A New Political Dialectic

<cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

Jackson Lears has a riveting piece up at the Nation which soundly routs the new parapositivism taking the popular and newspaper science cultures by storm.  The piece is called "Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris".  It's a takedown of Harris couched within a takedown of the New Atheist conceptual framework couched within a takedown of a positivism which oversteps its bounds.  Freddie deBoer recently praised the piece:

I think that absolutely everyone should read this profoundly necessary evisceration of Sam Harris, the Moe of the New Atheist Three Stooges, written by Jackson Lears and published by the Nation. It may be my favorite essay published this year; it goes well beyond the usual stalking horses of New Atheism and speaks to some of the fundamental analytical and ethical issues confronting our species, particularly when it comes to progress and the limits of knowledge. Read the whole thing, seriously.

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Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny (in Education)

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.

The phrase "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" refers to embryological parallelism, the idea that the development of any individual organism strongly parallels that organism's evolutionary history.  For example, in mammalian embryos, the backbone appears very early, followed by other neural developments in the order that they first appeared in mammalian macro-evolution.  The cerebrum is the last brain structure to develop in the individual human, as it is the newest structure in macro-evolutionary terms.  

If we look at whale embryos, legs begin to develop before retracting back into the body cavity.  Hair also develops briefly, but whale embryos lose this hair at further stages.  Birds have fingers at early stages of development, but these eventually fuse to form wings.  Birds also possess the genes for teeth, but these genes have been "turned off", and teeth never develop in birds.  Both human and monkey embryos briefly have tails to reflect our be-tailed common ancestor, but this tail disappears abruptly in humans, whereas it continues growing in monkeys.  This all correlates strongly with both genetic, mathematical models and the fossil record.

I find the parallelism between macro-evolutionary history, individual organismic development, and mathematically modelable genetic histories endlessly fascinating, and I am obsessed with reconciling and systematizing these phenomena.  But, I do not know enough about the subject right now; it is something that I would like to explore in depth in the future.  

For now, I'd like to see how such a model could be applied to education: that is, the educational development of the individual student recapitulates the macro-history of human knowledge.

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Inception: Drawing Demons

Martin Schongauer, Anthony the Great plagued by demons, 1480sI wanted to respond briefly to Pete's excellent review of Inception.

   

I just finished watching Inception, and I wanted to get these thoughts on the film out quickly before I forget them (like a dream).  First of all, I think the film tells too much instead of showing or allowing the viewer to draw his own conclusions or fill in the gaps in his own understanding of the story and its world.  While it surely required some degree of imaginative power to conceive the world of the film, watching Inception for me was a fairly unimaginative experience, somewhere between walking to the nearest convenience store and listening to music on my iPod.

  

That's not to say my mind didn't wander pleasurably throughout the film, just that processing endless amounts of exposition left little room for speculation. (There is a reason science fiction is often called speculative fiction.)  As an aspiring neurologist, I found the subject matter particularly thought-provoking.  It was the story that was really bare-bones.  I prefer the vague weirdness of say THX 1138 to the logical funeral pyre of Inception.  The way the story was told reminded me a lot of the kinds of television shows made for twelve-year-old boys, where so-and-so character has this ability and so-and-so character can do this but can't do this.  I imagine Dragon Ball Z served as the main inspiration for the Inception writing team.  

  

As such, Inception is just part of a greater trend within our culture towards Simple Simon cinematic experience based upon layer and layer of nerd-knowledge scaffolding.  As Pete says in his review, Inception is a stale heist film in disguise.  Its warm critical reception draws on the fact that critics were so distracted by the film's smoke-and-mirrors that they failed to see what was right in front of their faces (a trend): that with enough money, anybody over age eleven could have made this movie.

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The Virtue of Virtues

Some of the 72 disciples of Confucius at Koshi-byo in Nagasaki

Sharon Begley writes in Science Journal in 2004:

The task was to practice "compassion" meditation, generating a feeling of loving kindness toward all beings.

"We tried to generate a mental state in which compassion permeates the whole mind with no other thoughts," says Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk at Shechen Monastery in Katmandu, Nepal, who holds a Ph.D. in genetics.

In a striking difference between novices and monks, the latter showed a dramatic increase in high-frequency brain activity called gamma waves during compassion meditation. Thought to be the signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung brain circuits, gamma waves underlie higher mental activity such as consciousness. The novice meditators "showed a slight increase in gamma activity, but most monks showed extremely large increases of a sort that has never been reported before in the neuroscience literature," says Prof. Davidson, suggesting that mental training can bring the brain to a greater level of consciousness.

Not since David Hume has virtue ethics found a place in the mainstream philosophy community, despite the fact that - more than any other moral framework - virtue ethics serves as the basic moral framework for all of the world's major religions and cultures.

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On Neurotherapy

Charles Bell: Anatomy of the Brain c. 1805It's fashionable to affix "neuro-" to pretty much anything these days to make it sound sexy and imbue it with authority: neuromarketing and neuroesthetics specifically come to mind (no pun intended); though often times this authority is due, as we now have the technology to begin investigating the mind in a manner based on the scientific assumption of metaphysical naturalism.  More than anything else, neuroscientific discoveries seem primed to revolutionize everything else in the near future.

The always wry Rufus F. wrote a post at LoOG about Meredith Maram, who recently admitted that she falsely accused her own father of molesting her while caught up in the repressed memory syndrome fanaticism of the 1980s.  The comments got me thinking about scientific rationales for RMS

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Drug Policy: Engaging with Reality

In Japan, there is a widespread benign ignorance about the effects of recreational drug use on the human body.  I know only one person here who has tried a hardcore drug (by which I mean it doesn't pass the lunchbreak test), and he happens to be an extremely unique, strongwilled, powerful, and privileged individual.  Drugs (besides of course alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, nitrous, and until recently, both marijuana and mushrooms) are not a part of Japanese culture, and so if Japanese people do not dispassionately understand the physiological effects of crystal meth, who cares?  

However in America, a country saturated with recreational drug use, we suffer from a malignant almost willful ignorance on the part of parents and authority figures.  Our drug laws and programs designed to combat youth drug use, personal experimentation, and addiction are universally poor and self-defeating.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the easily-debunkable urban legends and boogieman stories disseminated through networks of parents and school officials engaging in discussions of mutual ignorance.  Like priests and nuns lecturing Catholic school students about sex, bureaucrats, PTA officials, and politicians not named Hunter S. Thompson should not be formulating drug policy or setting curricula.  This job should be the proper province of neuroscientists who understand the physiology of addiction, and illegal drugs should be scientifically reviewed and assessed by the chemists and clinical researchers at the FDA.

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Ken Mogi's TEDxTokyo Lecture

I feel like the TED brand has reached its "Decade of Decadence" phase.  The series has become a bully pulpit for Baby Boomers to preach certain maxims using contrived Guy Smiley stage voices and trite adverbial conjunctions like "Now,..." before long, pretentious pauses, then underwhelming rhetoric designed as an exercise in the capacity of willpower to restrain Pavlovian violence.

So I had low expectations for today's live stream of TEDxTokyo. (The "x" means it's independently organized and only using TED for its McMeal ticket - kind of like "Quentin Tarantino Presents"...some obscure cult film starring Sonny Chiba.)  But I was surprised by an interesting lecture from Dr. Kenichiro Mogi, a neuroscientist interested in solving the mind-brain problem now working and researching at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory.

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Fantasia and the Narrative Fallacy

As a new parent, I introspect constantly about the impact various media will have on my ten-month-old daughter's neural and moral development.  I seem to find major problems with nearly everything we try watching together, whether it's a disappointment with the Euclidean oversimplifications and anthropomorphism of everything in Inai Inai Baa, or a skeptical wariness of preachy Sesame Street.  While I certainly don't think it's healthy to be obsessed with a particular, fictitious, red monster, I usually convince myself that my criticisms are slightly overbearing, and that, as important as the first year of neurodevelopment is, thirty seconds a week of three triangles and a rectangle suddenly becoming a penguin is not going to force my daughter into a compartmentalized world-view or stymie an appreciation of the profound, true complexity of the cosmos.

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Political Ideology and Morality: Correlation Does Not Imply Causation

The first lesson one learns in Statistics 101 is that correlation does not imply causation; that is, if two events seem to follow each other, that doesn't mean they are directly related.  For example, for many years it was believed that children who slept with the light on were more likely to develop myopia later in life.  This correlation seemed to make sense logically, but many years of rigorous study confirmed that myopic children tended to have myopic parents who were more prone to use bright lights across the board.  In this case, bright lights did not cause myopia: it was the other way around.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, fond himself of correlating opposing political ideologies with unpleasant psychological problems, recently wrote a column on research linking conservatism to vulnerability and low tolerance for disgust.  Liberals, on the other hand, are more likely to slap their own fathers.  Kristof references a new database for this sort of psychological research: www.yourmorals.org, which I went to and submitted to several psychological tests.

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Temple Grandin's Perspectives on Society

I usually ride the train to work, which affords me the opportunity to surf the internet on my iPhone.  Recently, the combination of Wikipedia and YouTube led me to an hour and a half lecture by Dr. Temple Grandin. Grandin is a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University and one of the foremost authorities on the humane treatment of livestock.  She was diagnosed at age two with high-functioning autism and didn't speak until age four.  Grandin has called for the societal acceptance and nurturing of autism as a different and valuable mode of cognition, rather than a disease that must be eradicated.

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Orchids and Dandelions

David Dobbs recently wrote an article for the Atlantic called "The Science of Success" about a "controversial" new theory suggesting short/short and short/long human serotonin-transporter genes, long held as increasing the risks of developmental disorders such as ADHD, depression, and anxiety, are also responsible for artistic genius, success at business or politics, and other desirable traits.  Individuals that have the short/short variant of this gene are called orchids, because, if not given proper care, they wilt and wither, but if raised in the right environments, they bloom spectacularly.  Individuals with the long/long variant are called dandelions: they are able to take root and survive almost anywhere.  Of course this is an oversimplification, but this new research could usher in a paradigm shift in how we think about child development or workplace dynamics, as well as providing the answer to the long-fought nature vs. nuture debate: it's both.

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How to Win at Art

I've been using his "Android Brain-Animal Brain" idea a lot recently, so I thought I'd link to this genius series of articles on how to "score" art by Ken Arneson.  He postulates that language is the way our android brains, the conscious, reflective part of our brain, communicates, but that our animal brain, that is our evolved animal instincts, uses art to communicate.  Our animal brain uses pattern recognition in art to form associative memories that are the currency of creativity.  Good art forms lots of memories, bad art forms none.  The best art avoids habituation (the recognition of familiarity that allows us to ignore reoccurring patterns as unimportant so we aren't distracted from keeping a watchful eye out for new stuff that might be important to our survival) and cliche even upon repeat viewings.

Beyond art, that struggle between our animal and android brains seems pretty right on in my everyday life.  Life is the attempt to train our animal brain to shape its powerful tactics into the service of our long term android strategies.