The seed of reason

Causality, minds and society

Genetic determinism is the idea that genes determine behavior.  Sometimes genetic determinists are accused of positing that all behavioral trends can be understood by genetics alone.

The blank slate is the idea that for all people (regardless of sex, race, etc.) the mind begins its development at birth (or maybe some earlier stage) from the same (or almost the same) beginning state.  The metaphor is that the mind at birth is a blank slate waiting to be written on.  Sometimes this group is accused of ignoring real differences between groups.

As an example genetic determinists might argue that gender roles are largely coded within our genes and that differences between adult men and women can be accounted for mainly genetically.  On the other hand advocates of the blank slate might argue that men and women start out with the same minds but that the influence of peer pressure, advertising and social norms change their developmental paths so that men often end up with one set of psychological features and women another.

As another example one could argue that intelligence has a significant genetic component and that twin studies demonstrate this.  On the other it might be that intelligence is determined by how people with certain physical attributes are treated.

As one measure of intelligence (IQ) has shifted significantly with time the rival camps give differing explanations:  Evolution is increasing intelligence within humans in the 20th century; Schooling is of a higher quality (or more universal) than before.

As a final example consider personality disorders.  One might argue that criminal behavior is genetically determined.  If so tests for the relevant genes would open up significant social issues.  On the other hand it might be argued that personality disorders mainly arise from mistreatment in childhood and that if only we could prevent childhood abuse or improve support for children we could all but eliminate criminality.

The main problem with the above arguments is that they all make use of the either/or fallacy.  They assume that either there is a clear and simple causal link from genetics or there is a simple causal link from nurture.

Now of course there are also environmental causes (such as nutrition) for behaviors but the either/or fallacy is still a problem even if we incorporate all three types of causation.

There is an implicit assumption that the different causes do not interact or that even if they do that they can be teased apart easily.

This debate has significance in discussing free will and the 'soul' because causality is often called upon to argue that a causal physical universe cannot be all there is as then everything you do would be determined by environment, genetics and societal influences on your development.

If on the other hand there is no easy way to calculate your future behaviors from knowledge of these three categories of influence then this makes the argument dubious.  It essentially depends on ignoring the horrendous computational complexity involved in actually performing such a calculation.

Lets look at other possibilities!

The factors might interact in a fairly straight forward way.  E.g if you have a genetic predisposition to Alzheimers and contract the herpes simplex virus (cold sore) then you are very likely to develop Alzheimers.

The factors might interact as coupled differential equations.  E.g children may genetic dispositions and may simply copy the most successful adults.  Teenagers may copy each other.  Through such behavior complex results may emerge (the emergence of chaotic patterns from simple rules).

Finally there may be developmental accidents.  In a baby's developing brain there may be multiple ways to perform certain mental tasks.  Which one the brain picks may be a matter of chance but have significant repercussions later on in terms of their behavior.

Shadow arguments

Over the course of my life I have come across many arguments based on sound intuitions but where those intuitions are in my opinion misapplied.  I call such arguments shadow arguments as they shadow more interesting arguments and observations.  Shadow arguments occur often on the frontier between religious/'spiritual' and reason/scientific thought (they are often 'God of the gaps' arguments).  In this post I want to explain more about this phenomenon, give (in brief) some examples and discuss why I think it may be valuable to investigate further.

The intuitions involved in shadow arguments tend to be of the form "X is over simplified.  When X is simplified in this way important detail is missed or incorrect consequences are drawn.".

However, generally the argument takes the form of observing that a simplified explanation in some domain does not account for certain observations.  The conclusion is then drawn that a 'spiritual' understanding is needed.

Now from a Spinozoan perspective we ought to be interested in why people are making these erroneous arguments.  As mentioned above I suspect that there are underlying and valid intuitions involved (through misapplication).  Isolating these intuitions and finding valid application for them seems to be a worthwhile exercise to me.

I shall now give two examples along with the underlying intuition and how I think its misapplied.  I may return to some of the examples in future blog posts.

1) Emotions cannot be understood with reason.

Intuition: Emotional behaviors are not always rational.

Misapplication: The only way reason can seek to understand behavior is through rationality.

Rationality has a peculiar property:  It is not always rational to remain rational.  If one could choose to lose control over certain decisions or to cede control to an emotion this can be the best choice.  Emotions can be thought of as perfectly sensible ways to achieve certain goals which would not be accessible to rationality (at least if simply defined).

Note that democracy has much the same trouble.  Democracies can democratically decide to lose their democratic status (temporarily or permanently).

2) Ineffable qualities of sensory experience exist.

Intuition: A thing and a description of the thing are not the same.

Misapplication: The description of a sensory experience is not the sensory experience itself and so sensory experiences cannot to described.

A sentence in English may be represented in a brain in a very different way to how an experience is represented.  In a computer, opening an executable file in notepad does not run the file.  But that does not mean that everything describing the action of that program is not expressed in the notepad file (technically a hex editor would be needed here).

Further examples would include the Chinese room argument, arguments that is impossible to be good and various discourses seeking to establish that reason is not a sufficient mode of thought for understanding reality.

Computation, AI and the brain

This blog post is part of my series on seeing the world in terms of computation.  I think this is a very powerful technique which will bring new insights and solve old problems.

Today I will be looking at the human mind and will concentrate on coming up with a good computational model for it (no details just overall structure).  As I am doing this I shall point out some implications of the model for AI and human intelligence.

Practically all modern computers are what we know as serial computers.  They perform instructions in strict sequence with occasional branches to subroutines.  This branching happens incredibly fast with modern processors running at 3 billion operations a second.  Brains on the other hand have several billion neurons each of which is performing a complicated calculation about 100 times a second.  Brains are highly parallel and this has important implications for human intelligence.

The human brain should be very good at tasks which are parallel in nature such as locating one object amongst many, solving mazes and finding reasonable solutions to real world traveling sales man problems.  Modern computers on the other hand should be very good at tasks where no substantial speed up can be gained from parallel processing.  There are surprisingly few real world tasks of this type!  Most examples I can think of are related to encryption.

Modern computers have separate memory and processor units.  Human's have regions of the brain devoted to static memory but much of what the brain remembers (procedural memory) is stored in the pattern of use of synapses.  The regions of the human mind which store memories are heavily connected to the other parts of the human brain.  So for computers to simulate the human mind they would need highly efficient transfer of information from the memory to the processor unit.

Having memory units tightly integrated with processor units clearly could make various types of processing much more efficient.  Most of the reason that your computer takes ages to start up is due to how comparatively slowly memory can be accessed.  Computer scientists should look for ways to more tightly integrate random access memory with the processor and also (more important) with scaling up the amount of RAM available and reducing power demands for the RAM when not in use (flash memory is a good example).  Computers will perform much better and have more chance of running powerful AIs if they can solve these problems.

The human brain has a very high bandwidth connection to the outside world.  Until recently computers had very little in the way of sensory equipment.  This is slowly changing.  But if AI is ever to match the human mind in its capacity for physical acts such as dancing and sports, if AI is ever to match the human mind in its experience and sense of connection with the world then the sensory and motor equipment AI has must achieve a higher degree of sophistication.  A human arm has many muscles in it and thousands of sensory devices that detect heat and pressure.  We are still a long way from making an input device for a computer which matches the arm in its development (let alone the hand).

In summary:

1) The brain is parallel, computers are serial (but getting more parallel).

2) The brain is highly integrated, computers separate distinct tasks such as storage and calculation.

These together go some way to explaining the differing strengths of humans and computers.  However, there are clear trends in computer design moving towards parallel processing.  These are the development of more better quality RAM, the development of multi core processors and the integration of some RAM on to processor chips.

What I haven't gone into in this post is in what ways computers have advantages over humans.  I haven't gone into this because I already have a couple of posts [] [] on this and I don't yet have anything more to say.

Dangerous ideas II

Further highlights from "What is your dangerous idea?"...

6) Brains cannot become minds without bodies - Alun Anderson

Alun Anderson thinks it would be dangerous not to acknowledge this.  He's not batting for the existence of a soul here though.  He is trying to persuade us that it is not just our brains that generate our minds, but that our hormonal system, internal sensory systems, muscular feedback and spinal chord have important parts to play too.

Anderson argues that an understanding of the mind which encompasses more than just the brain is necessary to explain the placebo effect, reported physical sensations involved in the emotion love and links between stress and ill health.

Personally I think Anderson is onto something here.  I have noticed in the past that various emotions do seem to manifest themselves as aches, pains or internal sensations within my body.  Also it is clear that hormones, the spinal chord and other internal dynamics are important to mood, desires and can be used in problem solving (ever moved your arms to trace out a shape whilst thinking of it?).

7) Drugs may change the pattern of human love - Helen Fisher

Helen Fisher specifically questions whether a class of anti-depressants (Serotonin-enhancing) may interfere with the biochemical pathways necessary for romantic love.  Fisher provides evidence both that these drugs have such an effect and for a biochemical mechanism behind such an effect.

She regards it as a dangerous idea because if true it means that we are systematically preventing a significant percentage of our population from experiencing an emotionally normal life.  As Fisher points out it is also quite possible that social change and/or political changes may occur in our societies because of such an effect.

Although confronting such a dangerous idea may make one uneasy its clearly better to know the truth on this one.

8) You have the right to choose the sex of your child - Diane Halpern

Diane Halpern provides good evidence that left to their own devices families (and individuals) the world over have an inherent bias towards having male children (often through infanticide unfortunately).  Imbalance in the number of men and women is a problem (particularly in rural China) and various methods have been used to try to mediate this effect without much success.

The economist ran an article on the social effects that an imbalance of men and women had in China.  Amongst the problems were increased aggression amongst young males, increased rapes, forced marriages and a shortage of surrogate mothers not to mention larger numbers of men never marrying/having children.  This is a problem we should keep our eyes on.

9) The world may be fundamentally inexplicable - Lawrence Krauss

What is currently happening in cosmology and fundamental physics looks very much like what was happening in Chemistry before the periodic table.  Often in science just before a revolution in thinking more and more complex systems become necessary to fit new data into an old model.  I see no particular reason to think that we've reached the edge of our capabilities.  Krauss is delivering a council of despair before we've really got started trying to explain some new and interesting data.

Incidentally this structure of scientific revolutions (a weak reading of Kuhn) is interestingly similar to punctuated equilibrium (the hypothesis that evolutionary change proceeds in a series of slowly changing plateaus punctuated by sudden bursts of ultra-fast change).  The similarity is such that I'm tempted to hypothesise that there is a shared mathematical structure to these to phenomenon.

10) Insight is becoming impossible at the frontiers of mathematics - Steven Strogatz

Why Steven thinks this is dangerous is unclear.  It is probably undesirable.  Perhaps Steven thinks that the idea that this is happening is dangerous (he does think it is happening).

I think that the idea that this is happening is dangerous but furthermore I do no think that this it is happening (generally speaking I only think ideas that are not true are dangerous).  This sort of idea stems from the logical limitative results of the 20th century.  But these results show merely that absolute knowledge is algorithmically unattainable and that every system of logic is incomplete.

What seems to have been lost in all this is the possibility that progress in mathematics is nerve the less highly probable.  Again and again problems in mathematics that were considered unassailable have fallen (often to extremely elegant proofs).

Several things contribute to this.  Amongst others these are:  Advances in the expression of mathematical questions (e.g. algebra & calculus), advances in definitions (e.g. the definition of the group, the definition of first order logic), advances in communication between mathematicians (e.g. the journal, latex).

Such advances must not be underestimated.  The solution of the quadratic is much simpler once you understand algebra.  Computer visualisation programs can allow human pattern finding much more to work with.  Often those who cannot see the way forward decide we have reached a blind alley.  I suspect Steven Strogatz has made this perennial mistake.

There will be more highlights from this book in subsequent blogs.  Look out for the next instalment soon (I may blog on another topic first though).

Alternative medicine

In this blog post I shall look at alternative medicines in terms of their efficacy and the standard of evidence required to prove this.

Many experiments have been carried out on alternative medicines.  However, unfortunately a large number of these tests do not have good methodology.  As a bare minimum a good test should use a large group of test subjects; neither the patients nor the experimenters should know who is and who is not receiving the actual treatment & which patients receive the actual treatment should be random.

There are good reasons for these methodological restrictions:  If there are not enough people in the study its statistical power can be very low.  If researchers know who is receiving treatment they may not report their observations as accurately (this may be unconscious bias, wishful thinking or unwitting cherry picking of results).  Similarly if patients know whether they are receiving the test treatment this may effect them psychologically and effect their reports.  In addition there is an effect known as the placebo effect in which patients fair better off if they believe they are receiving a treatment whether or not they are actually receiving it.  The mechanism for the placebo effect is poorly understood but may involve an increase in endorphins changing the way the immune system prioritises different tasks.  Such biases can ruin even an otherwise very careful study.

There are many scientists who falsify or exaggerate their results in a bid to better secure funding or other benefits.  Papers claiming significant new results should be carefully checked for evidence of fraud (think human cloning!).  This is not a fringe problem!  Many well known experimenters fudged their results to make them look more convincing.  Examples include Mendel, Mickelson or Morley.

These two problems are problems with scientists and with their experiments.  The next problem is a problem with the system of publishing in peer reviewed journals:

Suppose you have a good quality paper by reputable scientists at Harvard with a novel result (say that scratching ones ear decreases the risk of cancer).  If 1000 groups also performed this experiment and found no result then you should take that into account when deciding how much credibility to grant this new experiment.  The problem is that most if not all of those other groups won't publish (who wants to read a paper saying that there's no evidence that scratching ones ear decreases the risk of cancer?).  Given that, what you'll see is one or two experiments including the Harvard one you're likely to inaccurately deduce that there is some evidence for a new cheap preventative remedy for cancer.

Of course all of the above problems apply to standard medical therapies just as much as alternative therapies.  They show that one should be generally sceptical of new studies and should always replicate them before rushing to the media!  The next problem is one specific to fringe claims:

If a study that is performed gives 95% statistical confidence that X is an effective therapy that does NOT mean that the chance it isn't an effective therapy is 5%.  Rather one must weigh the study against other relevant studies that have been performed and against your prior estimates.  A claim may be unlikely given other experiments that have been performed:

Homoeopathy takes a solution of a chemical and dilutes it to the point at which you should expect none of the original molecules to be present.  Any arrangement of water molecules that may have been produced by chemicals previously present would disappear within a picosecond according to well tested chemical and quantum theory.  Quantum theory together with chemical theory predict that homoeopathy cannot work.  This means that a test of homoeopathy is effectively a test of these theories as well as biological ones.

These physical and chemical theories have been tested (to the requisite level of accuracy).  The likelihood that they are inaccurate (in a way significant to homoeopathy's claims) is probably less than one part in 100,000.  A test of homoeopathy that concludes that it is effective with a 95% chance of being right just doesn't cut it against such odds.  This doesn't mean that a test of homoeopathy could not show it valid one day.  It does mean that this would show us new and important physics.  A test of homoeopathy that concluded it worked which had a statistical power of 1 in 1,000,000 would be much more convincing although fraud and malpractice would still have to be carefully ruled out.

Other alternative therapies are often different in this regard.  Herbal remedies giving health benefits does not contravene either our understanding of physics, chemistry or that of biology.  In this instance we can take the statistical power of studies as being close to probabilities that the treatment is effective.  Many of our standard medicines came from plant extracts of one kind or another and it is not implausible that some of these remedies might actually have an effect (however caution is advised, see below).  Of course many herbal remedies haven't passed this test in reality.

Acupuncture and therapies involving certain exercises, stretches etc.  These therapies actually do something to your body.  Claims need to be assessed on the basis of to what extent they contradict current well established theories.  The more this is the case the higher a standard of evidence should be required to show the therapies are effective.  A claim that acupuncture relieves pain in the area worked on is more convincing than a claim that it help reverse diabetes.

Incidentally we now know that some alternative therapies do have some positive effect.  Acupuncture for instance is thought to have certain limited positive effects.  A small number of herbal remedies have an affect also.

However, there are a good reasons to oppose many alternative therapies until they have been put through clinical testing:  Almost all known therapies have some side effect, some of which can be serious.  The more likely an alternative therapy is to have some effect the more carefully it should be put through clinical trials to make sure that this effect is not negative.  In addition many alternative therapies are not properly regulated and are hence full of quacks ripping off the infirm.  Apart from financial loss this can result in people failing to receive tried and tested therapies that have much more chance of actually helping them.

An example of the former problem is St. John's Wort.  A herbal remedy for the treatment of depression, it has been found to disrupt at least one form of the birth control pill.  It would be a mistake to assume that 'natural' remedies derived from herbs of plants are safe.

In another blog post I shall look into the difference between reductionist and holistic approaches to reality and explain why I think why holism is consistent with science.  I shall also come back to the issue of finding a plausible mechanism for a phenomenon and how this effects statistical calculations regarding detecting such phenomenon.

In summary the main point made in this post is that some scientific claims in one area of science (biology or psychology) have implications in another area of science (Physics or Chemistry).  When this is the case we must adjust our initial expectations depending on the other area of science and the standard of proof applied there.

Complexity theory and certain common arguments

Complexity is the study of how difficult calculations are.  Some problems take a small amount of time to solve and some take much longer (using a computer).  Complexity theorists study the differences in a mathematically rigorous way.

There are many arguments I commonly hear which I think of as dubious.  Amongst these are some where the crucial error comes from a lack of understanding of the relative hardness of performing different calculations.

I shall give examples of instances where people fail to take complexity theory into account.

* In science different kinds of phenomena are explained using different scientific theories (from Quantum mechanics through natural selection to social choice theories).  Often its claimed that all you need to understand other aspects of reality is the base theory.  Strictly it is the case that (assuming we have a fundamental theory that is computable) we can calculate everything that happens in the world from the state of the world as it is now (albeit in probabilistic terms).  However the complexity of those calculations make it effectively impossible to do in many possible worlds (possibly including ones based on quantum mechanics).  This means realistically we do need other levels of science to understand the world.

* Any mathematical function from the integers onto the integers that can be performed can be reversed.  It used to be considered to be impossible for two people to talk in public (without having met before) and communicate information privately.  Strictly speaking it is always possible, given enough time, to figure out what it is they were talking about.  There may exist (assuming a certain prominent mathematical conjecture) functions that are much easier to perform than to do reverse (the mathematical equivalent of scrambling an egg).  This would allow people to talk in public without eavesdroppers understanding them.  Large sections of our financial institutions depend on this mathematical conjecture being true (or at least not nastily false).  It took some particularly brilliant mathematicians to see this was the case when the common sense view made it seem impossible.

* In order to protect private data we used to keep sensitive information in locked filing cabinets, keep the filing cabinets within corporate offices and employ only people who've been carefully vetted.  Some (including prominent politicians) have argued that in the Internet age we need only adapt the policy to include digital locks on the digital filing cabinets and company networks.  This is dangerously flawed thinking.  The complexity of accessing a piece of private information (illegitimately) has gone right down.  Copying an entire warehouse full of private data would take months (before the Internet).  Today if the files are centralised the same task can be accomplished in hours, sometimes minutes.

* It has been argued by some neuroscientists that we will not be able to read people's minds even if we can trace the firing of their neurons explicitly.  The argument goes that the inner workings of people's minds are probably unique to them (almost certainly true), the minds have many things going on at once in parallel (true) and that we will therefore not be able to come up with a sensible way of understanding what the neuronal signals mean (hmmmm).  The important question is "Can you hide what task you're doing by performing it in an incredibly idiosyncratic way even if your enemies can see everything you do".  Well, this is essentially equivalent to finding a way to hide what a program is doing on your computer from someone who can watch its every calculation.  No one has found a way to do this (its possible to make it a little harder though).  Many cryptographers think its impossible to do.  Certainly its very unlikely that the brain is set up to do this (Why would it evolve this way?).  This means it is likely that knowing exactly what neurons were firing in a brain would tell you what that brain was thinking.

I hope thats given you some indication of the value of this new area of research!

The notion of the self

In this blog post I shall be analysing the notion of the self from a naturalistic point of view.  The issue is a complex one and I shall end by highlighting the limitations (of which I am aware) that my approach suffers from.

I shall start with some ground rules:

1) Any reasonable definition must not reference any special quality of our universe.  A definition of the self should not be something that only applies to universes like our own.

2) The definition should give the "correct" answers when applied to people in everyday situations.  Without this restriction it would be questionable if the use of the word "self" was justified.

So now let us look at some simple possible definitions and my criticisms of them:

A) The self is simply a collection of atoms moving according to the laws of physics.

This definition is often quoted as the materialist position.  There may be people who do advocate it.  However, it certainly is not implied by materialism and it is unsatisfactory.  This self hood would then apply to all collections of atoms.  Without a method to decide which collections to take seriously we aren't much better off.

More seriously this definition would not meet (2) as the atoms in people are recycled quite quickly.  The you of today contains very few of the same atoms as the you of a year ago.

B) The self is a lump of matter that has some coherence to it.  New atoms may join it and old atoms leave it but like a football team it can be defined never the less by relabelling atoms as they become part of the greater lump.

This definition is more refined.  It would manage to identify the movements of many people through their lives.  However, consider case of Siamese twins attached at the pelvis.  If the two are genetically identical who is to say when one twin ends and the other begins.  If what we are is a coherent lump of matter then we must treat Siamese twins as one individual.  Most people would acknowledge though that Siamese twins can and do have independent selves.

Note that we shouldn't rule out the possibility that there are (or could be) cases where selves do not come in neat packages but can blur into each other, split apart or fuse together.

C) The self is the pattern of electrical firing of neurons within the body.

This definition is often considered the 'scientific' notion of selfhood.  It is a notion that makes sense of almost every everyday scenario.  However, it is still flawed (as are A & B) in that it depends fundamentally on the physics of our universe and is totally inapplicable to many other possible universes (hence failing criterion (1)).

D) The self is a pattern of interactions between entities where the entities engage in greater exchange of information between each other than they do with the outside world.

This notion keeps the advantages of C whilst being able to deal with almost any possible universe.  It does, however, allow for the existence of non-living selves and vegetative selves.  This isn't necessarily a problem if we weigh the different selves by their computational capacity.  That way would get us a more familiar emphasis on those individuals with more significant selves.

Problems with my approach:

P1) How is the term entity to be understood? Neurons are certainly entities.  Is a hurricane an entity?  Is a current in the ocean an entity?

P2) How do we measure the computational complexity of an assemblage of entities in a reasonable manner?

P3) How do we use such a definition to track the motivations, thought processes and decisions of a 'self'?

I do actually think that these problems can be solved and a general and simple notion of the self defined.

Q1: What problems do you see with this approach?

Q2: Are the criteria I use correct? (and have I applied them correctly?)

Q3: What criteria should be added to them?

Evidence for the existence of Love

In discussions concerning the supernatural and/or science I have often heard the refrain "But what about Love? I can't show you evidence that she loves me but I know she does."  Sometimes people use this as an argument for the existence of a god "God is like Love.  You know God exists like you know your girlfriend loves you!".  I shall assume romantic Love is meant here.

In this blog post I will address this attitude to Love.  Firstly the contention that one can know that someone else loves you without evidence of any kind.

There are many simple things that you might expect if someone loves you:

* They remember important information about you.  When you have a job interview they ask you about it afterwards.

* They touch you gently when it is appropriate and linger slightly longer than necessary in such moments.

* They smile when they have emotional contact with you (e.g. a letter from you or a glance).

* They become agitated if something goes badly for you.

* They try to see you as often as possible.

* They do things just for the purpose of helping you.

* They tell you that they Love you without breaking eye contact.

There are also things you do not expect if someone loves you:

* They hurt you physically.

* They don't return your calls.

* They sound bored whenever they talk to you.

* They buy you something generic for your birthday or ignore your birthday altogether.

* They tell you they do not Love you.

In addition there are many subtle clues that you may only notice unconsciously:

* Their body language indicates interest.

* Their pupils dilate and contract rhythmically upon seeing you.

* Their friends treat you with particular attention and possibly respect (depends on the friends of course!).

* They start to take up habits or peculiarities of yours.

The lists are not meant to be exhaustive and each item on it is only a valid piece of evidence if its in the right context.  Furthermore some elements are more important than others (some very much so).  Never the less if you imagine a situation in which a friend claims their boyfriend loves them without any of this evidence (and with all the negative indications) would you accept her claim that he loved her? Or would you carefully and politely challenge it and suggest that she might be better off leaving him?

There are of course many pieces of evidence that are difficult to pin down precisely.  An example would be body language.  What exactly constitutes the body language for Love?  Here our own intuition may be much more accurate than any scientific test that has yet been devised.  But are we making use of evidence filtered through our evolved and culturally expanded instincts to come to those intuitions?  How would one know that thats not the case?  There are also many instances when the evidence is confusing or misleading but again this is really a matter of establishing the right context and understanding the emotion better (e.g. they may express their love by teasing you and be slightly too enthusiastic).

To conclude: Its sentimental to regard that Love is something for which there can be no evidence and which is ineffable.  However, it is much more romantic to realise that the love of a close one is shown to you by their every day actions, their priorities and by the way they treat you.  And it is much more poetic to see that their love for you can and is being described to you every day by the way they act around you.

So I ask the reader:

How does this emotional argument fall on your ears?

How do you see this post in light of the post immediately preceding it (God, the supernatural, qualia and the emotional brain)?

God, the supernatural, qualia and the emotional brain

In this (rather long) blog post I shall discuss some scientific discoveries regarding the emotional cortex and the way these discoveries may help us to understand belief in the supernatural be that in the form of god, qualia or ley lines.

A word of warning:  In the following the term emotional cortex is my short hand for several connected regions in the brain that are involved in emotional responses.

I have long found it difficult to understand why it is that emotional arguments (often only internal) with or without logical support are seen to be so convincing (by a sizable fraction or possibly a majority of society) where other arguments rely much more on their logical support.  Examples abound:

1)  I feel the presence of God through his love.  That is how I know he exists.

2)  A purely neurological description (and perhaps high order interpretation of that) of how my brain responds to the presence of a red bucket in my visual field cannot truly express what it is to experience the vitality of the colour red.

3) A computer with its wires and its purely mechanical operation cannot possibly truly feel pain or understand beauty.

4) Killing animals is wrong.  Aren't you disgusted by the images of these dogs suffering abuse?  Doesn't that tell you its wrong?

I think there is an important distinction to make.  People will often believe things because it consoles them or even just because it is easier to accept them than to challenge them.  This is not what I mean by emotional arguments.  It is no particular mystery that people often choose to believe something because it suits them or their mental state.  What is more interesting is when the presence or absence of an emotional response within the individual is presented as if it is a convincing piece of evidence in itself.

Now I shall present some scientific discoveries that are relevant:

Firstly it has been found that a type of epileptic fit occurring within the emotional cortex can produce intense feelings of a decidedly religious nature.  People experiencing these seizures often describe feelings that everything is valuable and that everyone is important.  Some attribute these feelings to a god or a universal spirit.  A scientific hypothesis to explain these feelings would be that their perception of value was altered by the electrical activity in their emotional cortex.  People who have had such fits often describe them as life changing.

Secondly a strange mental distortion sometimes occurs in people with a particular type of brain damage.  The patient stops recognising people close to her.  Furthermore she maintains that these people are imposters who bear a close similarity in appearance to her loved ones.  This change in perception can even extend to familiar environments such as the home or workplace.  These places are viewed of as being elaborate fake homes or fake workplaces.

The hypothesis here is that the emotional cortex plays an important role in recognition.  When the patient sees a loved one she expects an emotional reaction to occur within her as a result of seeing their face.  This doesn't occur because the parts of her brain responsible for such a reaction are severed from those that process the image.  For the patient to decide that the person is an impostor she must be paying more attention to her internal emotional response than to the evidence of her own eyes.

So this demonstrates how powerful emotional responses are in effecting people's perception of reality.  Not only do we decide to believe things because it is emotionally convenient but we also implicitly consider emotional responses as if they were an external and highly reliable form of evidence.

So going back to our earlier examples:

1)  I feel the presence of God through his love.  That is how I know he exists.

If an entity (real or imagined) has a strong emotional effect on someone that entity is perceived to exist in the world (as opposed to merely within the mind).  Similar effects often convince people that their loved ones still exist after death.

2)  A purely neurological description (and perhaps high order interpretation of that) of how my brain responds to the presence of a red bucket in my visual field cannot truly express what it is to experience the vitality of the colour red.

NB: There are two conflicting meanings of 'express'. There is "To contain all the relevant information regarding" and "To convey all the relevant information regarding".  By the second definition no description of any kind could truly express what it is to experience something as the description would always fail to elicit certain unconscious processes in your brain.  Suppose a neuroscientist knows exactly how the brain goes about the task of riding a bike.  She still will not be able to tell you how to ride it.  You will still have to learn certain parts of the skill yourself.  This is not because the neuroscientist lacks knowledge but because some of that knowledge cannot be transfered by speech alone.  I'm assuming the first meaning of the word here.

When you see the colour red that causes emotional responses (as do experiences of the other senses).  The description of the experience of seeing the red bucket as expressed in neurological terms lacks the capacity to induce an emotional response (or we imagine that it would lack it).  This lack is taken as evidence that the neurological description is incomplete.

3) A computer with its wires and its purely mechanical operation cannot possibly truly feel pain or understand beauty (even if it were endowed with software that made it appear to).

No strong AI has yet been produced.  The interaction between minds that produces the range of emotional responses between people is currently totally lacking between computers and people (there are other more prosaic sources of emotional response).  We come to understand other peoples minds mostly by our emotional interaction with them.  Until we have that sort of interaction with computers people will probably assume that computers could never be anything more than our mindless tools.  It is also likely that even then the lack of a face, smooth skin and and coherent physical form will make it difficult for people to develop an emotional attachment to computers endowed with AI.

4) Killing animals is wrong.  Aren't you disgusted by the images of these dogs suffering abuse?  Doesn't that tell you its wrong?

I do actually think that killing animals is wrong (see my posts on vegetarianism and libertarianism).  However, just showing people disgusting images doesn't prove this.  If I showed you photos of surgery they would also be disgusting but this does nothing to show that surgery is wrong!  Again we are seeing an emotional response used (this time deliberately), in the place of more solid evidence, to make an argument.

In conclusion we have a strong propensity to use our emotions implicity and explicitly to form our conception of reality.  This leads us to many dubious notions including god, the soul and the supernatural in general.  However, having understood this we may be able to overcome it.

Remember those patients who had lost the ability to recognise their loved ones.  An experienced medic found the following solution:  He reintroduced the patients to their loved ones on the phone (where they had no illusion) and then slowly allowed those loved ones to become visible.  This rewired the patients brains to respond emotionally to their loved ones again.  Perhaps such techniques would be more effective in convincing people to abandon supernatural notions than many a logical and scientific argument!