not do it justice. Here is how the full-length article on the book describes it:
"Just two months shy of his fourth birthday, Colton Burpo, the son of an evangelical pastor in Imperial, Neb., was rushed into emergency surgery with a burst appendix. He woke up with an astonishing story: He had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus, who had eyes that 'were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle,' Colton, now 11 years old, recalled."
Now we know our initial reaction is correct. This is fiction. Well maybe not. Maybe the non-fiction part is represented by the objective facts that the boy had appendicitis; he went to the hospital and had surgery; that he had a dream about meeting Samson, John, and Jesus in heaven; and that this 3-year old boy told his father about the dream. OK. So a non-fiction story that contains a description of a fictional event. But hold it. The title is "Heaven is for Real." That suggests that the fictional part of this story is somehow real. On the totality of the evidence, I vote to move this book to the fiction column.
In The Believing Brain, (see June 12, 2011 post) Michael Shermer reports on polls showing that a substantial majority of religious people believe in the afterlife: the eternal survival of the soul, heaven, and hell. The numbers are not as high for Jews, something I will discuss further below. Belief in the afterlife is constructed on what Shermer refers to patternicity and agenticity and theory of mind: we imagine ourselves and others as intentional agents continuing indefinitely into the future. As Damasio describes (see April 8, 2011 post), our brain unconsciously monitors everything that is going on in our body and it is consciously aware of the objective "me" --- our limbs, skin, the noises we make in the context of the environment we are in that are senses make us aware of --- and when this core self is coupled with the consciousness of a subjective autobiographical self -- "I" -- that autobiographical self becomes an extension of our body schema. The Theory of Mind , and what Michael Gazzaniga refers to as the decoupling device in our brains, enables projection of our unseen essence into the future, and combined with the left hemisphere of the brain's storytelling capacity we have the capacity to assign meaning and intentionality to our unseen essence, what we call our "soul," which has the ability to survive our physical death. Shermer uses the phrase "decentering," whereby we "imagine ourselves somewhere else from the Archimedean point beyond our body . . .we envision ourselves in the afterlife as a decentered image removed from this time and space into an empyreal realm." This is the brain's same capacity that enables us to create works of fiction. (See May 22, 2011 post). Our belief in heaven, hell, the eternal soul arises from our brain's capacity to write works of fiction and tell stories about that things that do not exist.
Fernando Pessoa is an authentic person, a beloved poet of Portugal. He was particularly admired by Jose Saramago, the author of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Pessoa invented "heteronyms" --- imaginary character(s) created by a writer to write in different styles --- one of which was Ricardo Reis. In Saramago's novel, Ricardo Reis arrives back in Portugal after sixteen years abroad in Brazil in mid-December 1939. Fernando Pessoa, the Portugese poet has just died on November 30, 1939 (a true historical fact). Reis is drawn to Pessoa's gravesite for a visit. Not long thereafter, Pessoa, who had been dead about a month, makes himself visible to Reis and they talk. "I have about eight months in which to wander around as I please," explains Pessoa. "Why eight months?" asks Reis, and Pessoa explains: "The usual period is nine months, the same length of time we spend in our mother's womb, I believe it's a question of symmetry, before we are born no one can see us but they think about us everyday. After we are dead they cannot see us any longer and every day they go on forgetting us a little more, and apart from exceptional cases it takes about nine months to achieve total oblivion." Perfect. So we have an "afterlife" of nine months that mirrors our "pre-life" of nine months duration. This is not illogical. But it's storytelling, no different than the storytelling in Heaven is for Real, and we do not place The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in the category of works of non-fiction.
Alan Segal wrote a very good history of the human belief in afterlife entitled Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion. Segal cites the same polling data that Michael Shermer refers to about the substantial number of people who believe in an afterlife. Belief in afterlife is documented to go back as far as we have a written record of human culture --- to Egypt and Mesopotamia. Ironically, the culture that coalesced around a single god --- the founders of monotheism --- the Jews (First Temple Judaism) was devoid of a story of the afterlife in pentateuch --- the five books of Moses. The afterlife did not creep into the Jewish psyche until a couple of hundred years BCE, around the time of the Book of Daniel or the period of the Maccabees, and it later became a part of the rabbinical tradition. This probably explains why belief in the afterlife is significantly lower among Jews than among Christians and Muslims. Ironically, Spinoza was excommunicated by his Jewish community in Amsterdam in the late 17th century because, in substantial part, he professed that there was no eternal soul. Segal also singles out adherents of Confucianism for very low belief in an afterlife.
Segal's history of human belief in afterlife, and even Spinoza's experience, confirms the role of culture and social structure --- religion, government, and family --- in reinforcing beliefs such as belief in the afterlife. Shermer's list of biases do not seem sufficient to explain why belief in the afterlife is so engrained --- although one bias that Shermer only mentions in passing --- the authority bias. the tendency to believe the word of persons in positions of authority --- would go part of the way in explaining the strength of this belief. There is something more in the reinforcement of this belief than just the biases that Shermer explains are critical to confirming belief. Storytelling is part of our social nature, and our capacity for storytelling is clearly something that has a survival value for us, even when it is a work of fiction. Belief in the afterlife is part of the social reality that many have constructed for themselves,. Its origin has explanation in adaptive strategies for survival at some point in our past.
There is a book that has been on the top of the recent paperback best-seller lists for non-fiction. I have not read it, and so I am unqualified to discuss it. The book is entitled Heaven is for Real, and here is how it is briefly described on the New York Times best seller list: "A father recounts his 3-year-old son’s encounter with Jesus and the angels during an appendectomy." The "what the heck" question that must come to everyone's mind is how on earth did the Times decide to put this book in the category of non-fiction? This is fiction. We know it when we see it. Well, maybe that one sentence did not do it justice. Here is how the full-length article on the book describes it:
"Just two months shy of his fourth birthday, Colton Burpo, the son of an evangelical pastor in Imperial, Neb., was rushed into emergency surgery with a burst appendix. He woke up with an astonishing story: He had died and gone to heaven, where he met his great-grandfather; the biblical figure Samson; John the Baptist; and Jesus, who had eyes that 'were just sort of a sea-blue and they seemed to sparkle,' Colton, now 11 years old, recalled."
Now we know our initial reaction is correct. This is fiction. Well maybe not. Maybe the non-fiction part is represented by the objective facts that the boy had appendicitis; he went to the hospital and had surgery; that he had a dream about meeting Samson, John, and Jesus in heaven; and that this 3-year old boy told his father about the dream. OK. So a non-fiction story that contains a description of a fictional event. But hold it. The title is "Heaven is for Real." That suggests that the fictional part of this story is somehow real. On the totality of the evidence, I vote to move this book to the fiction column.
In The Believing Brain, (see June 12, 2011 post) Michael Shermer reports on polls showing that a substantial majority of religious people believe in the afterlife: the eternal survival of the soul, heaven, and hell. The numbers are not as high for Jews, something I will discuss further below. Belief in the afterlife is constructed on what Shermer refers to patternicity and agenticity and theory of mind: we imagine ourselves and others as intentional agents continuing indefinitely into the future. As Damasio describes (see April 8, 2011 post), our brain unconsciously monitors everything that is going on in our body and it is consciously aware of the objective "me" --- our limbs, skin, the noises we make in the context of the environment we are in that are senses make us aware of --- and when this core self is coupled with the consciousness of a subjective autobiographical self -- "I" -- that autobiographical self becomes an extension of our body schema. The Theory of Mind , and what Michael Gazzaniga refers to as the decoupling device in our brains, enables projection of our unseen essence into the future, and combined with the left hemisphere of the brain's storytelling capacity we have the capacity to assign meaning and intentionality to our unseen essence, what we call our "soul," which has the ability to survive our physical death. Shermer uses the phrase "decentering," whereby we "imagine ourselves somewhere else from the Archimedean point beyond our body . . .we envision ourselves in the afterlife as a decentered image removed from this time and space into an empyreal realm." This is the brain's same capacity that enables us to create works of fiction. (See May 22, 2011 post). Our belief in heaven, hell, the eternal soul arises from our brain's capacity to write works of fiction and tell stories about that things that do not exist.
Fernando Pessoa is an authentic person, a beloved poet of Portugal. He was particularly admired by Jose Saramago, the author of The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. Pessoa invented "heteronyms" --- imaginary character(s) created by a writer to write in different styles --- one of which was Ricardo Reis. In Saramago's novel, Ricardo Reis arrives back in Portugal after sixteen years abroad in Brazil in mid-December 1939. Fernando Pessoa, the Portugese poet has just died on November 30, 1939 (a true historical fact). Reis is drawn to Pessoa's gravesite for a visit. Not long thereafter, Pessoa, who had been dead about a month, makes himself visible to Reis and they talk. "I have about eight months in which to wander around as I please," explains Pessoa. "Why eight months?" asks Reis, and Pessoa explains: "The usual period is nine months, the same length of time we spend in our mother's womb, I believe it's a question of symmetry, before we are born no one can see us but they think about us everyday. After we are dead they cannot see us any longer and every day they go on forgetting us a little more, and apart from exceptional cases it takes about nine months to achieve total oblivion." Perfect. So we have an "afterlife" of nine months that mirrors our "pre-life" of nine months duration. This is not illogical. But it's storytelling, no different than the storytelling in Heaven is for Real, and we do not place The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in the category of works of non-fiction.
Alan Segal wrote a very good history of the human belief in afterlife entitled Life After Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion. Segal cites the same polling data that Michael Shermer refers to about the substantial number of people who believe in an afterlife. Belief in afterlife is documented to go back as far as we have a written record of human culture --- to Egypt and Mesopotamia. Ironically, the culture that coalesced around a single god --- the founders of monotheism --- the Jews (First Temple Judaism) was devoid of a story of the afterlife in pentateuch --- the five books of Moses. The afterlife did not creep into the Jewish psyche until a couple of hundred years BCE, around the time of the Book of Daniel or the period of the Maccabees, and it later became a part of the rabbinical tradition. This probably explains why belief in the afterlife is significantly lower among Jews than among Christians and Muslims. Ironically, Spinoza was excommunicated by his Jewish community in Amsterdam in the late 17th century because, in substantial part, he professed that there was no eternal soul. Segal also singles out adherents of Confucianism for very low belief in an afterlife.
Segal's history of human belief in afterlife, and even Spinoza's experience, confirms the role of culture and social structure --- religion, government, and family --- in reinforcing beliefs such as belief in the afterlife. Shermer's list of biases do not seem sufficient to explain why belief in the afterlife is so engrained --- although one bias that Shermer only mentions in passing --- the authority bias. the tendency to believe the word of persons in positions of authority --- would go part of the way in explaining the strength of this belief. There is something more in the reinforcement of this belief than just the biases that Shermer explains are critical to confirming belief. Storytelling is part of our social nature, and our capacity for storytelling is clearly something that has a survival value for us, even when it is a work of fiction. Belief in the afterlife is part of the social reality that many have constructed for themselves,. Its origin has explanation in adaptive strategies for survival at some point in our past.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Michael Shermer, The Believing Brain (2011)
This is a better, more thorough book on the subject of how we come to believe things that are not real than Supersense (see June 5, 2011 post). I say that for multiple reasons. Not just because Michael Shermer avoids a gimmicky term like "supersense," but primarily because the structure of the author's presentation and the evidence marshaled in support of his thesis is more persuasive than Hood's more anecdotal presentation. While there is much in common with the subject-matter of Supersense, in The Believing Brain Michael Gazzaniga's "left hemisphere" interpreter is presented as a candidate for the brain's storytelling capability, which reconstructs events and weaves those events into a meaningful story --- including stories that are simply works of fiction. As I said in the previous post, this storytelling capability is critical to our narratives of belief. Finally, Shermer treats his subject with seemingly more objectivity than Hood. For Shermer, the study of how we believe something is not limited to the strange or unreal --- ghosts, angels, gods, aliens and phantom conspiracies --- but also politics, economics, and even hard science.
According to Shermer (and Hood, see previous post), as sensory data flows into the brain, there is a "tendency" for the brain to begin looking for meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. He calls this process patternicity. A second tendency of the brain is to "infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency." Shermer labels this tendency agenticity. Because of these tendencies, we form beliefs first and only later do we try to inform our beliefs with facts. The overall process Shermer calls belief-dependent realism (well, maybe there is one gimmicky term). This model not only purports to explain not only how we form entirely mistaken, fantasy beliefs, but also beliefs that are later embraced under the gospel of science (e.g. hypothesis later substantiated by empirical and repeatable testing).
Harkening back to David Hume (see February 27, 2011 post), Shermer asserts that patternicity is premised on "association learning," which is "fundamental to all animal behavior from C. elegans (roundworm) to homo sapiens." Because our survival may depend on split-second decisions in which there is no time to research and discover underlying facts about every threat or opportunity that faces us, evolution set the brain's default mode in the position of assuming that all patterns are real, says Shermer. A cost associated with this behavior is that the brain may lump causal associations (e.g. wind causes plants to rustle) with non-causal associations (e.g. there is an unseen agent in the plants). In this circumstance, superstition --- incorrect causal associations --- is born. "In this sense, patternicities such as superstition and magical thinking are not so much errors in cognition as they are the natural processes of a learning brain." Religion, conspiracy theories and political beliefs fit this model as well.
The difficulty faced by humans applying later learned facts to earlier-formed beliefs is that beliefs are often difficult to shake despite the fact that our factual knowledge is entirely inconsistent with the belief. The difficulty Galileo faced in convincing others that the earth revolved around the sun in violation of the long-held belief in Aristotle's geocentric view and the words of the Bible that the sun revolved around the earth is an example. What Shermer does, however, to document this difficulty is to catalog a series of biases that reinforce beliefs, which he labels cognitive heuristics that confirm the beliefs are correct. A heuristic is a brain's capacity to solve problems through intuition, trial and error, rules of thumb, or other informal means, when there is no formal means for solving the problem. These biases are part of our documented behavior, including the tendency to seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of an existing belief and to ignore or reinterpret disconfirming evidence (confirmatory bias), the tendency to reconstruct the past to fit the present (hindsight bias), the tendency to rationalize decisions after the fact to confirm that our action were the best we could have done under the circumstances (self-justification bias), the tendency to attribute different causes for our own beliefs and action than that of others (attribution bias), the tendency to believe in something because we have already invested so much in that belief (sunk-cost bias), the tendency to opt for whatever we are used to or familiar with (status quo bias), the tendency to value what we own more than what we do not own (endowment effect), the tendency to draw different conclusions based on how data is presented (framing effect), the tendency to rely too heavily on a past reference or on one piece of information (anchoring bias), tendency to miss something obvious while attending to something special and specific (inattentional blindness bias), and the tendency to recognize the power of cognitive biases in others, but to blind to their influence on ourselves (bias blind spot) and others.
Regrettably, Shermer does not provide a biological explanation for these biases (or "tendencies," as he seems inclined to refer to them). And "bias" may be too charged a term. Bias is a term that arguably reflects a cultural or community predisposition of some sort (whether the community consists of a family, a village, a region, nation or species), which is really within the province of nurture rather than nature. These "tendencies," however, can also be predispositions grounded in our biology, particularly our neurobiological system. I strongly suspect that if we dissected human brains and a network of connected neurons from a representative sample of humans, we would find a very high level of near identity among brains. There will be some differences due to DNA, and there will be some pathological differences as well, perhaps caused during embryonic development. But I believe that by and large we will find that human brains, neuron by neuron, are organized and folded and layered in substantially identical ways. This is the product of evolution. Some of these neuronal networks are unconsciously and automatically operational as part of what Damasio calls the protoself -- the body monitoring itself, (see April 8, 2011 post) and are functioning and repeating the transmission of electro-chemical signals to and from the brain even before we are born. Other neural networks are only activated in response to sensory experience with the external physical world as part of what Damasio calls the "core self," which process begins immediately with our birth. Finally, when the neural networks within the cerebral cortex are activated to trigger autobiographical memory and our storytelling capability, we find our autobiographical self. While much of the neuronal activity in the cerebral cortex is connected to the automated, unconscious neuronal networks tied to monitoring our own body and our external sensory experiences that are part of our core self experience, there is much that is influenced more by nurture than nature --- culture and learning at the social level. At the level of the protoself and the core self, except to the extent that a particular individual may have a variant pathological condition, there is a high level of commonality in the activation of neuronal networks repeatedly sending and receiving electro-chemical impulses. This is reflected in the high level of commonality of similar emotional and feeling experiences humans share in response to the same stimuli --- whether the stimuli is within the body or outside of it. There will be more differences among us at the level of the core self, because we will not always share sensory experiences with the same level of frequency as all other humans. I am now in speaking in terms of the brain's capacity for memory and learning, which, as Eric Kandel demonstrated, is influenced by synaptic connections strengthened through repeated experience and learning. In contrast, at the level of the neural networks in the cerebral cortex, there is likely to be greater disparity among us in the precise neural networks activated, because we are going to have significantly different cultural and social learning experiences. It is here where biases may be formed. But at the level of the protoself and core self, important biological predispositions or tendencies have significant influence on instincts and intuition that are part of the belief-forming process. And the tendencies that Shermer identifies may be the outcome of both of biologically hardwired predispositions and culturally learned biases.
The Believing Brain has a discussion entitled "Synaptic States and Believing Neurons" in which Shermer recognizes that neurons communicate information in three ways: (1) firing frequency, (2)firing location, and (3) firing number. This discussion also includes a recognition that certain types of chemicals in the neuronal network act to reinforce learning and belief. This discussion, in my view, supports what I just said. Shermer, on the other hand, does not incorporate this discussion into his discourse on biases, and this is a shortcoming of his discussion on biases.
Our senses evolved, Shermer observes, for "perceiving objects of middling size." I wrote in an earlier post (see August 31, 2009 post) that in my worldview, there are three very big subjects for human inquiry: 1) the realm of the very large --- the universe (and whether there is more than one, making the word universe a possible oxymoron), its origin and history; 2) the realm of the very small -- the smallest molecular (sub)units, and their behavior; and 3) the human mind --- how it works, consciousness, intentionality. "We are not equipped to perceive atoms and germs, on the one end of the scale, or galaxies and expanding universes, on the other end," writes Shermer. I disagree, but I understand Shermer's point. There are several cognitive biases, listed above (e.g., the status quo bias, the inattentional blindness bias), that discourage the general population from looking beyond objects of middling size to the realms of the very large and the very small. But frankly, most of us simply lack the education, training, and time to focus on the realms of the very large and the very small. We do not understand them. Shermer seems to have concluded that only "scientists," those trained in the scientific approach to knowing and understanding the world, are capable of neutralizing these various biases. But the substantial variation among the human population in education, training, and the amount of time we have to focus on the large and small confirms that our biases are significantly tied to culture and nurture. Are we all born with the capacity to become an Einstein or a Steven Weinberg? I am not saying that. But I don't believe Einstein became Einstein entirely on his own.
Finally, I want to return to the concept of agenticity -- the tendency to impart patterns with intention and agency, even patterns we perceive in inanimate objects, that lead us to believe that unseen agents control the world. Now we enter the world of spirits, gods, souls, devils, angels, aliens, and yes, intelligent designers. This is the domain of teleology, which I have mentioned in previous posts. (See March 24, 2010 and May 12, 2010 posts), as well as that part of philosophy that discusses intentionality --- how our brain relates to objects external to ourselves. Shermer's discussion of essentialism flows from the writings of Paul Bloom in Descartes' Baby, which concept is elaborated upon by Hood as well. Essentialism refers to the brain's ability to abstract about a physical object and to ascribe to that object an unobservable essence --- beliefs, desires, intentions and goals --- and treat these invisible essences as real. In the case of animate objects like other humans or animals, notes Michael Gazzaniga in Human, we believe they must have beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. just like our own. Anthropomorphism and teleological thinking are born.
Two questions emerge from the development of this discussion: what evolutionary value would essentialism provide to humans? And what is the biological process in the brain that explains it? Gazzaniga explains that our ability to reason about unobservable entities or unobservable essences allows humans to predict and explain events --- to predict the behavior of others. In other words, we can predict the behavior of another animal by inferring its psychological state (sometimes referred to as a theory of mind (TOM)), which would have enormous significance for survival. It also appears to relate to our storytelling capability about things that do not exist. Gazzaniga explains it this way in Human:
"Sometimes our predilection for explaining the cause of things or behaviors with teleological thinking runs amuck. One of the reasons is that the agency-detection device [in our brain] is rather zealous. Barrett calls it hyperactive. It likes to ...find animate suspects even when there are none. When you hear a sound in the middle of the night, the question that first comes to mind is Who is that? rather than What is that? When you see a wispy something moving in the dark, Who is that comes to mind because the detective device is not modern and up-to-date. The detective device was forged many thousands of years ago before there were inanimate objects that could move or make noise on their own. To first consider a potential danger as animate is adaptive. It worked most of the time. Those who did it survived and passed their genes to us. *** The hyperactive detective device, combined with our need to explain and teleological thinking, is the basis of creationism. To explain why we exist, the hyperactive detection device says there must be a Who involved. Teleological reasoning says there must be an intentional design. The cause must be the desires and intentions and behavior of the Who. The we were designed by a Who. *** All of this is reminiscent of what the left-brain interpreter would do, which it has been demonstrated to do in other settings."
The research into so-called mirror neurons (see September 18, 2009 post) puts us on the road to explaining how the brain helps us form beliefs about other people's intentions, and Shermer incorporates this research into his discussion of agenticity. So does Paul Ekman's research into facial descriptions, as described in Dacher Keltner's book Born to Be Good (see July 16, 2010 post).
I disagree with Shermer and others that we are hardwired to believe in God. Hardwired means that it is in our DNA, and I have rejected the idea that there is a "god gene" in prior posts (see November 30, 2009 post). We are hardwired to be disposed to believe first that if we do not immediately perceive a causal explanation for some event, that some unseen agent with intentions and desires and beliefs very similar to our own is the causal explanaton for this event. That unseen agent may be another person we do not see, another animal we do not see, a ghost we do not see, or the devil we do not see. We are hardwired to search for patterns in what we perceive, and we are hardwired with a storytelling capacity to explain what we perceive, and sometimes that story is based on things we can actually see and touch, and sometimes that story is made up out of whole cloth. But even if that story is made up out of whole cloth, it is a story about an agent that thinks, desires and behaves just like ourselves. God was made by humans in our image, not the other way around. In this explanation, we also begin to understand our ability for creativity --- engineering, songwriting, and writing works of fiction.
According to Shermer (and Hood, see previous post), as sensory data flows into the brain, there is a "tendency" for the brain to begin looking for meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. He calls this process patternicity. A second tendency of the brain is to "infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency." Shermer labels this tendency agenticity. Because of these tendencies, we form beliefs first and only later do we try to inform our beliefs with facts. The overall process Shermer calls belief-dependent realism (well, maybe there is one gimmicky term). This model not only purports to explain not only how we form entirely mistaken, fantasy beliefs, but also beliefs that are later embraced under the gospel of science (e.g. hypothesis later substantiated by empirical and repeatable testing).
Harkening back to David Hume (see February 27, 2011 post), Shermer asserts that patternicity is premised on "association learning," which is "fundamental to all animal behavior from C. elegans (roundworm) to homo sapiens." Because our survival may depend on split-second decisions in which there is no time to research and discover underlying facts about every threat or opportunity that faces us, evolution set the brain's default mode in the position of assuming that all patterns are real, says Shermer. A cost associated with this behavior is that the brain may lump causal associations (e.g. wind causes plants to rustle) with non-causal associations (e.g. there is an unseen agent in the plants). In this circumstance, superstition --- incorrect causal associations --- is born. "In this sense, patternicities such as superstition and magical thinking are not so much errors in cognition as they are the natural processes of a learning brain." Religion, conspiracy theories and political beliefs fit this model as well.
The difficulty faced by humans applying later learned facts to earlier-formed beliefs is that beliefs are often difficult to shake despite the fact that our factual knowledge is entirely inconsistent with the belief. The difficulty Galileo faced in convincing others that the earth revolved around the sun in violation of the long-held belief in Aristotle's geocentric view and the words of the Bible that the sun revolved around the earth is an example. What Shermer does, however, to document this difficulty is to catalog a series of biases that reinforce beliefs, which he labels cognitive heuristics that confirm the beliefs are correct. A heuristic is a brain's capacity to solve problems through intuition, trial and error, rules of thumb, or other informal means, when there is no formal means for solving the problem. These biases are part of our documented behavior, including the tendency to seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of an existing belief and to ignore or reinterpret disconfirming evidence (confirmatory bias), the tendency to reconstruct the past to fit the present (hindsight bias), the tendency to rationalize decisions after the fact to confirm that our action were the best we could have done under the circumstances (self-justification bias), the tendency to attribute different causes for our own beliefs and action than that of others (attribution bias), the tendency to believe in something because we have already invested so much in that belief (sunk-cost bias), the tendency to opt for whatever we are used to or familiar with (status quo bias), the tendency to value what we own more than what we do not own (endowment effect), the tendency to draw different conclusions based on how data is presented (framing effect), the tendency to rely too heavily on a past reference or on one piece of information (anchoring bias), tendency to miss something obvious while attending to something special and specific (inattentional blindness bias), and the tendency to recognize the power of cognitive biases in others, but to blind to their influence on ourselves (bias blind spot) and others.
Regrettably, Shermer does not provide a biological explanation for these biases (or "tendencies," as he seems inclined to refer to them). And "bias" may be too charged a term. Bias is a term that arguably reflects a cultural or community predisposition of some sort (whether the community consists of a family, a village, a region, nation or species), which is really within the province of nurture rather than nature. These "tendencies," however, can also be predispositions grounded in our biology, particularly our neurobiological system. I strongly suspect that if we dissected human brains and a network of connected neurons from a representative sample of humans, we would find a very high level of near identity among brains. There will be some differences due to DNA, and there will be some pathological differences as well, perhaps caused during embryonic development. But I believe that by and large we will find that human brains, neuron by neuron, are organized and folded and layered in substantially identical ways. This is the product of evolution. Some of these neuronal networks are unconsciously and automatically operational as part of what Damasio calls the protoself -- the body monitoring itself, (see April 8, 2011 post) and are functioning and repeating the transmission of electro-chemical signals to and from the brain even before we are born. Other neural networks are only activated in response to sensory experience with the external physical world as part of what Damasio calls the "core self," which process begins immediately with our birth. Finally, when the neural networks within the cerebral cortex are activated to trigger autobiographical memory and our storytelling capability, we find our autobiographical self. While much of the neuronal activity in the cerebral cortex is connected to the automated, unconscious neuronal networks tied to monitoring our own body and our external sensory experiences that are part of our core self experience, there is much that is influenced more by nurture than nature --- culture and learning at the social level. At the level of the protoself and the core self, except to the extent that a particular individual may have a variant pathological condition, there is a high level of commonality in the activation of neuronal networks repeatedly sending and receiving electro-chemical impulses. This is reflected in the high level of commonality of similar emotional and feeling experiences humans share in response to the same stimuli --- whether the stimuli is within the body or outside of it. There will be more differences among us at the level of the core self, because we will not always share sensory experiences with the same level of frequency as all other humans. I am now in speaking in terms of the brain's capacity for memory and learning, which, as Eric Kandel demonstrated, is influenced by synaptic connections strengthened through repeated experience and learning. In contrast, at the level of the neural networks in the cerebral cortex, there is likely to be greater disparity among us in the precise neural networks activated, because we are going to have significantly different cultural and social learning experiences. It is here where biases may be formed. But at the level of the protoself and core self, important biological predispositions or tendencies have significant influence on instincts and intuition that are part of the belief-forming process. And the tendencies that Shermer identifies may be the outcome of both of biologically hardwired predispositions and culturally learned biases.
The Believing Brain has a discussion entitled "Synaptic States and Believing Neurons" in which Shermer recognizes that neurons communicate information in three ways: (1) firing frequency, (2)firing location, and (3) firing number. This discussion also includes a recognition that certain types of chemicals in the neuronal network act to reinforce learning and belief. This discussion, in my view, supports what I just said. Shermer, on the other hand, does not incorporate this discussion into his discourse on biases, and this is a shortcoming of his discussion on biases.
Our senses evolved, Shermer observes, for "perceiving objects of middling size." I wrote in an earlier post (see August 31, 2009 post) that in my worldview, there are three very big subjects for human inquiry: 1) the realm of the very large --- the universe (and whether there is more than one, making the word universe a possible oxymoron), its origin and history; 2) the realm of the very small -- the smallest molecular (sub)units, and their behavior; and 3) the human mind --- how it works, consciousness, intentionality. "We are not equipped to perceive atoms and germs, on the one end of the scale, or galaxies and expanding universes, on the other end," writes Shermer. I disagree, but I understand Shermer's point. There are several cognitive biases, listed above (e.g., the status quo bias, the inattentional blindness bias), that discourage the general population from looking beyond objects of middling size to the realms of the very large and the very small. But frankly, most of us simply lack the education, training, and time to focus on the realms of the very large and the very small. We do not understand them. Shermer seems to have concluded that only "scientists," those trained in the scientific approach to knowing and understanding the world, are capable of neutralizing these various biases. But the substantial variation among the human population in education, training, and the amount of time we have to focus on the large and small confirms that our biases are significantly tied to culture and nurture. Are we all born with the capacity to become an Einstein or a Steven Weinberg? I am not saying that. But I don't believe Einstein became Einstein entirely on his own.
Finally, I want to return to the concept of agenticity -- the tendency to impart patterns with intention and agency, even patterns we perceive in inanimate objects, that lead us to believe that unseen agents control the world. Now we enter the world of spirits, gods, souls, devils, angels, aliens, and yes, intelligent designers. This is the domain of teleology, which I have mentioned in previous posts. (See March 24, 2010 and May 12, 2010 posts), as well as that part of philosophy that discusses intentionality --- how our brain relates to objects external to ourselves. Shermer's discussion of essentialism flows from the writings of Paul Bloom in Descartes' Baby, which concept is elaborated upon by Hood as well. Essentialism refers to the brain's ability to abstract about a physical object and to ascribe to that object an unobservable essence --- beliefs, desires, intentions and goals --- and treat these invisible essences as real. In the case of animate objects like other humans or animals, notes Michael Gazzaniga in Human, we believe they must have beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. just like our own. Anthropomorphism and teleological thinking are born.
Two questions emerge from the development of this discussion: what evolutionary value would essentialism provide to humans? And what is the biological process in the brain that explains it? Gazzaniga explains that our ability to reason about unobservable entities or unobservable essences allows humans to predict and explain events --- to predict the behavior of others. In other words, we can predict the behavior of another animal by inferring its psychological state (sometimes referred to as a theory of mind (TOM)), which would have enormous significance for survival. It also appears to relate to our storytelling capability about things that do not exist. Gazzaniga explains it this way in Human:
"Sometimes our predilection for explaining the cause of things or behaviors with teleological thinking runs amuck. One of the reasons is that the agency-detection device [in our brain] is rather zealous. Barrett calls it hyperactive. It likes to ...find animate suspects even when there are none. When you hear a sound in the middle of the night, the question that first comes to mind is Who is that? rather than What is that? When you see a wispy something moving in the dark, Who is that comes to mind because the detective device is not modern and up-to-date. The detective device was forged many thousands of years ago before there were inanimate objects that could move or make noise on their own. To first consider a potential danger as animate is adaptive. It worked most of the time. Those who did it survived and passed their genes to us. *** The hyperactive detective device, combined with our need to explain and teleological thinking, is the basis of creationism. To explain why we exist, the hyperactive detection device says there must be a Who involved. Teleological reasoning says there must be an intentional design. The cause must be the desires and intentions and behavior of the Who. The we were designed by a Who. *** All of this is reminiscent of what the left-brain interpreter would do, which it has been demonstrated to do in other settings."
The research into so-called mirror neurons (see September 18, 2009 post) puts us on the road to explaining how the brain helps us form beliefs about other people's intentions, and Shermer incorporates this research into his discussion of agenticity. So does Paul Ekman's research into facial descriptions, as described in Dacher Keltner's book Born to Be Good (see July 16, 2010 post).
I disagree with Shermer and others that we are hardwired to believe in God. Hardwired means that it is in our DNA, and I have rejected the idea that there is a "god gene" in prior posts (see November 30, 2009 post). We are hardwired to be disposed to believe first that if we do not immediately perceive a causal explanation for some event, that some unseen agent with intentions and desires and beliefs very similar to our own is the causal explanaton for this event. That unseen agent may be another person we do not see, another animal we do not see, a ghost we do not see, or the devil we do not see. We are hardwired to search for patterns in what we perceive, and we are hardwired with a storytelling capacity to explain what we perceive, and sometimes that story is based on things we can actually see and touch, and sometimes that story is made up out of whole cloth. But even if that story is made up out of whole cloth, it is a story about an agent that thinks, desires and behaves just like ourselves. God was made by humans in our image, not the other way around. In this explanation, we also begin to understand our ability for creativity --- engineering, songwriting, and writing works of fiction.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Bruce M. Hood, Supersense - Why We Believe in the Unbelievable (2009)
This is another book where I suspect the editor or publisher, not the author, dictated the title, but maybe I am wrong. The term 'supersense' is used liberally throughout this volume. This is a silly term, which suggests that there is some additional sensory modality beyond those we are all familiar with, and suggests that it is "superior" to all other senses. I disagree with the suggestion. [Postscript, October 15, 2011: the paperback version of this book has been renamed -- The Science of Superstition: How the Developing Brain Creates Supernatural Beliefs. A good choice.]
For humans, the most special sensory modality is vision, yet all the sensory modalities, both somatic (temperature, touch, pressure, pain, body position) and the five special senses (smell, hearing, taste, vision and balance) simultaneously provide important stimuli and convert energy into nervous impulses that are mapped in the brain at about the same time. And these different neuronal inputs, arriving initially in different areas of the brain, are subsequently joined in convergence zones in the brain, which integrate information arriving from the different sensory modalities that enables a unified experience of our environment rather than a series of fragmentary experiences. This is sometimes referred to as the "binding problem," whereby multisensory inputs are integrated in the brain to form a unified experience.
This concept of sensory experience is not what author Bruce Hood has in mind. For Hood, "supersense" is an "inclination that [our experiences, which are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence] may be real." In this vein, "supersense" is derivative of what we have labeled "extrasensory perception" and is not a "sense" at all. What Hood is getting is what we refer to as instinct, intuition, and inference, all of which are derivative of the known sensory modalities and the brain's capacity to search out and recognize patterns that explain our experiences. In the course of searching out and trying to find patterns, we initially form beliefs about our experience. This belief-forming capability begins in our infancy, a time when we are not cognitively capable of explaining what we believe or why we believe it. Our minds are designed, writes Hood, " to see the world as organized, [and] we often detect patterns that are not really present."
The following passage highlights that intuition is at the foundation of the so-called "supersense": "There is good evidence that children naturally and spontaneously think about the unseen properties that govern the world. They infer forces to explain events they cannot directly see, understand that living things have life energy, and reason in terms of essence when thinking about the true nature of animals. And, of course, they begin to understand that other people have minds. These processes are not taught to children. They are reasoning, though it is not clear that they can necessarily reflect on why or how they re coming up with their decisions. That is why their reasoning is intuitive.***Intuition is often called a 'gut feeling.' Sometimes we get a 'vibe' when we sense a physical feeling of knowing . . .The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls this the somatic marker: it indicates the way emotions affect reasoning in a rapid and often unconscious way." Hood's point: a lot of our responses to what our sensory modalities experience is automatic and "unlearned." It is in our nature, therefore, that there will likely be a variance between what we believe and what is real.
Hood is not original in this way of thinking and the body of research that supports it. Paul Bloom's book, Descartes Baby, demonstrated that from a very early age children distinguish between physical states and mental states, making us "natural born dualists," and that we reason differently about the two states. And within the realm of mental states, children discern intentions, purpose, goals, and emotions in other animate objects. Children believe and recognize that other animate objects have "minds," and believe they can recognize intentions, purpose, goals and emotions in others: we can read minds. In a previous post (see September 18, 2009 post), the role of "mirror neurons" have been identified with our ability to "feel" the actions and perhaps the intentions of others. Numerous researchers, including Michael Gazzaniga (see September 27, 2009 post) have written about the neural mechanisms of nonconscious mimicry and emotional contagion (taking on the mood of others) that begins in early infancy --- particularly in the case of child and mother.
According to Hood, the intuitions of children include the belief that there are no random events or patterns, that events are caused by intention, that complexity is neither random nor spontaneous but a product of design, and that living things differ because of some essential, invisible property inside them. These intuitions "are fertile soil for creationism," concludes Hood. As children, we "infer structures where there may be none," and it is these inferences that give rise to supernatural beliefs. Natural selection is counter intuitive. As children grow older, they tend to categorize their experiences and "generate naive theories that explain the physical world, the living world, and ultimately the psychological world of other people. While children's naive theories are often correct, they can be wrong because the causes and mechanisms they are trying to reason about are invisible...When we misapply the property of one natural kind to another, we are thinking unnaturally. If we continue to believe it is true, then our thinking has become supernatural ...This is where the supersense comes from." From this point, what we call "animism" and "anthropomorphism" is a natural next step. We create mythological "gods" in our own image, and then we use our storytelling capability to say that "god" created us in god's image. At this point, culture takes over and reinforces what began as "naive theories." Children's misconceptions are intuitive and not taught, "but they feed into a cultural context to become folklore, the paranormal, and religion. We know that social environments are important in providing frameworks of belief, but they only exist in the first place because of the supersense."
Instinct, intuition, and inference are not culprits in this story. All are essential to human survival, and hence the neurobiological system that has evolved with our modern human mind is an evolutionary outcome that favors taking shortcuts, including adopting beliefs about things that might not be true. "Intuitive reasoning," Hood notes, "has the advantage in the race to influence our decision-making because it is so effortless, covert, and rapid." It consumes less energy, and without it our decision-making would be slower making it more likely that we humans might be someone else's lunch.
What is missing from Hood's account of how we come to believe that things that are not real are real is the mind's role in storytelling --- explaining beliefs in either fictional or non-fictional terms. This is something that is probably unique to humans, because it requires a language faculty. Hood acknowledges that "humans are compelled to understand the nature of the world around as part of the way our brains try to make sense of our experiences." But the closest Hood comes to discussing this subject is his discussion of free-will. We have the experience of making "conscious decisions" to undertake action, but brain research shows that the point in time when we think we have made a choice occurs after the event (action) has occurred, suggesting that the mind constructs a story that fits with a decision after they have been made. In Human (see September 27, 2009 post), Michael Gazzaniga writes that while "other animals and humans use observables to predict, it may be that humans alone try to explain." For Gazzaniga, this is the role of the left side of our brain, which acts as an interpreter of our conscious experience, which is "driven to generate explanations and hypotheses regardless of the circumstances." From studies of brain lesions, we know that the interpreter on the left side of the brain is only as good as the information it receives, and the outcome of its efforts to make sense of wacky incoming information can be a lot of "imaginative stories." Gazzaniga adds, "just because you can imagine something does not mean it true. You can imagine a unicorn, a satyr, and a talking mouse. Just because you believe or imagine that the mind and body are separate does not mean they are." So the structure of the human brain has either evolved or adapted to interpret and explain both the environment around it and its own subjective experiences. Language provides the faculty to convert interpretation into a story, which may be either true or false, but which become beliefs nevertheless.
For humans, the most special sensory modality is vision, yet all the sensory modalities, both somatic (temperature, touch, pressure, pain, body position) and the five special senses (smell, hearing, taste, vision and balance) simultaneously provide important stimuli and convert energy into nervous impulses that are mapped in the brain at about the same time. And these different neuronal inputs, arriving initially in different areas of the brain, are subsequently joined in convergence zones in the brain, which integrate information arriving from the different sensory modalities that enables a unified experience of our environment rather than a series of fragmentary experiences. This is sometimes referred to as the "binding problem," whereby multisensory inputs are integrated in the brain to form a unified experience.
This concept of sensory experience is not what author Bruce Hood has in mind. For Hood, "supersense" is an "inclination that [our experiences, which are not substantiated by a body of reliable evidence] may be real." In this vein, "supersense" is derivative of what we have labeled "extrasensory perception" and is not a "sense" at all. What Hood is getting is what we refer to as instinct, intuition, and inference, all of which are derivative of the known sensory modalities and the brain's capacity to search out and recognize patterns that explain our experiences. In the course of searching out and trying to find patterns, we initially form beliefs about our experience. This belief-forming capability begins in our infancy, a time when we are not cognitively capable of explaining what we believe or why we believe it. Our minds are designed, writes Hood, " to see the world as organized, [and] we often detect patterns that are not really present."
The following passage highlights that intuition is at the foundation of the so-called "supersense": "There is good evidence that children naturally and spontaneously think about the unseen properties that govern the world. They infer forces to explain events they cannot directly see, understand that living things have life energy, and reason in terms of essence when thinking about the true nature of animals. And, of course, they begin to understand that other people have minds. These processes are not taught to children. They are reasoning, though it is not clear that they can necessarily reflect on why or how they re coming up with their decisions. That is why their reasoning is intuitive.***Intuition is often called a 'gut feeling.' Sometimes we get a 'vibe' when we sense a physical feeling of knowing . . .The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio calls this the somatic marker: it indicates the way emotions affect reasoning in a rapid and often unconscious way." Hood's point: a lot of our responses to what our sensory modalities experience is automatic and "unlearned." It is in our nature, therefore, that there will likely be a variance between what we believe and what is real.
Hood is not original in this way of thinking and the body of research that supports it. Paul Bloom's book, Descartes Baby, demonstrated that from a very early age children distinguish between physical states and mental states, making us "natural born dualists," and that we reason differently about the two states. And within the realm of mental states, children discern intentions, purpose, goals, and emotions in other animate objects. Children believe and recognize that other animate objects have "minds," and believe they can recognize intentions, purpose, goals and emotions in others: we can read minds. In a previous post (see September 18, 2009 post), the role of "mirror neurons" have been identified with our ability to "feel" the actions and perhaps the intentions of others. Numerous researchers, including Michael Gazzaniga (see September 27, 2009 post) have written about the neural mechanisms of nonconscious mimicry and emotional contagion (taking on the mood of others) that begins in early infancy --- particularly in the case of child and mother.
According to Hood, the intuitions of children include the belief that there are no random events or patterns, that events are caused by intention, that complexity is neither random nor spontaneous but a product of design, and that living things differ because of some essential, invisible property inside them. These intuitions "are fertile soil for creationism," concludes Hood. As children, we "infer structures where there may be none," and it is these inferences that give rise to supernatural beliefs. Natural selection is counter intuitive. As children grow older, they tend to categorize their experiences and "generate naive theories that explain the physical world, the living world, and ultimately the psychological world of other people. While children's naive theories are often correct, they can be wrong because the causes and mechanisms they are trying to reason about are invisible...When we misapply the property of one natural kind to another, we are thinking unnaturally. If we continue to believe it is true, then our thinking has become supernatural ...This is where the supersense comes from." From this point, what we call "animism" and "anthropomorphism" is a natural next step. We create mythological "gods" in our own image, and then we use our storytelling capability to say that "god" created us in god's image. At this point, culture takes over and reinforces what began as "naive theories." Children's misconceptions are intuitive and not taught, "but they feed into a cultural context to become folklore, the paranormal, and religion. We know that social environments are important in providing frameworks of belief, but they only exist in the first place because of the supersense."
Instinct, intuition, and inference are not culprits in this story. All are essential to human survival, and hence the neurobiological system that has evolved with our modern human mind is an evolutionary outcome that favors taking shortcuts, including adopting beliefs about things that might not be true. "Intuitive reasoning," Hood notes, "has the advantage in the race to influence our decision-making because it is so effortless, covert, and rapid." It consumes less energy, and without it our decision-making would be slower making it more likely that we humans might be someone else's lunch.
What is missing from Hood's account of how we come to believe that things that are not real are real is the mind's role in storytelling --- explaining beliefs in either fictional or non-fictional terms. This is something that is probably unique to humans, because it requires a language faculty. Hood acknowledges that "humans are compelled to understand the nature of the world around as part of the way our brains try to make sense of our experiences." But the closest Hood comes to discussing this subject is his discussion of free-will. We have the experience of making "conscious decisions" to undertake action, but brain research shows that the point in time when we think we have made a choice occurs after the event (action) has occurred, suggesting that the mind constructs a story that fits with a decision after they have been made. In Human (see September 27, 2009 post), Michael Gazzaniga writes that while "other animals and humans use observables to predict, it may be that humans alone try to explain." For Gazzaniga, this is the role of the left side of our brain, which acts as an interpreter of our conscious experience, which is "driven to generate explanations and hypotheses regardless of the circumstances." From studies of brain lesions, we know that the interpreter on the left side of the brain is only as good as the information it receives, and the outcome of its efforts to make sense of wacky incoming information can be a lot of "imaginative stories." Gazzaniga adds, "just because you can imagine something does not mean it true. You can imagine a unicorn, a satyr, and a talking mouse. Just because you believe or imagine that the mind and body are separate does not mean they are." So the structure of the human brain has either evolved or adapted to interpret and explain both the environment around it and its own subjective experiences. Language provides the faculty to convert interpretation into a story, which may be either true or false, but which become beliefs nevertheless.
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