Thursday, May 26, 2011

The Shared Mind

In a recent post discussing the nature of individuality, I mentioned the paucity of examples of combined nervous systems or brains. Single brains that have been divided exist, but as I said, there are no good medical reasons to combine brains.

Well, I sometimes forget that nature runs little experiments of its own sometimes. Case in point: Krista and Tatiana Hogan. These two four-year-old girls, joined at the head, seem to have neural pathways connecting their brains, and while they have not been rigorously tested (due mostly to their age), they appear to be able to share some level of sensation, and occasionally they refer to themselves as if they are one. Their brain structure is unique, probably in all of human history.

So here we have a case, produced by nature, of two people who may be one person, or may be somewhere in between.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Epigrams

I love epigrams. Most of the time, I tend to express myself in an exceedingly verbose manner, as you can probably tell if you have read any of my posts here. I ramble. So I love trying to come up with a way to express big ideas more efficiently, with minimal words.

As such, I've come up with a number of epigrams over the years, most of which are forgotten to me because I've never had the good sense to write them down. That changes now!

I will make occasional posts here of epigrams I've come up with as I think of them. Some may lead to other discussions, but I'll post epigrams occasionally as collections (i.e. not a new post every time I think I've come up with something witty). Sometimes they may not precisely meet the definition of an epigram, which I guess doesn't have a very precise definition anyway, and some may not be as witty as I think they are. Very often they will be riffs on or reversals of known sayings, which I like to do, but they will always be my own concoctions, not quotes. Not intentionally anyway. (I have on occasion unintentionally plagiarized others, saying something I'd thought was my own when I'd clearly heard it elsewhere and forgotten. I'll try to avoid that.)

So, without further ado, some epigrams of mine. Some of these are kind of old...

  • Conventional wisdom usually involves more convention than wisdom.
  • It is better to be thought of as the first of something than the next of something.
  • A rose by another name may smell as sweet, but would you take a whiff if I told you it was feet?
  • The two birds in the bush are worth the one in your hand.
  •  There is much more freedom in accepting your insignificance than there is in trying to prove your significance.
  • Slow and steady wins the race only if no one fast and steady is running.
  • The early worm gets eaten by the bird.
  • Those seeking perfection will find only flaws.
  • You can drown in a one inch puddle of water, and you can survive hundreds of feet beneath the surface of the sea. It's not so much about the quantity of the water as it is about how you approach it.
  • We are the sum of our actions. Not our thoughts or intents, but our deeds. We will not be remembered for our potential, but for how well we fulfill it.
  • Are you really against all those things you're against, or are you just envious of those who get to do them?
  • Those who stop to smell the roses will be left behind in the dark, to be eaten by the wolves of progress, while those who stand in righteous poses are elected gods of the world. 

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Humility

Some days back, I was reading a book by Bill James called Solid Fools Gold. James is a baseball writer and thinker who is considered a pioneer of the more evidence-based, mathematical analysis of the game. It's the sort of very nerdy stuff I'm really into. What struck me was that one of the chapters was on the importance of humility to the scientific method.

This is something I have rarely heard stated but that I've found, working as I do within the scientific community, to be very true. In order to be successful as a scientist (and by successful, I mean successful at science, not successful at making money with science), one must be willing to recognize and accept when one is wrong. Being incorrect is a very important part of the scientific process. If we knew our hypotheses were true, they wouldn't be hypotheses. Just because something is fathomable or makes sense in theory doesn't mean it is true.

While it is true that scientific consensus can be wrong on occasion, and in such cases, a dissenter who insists on the truth of an idea others find implausible is a true asset, more often the consensus is correct. The beauty of science is that the truth is always a moving target. A real scientist knows that the ultimate truth is unknowable and does not claim to have all the answers. She is only making her best guess given the severe limitations imposed by the human condition.

Real science does not deal in certitude. It deals in likelihood. We can never say, "This is true." We use confidence intervals and define something as "true" if we have determined that there is a 95 or 99 percent chance of it being true. But we acknowledge the existence of those other few percentage points.

Someone is always coming along with a better idea. Sometimes it is a refinement of an old idea, and sometimes it is a complete paradigm shift. A good scientist needs to be able to recognize when a new idea is better and scrap old preconceptions, even if it means giving up one's own ideas in favor of those of another.

With that in mind, nothing that I say in this blog is set in stone as fact. Nothing is intractible. I am not afraid to say, "Oops, I was wrong about that." Of course, that won't stop me from posting my half-baked ideas.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Indivisibility and Inmultiplicability

I've spent a fair amount of time in my life thinking about numbers. Granted, I am not a mathematician, nor can I claim any understanding of the highest levels of mathematical thinking, but I'm pretty good with numbers, and I like them.

Unfortunately, numbers are not real. They are, like everything else, abstractions that help us better understand reality. There is no such thing as a one or a two. That's clear enough. But what we often don't appreciate are concepts some of the less obvious number-related truths: you can't really have more than one of anything, and you can't really divide anything into parts.

I say that as I have in front of my two apparently identical cups. I know that they are not identical, however. Aside from all the miniscule flaws in design that may make one different from another, the mere fact that I can identify them as distinct objects implies that they are not identical. One is on the left, and the other is on the right. In order for two objects to be identical, they must have no features that distinguish them from one another. In other words, they must occupy the same space at the same time while exhibiting the same traits. That is, they must be the same object.

We categorize, as I have mentioned previously, in order for our limited minds to make sense of what is around us. We find patterns and we make inferences about one pattern based on what we know of another similar pattern. As I have said before, this is good and useful for us, but we too often fall in love with the abstractions and forget that they merely describe an underlying reality. They are not the reality itself, which is continuous and essentially indivisible.

So, with this in mind, I turn my attention to human beings. In daily life, we usually feel pretty comfortable thinking of ourselves as distinct from other people. I am not you, and you are not me. However, like all other separations, even this seemingly obvious one falls apart upon more careful inspection. What makes me not you? Religious people will make claims about souls or some dualistic ideas that don't so much add to the conversation as block further discussion. I'm going to throw out the notion of a soul as an idea constructed egocentrically as a mechanism for making sense of the limitations of our consciousness. In other words, I don't buy it. I'm a scientific thinker, for the most part, and I don't like conclusions that rely on making stuff up to explain what is difficult to explain.

So what is it that separates us? Information. We recognize ourselves as distinct from other people (and other objects, for that matter) due to the lack of information flowing between us and others. Specifically, our nervous system does not extend beyond what we recognize as the bounds of our bodies. We cannot send or receive information beyond the extents of our nervous system without indirect methods. Information can be received through our senses and transmitted through our motions, but there is no neural connection, no direct, two-way flow of information like there is within the nervous system.

So what happens when you cut up a nervous system? If you lose your arm, is it a part of you anymore? Beyond a sort of sentimental attachment, I don't think most people would feel that their detached arm is still part of them. Once something is removed from the nervous system's central controls, it becomes something else.

So then, what happens if you split up the central controls themselves (for the most part, the brain)? Well, that's complicated, but it has happened. There are plenty of studies out there on the effects of brain damage and, perhaps more to the point, split-brain studies. A split-brain person is a relatively recent sort of medical creation. For the most part, fiddling with the brain is a bad idea. In cases of extreme epilepsy, though, doctors may sever the corpus callosum, which connects the two hemispheres of the brain. Naturally, the results are rather interesting. The two halves of the brain, lacking the direct communication they had, effectively become different people sharing a body, each with control of one side. There's a lot to read about this, most of which can be googled. Here is a particularly good, succinct summary.

So if you can split someone into two people, can you combine two into one? Theoretically, sure, but the mechanisms for doing so don't yet exist. You would need to be able to fuse two nervous systems, at least, and find a way to make their brains work together with a direct connection. I am not anything close to a neurologist, so I won't begin to theorize about the difficulties involved. Compatibility issues, I would think, could complicate things. But lacking any real medical reason to fuse people together, it will likely not be happening anytime soon.

The point, though, is that what we define as ourselves is not some kind of actual, separate thing from everything else. It is only a sort of sensory limitation. On an atomic level, in fact, objects are constantly moving around and switching places. There is likely not one particle of you that was in you when you were born. The continuity of self comes from the continuity of information flow. It is, therefore, as much an illusion and a simplification as anything else.

I realize this negates many of the world religions, particularly Abrahamic ones that depend on ideas like individuality and personal salvation. I'm not out to negate religions. I don't really care much about religion beyond examining its role within society and such. I'm an atheist, but I don't care if you are. I'm just out to make sense of the world based upon my observation of it.

I'll get into ideas like ethics and morals in a later post.

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Osama's End

News came a couple of days ago that the US had finally, after more than nine years, found and killed Osama bin Laden. I first heard it while watching a baseball game on television, during which the broadcasters announced it. I was completely caught off guard by the news, and the full impact of it did not immediately strike me. It was only when I watch President Obama talk about it in his address to the nation a few minutes later that I realized that this was indeed something pretty big.

My feelings about the matter are not simple. I am never one to celebrate the death of another person, even when that death benefits the world or is necessary. It is not a happy thing that a man needed to be killed. Being killed is never the most preferable end to any life, even when there is no other palatable choice. Death prevents redemption. It prevents any potential good from coming from that person. It prevents anything more positive than itself from happening. Ultimately, the best thing would have been for bin Laden to renounce violence and help others to lead a better life. It is unfortunate that he chose to continue the violence instead.

This is not to say that the man didn't have it coming. His actions killed many innocent people. He is, by proxy, a mass murderer. I saw the destruction of the Twin Towers up close. I was near enough when the second plane hit that I could feel a wave of heat from the explosion. I watched helpless, desperate people jump to their deaths in order to avoid burning to death. This was all on bin Laden, ultimately. It is good that, given his lack of redemption and the harm he has caused, he has been removed from the world. It is good, but it is also sad that it had to come to that.

I hope that those who lost loved ones on 9/11 and in other attacks worldwide can feel some kind of peace with bin Laden's death. I hope this serves to remind us here in the US that all our recent political bickering disguises some degree of solidarity. I hope that the best can come as a result of this sad thing.