Fallible

The spirit is willing but the will is decidedly unspirited. One of these days I'll be a real blogger, blaging on the blagosphere from my dirigible.
Until then, this!

Earlier today I saw a fascinating video about the human blind-spot:



God is such an awesome designer, he decided to have our optical nerves bore up through the base layer of the retina, then splay out it's layer of nervous tissue, and grow the optical receptor cells pointing downward, meaning they catch light after it's already bounced off of the back wall of the eye ball.
Now, evilutionists may point out that there's an entirely logical progression to this structure along well studied evolutionary pathways; that these even expose some of the reasons for it to sport the structure it has today; and that only an incompetent would actually design an eye from the ground up to work like that for humans; but, um....

Okay, okay, I'll stop taking the easy potshots at creationists now, and return to the original tangent.

(After this one: when it becomes possible to have my selfness extracted from its current meat matrix and installed in a body of my design, would you all still be my friends if I had a smooth visor where my eyes, forehead, and temples are now, concealing some sort of multiple aperture or plenoptic lightfeild camera? That or maybe just gave myself mantis shrimp eyes.)

So because the nerve has to punch all the way through the retina before spreading its tendrils, there are no optical receptors in that small spot.
You'd think you'd notice when, however small, there's a pair of circles of your field of vision to which you are truly, literally blind.

Humans are blind to a lot of things though:

Kinda trippy but not interesting right?
Open this picture in a program with a color picker (The GIMP, Photoshop, etc), or use a stand alone color picker program.
Pick the green spiral and the blue one.
No, you didn't mis-aim (unless you did and got the magenta or the orange). Both spirals, blue and green, are the exact same color.

The point that this video and the image really brings home, at least to me, is that the information we receive from our senses is heavily filtered well before it gets to our higher level consciousness.
And being a very meta-cognitive sort (why do I think so much about why I think about the things I'm thinkin' of?), I start to wonder what else our brain does this kind of filtering to. Is this really just an artifact of how our brain processes visual information? (Well, yes.) Is it something to be amused by, and then pass up as a mere trick, an optical illusion? (I don't think so.)
Maybe this is simply my bias, short circuiting those mental circuits I've attempted to build, to use to evaluate the world logically. But every time I see an optical illusion, it connects, in my mind, to all of the magical thinking humans participate in, through time and around the world. A belief in the supernatural, in philosophies unsupported by evidence, in policies that foster a result directly counter to the aims that built them. It's all based on humanity's ability to filter the information they receive, to alter it at a level that they're completely unconscious of. The things we think rewire our brains as we think them. Deep tracks worn on crackling neurons with the continuous application of self-feeding networks of varying voltage.
The executive center of our brains isn't "designed" to apply rigorous, logical thought to the information it receives. It isn't "designed" to come up with the best solution to complex social issues that decide our quality of life.
The human brain evolved because it was a powerful tool for feeding a tribe of pre-humans enough to raise another generation. What gazelles do before they run away from, or are felled by, your rocks, and what the ones you don't eat do, that doesn't matter. It doesn't really affect the pre-human's ability to catch and eat it, so why not believe they gallop across the sea at night. (Or, as Aristotle thought, that birds hibernate under swamps and seas during the winter).

I can only see one path out of this morass. Or rather, one way to find that path. Measure, measure, measure. Nail the world down with facts, trap the structures and inter-relations with chains of words. Remove our conceptions of the world from our flawed psyches, and we can begin to see things as they really are. Step back, and appreciate the glory of the world exposed in a way unique, so far as we can tell, to humanity. Examine yourself with rigor, ask your friends to help (help me?), find the discontinuities, and create rules to reduce the impact of perceptual or cognitive error on your life. Shine a light in the dark corners of existence, and when our flaws are exposed, sadness and suffering can be reduced to the lowest level mathematically possible.

Of course, I could be wrong. Humans are fallible after all.

That Which Is Is All There Is

I love learning. Every new quantum of information adds a new dimension of depth to my understanding of the world. Sometimes a new idea is so powerful I feel it physically. A chain of connections, revelations and insight crackles through my body. The sensation is quite literally orgasmic.

I hope you'll all forgive me for taking a moment to argue against a scarecrow that hasn't made it to Oz yet. But there exists this attitude, here and there, that science is something cold or passionless. That it robs the romance from all the beautiful things in the world.
I think, taking my first paragraph in context, you will see why this view quite stupefies me.

When I stand deep in the woods, and inhale the rich scents of leaf mold, and listen to the raucous peaceful business of life going on all around me, I am filled with a visceral pleasure; a strong sense of belonging and peace.
Tell me, why would that feeling be aught but strengthened by the understanding of my place in this ecosystem?
I know (for certain values of know) the physics, chemistry, and biology of the trees and the sun and the wind. I know about the creatures that surround me, and I know about the millions of years that put them there, and what the niche they've adapted to is. I even understand the neuro-biology that makes me so happy to be there.

I ask again: if the rainbow is beautiful, why are the quantum physics of refraction anything but awe-inspiring?

And there's always more to learn. I barely knew anything last year. Now, with increasing education, I am exposed to whole new vistas, the contours of which describe in elegant geometry exactly how little I know. It is an ever-full cup from which I could never tire of drinking.

And so I find another object of inquiry: we've all experienced the exultant heights and bitter valleys of love. Ah, amore, that most elusive and poignant emotion of the human cornucopia.

It doesn't surprise me that some would balk at turning the piercing gaze of science to the state of love. It feels as an invasion of our deepest privacy. There's nothing more intensely personal than love.
It's also a little distressing to think that our decisions and motivations are the product of more than some kind of "pure" thought. It makes us feel less like perfectly rational, ideal game theory actors.
Furthermore, it's as if a bit of selfness is stolen away. Is love still so important when it is "just" some chemical and neurological interactions?
And I can only respond, both to my own quivering heart, and to the doubts of others, that nothing has changed: knowledge can only bring us the why. It will change nothing about what is. You are no less in love for understanding why that state exists in your mind.

"To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must cultivate our personal life; and to cultivate our personal life, we must first set our hearts right." —Confucius

So hopefully you can see why I was so excited at an interesting coincidence of articles recently.
I'd been reading about relationships. This is a representative sample. Think about their impact on my life. What kind of relationship I wanted, why I wanted that, and how I should go about it. One thing that ran through my mind was why sex, a physical act, should be so important to my emotional well-being. Whether that held true for other boys, or for women, and to what degree.
I'm also reading a book, The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris. It's an older book, but still has a lot of interesting insight into the human condition, as a big ol' ape with a uniquely ginormous frontal lobe jury-rigged to a matryoshka of more primitive ganglia stacked on each other.
And finally, this.
I can't say that strongly enough. THIS.

Now, before I get too excited, it is my duty to warn you that this is just conjecture. They emphasis in the article that this is preliminary research. Data collection. They're only now forming testable hypotheses.
But oh my stars it's incredible.
Just half-way through I felt struck by the sensation I described at the beginning here. Arched back, rushing sound in my ears and all.
I hope I'm not overselling this, but it's as if a handful of disparate bits of my life have finally caught fast and gelled into an intricate net of understanding that touches every corner of my existence.

One particular caveat I want to make note of before pressing on: the article makes a lot of reference to specific chemicals and their effects on our emotions. While many of these are pretty unambiguously proven, I advise a healthy dose of caution to any offer of a single hormone or neuro-transmitter as the sole source of any specific behavior or emotion.
My primary source for this caution is the serotonin hypothesis (essentially the theory that serotonin is the primary mood regulation chemical), which was, in essence, conjured whole-clothe from the rectums of anti-depressant pharmaceutical companies.

Forgive me as I reiterate some of the article while talking about the connections it's formed for me.

The article describes a group using a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine to scan the brains of people in various states of love. This machine analyses in three dimensions, in real time, blood flow inside the brain. Subjects are asked to look at a screen with certain pictures, or to think of certain things. Synapses involved in that kind of thinking fire more in greater density, and more blood is drawn to that section. The fMRI measures this blood flow, hopefully telling us what parts of the brain are involved in what kind of thinking. There are some criticisms here. That researchers are finding patterns that don't exist in what is essentially noise. But cross-referenced with other neuro-biological data, and with a large enough sample group, it seems to promise some stunning insights into the functioning of the human mind.

In high school I had a conjecture. I knew at the time it was flawed, and since then have always wondered what it was missing.
"Is love more than just a really strong friendship, plus attraction?"
And two highly respected doctors Helen Fisher and Lucy Brown have started work on a hypothesis that says "yes".
(PS: isn't it wonderful that there are more women in science every day? I'll have to write on that sometime soon.)

What was I missing? Perhaps it's so obvious that I feel silly even saying it.
Romance.
That's it.
Romance.

"But Robert, isn't that a tautology, 'romance is romance'?" I'll pretend you're asking.
Well, you see, perhaps we've been putting the cart before the horse.
We think perhaps we desire to settle down with that one special lady or one special guy (or a couple special someones?) because we're in love. But truly, we're in love because we want to settle down.
I'll try and explain.
When you're in love, your sex drive fires up. I don't think that needs much more explanation. So does the attachment system, which is basically the same stuff that makes you happy to be with friends, to talk with them and make them happy.
(It's even a little related to the instincts that make you love and want to protect both your body, and your possessions. Which says something interesting about materialism: our brain literally treats our possessions as similar to the way we treat parts of our body. Just, you know, without direct nervous system connections.)
Thirdly, this instinct, the missing branch. The two researchers have labeled a network of parts of the brain the "romance system." This system is the one that really makes what we call love. The heady, literally-cocaine-like rush when you see or hear or smell the recipient of your ardent desire. It is responsible for the "pair bonding" instinct. The interesting thing is that while ours is slightly extended, it's basically the exact same system we see in almost anywhere we see pair-bonding in the mammal family tree.

Which is where The Naked Ape comes in. Old as it is, it still walks through the logical progression of how pair-bonding became a fixture of human life. Through biology. The shared ancestor of chimps and humans was probably pretty similar to today's chimp. Humans are the descendants of the offshoot that left Eden the forest, and the other branch had no need to change. In the forest, these apes roamed their territory in small groups, eating and resting wherever they felt like it. Males would always be around to respond to any challenges for mating rights.
But on the Serengeti, this didn't work anymore. From our ape heritage, women needed to take care of children. And to get enough food to survive, men had to leave on multi-day hunting excursions. Cooperation in a hunting was mandatory. Although we eventually learned endurance, like wolves, especially early on, the only way to get prey was to work together. Competition for mating rights had no more place in the new world. Especially not when they started picking up elk thighbones, and gaining the power to kill with a blow. Another structure that died out were alpha males and harems. Even "lesser" men had to have a franchise in the future of the group, or there wasn't enough reason for them to cooperate. Pair-bonding, or love, gave them this franchise. A guarentee of passing on his genes. This is why the popular use of Darwinian always pisses me off. Humanity is one of the most cooperative species on the planet, and that's what makes us the most powerful species on the planet.
Furthermore, any male ape that would only share meat with his own children had a distinct genetic advantage. Genes that promoted either more or less altruistic behavior were at a disadvantage.
Thus, the ancient mammal instinct of pair-bonding was pulled from inactive duty by mutation and kept in service by selection.
Another part of why I love science so is the way that as better and more complete theories develop, everything begins to connect together. Ends meet and the structure as a whole is reinforced.
Pair-bonding was also heavily connected to sex. An the article says, they've only studied men so far. And furthermore, even a specific subset of them. But so far we've shown a lot of connections, ones that aren't present in many other animals, between our "romance system" and our sexual one. I really can't wait until Fisher and Brown have studied how women are wired. But everything in this article, discerned from the mental shape of love, is supported by the observational, anthropological and zoological data encoded in the forty year old book, the Naked Ape. And that one can definitely tell you: breaking down the mating habits of our proto-chimp ancestors took some unique solutions. And I'm sure you'll all agree with me that what they stumbled on, a complex cocktail of pleasure and affection chemicals released by sex, was a damn good one.

Some interesting factoids:
Semen literally contains pheromones that strengthen the romance system in women. An amusing, but groundless speculation: this could be why many guys like it when their partner swallows.
A bit of the reason we like doggie style may simply be mechanical; ie, how the friction occurs. But another part may be the "lordosis" posture. A vast majority of female mammals, to indicate that they're ready for mating, will raise their hips towards their mate, and look back over their shoulder. This apparently still jabs a poker into the most primitive, instinctual parts of our brain, branding "Iz tiem for sex now?" right down to our neurons.

Now, I keep saying pair-bonding, but that's not necessarily accurate. We apes come from a pretty hedonistic free-for-all sexual mannerism background. Pull an old behavior from your butt, clean it off, and staple it on, it's not going to completely supplant the old one. (Especially when some degree of variability is a pro-adaptive trait). While monogamy was adaptive enough, I'd imagine that polyamory would be a useful enough trait to have some biological basis in the here and now.
Of course, I'm sure there are a lot of reasons for non-monogamous behavior. But I'd be really fascinated to see a study of self-identified polygamous and polyamorous individuals. There's a lot of focus on it being purely about sex, about jabbing that sexual impulse reward button. Though this is just a guess, I'd be willing to bet that in most of them, those same connections exist between the sex and romance centers.

And that's another reason people don't like science poking into the boudoir. It's challenging. If reality challenges your prejudices, what are you going to do?

In Which I Carefully Avoid Puns on "Shocking"

I don't know if I can do this justice.

The Milgram experiment was ground breaking for many reasons. It was one of the first social experiments that opened the door on the fact that humans do not occupy some special or exalted position in the natural order. Most people assume the existance of some Platonic, indeliable substance that makes up the "true" them. That if you altered every detectable outside quality, there'd still be an inherent "Bob"-ness or "Jane"-ness to them. That no matter how circumstances change "they" will remain. Though this is starting to get into the philosophical, the point I'm trying to make is that we are as susceptible to primate dominace structures and Pavlovian conditioning as our ancestors, if not more.

I think I first read about the famous experiment the year after I graduated high school. This was a time of exploration and self discovery for me. Now free of arbitrary goals and restrictions, and having just recoverd from my life's first big emotional upheaval, I wanted to know who this new human would be.
I think I began to understand, at that time, how much I hate falsehood, and lies. And that the world we interact with is really an internal construct, that does not necessarily represent the real world very accurately at all. If we do not test our assumptions, then some day a foundation that you've always trusted could easily betray you.

So all this ran through my mind, and slowly accreted, killing who I once was, and creating who I was then.

But I think the real take away message is actually about other people, rather than perceptions. It's a little easier to empathise with people when you don't think of them as inherently jerkass. So the next time some asshole does or says something to you inducing apoplectic fury, remember that you might be as stupid, had you not had the benefits of your conditions.


Echoing the article: "When we see people acting out of character, the first thing we should ask is: 'What's going on in this situation?'"

Which reminds me of something I've always kept near and dear to my heart (ooo, hoity-toity-ness max!) :
"Whenever you feel like criticising anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had."
Fun as it is to quote The Great Gatsby, I really think it'd be a much better world if, as we went about our lives, we kept something like this in mind.