the death of philosophy

It's because of statements like this that philosophy as a profession is dead: "philosophy is not a quest for knowledge about the world, but rather a quest for understanding the conceptual scheme in terms of which we conceive of the knowledge we achieve about the world. One of the rewards of doing philosophy is a clearer understanding of the way we think about ourselves and about the world we live in, not fresh facts about reality." This is from an interview with Oxford philosopher Peter Hacker (see full interview here). I don't really understand what he means (and there's nothing in the article that clears it up). In any case, can't I make this same claim about the rewards of doing psychology, or artificial intelligence, or linguistics, or mathematics, or virtually any intellectual discipline that requires disciplined reasoning?

Hacker becomes downright confusing when discussing his distaste for neuroscience:

“Merely replacing Cartesian ethereal stuff with glutinous grey matter and leaving everything else the same will not solve any problems. On the current neuroscientist’s view, it’s the brain that thinks and reasons and calculates and believes and fears and hopes. In fact, it’s human beings who do all these things, not their brains and not their minds. I don’t think it makes any sense to talk about the brain engaging in psychological or mental operations” (emphasis added).

Hacker makes a three-way distinction between human beings, brains, and minds, with nothing more than fluff to draw the distinction. I happily admit that I'm pretty strongly on the meat-puppet end of the spectrum, so I see no reason to posit that there exists a thing HUMAN_BEING that is somehow magically not a function of the physical stuff that makes up the human body.

But more to the point, Hacker seems incapable of discussing this in a way that is easy to follow. Exactly what is Hacker's HUMAN_BEING? I wish I had a clearer understanding of what he means. How do I objectively distinguish this from new-age hippie gibberish? It sounds remarkably similar to this passage: "It doesn't require a three-dimensional descriptive identification as the totality of it's unseen dynamics can be seen everywhere, in everything. Without the spirit, the physical and the mental would have no reason to exist as neither would be whole." This quote is from the wise sage Shirley MacLaine.

I'm a reasonable adult with a graduate level education and yet I cannot follow what should be a simple interview about what this man does for a living without encountering vague claims and incoherent distinctions. Am I supposed to sit through suffocatingly boring and pretensions philosophy seminars in grad school before I can come to an understanding of what Hacker means? If that is true, then philosophy is dead, truly.

The ironical part is that Andrew Sullivan referenced this interview with the pompous heading The Hubris Of Neuroscience. The only hubris I found in the interview was Hacker's.

Neuropuns

I'm not normally much of a pun guy, but this one got me giggling. Speaking about the much discussed Belgian patient in a vegetative state who recently showed surprising brain activity, Dr. Allan H. Ropper, a neurologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, similarly warned against equating neural activity and identity. “Physicians and society are not ready for ‘I have brain activation, therefore I am,’ ” Dr. Ropper wrote. “That would seriously put Descartes before the horse” (original here).


UPDATE (02/14/2010): hehe, still makes me giggle 10 days later...

(HT FARK)

100 Years and Counting

(image from The MacGuffin)

Neuroblogger, and all around skeptic, The MacGuffin has a nice review of the remarkable relevance of Brodman's 100 year old map of functional areas of the brain HERE.  Money quote:

Brodmann's work helped to revolutionize modern neuroscience. While many other maps have followed Brodmann's, and even though contemporary research has shown that "his map is incomplete or even wrong in some of the brain regions," many of the areas do correlate very well with various functional areas of the cortex, which is why his work still has relevance 100 years later. 

Blob Wars

(images from Neuroskeptic)

Neuroskeptic reports on some disturbing news that the results of fMRI studies can be seriously impacted by the software package used to analyze the results. There are several packages available and while most do much the same thing, at least one uses a unique statistical approach which produces different results. Not "better" or "worse" mind you, just different. The image above contrasts results using the same data but different analysis software. Money quote:

Analysis using both programs revealed that during the processing of emotional faces, as compared to the baseline stimulus, there was an increased activation in the visual areas (occipital, fusiform and lingual gyri), in the cerebellum, in the parietal cortex [etc] ... Conversely, the temporal regions, insula and putamen were found to be activated using the XBAM analysis software only (emphasis added).

The comments on Neuroskeptic's post are detailed and instructive.

Brain Farts

The title alone made this worth reading: Anatomy of A Brain Fart.

Money quote: The latest research seems to indicate that brain farts are a unique type of cognitive mistake. Unlike errors caused by lack of information or experience, or by distractions, brain farts are innate. They have a predictable neural pattern that emerges up to 30 seconds before they happen. When you are absorbed in inward-focused thinking such as daydreaming, a collection of brain regions jointly called the default mode network (DMN) starts furiously popping away. Neuroscientists don’t agree on exactly which parts of the brain compose this network, but they now believe it is one of the busiest neurological systems.

Are All Writing Systems Alike?

(image from The Topography of Language)

Just started reading an interesting article by the evolutionary biologist Marc Changizi who claims in The Topography of Language that all the world's writing systems utilize the same set of shapes because these shapes were selected for during the evolution of our visual system (or something like that). More as I digest this interesting claim.

Money quote:
Amongst both non-linguistic and linguistic signs, some visual signs are representations of the world­ e.g., cave paintings and pictograms, respectively­ and it is, of course, not surprising that these visual signs look like nature. It would be surprising, however, to find that non-pictorial visual signs look, despite first appearances, like nature. Although writing began with pictograms, there have been so many mutations to writing over the millenia that if writing still looks like nature, it must be because this property has been selectively maintained. For non-linguistic visual signs, there is not necessarily any pictorial origin as there is for writing, because amongst the earliest non-linguistic visual signs were non-pictorial decorative signs. The question we then ask is, Why are non-pictorial visual signs shaped the way they are?

HT: Stanislas Dehaene (via The Daily Dish)

Hero Acquisition Device

(screen shot from NBC.com online video)

Folks, I can suspend my disbelief with the best of them, but there are times that pop culture pseudo-science references try my soul. One of these times occurred on Monday night's premier of the superhero show Heroes.

While slicing into good, sweet, honey, sugar-candied Clair's brain, über villain Sylar marvels at the brain's complexity, then, disappointingly, repeats one of the greatest neuroscience fallacies of all time: the brain only uses 10%-20% of its capacity.

There is zero factual basis to this ridiculous claim. "Though an alluring idea, the "10 percent myth" is so wrong it is almost laughable, says neurologist Barry Gordon at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore" (Scientific American). The writer's could't spend two minutes Googling around to check up on this tid-bit? Hmmm? Really? Unfortunate. Even the Neuroscience For Kids website debunks this idiocy.

In Feb 2007, blogger Peggy at her Biology in Science Fiction blog ran down a few genetics related plot devices that make her start shaking her fist at the screen. An enjoyable read. More recently, she took on the new adrenelin plot device here.

Note: feel free to track down the homage in my italicized description of Clair (wink).

On The Cognitive Properties of Skin

After posting on the voiceless phone call story below, I began searching around for more information on how the device actually works. Failing to find any relevant patents pending (suspicious, I thought) I began searching for information on Michael Callahan, the wunderkind who appears to be the principle inventor, though many are probably involved.

After some searching, the most specific information I have yet found on the technology behind the voiceless phone was found in this article from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Engineering department website. Note the passage I have emphasized:

“Once we hit upon the idea of direct input, we were off and running,” explained Thomas Coleman, a project team member. The young researchers discovered that information sent from the brain can be accurately measured through the conductive properties of the skin. Typically, according to Coleman, these measurements are obtained through rigid metallic electrodes which neither respond to natural movements of the body nor to increasing skin moisture. They often become very uncomfortable under prolonged use.

"Our system uses proprietary technology to gather neurological information through encapsulated conductive gel pads, shielding the embedded electrode from the skin,” Coleman said. ‘The Audeo’ device we developed applies gentle pressure over the vocal cords, while the form-fitting band automatically adjusts in diameter, accommodating head and neck movements to maintain efficient contact.”

From there, team members created a computer program, which reads the intercepted neurological signals, and communicates a ‘response,’ both on the screen and as an audio signal. Initial work centered on determining the differences between a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ response, which could be recognized by the computer. The software has since been enhanced to effectively ‘learn’ and adapt to the user’s neurological signals without the need of extensive training. The equipment analyzes the user during a one-time calibration process and generates a personalized user identity. (my emphasis; quote marks had to be manually inserted to replace funny characters, but i tried to represent the original faithfully)

This is how far removed from serious neuroscience I am. I had no clue. I realized some information could be gathered from the skin, like Galvanic skin response, but I must say I’m shocked to learn that phonemic information regarding unarticulated utterances can be retrieved from the skin around a person’s neck. Clearly, there is more to this story. I’ll keep digging.