"It doesn't matter what’s true." Schemas predominantly matter in political discourse.

What?

  

   

OK, gotta admit, I'm now a major-league Brian Klaas Fan Boy in the wake of reading his book.

 

Zuck was right. "Young people are just smarter."

Well, some of them.

 

So, Brian has a Substack (of course). I subscribed (and paid, notwithstanding my prevailing dubiety; it's a wimpy authoring platform, generally). 

I ran across this today.

Schemas and the Political Brain
Understanding how cognitive shortcuts work when processing new information is crucial to understanding modern politics—and it's a facet of cognition that Republicans manipulate extremely effectively.

Republicans have battered Democrats on messaging in recent years because they intuitively understand schemas in a way that Democrats often don’t.

What is a schema?

The word schema comes from the Greek schēmat or schēma, which means “form.” But the concept in its modern usage refers to patterns of thought that provide intellectual shortcuts for processing the information we encounter in our lives. Think of it a bit like your brain’s organizational system, which structures our knowledge, old and new. To organize vast quantities of data, we need to sort everything into categories and patterns, with simplified assumptions.

The whole world we experience is, in a sense, a giant set of data. When you go for a walk, the amount of data your brain encounters is overwhelming—the shade of color on every leaf, the patterns of cracks on the sidewalk, the faces of every person you encounter, what they’re wearing, and whether they smiled at you as you went past.

It would be impossible for your brain to process and retain all that information, particularly because most of it provides little value to you. You don’t need to recall in vivid detail whether a random woman you once walked past was wearing a hat or not. As a result, the brain does a bit of intellectual triage, where most of the information we process about the world is culled and discarded. It’s a highly efficient way of dealing with and navigating an immeasurably complex world. Our brains have evolved to process information this way because it helps us survive, able to retain what matters and forget what doesn’t...

Yeah, heuristics & stuff. Type I & Type II thinking, etc. 

 

Brian sums up...

How to use schemas

The lesson, then, is not that fact-based arguments are meaningless in politics, but rather that facts are most effective when they’re nestled within a ready-made intellectual framework for how to make sense of the world. Effective political movements use facts to reinforce schemas, but they understand that the schemas are what matter most. It’s a depressing truth, but getting the right taglines, slogans, and vivid ways of presenting political opponents is often far more important than being right.

So, if Democrats want to loosen Trump’s grip on the modern GOP, then the messaging needs to match the audience, while recognizing the schemas that Trump’s voters are using to process reality. Democrats can shout from the rooftops about how Trump is a racist authoritarian tax dodger who poses an existential threat to American democracy (facts that are certainly worth repeating!). But no matter how loudly those arguments are repeated, voters in the GOP base use schemas that simply don’t have a place for those facts. They’ll ignore them, dismiss them, contort themselves with brain gymnastics until they end up in a position where they remain comfortable within their existing cognitive framework.

What’s more likely to be effective to sway the MAGA base is to brand Trump as a loser, partly because that does fit with Republican schemas, and partly because it’s a direct attack on the schema that Trump has tried to cultivate for himself for his entire life — that he’s a winner who lives in a golden penthouse, a strategic genius who always ends up on top.

If you really want to destroy someone in politics, don’t attack them with a barrage of facts and decimal points, change the fundamental way that their own supporters perceive them. The path to political victory runs, to an astonishing degree, through psychology and neuroscience. That way true power lies.

OK. lots to remark upon. Goes to a lot of prior topics here. to wit,

Having to go back and re-study this beaut.

  

Kathryn rocks.

 

This delightful person (a Twitter/X fellow-traveler) started me down this latest rabbit hole.

  

Click

to wit,

Click

2 Core Rules:
The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.

The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.

10 Commitments:
Fallibilism
The ethos that any of us might be wrong thus we strive to keep our ideas open to criticism.

Objectivity
Understanding that truth is not based on feeling, identity, or a person's/group’s lived experience.

Exclusivity
A commitment to the idea of objective reality because what lies beyond that is chaos.

Disconfirmation
A commitment that all ideas and viewpoints are subject to challenge by the community.

Accountability
A commitment to offering our ideas for critique in good faith and acknowledge when we’re wrong.

Pluralism
Valuing viewpoint diversity and a commitment to encourage, and seek it out.

Civility
A commitment to discourage and avoid personal attacks and, instead, depersonalize rhetoric.

Professionalism
A commitment to valuing the credentials and reputations of this reality-based community.

Institutionalism
A commitment to valuing and relying upon established norms and codes of conduct.

No Bullshitting
A commitment to sincerely regard the truth instead of obscuring it.

Well, "scientific method," anyone?  Likin' the "civility" reference in particular. "Pluralism?" I'm in, notwithstanding its political contentiousness of late (e.g., DEI).

These topics also have me recalling the excellent work of Zoe Chance.

More shortly...

_________

  

"It doesn't matter what’s true," continued.

The Allure of Certainty (Kathryn Schulz)

The trouble began, as it so often does, with taxes. In AD 6, the Roman Empire, ramping up its policy of territorial expansion and control, decided to impose a tariff on the Jews of the province of Judaea, in what is now Israel and the West Bank. By then, the local Jews had been living under a capricious and often cruel Roman rule for seventy years, so the tax issue was hardly their only grievance. Still, it rankled, and the question of what to do about it caused a schism in the community. The majority heeded the counsel of the high priest Joazar and reluctantly agreed to pay up in the interest of keeping the peace. But a handful, led by one Judas of Galilee, rebelled. Disgusted by what he saw as Joazar’s complicity with Roman rule, Judas vowed to establish a new sect of Jews whose members, in the words of the first-century Jewish historian Josephus, “have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and say that God is to be their only Ruler and Lord.”

That sounds like an honorable attitude. And a courageous one: Judas and his followers, a small and marginalized minority, took on one of history’s most formidable imperial states. As such, they seem like good candidates for hero status in the eyes of their fellow Jews, ancient and modern—and some people view them that way. But to Josephus, and to many others before and since, they were little better than villains and murderers. Judas’s sect practiced a scorched-earth policy (including against other Jews, to deprive them of food and shelter and thereby force them to join the sectarian fight), advocated the outright murder not only of Romans but also of Jewish “collaborators” (essentially, anyone with less single-minded politics than their own), and contributed to the destruction of Jerusalem and the ferocity of Roman reprisals through their own extreme violence and unwillingness to negotiate. Josephus records a characteristic raid—the sacking of the Jewish enclave of Ein-Gedi, where the able-bodied men apparently fled, and, “As for such that could not run away, being women and children, they slew of them above seven hundred.” The historian sums up the sect and its legacy this way:

All sorts of misfortunes also sprang from these men, and the nation was infected with this doctrine to an incredible degree; one violent war came upon us after another, and we lost our friends which used to alleviate our pains; there were also very great rob beries and murder of our principal men…. Such a change was made, as added a mighty weight toward bringing all to destruction, which these men occasioned by their thus conspiring together; for Judas and Sadduc [another leader of the rebellion], who excited a fourth philosophic sect among us, and had a great many followers therein, filled our civil government with tumults at present, and laid the foundations of our future miseries.

Who were the members of this “fourth philosophic sect,” in all their unphilosophical brutality? These were the original, capital-Z Zealots. History doesn’t record the fate of Judas, but most of the other Zealots perished in the first Jewish-Roman war, which began in AD 66 and ended four years later, with the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem and the defeat of the Jews. A small band of survivors retreated to a fort at Masada, near the Dead Sea, where they held off a Roman siege for three years. When the Romans finally breached the fort, they discovered that its 960 inhabitants had organized a mass self-slaughter, murdering one another (suicide being forbidden in Hebrew law) rather than letting themselves be captured or killed by the RomansAs the generic use of their name suggests, the legacy of the Zealots was not ideological but methodological. Murdering in the name of faith, religious or otherwise, was hardly unheard of before they came along, but they clarified and epitomized it as a practice. In the two millennia since the last of Judas of Galilee’s Zealots perished, a thousand lowercase zealots have kept that legacy alive—meaning, they have killed in its name. These latter-day zealots have hailed from many different backgrounds and held many different beliefs. At heart, though, and paradoxically, they have all shared a single conviction: that they and they alone are in possession of the truth. (The very word “zealot” comes from a Greek root meaning to be jealous of the truth—to guard it as your own.) What zealots have in common, then, is the absolute conviction that they are right. In fact, of all the symbolic ones and zeros that extremists use to write their ideological binary codes—us/them, same/different, good/evil—the fundamental one is right/wrong. Zealotry demands a complete rejection of the possibility of error.

The conviction that we cannot possibly be wrong: this is certainty. We’ve seen a lot of this conviction already, in the form of people who are sure they can see, or sure of what they do see (mountain chains, pregnant women), or sure of what they believe or predict or recall. Most of the time, this garden-variety certainty seems far removed from zealotry—and in a sense, it is. There’s a very big difference between, say, insisting that you are right about Orion and, say, murdering the Protestants, Muslims, Jews, bigamists, blasphemers, sodomites, and witches who are defiling your country. Not everyone who is filled with passionate certitude is Torquemada…

Schulz, Kathryn. Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error Chapter 8 (pp. 159-162). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Kathryn published those thoughts in 2010. Still reads much like yesterday (arguably moreso). Being Wrong is one of my favorite books. Do yourselves a favor. Get it. Study it closely.

I bought the book in hardcover when it first came out, then later also bought the Kindle edition, for ease of further study and citation. I've long read her work in The New Yorker. She is a fabulous writer and thinker. This post is intended to continue the riff begun in the prior post. No timely "Zealotry" flying around these days, right? Hmmm... let us not forget today's Christian Nationalist Warriors, either.

"Two Cheers for Uncertainty"

What?

Yeah, that always gets 'em going.

UPDATE ERRATUM

I diverged into downloading and reading Kathryn Schulz's memoir. Hit 'pause' on the world while I finished it.

   

I am rarely at a loss for apt words, but, this is one of those times.

_________

 

"Freedom?" (per "Volition?") "Culpability?" "Merit?” “Morality?" "Destiny?"

Are those delusions?

  

 

Timely topical upshot of reading a Science Magazine book review, especially in light of the latest Hamas vs Israel tragedy.

Freedom from free will
A scientist presents a case for a predetermined future

We all sometimes behave in ways that seem to conflict with our goals and intentions. One person might struggle to resist a favorite comfort food despite knowing that a different option will be more nutritious. Another may repeatedly snooze their alarm and miss their morning workout. Still others may wish to spend more time with family but instead find themselves mindlessly browsing social media. If we only had more willpower, the conventional wisdom goes, we could eat healthier, exercise regularly, and spend more time with loved ones. In Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will, neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that we have no free will and that such choices are thus actually determined by factors beyond our control.

Our genetic and epigenetic makeup, together with environmental and cultural factors, make us who we are and determine how we behave, Sapolsky claims. Whether a person makes it to the gym or opts for a decadent dessert is little more than a function of the architecture of their prefrontal cortex and the neurotransmitters and hormones circulating in their body, all of which in turn are physical manifestations of a person’s genetic inheritance and the environment in which they spent their formative years.

This claim is not new. It is a version of the “consequence argument,” popularized by philosopher Peter van Inwagen in 1983, which states that in a deterministic universe—one where all events are completely determined by an initial state and the laws of nature—all human actions are a consequence of the laws of nature and events in the remote past and are therefore not under our control. Nevertheless, Sapolsky’s coverage of the relevant science is first-rate and very much worth reading...

Sapolsky’s decades of experience studying the effects of the interplay of genes and the environment on behavior shine brightly in these discussions. In particular, he argues against the claim that “luck” evens out over time, with fortune and misfortune striking most people in equal measure over the years, an idea favored by philosopher Daniel Dennett and others. Instead, he provides compelling examples that bad luck compounds, meaning that many who are born “unlucky” have little chance of getting ahead. In later chapters, he convincingly argues against claims that chaos theory, emergent phenomena, or the indeterminism offered by quantum mechanics provide the gap required for free will to exist.

...If we accept that humans are not responsible for their misdeeds, will some of us feel emboldened to behave badly? He thinks not, citing epilepsy as a case in point. Once thought to be the result of demonic possession, it is now understood as a neurological disorder. In addition to leading to the development of effective treatments, this framework helped us to rethink to what degree an individual undergoing an epileptic seizure is responsible for any potential negative outcomes.

Although he is careful not to conflate determinism with the inability to affect change in the world, Sapolsky’s dismissive attitude toward how determinism might be compatible with free will is one of the book’s weak points. Indeed, he sets the bar very high for free will (“Show me a neuron being a causeless cause”). This well-written book is nonetheless worth reading. Better yet, pair it with Kevin Mitchell’s book Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will, also publishing in October 2023, which makes the opposite argument, and then decide for yourself whether you had a choice to do so or it was all predetermined.

Eyeball deep in both books. Had not planned on this. I can see right off the bat myriad definitional problems. Not being anywhere close to being the sharpest knife in the drawer, I have way more questions than answers at the moment.

Nice L.A. Times review by Corinne Purtill.

 

QUICK TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE?

 

1. A Technology of Behavior

IN TRYING TO SOLVE the terrifying problems that face us in the world today, we naturally turn to the things we do best. We play from strength, and our strength is science and technology. To contain a population explosion we look for better methods of birth control. Threatened by a nuclear holocaust, we build bigger deterrent forces and anti-ballistic-missile systems. We try to stave off world famine with new foods and better ways of growing them. Improved sanitation and medicine will, we hope, control disease, better housing and transportation will solve the problems of the ghettos, and new ways of reducing or disposing of waste will stop the pollution of the environment. We can point to remarkable achievements in all these fields, and it is not surprising that we should try to extend them. But things grow steadily worse, and it is disheartening to find that technology itself is increasingly at fault. Sanitation and medicine have made the problems of population more acute, war has acquired a new horror with the invention of nuclear weapons, and the affluent pursuit of happiness is largely responsible for pollution. As Darlington has said, “Every new source from which man has increased his power on the earth has been used to diminish the prospects of his successors. All his progress has been made at the expense of damage to his environment which he cannot repair and could not foresee.”

Whether or not he could have foreseen the damage, man must repair it or all is lost. And he can do so if he will recognize the nature of the difficulty. The application of the physical and biological sciences alone will not solve our problems because the solutions lie in another field. Better contraceptives will control population only if people use them. New weapons may offset new defenses and vice versa, but a nuclear holocaust can be prevented only if the conditions under which nations make war can be changed. New methods of agriculture and medicine will not help if they are not practiced, and housing is a matter not only of buildings and cities but of how people live. Overcrowding can be corrected only by inducing people not to crowd, and the environment will continue to deteriorate until polluting practices are abandoned.

In short, we need to make vast changes in human behavior, and we cannot make them with the help of nothing more than physics or biology, no matter how hard we try. (And there are other problems, such as the breakdown of our educational system and the disaffection and revolt of the young, to which physical and biological technologies are so obviously irrelevant that they have never been applied.) It is not enough to “use technology with a deeper understanding of human issues,” or to “dedicate technology to man’s spiritual needs,” or to “encourage technologists to look at human problems.” Such expressions imply that where human behavior begins, technology stops, and that we must carry on, as we have in the past, with what we have learned from personal experience or from those collections of personal experiences called history, or with the distillations of experience to be found in folk wisdom and practical rules of thumb. These have been available for centuries, and all we have to show for them is the state of the world today.

What we need is a technology of behavior. We could solve our problems quickly enough if we could adjust the growth of the world’s population as precisely as we adjust the course of a spaceship, or improve agriculture and industry with some of the confidence with which we accelerate high-energy particles, or move toward a peaceful world with something like the steady progress with which physics has approached absolute zero (even though both remain presumably out of reach). But a behavioral technology comparable in power and precision to physical and biological technology is lacking, and those who do not find the very possibility ridiculous are more likely to be frightened by it than reassured. That is how far we are from “understanding human issues” in the sense in which physics and biology understand their fields, and how far we are from preventing the catastrophe toward which the world seems to be inexorably moving…

Skinner, B.F. Beyond Freedom and Dignity Hackett Publishing

Ahhh... And we'd thought Ol' Mr. Operant Conditioning Skinner had been safely remanded to a musty basement at Harvard.

"What we need is a technology of behavior."

Yeah. Nita Farahany's nightmare.

QUICK UPDATE

Burrowed down into both books at the moment, alternating back & forth in fairly lengthy chunks. My Kindle app tells me the Sapolsky book will take me 15 hours, and Mitchell's will consume 9. I can already see a lot of dueling definitional "No True Scotsman" stuff going on. "Depends on what you mean by ____________."

 

Inevitable, one supposes. ;) arf.

The writing styles are both quite engaging. Sapolsky is by far the funnier of the two. While I'm sure I will find these to have been fully enjoyable and worthy in their own respective rights, I have to wonder to what degrees these will settle much in terms of ethical policy utility.

Inevitable, one supposes? ;) arf.

 

I must admit to being a bit Pavlovian when it comes to rather reflexively delving into books I encounter via Science Magazine reviews.

 

Inevitable, one supposes? ;) arf.

A COUPLE OF CITES

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?
Giving this section this ridiculous heading reflects how unenthused I am about having to write this next stretch. I don’t understand what consciousness is, can’t define it. I can’t understand philosophers’ writing about it. Or neuroscientists’, for that matter, unless it’s “consciousness” in the boring neurological sense, like not experiencing consciousness because you’re in a coma.

Nevertheless, consciousness is central to Libet debates, sometimes, in a fairly heavy-handed way. For example, take Mele, in a book whose title trumpets that he’s not pulling any punches—Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will. In its first paragraph, he writes, “There are two main scientific arguments today against the existence of free will.” One arises from social psychologists showing that behavior can be manipulated by factors that we’re not aware of—we’ve seen examples of these. The other is neuroscientists whose “basic claim is that all our decisions are made unconsciously and therefore not freely” (my italics). In other words, that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, an illusory, reconstructive sense of control irrelevant to our actual behavior. This strikes me as an overly dogmatic way of representing just one of many styles of neuroscientific thought on the subject.

The “ooh, you neuroscientists not only eat your dead but also believe all our decisions are unconscious” nyah-nyah matters, because we shouldn’t be held morally responsible for our unconscious behaviors (although neuroscientist Michael Shadlen of Columbia University, whose excellent research has informed free-will debates, makes a spirited argument along with Roskies that we should be held morally responsible for even our unconscious acts).

Compatibilists trying to fend off the Libetians often make a last stand with consciousness: Okay, okay, suppose that Libet, Haynes, Fried, and so on really have shown that the brain decides something before we have a sense of having consciously and freely done so. Let’s grant the incompatibilists that. But does turning that preconscious decision into actual behavior require that conscious sense of agency? Because if it does, rather than bypassing consciousness as an irrelevancy, free will can’t be ruled out.

As we saw, knowing what a brain’s preconscious decision was moderately predicts whether the behavior will actually occur. But what about the relationship between the preconscious brain’s decision and the sense of conscious agency—is there ever a readiness potential followed by a behavior without a conscious sense of agency coming in between? One cool study done by Dartmouth neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley and collaborators shows precisely this—subjects were hypnotized and implanted with a posthypnotic suggestibility that they make a spontaneous Libet-like movement. In this case, when triggered by the cued suggestion, there’d be a readiness potential and the subsequent movement, without conscious awareness in between. Consciousness is an irrelevant hiccup.

Sure, retort compatibilists, this doesn’t mean that intentional behavior always bypasses consciousness—rejecting free will based on what happens in the posthypnotic brain is kind of flimsy. And there is a higher-order level to this issue, something emphasized by incompatibilist philosopher Gregg Caruso of the State University of New York—you’re playing soccer, you have the ball, and you consciously decide that you are going to try to get past this defender, rather than pass the ball off. In the process of then trying to do this, you make a variety of procedural movements that you’re not consciously choosing; what does it mean that you have made the explicit choice to let a particular implicit process take over? The debate continues, not just over whether the preconscious requires consciousness as a mediating factor but also over whether both can simultaneously cause a behavior.

Amid these arcana, it’s hugely important if the preconscious decision requires consciousness as a mediator. Why? Because during that moment of conscious mediation we should then be expected to be able to veto a decision, prevent it from happening. And you can hang moral responsibility on that…

Sapolsky, Robert M.. Determined (pp. 31-33). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
________

…the sequence of the genome in a lineage comes to reflect information about the environment and the past experiences of the population of organisms in that lineage, both good and bad. For example, imagine a mutation that alters the function of an enzyme, such that the organism can now metabolize a new source of food (say, a different type of sugar). If that type of sugar is available in the environment, then that mutation may be beneficial and selected for. This sequence of DNA persists because it carries information about the environment; namely, that this type of sugar can be found in it.

That same process of adaptation happens across the whole genome, reflecting all kinds of aspects of the life histories of individual organisms in the lineage. And the unsuccessful mutations—the ones that don’t make it through—convey a kind of information too, by their absence. I described the genome as a reference template that carries information about the configuration of all the cell’s biochemical components and processes. In a sense, an abstract model of the cell is encoded in the genome. And by virtue of the optimizing actions of natural selection, the genome also embodies a model of the environment or, more precisely, of the fittedness of the organism to the environment.

This model allows living organisms to use information about the past to predict and anticipate the future—to adapt to the regularities of their environment by embodying useful functions or responses in their own structure. If we want to understand what happens in a biological system at any given instant, this historicity is a key part of the explanation. The sequence of the genome and the resultant structure of the organism right now reflect the configurations of its ancestors and whether those configurations promoted persistence or hastened death. In addition to whatever factors are impinging on an organism at any given instant, there are thus causes at work from the distant past, captured in the sequence of the DNA. In a very important sense, there are also causes from the future.

What’s the Point?
The sequence of events described in this chapter might suggest to some a purposive process—as if the point of all that was to generate life. But there’s no reason to assume a purpose. Life reflects an unlikely arrangement of matter, but its emergence and the resultant trajectories of its evolution are merely statistical outcomes of the application of the mindless algorithm of natural selection. There is a set of circumstances that led to its emergence but there’s no reason for it. If, rather than asking “What is life?,” we ask “Why is life?,” the answer lies in the question: life is why. It exists because it can. There is no cosmic purpose at play—merely thermodynamic tendencies played out in the particular conditions of our young planet (and of who knows how many others).

But once life does exist, everything changes. The universe doesn’t have purpose, but life does. Natural selection ensures it. Living organisms are adapted to their environment—retrospectively designed to function in specific ways that further their persistence. Before life emerged, nothing in the universe was for anything. But the functionalities and arrangements of components in living organisms are for something: variations that improve persistence are selected for on that basis, and ones that decrease persistence are eliminated.

Nothing in this whole arrangement—not the organism, nor any of its components, nor natural selection—is aware of this purpose. Indeed, you might argue that this is not real purpose: it’s only the system behaving as if it had purpose. And its components don’t actually have functions; they only have physical and chemical properties and tendencies that fit well together to form a whole system that tends to persist over time.

But we can approach the question from the other end and ask, “What would be the difference in the consequences between a system with ‘real’ purpose and one that only behaves as if it has purpose?” If we put aside the fact that all this apparent design was actually imparted by the blind actions of natural selection, we can see that the result is a fittedness of the organism to its niche and a fittedness of each component to the whole system.

Just as importantly, there is a fittedness of the activities of the system to the future outcome of its persistence. Organisms are doing work in order to maintain themselves: all those activities are goal directed (and thus qualify as functions). At least that is the effect, and the pragmatic consequences are no different than if the organism was explicitly designed to have that goal. Things happen because of that goal. The system behaves in ways that advance it. The components of the organism and its internal processes have functions, with respect to the goal of persistence. Once you have those properties, what else is needed for something to qualify as a goal or for us to say the whole system has purpose?

And unlike the designed machines and gadgets that surround us in our daily lives, which also have a purpose or at least serve a purpose, living organisms are adapted for the sake of only one thing—their selves. This brings something new to the universe: a frame of reference, a subject. The existence of a goal imbues things with properties that previously never existed relative to that goal: function, meaning, and value.

In a lifeless universe, things have consequences, but nothing matters. There’s nothing with respect to which they could matter. Things just happen, with nobody or no thing trying to make them one way or another. Nothing has meaning or value; nothing is good or bad. But living things do try (to stay alive), and because of that, things matter to them. As we will see in later chapters, meaning and value are the internal currency that drives the mechanisms of decision making and action selection that emerged as life continued to evolve.

From the rocks and sea of our early world, life emerged—organisms that actively maintain their internal states and sustain a degree of causal autonomy from the world around them. The next step in the evolution of agency is the ability of these autonomous organisms to act on the world, to become causes in their own right…

Mitchell, Kevin J.. Free Agents (pp. 40-43). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.

Lots to ponder. Below, I'll just drop this snippet in for now:

14.5 Living With Uncertainty
Without uncertainty, there would be no hope, no ethics, and no freedom of choice. It is only because we do not know what the future holds for us (e.g., the exact time and manner of our own deaths) that we can have hope. It is only because we do not know exactly the future results of our choices that our choice can be free, and can pose a true ethical dilemma. Moreover, there is much uncertainty in the world, and one of our most basic choices is whether we will accept that uncertainty as a fact or try to run away from it. Those who choose to deny uncertainty invent a stable world of their own. Such people’s natural desire to reduce uncertainty, which may be basic to the whole cognitive enterprise of understanding the world, is taken to the extreme point where they believe uncertainty does not exist…

Hastie, Reid; Dawes, Robyn M.. Rational Choice in an Uncertain World (p. 333). SAGE Publications. Kindle Edition.

Actually, you'd really like the entirety of Chapter 14 (and the Stats appendix).

 

A BIT MORE DETERMINED

…the Libetian Wars don’t ask the most fundamental question: Why did you form the intent that you did?

This chapter shows how you don’t ultimately control the intent you form. You wish to do something, intend to do it, and then successfully do so. But no matter how fervent, even desperate, you are, you can’t successfully wish to wish for a different intent. And you can’t meta your way out—you can’t successfully wish for the tools (say, more self-discipline) that will make you better at successfully wishing what you wish for. None of us can.

Which is why it would tell us nothing to stick electrodes in your head to monitor what neurons are doing in the milliseconds when you form your intent. To understand where your intent came from, all that needs to be known is what happened to you in the seconds to minutes before you formed the intention to push whichever button you choose. As well as what happened to you in the hours to days before. And years to decades before. And during your adolescence, childhood, and fetal life. And what happened when the sperm and egg destined to become you merged, forming your genome. And what happened to your ancestors centuries ago when they were forming the culture you were raised in, and to your species millions of years ago. Yeah, all that.

Understanding this turtleism shows how the intent you form, the person you are, is the result of all the interactions between biology and environment that came before. All things out of your control. Each prior influence flows without a break from the effects of the influences before. As such, there’s no point in the sequence where you can insert a freedom of will that will be in that biological world but not of it.

Thus, we’ll now see how who we are is the outcome of the prior seconds, minutes, decades, geological periods before, over which we had no control. And how bad and good luck sure as hell don’t balance out in the end.  Determined [p. 46].

AND, BACK AGAIN TO FREE AGENTS

Although their behaviors appear simple from the outside, these single-celled creatures are thus far from being passive stimulus–response machines. Their response to a given signal depends on what other signals are around and on the cell’s internal state at the time. These organisms infer what is out in the world, where it is, and how it is changing. They process this information in the context of their own internal state and recent experience, and they actively make holistic decisions to adapt their internal dynamics and select appropriate actions.

This represents a wholly different type of causation from anything seen before in the universe. The behavior of the organism is not purely driven or determined by the playing out of physical forces acting on it or in it. Clearly, a physical mechanism underpins the behavior, which explains how the system works. But thinking of what it is doing—and why it is doing it—in terms of the resolution of instantaneous physical forces is simply the wrong framing. The causation is not physical in that sense—it is informational.

Information and Meaning
Before we go on, let me discuss what I mean by information, why it is useful for organisms to have it, and how it can have causal power in a physical system. First of all, information is physical; that is, it has to be carried in the physical arrangement of some kind of matter. It doesn’t just float around in the ether but has to be instantiated in some physical medium. That is literally what the phrase to in-form means. As a result, the idea that information can have causal power in a physical system should not be so outlandish: it is the same as saying that the way a system is organized constrains how it evolves over time.

The word “information,” however, has multiple meanings, both colloquially and technically, which can create confusion. The most commonly used technical sense of the word was developed by Claude Shannon working at Bell Labs in New Jersey and published in 1948 in an article titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” Shannon was working on a classic engineering problem of signal transmission: how best to encode a signal, send it via some noisy medium, and decode it at a receiver. He conceived a way of calculating the amount of information in any given message and derived a formula to calculate the optimal rate of information transfer relative to the noise.

Shannon’s deep insight—one that let him develop a theory of information in the abstract, independent of the message or medium—was to think of information in terms of uncertainty or probability. He reasoned that the way to calculate how much information it would take to send a message—a sequence or “string” of elements—is to ask how many other arrangements a string of the same length could be in.

If the string is just a single digit, say, then from the receiver’s point of view, there are ten possibilities for which one it could be. If it were a single letter, then there would be twenty-six possibilities. The receiver has greater uncertainty about which letter it would be than which number it would be, because there are more possibilities. Conversely, the message with a particular letter contains more information than the one with a particular number, because it resolves a greater degree of uncertainty. Obviously, longer strings carry more information than shorter ones.

The amount of information can be measured in bits—roughly, how many yes/no questions you would have to ask to know what the message says. The amount of information in the signal thus relates to how improbable it is, which is a function of how many other forms it could have taken. If this sounds similar to the discussion in chapter two about the probability of particular arrangements of matter, it should—there is a mathematical equivalence between these ideas.

There is something very fundamental about this framing that is crucial for understanding the role of information in living systems. For something to count as information and for it to have causal power in a system as information, the possibility must exist that it could have been different. We will talk about this concept more in later chapters, but it’s worth noting here that in a truly deterministic universe, such possibilities would not exist nor would information in this sense… Free Agents [pp. 62-64].

Y'see where we might be headed?

 

HASTIE & DAWES APPENDIX

 

apropos?

A recent president of the American Psychological Association gave as his presidential address a talk on “torque and schizophrenic viability.” In it, he presented some absolutely striking data. Of 52 children who had seen him 10 years earlier who drew circles clockwise, 11 were later diagnosed as schizophrenic; of the 54 who drew circles counterclockwise, only 1 had been diagnosed schizophrenic. This relationship reached the “.01 level of statistical significance.” He related his finding to the fact that “the world turns in a counterclockwise direction with respect to the north–south axis” and that “with some exceptions, this ‘left-turning’ is characteristic of living cells.”

Certainly, a finding of this magnitude—particularly when it is related to fundamental properties of the earth and of the very unit of life—should have set the psychological world on its ear. At the least, it might have contributed to our understanding of schizophrenia, which is one of the two most prevalent mental health problems in the United States (along with depression). The average citations by other scientists to that article hovered around three per year in the subsequent 8 years, until it vanished from the charts. Why so few citations? Perhaps the researcher will be neglected for 50 years, only to be rediscovered as the founder of a modern theory of schizophrenia. A more likely explanation is found in part of his talk: “Subjects for this study were 155 children first seen for psychological evaluation at my private psychological clinic.” Children seen for such evaluations are given many tests, each of which can be evaluated on a multiplicity of variables. The researcher reported his findings on only one of these tests in his presidential address. Our educated guess is that it was 1 out of approximately 200 that he could have easily related to later diagnoses of schizophrenia. (It is important to what follows to note that this guess is based on the authors’ knowledge of clinical practice, not on the plausibility that he looked at many tests. But imagine a scenario in which a child enters a psychologist’s office, is asked to draw a circle, and is then told to go away.)

How does one evaluate whether one of these very unusual findings might be important? The best answer, of course, is to determine whether it can be repeated. Attempts to replicate such “psychic power” findings have had a dismal history. Absent the possibility of prediction, control, and replication, the best approach is to precisely specify the hypothesis of interest in advance, to specify the conceptual sample space of possible relevant events, and then to systematically collect data—even anecdotes—to describe the entire space of possible outcomes. Persi Diaconis and Fred Mosteller (1989) have outlined such a strategy and illustrate it with an application to the common experience of encountering coincidental “clusters” of newly learned words in everyday life.

If we look hard enough, we’re bound to find something. After all, the probability that exactly nothing will happen is indeed exactly zero. And, as Diaconis and Mosteller (1989) note, “When enormous numbers of events and people and their interactions cumulate over time, almost any outrageous event is bound to occur” (p. 853). Both classical and Bayesian analyses of statistical significance and informativeness are addressed to questions asked beforehand. In evaluating research findings in order to reach rational decisions, it is crucial to determine whether they were hypothesized in advance or simply picked out post hoc— from the imagination of the person purporting to have discovered them.  Rational Choice in an Uncertain World [pp. 357-359]

".01 level of statistical significance." Don't get me started.

 

INTERMISSION: 2 HOURS OF ROBERT SAPOLSKY

 

 

AND THEN KEVIN J. MITCHELL

ROOTING AROUND...

 

Minimally, I'm now having some wafts of "Black Swan" misgivings. Also rummaging around on the Internets today to see what, if anything, the Buddhists might have to say on the topic. They are generally the only peeps who ever made any sense to me.

 TEXTING WITH A PROFESSOR FRIEND

 

MEANWHILE,

More to come...

__________

 

.alt.dx/px/tx: What about "Mind-Body Medicine"?

Well, yeah. As a life outlook generalization, if you don't believe you can achieve "x," you likely won't even try. But, what of the broad implications for health and for recovery from injury or disease? To what extent (if any) is "mind over matter" a valid and useful concept in health and health care? To what extent is anything labeled "alt." -- anything not easily reducible to an ICD-10 code for efficient conventional inclusion into an EHR -- dismissible as "quackery" or simple ignorant wishful-thinking fallacy naivete? These questions became more than epistemological abstractions for me roughly 20 years ago with my late daughter's cancer dx and

...our experience thus far with the quackery end of the alternative therapy spectrum, a distribution of propositions whose opposite terminus abuts the breadth of mainstream clinical research and practice, where methods as yet"unproven" but more logically reasonable and promising vie for acceptance by the medical establishment. In the middle lie tougher calls: does shark cartilage really shrink tumors, functioning as an angiogenesis inhibitor? (one skeptical journal article called it "the laetrile of the 90's") Hydrazine sulfate? (also reported on extensively in the mainstream clinical literature and generally-- though not uniformly-- dismissed as 'ineffective.') Nucleotide Reductase? Plant oils? Blue-green algae?

All of these unconventional therapeutic assertions-- many of which would prove to be merely unproductive, outlandish, maddening distractions-- would have to be checked out while also slogging through the vast archives of mainstream clinical literature, a quest that would take me through the most recent three years of month-by-month National Cancer Institute (NCI) hepatoma citations. Also, I began ... keyword-searching the Medline indices for anything related to Sissy's condition that might prove useful...

"alt.medicine" stuff spans the gamut from every imaginable bozo goop concoction tx to "healing and the mind." Again, from my One in Three essay:

Healing and the mind
Recall Bill Moyers' PBS series and popular book of the same name. Spanning both the alternative and mainstream spectra are the somewhat overlapping domains of "immunotherapy" and "psychoneuroimmunology." Proponents of these approaches to therapy theorize that malignancies-- in addition to the more mundane panoply of human ailments-- can take hold only in the presence of a compromised immune system. One must strengthen the immune system for long-term healing to take place. Conventional medical treatment, it is argued (and not without substantial merit) focuses far too often on combating symptoms rather than curing root causes, and chief among the root causes of disease are the dietary, psychic, and other lifestyle imbalances so widespread in our culture.

Investigations here take one through the myriad contending "healing" dietary regimens that crowd the book chain shelves. Acupuncture and medicinal herbs also employed in the effort to restore immunological balance. Dr. Andrew Weil's recent best-seller Spontaneous Healing covers these areas in quite some detail, as does Jean Carper's more recent Miracle Cures. In the Adam Smith-redux "powers of mind" camp along with Moyers' work, the likewise best-selling publications of Drs. Bernie Seigel and Deepak Chopra are surely familiar to those who frequent Barnes & Noble, Borders, or their bookstore brethren. And, renowned writer Norman Cousins recently reported on his work in psychoneuroimmunology research at UCLA in Head First: The Biology of Hope and the Healing Power of the Human Spirit. Dr. Cousins and his UCLA colleagues undertook to put the previously disparate and frequently anecdotal evidence of psychological factors in healing to the test of rigorous scientific scrutiny, concluding that physiological effects indeed do frequently arise from psychological causes, for better or worse, and that research should continue in earnest in the area of psychoneuroimmunology.

All of these works and many more, some by now dog-eared, awash with highlighter residue and freighted with sticky-notes, line my bookshelves aside the ever-accruing mounds of NCI, Medline, and countless other internet cancer information downloads I cyber-mine for nearly every day...

I enthusiastically cut my methodological teeth in the mid/late 1980's in a forensic-level radioanalytical lab in Oak Ridge, and have subsequently long been an irascible hardass for the scientific method and critical thinking. Nonetheless, I came away from Sissy's illness and death not knowing in many ways what to believe anymore.

A chronic, low-grade background epistemic ambivalence that lingers to this day.

Is western reductive science the only way of knowing? (We call that "scientism.") I am reminded of something I wrote in my 2009 post on another of my blogs, "The U.S. health care policy morass."

Several years prior to being diagnosed with fatal liver cancer, my daughter also had encounters with non-western medical diagnostic assessments, one of which might well have saved her life (and this father's now permanently broken heart) had she not blown it off. As I wrote in my "1 in 3" essay, ruminating on this aspect of "alternative medicine":

It was, after all, a Santa Monica Chinese practitioner of acupuncture and herbal medicine, one Dr. Yi Pan, who first called Sissy's attention to a problem with her liver several years prior to her HCC diagnosis. She'd been referred to him by a girlfriend for attention to a menstrual problem. Dr. Pan had a diagnostic acumen requiring no x-rays, CT scans, or blood tests. Yet, the internet medical fraud site www.quackwatch.com dismisses traditional Chinese medicine as "ineffective," as do many other critics of alternative practices.

Tragically, Sissy summarily discounted his prescient admonition. I can only speculate wistfully on the implications of our having known three years earlier.
__

Indeed. Indeed.

I bring up the foregoing only to pose some questions I ask myself all the time. To what extent is our potentially bankrupting dependence on crushingly expensive and ever more "sophisticated" medical technology at least in part a function of our enslaving cognitive enfeeblement wrought by reliance on such technologies? Would we have ICD-9 or CPT "dx" ("diagnosis") 3rd-party payor billing codes through which to encapsulate (and reimburse for) the (accurate, as they were) evaluative encounters of a Yeshi Dhonden or a Yi Pan?

The answer to the latter question is an unequivocal "no".

[Note. Re: "cognitive enfeeblement," see my review of "The Glass Cage."]

I guess a broad ".alt" concern today goes to "how much of our three trillion dollar annual NHE do we continue to waste on the 'woo'?" How much of "patient-centered care" will comprise indulging patients' OTC/DTC-buttressed magical thinking?

From "The Values and Value of Patient-Centered Care."

"[P]hilosophically, patient-centered care is an approach to care and perceived as the right thing to do. Taking this view, behaviors associated with patient-centered care, such as respecting patients’ preferences, should be justified on moral grounds alone, independent of their relationship to health outcomes."

__

Among my stash of new reads:

INTRODUCTION

One weekday morning last summer, I was in the local park. It was a cheerful south London scene, with kids splashing in water fountains and playing soccer on the grass. I perched on the edge of the sandpit with two other mothers, clutching sunscreen and rice cakes as we watched our children build lopsided castles with brightly colored plastic spades.

One of the women, a bright, articulate mom I had just met, was explaining how a homeopathic medicine had cured her of longstanding, debilitating eczema. “I love homeopathy!” she said. As a scientist, I had to protest. Homeopathy is effectively water (or sugar pills) in fancy bottles— any active substance in these treatments is diluted far beyond the point at which any single molecule of the original could possibly remain. “But there’s nothing in homeopathic remedies,” I said.

My new friend looked at me scornfully. “Nothing measurable,” she replied, as if I were slightly dim for not grasping that its healing properties are due to an indefinable essence that’s beyond scientists’ reach. And in those two words, I felt that she summed up one of the major philosophical battles in medicine today.

Stacked up on one side are the proponents of conventional, Western medicine. They are rational, reductionist and rooted in the material world. According to their paradigm, the body is like a machine. For the most part, thoughts, beliefs and emotions don’t feature in treatment for a medical condition. When a machine is broken, you don’t engage it in conversation. Doctors use physical methods— scans, tests, drugs, surgery— to diagnose the problem and fix the broken part.

On the other side is, well, everyone else: followers of ancient, alternative and Eastern medicine. These holistic traditions prioritize the immaterial over the material; people over conditions; subjective experience and beliefs over objective trial results. Rather than prescribing physical drugs, therapists using acupuncture, spiritual healing and reiki claim to harness intangible energy fields. Advocates of homeopathy aren’t concerned that their remedies contain no physical trace of the active ingredient, because they believe that an undetectable “memory” of the drug somehow remains.

Conventional medicine still has the upper hand in the West, but alternative medicine is embraced by millions of people. In the U.S., the wonders of spiritual healing and reiki are regularly discussed on television news. As many as 38% of adults use some form of complementary or alternative medicine (62% if you include prayer). Each year they spend around $ 34 billion a year on it, with 354 million visits to alternative medicine practitioners (compared with around 560 million visits to primary care physicians). In London, where I live, mothers commonly put amber necklaces on their babies in the belief that this gemstone has the power to ward off teething pain. Intelligent, educated women reject crucial vaccines for their children and, like my friend, embrace treatments that make no scientific sense. Not surprisingly, scientists are fighting back. Professional skeptics on both sides of the Atlantic— debunkers like James Randi and Michael Shermer; scientist bloggers like Steven Salzberg and David Gorski; the biologist and author Richard Dawkins— aggressively denounce religion, pseudoscience and especially alternative medicine…

I’m all for defending a rational worldview. I believe passionately in the scientific method: I have a PhD in genetics and medical microbiology, and I spent three years probing the inner workings of cells at a top London hospital. I believe that everything in nature can be studied scientifically if we ask the right questions, and that the medical treatments we put our trust in should be tested in rigorous trials. The skeptics are right: if we abandon science for wishful thinking we might as well be back in the dark ages: drowning witches, bloodletting and praying that God will save us from the plague.

But I’m not sure that simply dismissing alternative medicine is the answer. In my work as a science journalist, I encounter not just those who are cured by modern medicine but those who aren’t: patients whose lives are devastated by gut problems or fatigue yet are dismissed as not having a “real” condition; people suffering from chronic pain or depression, prescribed ever-higher doses of drugs that create addiction and side effects but don’t solve the underlying problem; cancer patients who receive rounds of aggressive treatment well past the point at which there’s any reasonable hope of extending their lives.

And I regularly come across scientific findings— sometimes making headlines but often buried in specialist journals— suggesting that intangible, immaterial treatments can have real physical benefits. Patients hypnotized before surgery suffer fewer complications and recover faster. Meditation triggers molecular changes deep inside our cells. And as we’ll see in the first chapter of this book, if a treatment works no better than placebo that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work— simply believing you have received an effective remedy can have a dramatic biological effect. The mothers around me using amber bracelets and homeopathic pills aren’t ignorant, or stupid; they know from experience that these things genuinely help.

So although I believe that the alternative medicine advocates are deluded with their talk of water memory and healing energy fields, I don’t think the skeptics have got it completely right either. I started to write this book because I wondered whether they, along with conventional doctors, are missing a vital ingredient in physical health; an omission that’s contributing to the rise of chronic disease and sending millions of sane, intelligent people to alternative practitioners. I’m talking, of course, about the mind...

Marchant, Jo (2016-01-19). Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body. Locations 65-104. Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. 

The Science Based Medicine people wasted no time in (relatively mildly) jumping on her case.

The publisher sent me a review copy of the book and I read it. I was expecting to hate it, but I was pleasantly surprised. I enjoyed reading it. I found it fascinating. I found myself agreeing with much of what Marchant says, and I was intrigued by some of the recent research she reports that I was not yet aware of. Preliminary studies, to be sure, but thought-provoking. The book challenged me to think more deeply about placebos, alternative medicine, and patient comfort. - Harriet Hall, MD

Jo Marchant's book brought to my mind another I've had in my stacks for more than 40 years.

MYSTERY: TIME, SPACE, INFINITY, STATISTICAL ABERRATION

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura...

On the first day of Christmas, my allegedly true love gave to me a silver pillbox. Infuriating. It was true, of course, that gentleman of finance consumed pain easing pills, traveled with them, and even offered them to each other, but then, there was a lot of pain around.  fund managers chewed absently on antacids,  wondering where the last hundred million went so quickly. When you met them, they might offer you one, as if proffering a cigarette or a Life Saver. A high risk, high stress profession, wrote one psychologist in a paper. The University of San Francisco offered a course for clergymen, a laboratory in pastoral ministries, course #261, to "communicate with persons with unusual needs… Such as the sick, the aging, broken families, alcoholics, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, stockbrokers." No wonder drug companies had such nice profit margins, and sold at such high premiums.

Two gallants of my acquaintance wrote one of the best short reports I have ever read. The University portfolio they managed was down by a little over $200 million. (Do you know how long it takes to raise $200 million?) They remained fully invested, they said, because things were so bad they thought they could get no worse. "The light we saw at the end of the tunnel," they said, "was a freight train coming the other way."

Some people disappeared from the money business, and some disappeared right off the planet, ahead of schedule. If somebody had a heart attack, we said, oh sorry, when will he be back in the office? It was certainly a statistical aberration when I lost my panel, the investment strategy panel I moderated at the annual convention. My panelists were in their 30s and 40s and not fat and they liked their work, so statistically they should have not exited with one heart attack, one also attack, and one something I forget. We recruited another panel without even a moment of silence for our fallen comrades. Very cool, very macho, the show must go on.

I think what I had in mind when I began my research was that I would do some research on health. I would leave my nine foot teak desk, my phone with all its buttons lit up, and my totally filled in month at a glance calendar, go find some answers, and be welcomed back to the business community, like the first Arapaho who came back to his horseless tribe with a Pawnee Pinto. Look, fellas, now we can go twice as fast. I thought this might take a couple of months but well worth it, very important. (I could return the silver pillbox with the appropriate insult.) There was something else, Misty, unarticulated, in this program. One of my convention panelists had told me what his plans were, just as soon as he had enough time and enough money. He certainly had enough money, but he had had time back when he thought he didn't, and then he didn't.

The first physicians I consulted in this venture had all the same symptoms as my compatriots. We have to take it easier, they said wisely. Then they would answer the phone, rubbed their eyes, and say, yes, they would cover further buddy until midnight. And then they would say, what's happening, my Gawd, my stocks are down 40%, we may have to sell our ski condominium unless we raise our fees.

I would not have believed, at the outset, that I would be spending any time with exotics like Tibetan llamas and which doctors and gentlemen who had beards and wore funny close. I did not have a beard and I did not own any funny close. I would not have believed that I would ever sit in a room chanting a Sanskrit syllable, or drawing a lotus in the air with a $1.98 G. Shirmer recorder.

Minds. Trouble is mine's, not organic medicine, not some germ that comes flying through the air looking for home. This is Dr. Hans Selye, 68 years old, the distinguished Dean of stress medicine. Stress is "a physiologic response inappropriate to the situation." Misfired signals between mind and body. The physiologic response is the caveman's response when the shadow of the pterodactyl falls over him. Adrenal secretions increase and muscles tense and the coagulation chemistry gets ready to resist wounds. Fight or flight. But what Pterodactyl is this? They tell you: the market is down 20 points, or the vice president wants to see you, or, this whole operation is going to be shut down and moved to Chicago. Blam, pterodactyl time. Gives you, says Dr. Selye, headaches, insomnia, high blood pressure, sinus, ulcers, rheumatism, cardiovascular and kidney disease. And more. One from column A, one from column B. Some people have a pterodactyl every day. Why? An imbalance says Dr. Selye, an imbalance.  in what? In living. Western medicine doesn't extend its authority there, except to say take it easy, take off some weight, watch your diet.

So: lots of explorers have headed west by going east, saying, there must be a better way, and that was how this venture in — what? It's hard to define, some sort of psychology or awareness, maybe. That was how it began. Nonexistent pterodactyls flapping their great wings over fallen security analysts.

Some of my opening questions were:

Could we really learn to control her internal processes with our heads instead of with pills? (If true, I made a note, sell drug companies.)

Could we learn to pop ourselves into an alpha state? What is an alpha state? What happens if we succeed?

If someone can't hear and they have one session with a psychologist and 15 minutes worth of hypnotic induction, and suddenly they say, "I can hear!" What just happened in their brains?

What about all these claims for meditation? What do they mean by meditation? (I had just read an article in a technical journal.)

Is it true that a Sanskrit sound has a different effect on your head than one in English? (I don't know where I got that one.)

The field was not well marked. For example, in the great pharmacology textbook The Pharmacological Basis of Therapeutics, Goodman and Gilman — it has the same lock on its feels that Samuelson does in economics — three phrases begin to recur when you get to the effects of mind, or the interaction of some substance and the mind. The etiology is unknown. We don't know the cause. The site is unknown. We don't know exactly where it happens. The mechanism is unknown. Where not exactly sure how it happens.

Unknown, unknown, pictures of elephants and white space in the middle of old maps of Africa.

 at one juncture I sent a careful letter to an official in the national Institute of mental health in suburban Washington. I wanted to know, in this instance, about placebos — sugar pills — and I detailed all of my references in the work done so far, and asked: where can I go to find more? Who is doing work in this field?

"You are," the answer came. "The field is open. Please let us hear from you when you finish."

In an unmarked field, it is easy to wonder. Why on earth would I ever have read six years worth of the British medical Journal called Brain? Sheer inertia. I looked up one article on consciousness and then — look, the editor of Brain is Lord Brain. If you sent him a postcard, addressed only "Brain, Brain, London," would it get there? Was his name Brain already, or did he take "Lord Brain" as a title because he was the editor of Brain? Let's see what goes on here in Brain's Brain. (He did not have to turn to the back for the answer. The distinguished neural physiologist Lord Brain, now deceased, was born Russell Brain, and the postcard  "Brain, Brain, London" would have reached him, but faster if you added "Harley Street" and the zip code.)

It occurred to me that all the answers were not in Brain or even in medicine as we know it, fabulous as it is. There is a case in one of the journals about a Nigerian princeling in London who got sick and depressed, about two generations ago. He sent home for the witch doctor, since the Harley Street crowd couldn't do much for him. The which Dr. chanted whatever witch doctors chant, gave him a magic extract of a plant, and the Nigerian recovered. The magic extract came from a plant called Rauwolfia Serpentina, named by a French botanist.

A generation went by, and Western medicine sought to control high blood pressure and to calm people with tranquilizers. The detail salesman from the big drug companies, CIBA and Riker and Squibb, fanned out to doctors and hospitals with their great new drugs, and one of the great new drugs was reserpin, called Serpasill or Rawwiloid or Raudixin, depending on the drug company. And what did reserpine come from? Of course Rauwolfia Serpentina. The drug companies found it and wrote it up in learned journals and analyzed it; the which Dr. didn't have any journals, he got it from his daddy, who got it from his daddy, who was one hundred years ahead of CIBA and Riker and Squibb, and he was late because  Ayurvedic medicine in India knew Rauwolfia when the ancestors of the Harley Street crowd were staining themselves blue.

I had to go back to school. I brought certain abilities as student and the willingness to be an utter fool, to make up for naïve skepticism. Some of the customs had changed. I knew the dorms were coed, but when did they make the bathrooms coed? One evening in a movie theater near the University of California campus in Berkeley, the following conversation took place in the seats behind me:

She: say, I dig George.

He: Hmmmmm...

She: I mean, I really dig George's bod.

He: (a grunt)

She: why don't we have a threesome or a fivesome some time?

He: okay.

Often I felt a stranger in a strange land, or an anthropologist with a new tribe. What happened to the even numbers?

Strange schools, sometimes. Some trips, you go to Abercrombie and Fitch to get your mountaineering boots or your fishing vest. I had to buy tie-dyed jeans, because my new classmates were staring at my suit and tie.

I followed where the trail led. I met more Nobel Prize winners then I knew were there. I met biofeedback technicians who said people could train control of their heartbeats. I met meditators who said meditation was more restorative the densely.

And: an astronaut who had a mystic experience on the way back from the moon. A pro quarterback who could send signals to his wide receiver by telepathy, or something like telepathy. It blue-eyed British witch doctor, apprenticed in Lesotho or Botswana, who could attract liens by sent; Manhattan traffic gave him a tic, I had to help him across the street.

And: Masters of martial arts, aikido and kung fu, who said those arts read patterned brains. Bushels of psychiatrists and pecks of gurus. A gentleman who could push a knitting needle through his arm, command the blood to stop, and it would. Another gentleman who could smoke a cigar and send his mind to Jupiter and Mercury, simply by having it clear.

Some of it gets very far out. That was a phrase I learned from my new classmates. Far out.

There is a peculiar characteristic to this field. It is never easy to explain, and it is impossible to photograph...

LOL. A great book. The snark-daddy forbear of Michael Lewis, this "Adam Smith" guy. Another snip, apropos of Jo Marchant:

No one doubts the effect of mind on body to some extent, and the extent varies with the believer. George Bernard Shaw said he considered Lourdes a blasphemous place because they kept there all the crutches and wheelchairs of the people who walked away, but among these items was not one wooden leg, one glass eye, or one toupe.

Stuart Alsop said, "there are mysteries, how above all the mystery of the relationship of mind and body, that will never be explained, not by the most brilliant doctors, the wisest of scientists or philosophers."

There is a reason we are so sketchy on minds, and that is that we perceive the world through whatever paradigm we live in, and our present paradigm is sketchy when it comes to "mind." [Powers of Mind, pg 19]

'eh? Not much has changed since 1975 on that front.

Had to read all that stuff in with Dragon. No Kindle edition.
__

apropos (?): Who wrote this?

“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavor to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.”

Albert Einstein, 1938.

Is it too early to start drinking?

I got that here, out of another old book from my stacks (you can now actually get this one in Kindle format):

I dropped a few lines into Photoshop.

Click to enlarge. Pretty much sums up my take on "spirituality." Is there a "supreme being"? Well, yeah, necessarily -- "that which is. Even that which is not is part of that which is."

None of which mandates an irascible anthropomorphic white-bearded old coot in the sky. Note the lower case "supreme being." That was not an accident. Just denoting the infinite noun, absent any religious ideology.

"The most preposterous notion that H. Sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all of history." - Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long

BTW, see my "speculation on the afterlife" post.

COMING UP

I finished this book yesterday. Wow.

"The quest to discover how life works and why it matters." Highly recommended. It spans the gamut, from molecular biology / "omics" to aggregate ecosystems, replete with some riveting science history. Stay tuned.

Also on tap, in light of my renewed initiative to tie off documenting the loose ends regarding my daughter's death.

When Ann Neumann’s father was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she left her job and moved back to her hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She became his full-time caregiver—cooking, cleaning, and administering medications. When her father died, she was undone by the experience, by grief and the visceral quality of dying. Neumann struggled to put her life back in order and found herself haunted by a question: Was her father’s death a good death?

The way we talk about dying and the way we actually die are two very different things, she discovered, and many of us are shielded from what death actually looks like...

...death in contemporary America is much more complicated than we think. Medical technologies and increased life expectancies have changed the very definition of medical death. And although death is our common fate, it is also a divisive issue that we all experience differently. What constitutes a good death is unique to each of us, depending on our age, race, economic status, culture, and beliefs. What’s more, differing concepts of choice, autonomy, and consent make death a contested landscape, governed by social, medical, legal, and religious systems...

Waiting for the Kindle price to drop from the rather high $25.99 (I have a lot of books to continue to buy). As next-of-kin caregiver I've had to attend the deaths of my daughter and both of my late parents. And, now, at the age of 70 and having just had my own turn in the cancer dx/tx barrel, issues of mortality (in addition to staying down in the Health IT tech weeds) are a bit more on my mind.
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More to come...