Interesting Saponlsky lecture here Strong ties between Obsessive Compulsive Disease (OCD) and religious ritual. Schizophrenia and magical thinking. Superstition as a sign of brain damage. Verified in rats. Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (fun example - St Paul) Serious  Neophobia - dislike of new things Hypergraphia - obsessive writing Obsessive interest in religion More here - a bit too much weight on pseudo - evolutionary theories. The idea that whatever we see in nature must have an adaptive value. Sets up for asking "what is a mild version of schizophrenia"? Schyzotypalism  social withdrawal metamagical thinking  frenzied new age ideas concrete religious belief  1/2 crazy shamans 

This is a post to index the Sapolsky lecture on depression Depression Neuropenepherine Serotonin Limbic System Stress Response Appetite thyroid ruminating sex hormones cortisol stress melancholia aggression learned helplessness heritability "Simplistic idea: Cortex is getting the rest of the brain to go along with the "idea" that the body has been seriously injured" - Depressed = cortex going along with "abstract pleasure" Genetic factor pre-disposes us to depression when you are exposed to major stress. Gene involved in cortisol

I've been doing a lot of thinking and reading lately. Things seem to be coming together in a way that demands a bit of summarization. THE PROBLEM OF "MIND I think Dennet's reductionist approach is wrong. He seems to think that everything important about "mind" can be learned from studies of the way the physical brain works (neurology) plus experiments with subjects to correlate what is known about the brain with what subjects reveal about their "first person" experience of the world. This is a "bottom up" approach. I would say that for, humans at least, the brain is almost certainly necessary but not sufficient to create a "mind". The first person experience of the world is infinite, open-ended and individual. It can't be "averaged" and will resist creation of general "laws" of much interest. The mind is, to a first approximation, identical with the first person experience of the Universe. At first, there woul...

This is a series of Massey Lectures , available on-line through the Ideas archive or as a book . The lectures are well-worth reading. Franklin is a deep and original thinker. For the purposes of this blog, her most significant idea is the way that technology turns society into a collection of compliant robots - a specific reference to the "Dragon Theory" idea. How does this work? Technology demands "work" to be parcelled out into steps or specialized components. Each piece of work needs to "fit" with all the others, so "good" work is basically work that tightly complies with specifications. Human qualities of judgment are ruled out. Any identification with the end product is removed. This in what Marx called "alienation". But Marx traced alienation to the fact that the worker no longer owned the means of production or the product of his labour. Perhaps the deeper reality was the switch to mass production, centralized because the power s...

Introduction - Intuition pumps, thanks to Dennett. Basic "pumps" - zombies, "kinda", heterophenomenology, memes etc. M-The Wonderful Mind. "Mind" as the 1st person account of "all there is" - the Universe.  Can heterophenomenology tell us anything interesting about the mind? Is there anything it must leave out? Object Oriented Analysis - OOA - How Computers Really Work OOA as the "meme" behind a large class of human-made machines Self-replication - an alternative to "life" What is life? Are we machines? Why life is "poorly designed" from the OOA perspective Is DNA "software"? Are protein molecules machines? Are living things "objects" or "classes" of objects in the OOA sense? Why poor design may be a feature, not a bug The Xombie - Can we build a person? Using OOA to sketch a schematic for a Xombie Complete set of human senses and "memory bank"  Ability to learn, discover, make...

This book provides a handy bridge between the Diary blog and the Dragon blog . The Dragon blog is getting bogged down with notes on the way the world works (assuming Dragon Theory) but it's short on providing a theoretical foundation for the theory. "Emergence" has always been assumed but rarely clearly connected with appropriate documentation to related work. Johnson's detailed treatment of the emergent "mind" of an ant colony is a great jumping-off point to introduce the concepts underlying Dragon Theory. Johnson plays with a number of other emergent systems that are based on "human" components (such as the city). His examples are a bit muddled and he doesn't make his point very clearly. "Dragon" examples would work better, such as: Self-structuring of language to create a structured universe of related "memes" Self-structuring of the economy around the shared idea of money Self-structuring of society itself around armies...

Dennett's "Intuition Pumps" has inspired me, at last, to write a book. Maybe. I'd call it "Better Intuition Pumps" (BIP). Dennett's book is a lovely "intuition pump" in its own right, but it cries out to be rewritten, refuted or at least challenged. In other posts, I'll flesh out possible chapters in BIP, but I can outline some main points here. Dennet champions as "Scientific" discipline for the study of mind, which he calls heterophenomenology  "H". The idea is that anything important about the mind can be learned from the "outside", through experiments, interviews etc.  The data "H" works with is the set of observable, documented "observations" along these lines. My problem with H is that it doesn't actually study the mind. Dennett is making the assumption that the mind is , for all intents and purposes, the brain. But one would think this is exactly what he needs to prove. "Pump...

John Horgan is a journalist , not a Scientist. A very successful journalist. You can get the thrust of his approach in The End of Science or a short video Soft vs. Hard Targets Interview Science is a vast endeavour and Horgan is bound to miss as often as he hits. His main technique is to go around and interview famous Scientists, then write articles for the layman exposing the flaws in the reasoning of the experts. His main thesis, which he has tirelessly defended for decades is that there nothing fundamentally discovered in Science since, say, the 1950's. This is ridiculous on its face and he's buried with opposition. He's just plain annoying. His response to the critics is Lots of "advances" are simply not true . He especially likes to cite fads in medicine, but these are "straw men". Does proving that some results are false establish that no advances are being made? Anyone who follows the subject is stunned at how often we find answers to questions we...

Laughlin's " A Different Universe " provides a sweeping re-examination of the idea of "emergence", along with a telling criticism of the doctrine of reductionism.   Although I'm not sure Daniel Dennett would admit it, he's a poster child of reductionism. He basically claims that the "mind" can be completely understood by examining a subject (i.e., the brain of the subject) from the "outside". The mind is "nothing more" than the activity of neurons in the brain. Opposed to this view is the idea of emergence: that a system of "simple" components can spontaneously reorganize itself into something new, specifically something with properties and behavour that cannot be derived, even in principal, from laws governing the components. That's Laughlin. Laughlin's book is a bit of a disorganized mess, but it's possible to glean some very important ideas from it. He makes some powerful general observations about t...

What, if anything, is "consciousness"? This is a central question of Zen . I have recently taken a look at the more "Scientific" view on the question. I just read Daniel Dennett 's discussion of consciousness. There are lots of Dennett lectures online. He's articulate and entertaining.  Dennett is a philosopher so tends to dig himself into obscure debates about language, terminology and disputes with other philosophers. He borrows a lot of experimental results, but he's not really part of the Scientific culture. Sorry, philosophers, philosophy is not Science. As Robert Laughlin reminds us, scholars of the humanities talk about words; physicists talk about facts. Dennett is still well worth reading though. Let me sketch out what I think he's talking about. He seems to be arguing against the intuitive view of consciousness, best represented by what's called the Cartesian Theater . This pictures the mind as something sitting in a theater watching t...