#168 Mind and Motion

#168 Mind, Space & Motion With Barbara Tversky

This was one of the more interesting podcasts I've heard in a while. Maybe because she sounds like someone's wise old aunt from Massachusetts. Maybe because I didn’t know much of this stuff before listening. 

The starting point was how our understanding of spatial relationships is more fundamental than abstract thought or language, which turns out to be Law Number Six in the "Nine Laws of Cognition" that she proposes.

Here are a few random factoids which came out of the conversation:

Blind children use their hands to describe directions. The gesturing helps complete the thought. 

Children’s drawings naturally tend to exaggerate those parts of the body (head, hands) that have a lot of neuron connections. 

People recognize videos of their own body motion better than they do strangers or even friends. It’s like trying on a piece of clothing to see if it fits—"and here it’s trying on a pattern of motion."

Moving in space can be better for old people to preserve cognitive alacrity than doing crossword puzzles. 

And here are Barbara’s Nine Laws of Cognition. I'm not sure about calling these laws--I'd be more inclined to downgrade them to the 9 Observations of Cognition. Because they seem to be more heuristic than theoretical: 

1st law: There are no benefits without costs. 

E.g. being creative is the antithesis of learning. 

2nd law: Action moulds perception.

E.g. our perceptual learning is done by moving in the world. 

3rd law: Feeling comes first

E.g. you know you like something before you recognize it. 

4th law: the mind can override perception

E.g. there was a study in a mental hospital where fake patients quit faking it after a while and began to act "normal," but those psychologists continued to interpret their actions as symptomatic of psychoses. 

5th law: Cognition mirrors perception 

E.g. within mentally imposed categories, differences are ignored, while between categories differences are exaggerated. 

6th law: Spatial thinking is the foundation of abstract thought

I.e. we learn how to manipulate abstract ideas by imagining prepositional relationships between them--over, under, above, within &c. 

7th law: The mind fills in missing information

E.g. If you see a guy sitting behind a desk, you guess he has legs, even if you can’t see them.

8th law: When thought overflows the mind, the mind puts it in the world

E.g. cavemen blurted out their thoughts into carved bones, indigenous people into hieroglyphs, and modern people into tweets.

9th law: We organize stuff in the world the way we organize stuff in our minds

E.g. we keep food in the kitchen, tools in the garage, children in school, and art in museums.

Shameless plug for my novel

This post is only distantly related to anything to do with Sam Harris. To wit:

Imagine a dystopian future world. Now imagine that world through the eyes of one of your fellow Sam Harris audience members. Maybe it would look like my novel, The Unsettler.

The second installment of my novel The Unsettler has come out, and here's what my publisher has to say this time: 

In this coming issue of SERIAL Magazine, the theme is SURVIVAL. We’ve got 5 short stories and two novel installments all about surviving whatever life may throw at you....

SERIAL MAGAZINE, Issue 11[In] the second installment of The Unsettler by Charles Joseph Albert..., Javier would like nothing more than to stay in the resource-deprived City he crew up in. You either run or adapt to survive and Javier has adapted quite well to the only life he’s ever known. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a choice about whether he stays or not. In ISSUE TEN, Javier was kidnapped by a childsnatcher and dumped in the wilderness. In ISSUE ELEVEN, we see him meet an unlikely companion who guides him to a “better life.”

#165 Journey Into Wokeness with Caitlin Flanagan

This podcast begins with a sample Waking Up episode, which takes the place of this episode’s housekeeping. 

(I’m going to editorialize a tiny bit here; you can take this ignorant opinion or leave it at your pleasure.) About two months ago, Sam had some British guy on--I think he's a writer--who pushed back on the notion that meditation has any real impact on the meditator. He found it boring and decided--whether through a knee-jerk reaction or through really trying it--that it was a big fat waste of time. It wasn't going to lower his blood pressure or cause him to reconcile with his ex or any other claims stretching credulity. But I say, as long as if it’s fun and it distracts you from your mortality for ten minutes, then it's all well and good. And yet I have to agree with that guest--thinking that you're going to learn how to recognize the important from the inconsequential, as Sam promises in this sampler, just because you meditate—well, that's just silly.

CF is an interesting left-leaning but not-really-feminist feminist, who skewers hypocrites right and left. Since she’s the mother of two sons, she isn’t so quick to vent about toxic masculinity.

She wrote an expose of the nanny industry pointing out that many privileged white upper class Harvard graduates who make it to the top of their New York investment banks end up hiring a illegal aliens as nannies. And somehow, Biffy doesn't pay Consuela's social security on the proposition that she's a “member of the family.” 

And yet, CF reports, Consuela is always mysteriously fired within five years.

Here's another droll CF comment: men say women are hysterical. But if women are more hysterical, it’s probably because of all the sexual assaults they’re repressing.

One last thought: CF makes a fascinating point that Harvard is making use of minority students to bolster their image, but it is not being straightforward with them about what will be needed for them to succeed in highly competitive fields like STEM. This means Harvard is condemning their minority students--even those who are superlative students--to compete in an unfair field against Palo Alto kids with three years of AP physics, kids who have done unbelievable experiments already in their high-school labs. Harvard owes it to their social-engineering admissions to prepare them in some way, offer them the remedial or even advanced prep classes that they might not have been given, and yet instead of doing that, the kids are callously left to sink or swim at their peril, never mind the psychological damage that might be inflicted on them.

I knew a couple of kids in that category from when I was in school, kids who were dumped in the deep end without adequate preparation. Hell, when it comes down to it, I was one of those kids myself. Admitted to Berkeley from a mostly minority high school and left to flounder without the least concern of how badly of my depth I was. So I can attest--CF knows what she's talking about here. This stuff is real.

Review of #162 - Medical Intelligence, with Eric Topol

I wasn't surprised by the reddit/blogger controversies stirred up by Sam. He spent so much of the podcast bemoaning the violence of Antifa protesters! I was thrown off, though, when he complained about how wacky the left is. Because I thought he was saying that "the left" = "Antifa".

It took me a while, but I figured out that he was really complaining about "the mainstream media" coverage of the event. How those lefties did not take to task the violent thuggishness of Antifa. The fact that NPR, CNN and NYT refuse to condemn the violence makes them--he says--look biased and cowardly. And I agree--look on the Internet for coverage of the Antifa thugs, and the only critical coverage you'll find are from screwball right-wingers. The left is, as Sam points out, suffering from severe whataboutism.

As for the main podcast itself, it really was good, but didn't teach me anything new. I'm sure we'd all rather have an AI looking at our radiology than a human, I don’t think this is controversial. I don't remember anything interesting coming out of the conversation that I hadn't already heard with the possible exception of this one horrible irony:

Medicine in the US is remarkable--unique, maybe--for its pernicious overtreatment to the point of harm done to the wealthy... an evil exceeded only by its callous undertreatment of the poor.

#159: Conscious (with Annaka Harris)

One of the immediate attractions of this podcast, to anyone who has listened to more than one or two of them, is the unedited goofy beginning of this where Sam and his wife Annaka figure out how to get into the dynamic of interviewer/interviewee instead of husband and wife. A lot of awkward moments, a lot of laughs, and a thoroughly enjoyable glimpse into the man behind the rigorous, austere veneer that must be the face of every public figure.

Once you get past that, there may not be much of interest to the hard-core neuroscientist or political observer or AI researcher. But if you come at these with a more general interest level, which probably describes most of us, then you might derive something from it. I for one was expecting to hear Sam extract from Annaka that the hard problem was going to be solved in ten years and soon we'd be making computers that were just as conscious as we are.

Instead, she voiced a scruple that I share: what if consciousness isn't an either/or proposition (humans have it but dogs don't, for example) but more of a phenomenon that can occur in degrees. Humans are more complexly conscious than rats, who are more conscious than complexly worms, who are more complexly conscious than bacteria, who are--who knows?--more complexly conscious than atoms.

I did my PhD dissertation in relativistic quantum mechanics, and I still don't understand how an electron knows when to emit a proton that is off-shell, and when to emit one that is on-shell. Or why the energy that makes up an electron decided to coalesce into the clunky and sluggish existence of matter at all! Why not remain pure, massless, and immune to entropy?

So I say, maybe there is some level of complexity within even the reductionless point particle we call an electron. And maybe that complexity is a building block of consciousness, though we only recognize it when it has been added to in sufficient number.  And it was pretty cool to hear these two skirt this idea. To hear Sam say, "what is it like to be an electron?"

#58 - The Putin Question

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Garry Kasparov about the problem of waning American power, the rise of Putin, the coming presidency of Donald Trump, computer chess, the future of artificial intelligence, and other topics.

Coming back to this episode months later, I don't remember anything about Trump, computer chess, AI, or other topics. The only thing I remember can be summed up in my handy-dandy little meme I just generated instead of working:

Review of Making Sense #157: What Does the Mueller Report Really Say? With Benjamin Wittes

Oh, boy! This was a juicy one. Starting with good disclaimers about how Benjamin is not a lawyer but a legal reporter, and also that he despises Trump and wants him out of office. So if you take him at his word, you won't view the rest of the interview as yet another Trump lackey running a screen for him. And really, unless you're blinded by your own political bents, you will find yourself unable to disagree with pretty much everything Benjamin says.

He makes clear that in Volume 1 of the report, Mueller found no criminal activity on Trump’s part prior to the 2016 election:

• Gross incompetence kept him from accomplishing the conspiracy he intended 
• So did a halo of interceding aides 
• Merely applauding and being the beneficiary of Russian hacking does not mean Trump conspired.

So, though there are terrible lapses of judgment recorded, there's nothing criminal there.

Volume 2 is a different story, though. That one is about the Trump response to the investigation. Benjamin notes that Mueller was legally not allowed to say that anything indicted Trump, only whether he is exonerated or not. But he says there are three clearly criminal and impeachable classes of offenses outlined in Volume 2:

• Criminal offense #1: serial abusive attempts to influence the investigation by firings etc.
• Criminal offense #2: serial attempts to abuse his power and launch FBI attacks on Hillary Clinton and other political enemies 
• Criminal offense #3: commanding and encouraging witnesses to not cooperate with the investigation.

Benjamin ends by recognizing the danger of proceeding with impeachment proceedings, which may only energize Trump's base for a 2020 election. And he very rightly counters that with the danger of turning a blind eye to such criminal and reprehensible behavior.

Sam does a good job of staying out of the way and only asking intelligent and appropriate questions. At the end, he asks the question which is on my mind a lot these days: "what do you say to the die-hard partisan Trump supporter who keeps insisting that there is no 'there' there?" 

Benjamin's answer is one we've probably all heard before: "Tell them to substitute 'Biden' or 'Hillary' (or whatever) in the report everywhere you see Trump's name, and see if you can't understand how terrifying this is to people on the other side who are concerned about the fate of our democracy.'

Sound advice. But I bet many committed Trump supporters would be willing to ride a nuke into--well, not Moscow, anymore, but how about San Francisco?--if Trump told them to. So I don't think they'd give a fig about the fate of our country's democracy.