The Google-Brain and the Future of Memory

by JL Wall

Working to reframe the question of whether Google makes us Stoopid, Peter Suderman (not without his own hesitations, I should add) ends his post over at The Scene:

Why memorize the content of a single book when you could be using your brain to hold a quick guide to an entire library? Rather than memorize information, we now store it digitally and just remember what we stored — resulting in what David Brooks called “the outsourced brain.” We won’t become books, we’ll become their indexes and reference guides, permanently holding on to rather little deep knowledge, preferring instead to know what’s known, by ourselves and others, and where that knowledge is stored.

While I like being able to rattle off statistics about baseball teams that played before I was born, maybe it is a better thing that I can’t do that for any team since the entry into my life of, well, the internet – more space for other things. I’m not quite as concerned about this in terms of statistics and data as I am with – what did you expect? – the experience of story and literature.

The experience, yes – even after the fact, even while merely remembering the encounter. Literature, story, poetry – whatever you choose to call it/them – are (or ought to be) experientially timeless. To have listened to Homer recited as he must once have been, to give oneself wholly to the music of an orchestra, to sit reading Keats (silently or aloud), to immerse oneself in say, the worlds of Dostoevsky (or even, I’d say, of a Clancy or Crichton – as far as this particular point is concerned, there is no necessary limit to “high” literature) is to experience time in a way removed from that of our day-to-day lives. When we say that we “lose ourselves” in a book, or a piece of music, or a work of art, this, partly, is what we mean – it is what has occurred when, reading, one looks up and suddenly realizes – realizes! – that one is, in fact, sitting on the living room sofa, holding a book in their hands.

But the experience and the meaning cannot be divorced, at least not wholly. We cannot, as Virginia Woolf declared, ever truly and fully know the Greeks because we cannot know what we have to know them through – their poetry, their music, their performance – as they knew them.

There are two ways to encounter a work: directly, in that initial experience of reading or listening or observing; and later, indirectly, through memory and consideration and reflection. To learn from a work – for a work to affect you and for you to be affected by the work – both are necessary. Somehow, it is less the direct than the indirect that I would say is at risk of being lost on account of the Googlized index-memory – though the encounter, too is certainly threatened by the fact that we are now (or so we’re told, and have witnessed) increasingly likely to index rather than remember. It becomes harder to achieve that atemporality of the encounter with art if our attention spans are severed and shortened. Giving oneself over to a work is, in its own way, a skill, and must be practiced and honed to be kept sharp. If I go too long without reading a long piece – especially a work of fiction – it can take me several days to remember how to (this is one of the reasons why I’ve forced myself to carve out time to read something as often as possible that has nothing to do with school, and nothing to do with the world of the internet).

But my concern is more for the indirect, as I said earlier. That is, for the memory, the recollection, the other angle(s) from which one looks at something in order to see what is there. For example: the difference between thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand knowing that it contains the death of Hektor, and thinking of Book 22 of the Iliadand recalling the death of Hektor. Or, to zoom out, of thinking of the Iliadand knowing only: Akhilles, Hektor, Agamemnon, Helen, Paris, war, fate, glory; or thinking of the Iliad and seeing all of those (and more), but in (something of, at least) the complex web of their relationships and interactions in all its glory.

The knowing – the memory – of a work is not re-experiencing the encounter. The encounter is outside of time; the memory places it within time and so is able to examine it. The index has two dimensions to the memory’s three: when you hold it up and tilt it, you may still be able to notice something new in the way the light hits it, but it becomes far more difficult.

There is good and bad in the way that Google (to use it as shorthand for all that is new) makes us think differently – the access to information that we otherwise might not have been able to remember is certainly good, as is the freedom to spend more time on those things which are of greater importance to ourselves. But the danger is in the loss of depth of consideration: of Buber’s Du; of the delight of Oakeshott’s Poetical Mode; of Heschel’s allusive timelessness.

Filed under: media/culture, science/tech

The Body World and The Machine

by JL Wall

[EDIT: I really need to be better about remembering to sign my posts over here when I first put them up.  For future reference, if they talk about being in Chicago and being Jewish, it's probably me. -- JLW]

I remember when the “Body Worlds” exhibit was in Chicago a few years ago and ads for it were plastered all over the city – there was one night in particular that I couldn’t get away from them (I think I was waiting on a bus) and I couldn’t bear to look at them – not because I thought it was gross, or dirty, or anything like that, but because, even though these were the bodies of “donors,” I felt it was disrespectful to them to ogle the dead body. I’ve always felt those taboos particularly strongly (and, contra Van Hagens, I don’t see anything wrong with that). Anyway, at risk of repeating what’s already been said, we now have this:

A new exhibition featuring preserved dead bodies having sex opened in Berlin on Thursday with critics saying a maverick German anatomist dubbed “Doctor Death” has gone too far this time.

The couple, part of Gunther von Hagens’s exhibition “The Cycle of Life”, is the “low point in his tastelessness”, Michael Braun, culture expert from the conservative CDU party, told AFP.

Von Hagens said his copulating couples show the sexual act in “bracing clarity”.

The exhibits, of four “consenting donors”, are in a separate room accessible only to over-16s.

But it is, in a sense, the inevitable extreme if there’s an insistence on dividing the body and the soul, the worldly and the spiritual, and declaring the former base and unworthy and the latter alone sacred or noble. If we are prisoners in our bodies, why not conquer and imprison the prison itself, to free ourselves, as one might say the name of an incubus to defeat it?

The religious case against it is easier—to point out the role of creature and Creator, to remind one that such subjugation of the body is, in fact, to forget that, in the words of Rabbi Heschel, man “is the knot in which heaven and earth are interlaced”: that the body and the soul are essential to state of being human.

A more secular case is harder, especially for me; I’ve been raised to think that there are just certain things one doesn’t do: that the taboos are there for a reason; that even if there is nothing behind them, they are good for the order and structure and survival of society? That this “liberation” from the bodily prison, the so-called subjugation of the guards is actually the subjugation of the human body to the fruits of human technology—only reinforcing Wendell Berry’s dichotomy between the organic and the mechanical, and that it is a dangerous symptom of the growing dependence on that which cannot be sustained inevitably? That, in other words, we would liberate ourselves from one prison into another? (Are these even truly “secular” anymore?)

I don’t mean to imply that there isn’t a good non-religious case against what I’d term the body’s desecration; but any argument against it must be founded on the belief that there is something unique in mankind. The moment a human being is literally “just another animal,” anything is permitted.

Filed under: morality, religion, science/tech

Freeman Dyson Against the Experts

Having just finished reading it, I’ll join Ross and Rod and Will Wilkinson in strongly recommending Nicholas Davidoff’s profile of Freeman Dyson in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. It’s one of the most enjoyable pieces of this sort that I’ve read in quite a while. Here’s an especially choice bit:

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that “they know it all.” The men he most admires tend to be what he calls “amateurs,” inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, “was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game.”

Read the whole thing, as we kids with our blogs are inclined to say.

Filed under: environment, science/tech

Hey! That’s my adviser!

The philosopher just quoted on the Dish, I mean. Here’s another choice excerpt:

… the view that the self and consciousness can be explained in terms of the brain, that the real us is found inside our skulls, isn’t just misleading and wrong, it’s ugly. In that view, each of us is trapped in the caverns of his own skull and the world is just a sort of shared figment. Everything is made interior, private, rational and computational. That may not pose a practical danger, but it presents a kind of spiritual danger.

In that view, each of us is an island of intellect, alone. When you think of us as just interior neurological mechanisms, you see us as alienated from the world around us. The world shows up for us as bits of information that we decipher, like linguistic relics of an ancient culture that we have to interpret. Like when Mr. Spock says, “What is this strange kissing custom?” The danger is alienation, plain and simple. We’re strangers in a strange land.

I find this a very sad and ugly picture of our circumstance. Now contrast that view with a sense of ourselves as engaged in the flow, responsive to the things going on around us, part of the world. It’s a very different picture.

I don’t always agree with Alva’s views in their entirety, but this bit in particular is right on the mark. The whole thing is worth reading.

Filed under: philosophy, science/tech

Borlaug Birthday Linkage

Today is the 95th birthday of Norman Borlaug, the man who invented modern industrial agriculture and (some say) fed the world. Here is Ron Bailey’s post in honor of the day, which includes these striking remarks from a 2000 interview:

Even if you could use all the organic material that you have–the animal manures, the human waste, the plant residues–and get them back on the soil, you couldn’t feed more than 4 billion people. In addition, if all agriculture were organic, you would have to increase cropland area dramatically, spreading out into marginal areas and cutting down millions of acres of forests.

At the present time, approximately 80 million tons of nitrogen nutrients are utilized each year. If you tried to produce this nitrogen organically, you would require an additional 5 or 6 billion head of cattle to supply the manure. How much wild land would you have to sacrifice just to produce the forage for these cows? There’s a lot of nonsense going on here.

For good measure, here and here are a couple of my earlier posts on organic crop yields and the sustainability of sustainable farming (be sure to read the comments!), and here is Kevin Carson’s take on why the official “Green Revolution” mythology is a load of bunk. Also, here is what I wrote about the subject of crop yields in my TAC piece on “culinary conservatism”:

Proponents of a new way of eating are on shakier ground when they claim that a widespread turn toward small-scale and deindustrialized agriculture would not affect crop yields. McKibben proudly cites a study in which sustainable farming methods were found to lead, on average, to a near doubling of food production per hectare. He does not mention the many cases in which results have been less impressive. A much discussed study published in the journal Science in 2002 found that switching to organic farming reduced yields by 20 percent, though the possibility of lessening our reliance on petroleum may be worth the investment of some extra land. Reincorporating into the human food chain some of the millions of acres where corn and sorghum are now grown for ethanol production would also make a great difference.

But no reasonable person wants to remake the world or do away with modern agricultural technologies all together. The best solutions will come through honest, case-by-case engagement with the subtle demands of specific situations. As the UC Berkeley agroecologist Miguel Altieri puts it, a sound approach to agriculture “does not seek to formulate solutions that will be valid for everyone but encourages people to choose the technologies best suited to the requirements of each particular situation, without imposing them.” (That this could just as well be the summary of the ideal domestic or foreign policy ought to argue in its favor.) Respect for tradition and social and ecological responsibility can work together with technological innovation and capitalist resourcefulness to respect the ridges and valleys of regionalism in an increasingly flattened world.

In any case, a very happy birthday to Dr. Borlaug, and many happy returns indeed. In my home, we will be eating free-range chicken and organic brussels sprouts in his honor.

(Cross-posted at The American Scene.)

Filed under: agriculture, food, science/tech

Bloggy Smackdown of the Day

Freddie can dish it out with the best of them:

As I have said many, many times, there are good things about Apples and good things about PCs. If it makes sense to you to buy an Apple, go with god. And many Apple owners do just that, buy a product, use it and enjoy it. I’ve considered getting an Apple laptop in the past and may in the future. But it amazes me, absolutely amazes me, the number of Apple owners who lack the clarity or self-awareness to realize that purchasing a commodity from a enormous, soulless corporation that is also  owned by several million other people doesn’t make you a unique and beautiful snowflake. Apple has a better PR campaign, better advertising and a more gullible, credulous customer base. That’s it. It’s got nothing to do with individuality or noncomformity. I know many people are probably saying that this is a completely banal thing to say but I am consistently astounded by otherwise smart people who will tell you different.

For the record, I’m a PC guy myself.

Filed under: media/culture, science/tech

Religion and Falsifiability

Responding to the Jerry Coyne essay on science and religion that Jim and Alan blogged about last week at the Scene, Ross makes an important point:

… people move in and out of religions all the time, based on experiences they’ve had, polemics they’ve read, and so forth. The belief in God is no more impervious to argument, alteration or abandonment than a belief in Randian objectivism or Rawlsian liberalism. Pace Coyne, the problem of theodicy does, in fact, persuade some people to abandon their belief in God – just as the sense that they’ve encountered God in prayer does, in fact, persuade some spiritually-inquisitive agnostics to take up a religion. Some religions’ claims about the world look more implausible than others; some religions (like some political ideologies) lose adherents because their predictions don’t come true; some religions clash directly with the current scientific consensus and some do not. (Even Coyne, who I think wildly overstates the conflict between Christianity and science, allows that “pantheism and some forms of Buddhism” are potentially compatible with scientific truth.) It’s true that I can’t think of a single one-off experiment that would disprove my belief in God once and for all, but I can think of all kinds of experiences and discoveries that would weaken that belief. And I’m pretty sure that Mother Teresa doubted the truth claims of Christianity more frequently than, say, Howard Dean has ever doubted the truth claims of the Democratic Party.

This is, I think, exactly right. I’d started to write a post on this last week before chaos struck, and in reading and re-reading the portions of Coyne’s argument that raise the charge of unfalsifiability – much of which Jim, by the way, seemed pretty willing to grant – I found myself less and less able to make out what Coyne is trying to get at when he says, e.g., that “religious truths” [sic!] leave no room for an answer to the question, “how would I know if I were wrong?” But it is crucial, I think, to see that Coyne is not best read as arguing that religious beliefs are unfalsifiable in principle: indeed, he makes it quite clear that he thinks they are false, and indeed that a great many of them have been straightforwardly falsified by such things as the truth of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the (supposed) scientific impossibility of miracles, the inefficacy of prayer, and so on. (Young Earth Creationism, for example, is wildly unpopular precisely because it can do no justice whatsoever to a host of obvious scientific facts: if this isn’t falsification, I don’t know what is.) Hence when Coyne says that “[t]here is no way to adjudicate between competing religious truths as we can between competing scientific explanations”, this strikes me as more a misstep than a substantive point: if all orthodox religious beliefs – with the exception, perhaps, of “pantheism and some forms of Buddhism”! – are demonstrably false, then we clearly can adjudicate between at least some of the different truth claims in question. The traditionally Popperian conception of falsifiability cannot, I think, be what’s at stake in his argument.

Rather, what Coyne really seems to be focusing his scorn on is the particular ways in which religious beliefs are held: they are “immune to ugly facts”, he says, adding that he has “never met a religious person who could tell me what would disprove” the existence of God. But then as Ross points out, this is simply false, since people lose or switch their religious convictions all the time – the reasons for this are a bit hodgepodge and unsystematic, to be sure, but then again so are our religious convictions themselves, and the key point is just that a belief’s being firmly held does not mean that it can or will never be let go. I may not be able to tell you in advance exactly what it would take to get me to abandon or radically revise my belief in God, but that doesn’t mean that belief is unaffected by the events and ideas I encounter throughout my life.

Now this is not, of course, to say that religious believers leave their convictions open to falsification or revision in the same ways as scientists do; hence Coyne writes:

Like all sciences, evolution differs from religion because it constantly tests its assumptions, and discards the ones that prove false.

But even if we choose to overlook the fact that this is a hopelessly idealized picture of the way that real science works, it’s once again unclear why this should matter. True, religious believers don’t put their core convictions to the test in the same sorts of ways that scientists tend to, but that has quite a lot to do with the fact that they’re different sorts of convictions: faith in God, and in a particular understanding of his actions in history, is the sort of thing that shapes one’s entire life in ways that a merely empirical theory never can, and so resists revision or wholesale overturning in the sorts of ways that any overarching Weltanschauung almost essentially will. To use a somewhat clumsy analogy, a body of religious belief is rather more like the attachment to the Newtonian system in general than to one of its specific claims; hence one or two or even a handful of apparent weak points usually aren’t going to be enough to overturn the whole system, especially without an obviously superior contender waiting in the wings.

Note that my point here is emphatically not to claim, as far too many do, that science is in no place to criticize religion because “everyone’s got to believe in something”, as if there were nothing more to religious faith than the kind of garden-variety confidence that scientists have in the possibility for progress in their field. That view is a false one, and at the end of the day its prevalence does religion far more harm than good. Rather, my central points are that (1) the fact that religious belief is a radically different kind of belief than the scientific kind is precisely why it’s foolish to hold it to scientific standards (a point which, as Ross notes, holds with equal force for political ideology, much of academic philosophy, and so on); and (2) the fact that the standards for the abandonment or revision of religious convictions are different than those for theory change in the philosophy of science does not mean that there are no such standards in the former case – indeed, it’s only because of the false equation of the proper standards for believing in general with the standards that govern the kind of belief that we have in science that this kind of confusion could be possible.

Filed under: philosophy, religion, science/tech

Voodoo Neuroscience?

It would take a different mind than mine (*cough*razib*cough*) to comprehend the intricacies, but this sort of thing certainly warms my anti-phrenological heart:

The studies in question have tended to claim astonishingly high correlations between localised areas of brain activity and specific psychological measures. For example, in 2003, Naomi Eisenberger at the University of California and her colleagues published a paper purporting to show that levels of self-reported rejection correlated at r=.88 (1.0 would be a perfect correlation) with levels of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex.

According to Hal Pashler and his band of methodological whistle-blowers, if Eisenberg’s study and others like it were accurate, this "would be a milestone in understanding of brain-behaviour linkages, full of promise for potential diagnostic and therapeutic spin-offs." Unfortunately, Pashler’s group argue that the findings from many of these recent studies are virtually meaningless.

[…]

Pashler and his team found that 54 per cent of the studies had used a seriously biased method of analysis, a problem that probably also undermines the findings of fMRI studies in other fields of psychology. These researchers had identified small areas of brain activity (called voxels) that varied according to the experimental condition of interest (e.g. being rejected or not), and had then focused on just those voxels that showed a correlation, higher than a given threshold, with the psychological measure of interest (e.g. feeling rejected). Finally, they had arrived at their published brain-behaviour correlation figures by taking the average correlation from among just this select group of voxels, or in some cases just one “peak voxel”. Pashler’s team contend that by following this procedure, it would have been nearly impossible for the studies not to find a significant brain-behaviour correlation.

Here (pdf) is an ungated preprint of the Vul et al paper; and thanks to Tyler Cowen for the link. I haven’t yet read the paper myself (though I do plan to), and am once again insufficiently schooled in the relevant methodological niceties to have anything more than a cursory grasp of the force of these criticisms, but at first glance they’re hardly that surprising.

Not because neuroscientists are inclined to make stuff up, though! The use of fMRI is a tricky business: the data it yields are almost essentially messy, and the methodology for dealing with them is being worked out very much on the fly. But if the verdict of Pashler and his colleagues (“a disturbingly large, and quite prominent, segment of social neuroscience research”, they write in their concluding remarks, “is using seriously defective research methods and producing a profusion of numbers that should not be believed”) is to be believed, then the present situation in social neuroscience at least is not an especially healthy one.

Anyway, I’m going to read the whole paper and report back if anything particularly interesting jumps out. Bonus points to readers not named Razib who can offer an eighth-grade-level refresher course on what in the world an r-squared value is again.

Elsewhere: Yale Mafioso and Culture11 contributor and blogger Will Wilson and I went back and forth on the varieties of modularity during a stint at James’s old blog, here and here and here and here and here.

(Image via Flickrer Jim Lindley.)

Filed under: philosophy, science/tech

"Infected"

My computer has come down with a virus, and over at TAS I try to understand the mind of the person who created it.

Filed under: personal, science/tech

Twitter

Despite Cheryl Miller’s best efforts, I still don’t really understand what it is. And I don’t expect I’ll ever find out, either: like my grandparents with blogs and IM, I’m happy to go to my death never having tweeted – though with kids these days, you never know how your undergraduates will try to get in touch with you.

Still can’t get over that Ezra Klein incident*, though …

* NOTE: Profanity on the other side of that link. Hilarious, eye-popping profanity.

Filed under: media/culture, science/tech