Ingroup nurturing and socialism

I was listening to the podcast, Point of Inquiry, as they were interviewing George Lakoff. I really recommend this episode, as it discuss on the neural basis of rationality, and how you can't separate your "feelings" from your thought processes, mainly due to the fact that you don't control most of you thought processes, as they occur subconsciously.
The main point that I wanted to discuss, because it blew my mind off, it is how different our thinking about a specific aspect can be if we are part of that aspect. The great example they used is the conservative US movement. If you asked them about their opinion on socialism, you would find a large negative view of it. If then you ask about their opinion on the military, then you would find an almost absolutely positive view of it.
This is interesting, because from a practical point of view, the military is the perfect socialist organization. All the decisions come from the top, the individuals have no liberty to decide their roles and the distribution of resources is decided by a central organization. All hallmarks of socialism.
So how you reconcile this opposite views? Well, there is the fact that probably a large amount of conservatives have not thought about the military from this point of view (I had for sure not). But there is also the point that we can have different beliefs in different important social/political ideas and they may have different levels of priorities. One of the defining characteristics of the conservative movement is the ingroup nurturing (things like post church soup stands, boy scouting, and the military). Therefore you may have these two different ideas and they will have to resolve into a final "conscious" opinion. Depending on the strongest one, then you will have two completely different opinions on one or the other.
And you never know how you came about that opinion. At least not consciously.

Different ways to say the same thing?

Recently I was listening to the great biotech podcast Future in Biotech episode 77 when they were interviewing the great Susan Lindquist and her postdoc Daniel Jarosz about a paper just published. I will not go through the paper here (go to the link, great interview), but the gist is that they discovered another layer of subtle control on the expression of proteins by a cell, that can be tweaked depending on the environmental conditions. As I was listening to the interview, I was trying to construct a mental model of all the control mechanisms that a cell has, and it simply overwhelmed my imagination.
At that point, I suddenly remembered a post by PZ Myers in the very popular Pharyngula where he starts the article with one of the best phrases ever: "Most of you don't understand evolution". Then he proceeded to destroy the general bad assumptions that most of us (non evolutionary biologists) have about evolution. I am not talking about creationism stuff, just about the fact that the basic idea that we have about evolution is structurally wrong. PZ concentrated in the fact that most people think that evolution is for individual beings and simple genes while it is actually about population of beings and networks of genes, but I am sure that there are a bunch of other similar misconceptions that the general scientific public has (and let's not even mention the general non-scientific public as seen here).
Then I came back to something that I had been discussing recently in another forum (It's Science, you wouldn't understand ) where I discussed about how much intervention the general (non scientific) public should have in deciding the agenda for Scientific institutions. I don't think I did a great job explaining my position (yes to explain the general principles and yes to deciding the general directions, no to every other intervention), but I think both the FiB episode and PZ's article point towards the same direction.

People tend to confuse the map with the territory.

It is not because you have a basic understanding of a scientific theory that you actually know about it. There is a reason why there are so few postdocs in every specific topic, as it takes a long time to acquire the expertise to avoid confusing the map/metaphor with the territory/reality.  And just as you can't jump into a map and arrive to a destination, you can't use you basic understanding of a scientific issue to take decisions about that issue. You have to walk the pathway to arrive to the territory.

Science is hard. But it is so good.

Skepticism and Ethics

Recently, the new blog Skepticism and ethics asked for submissions. You can see the winner here . Clearly well deserved. I did submit something, and clearly it was inferior to the winner. But as this is my blog, then I can put it  here. Well, it's call "Learning to think", not "I know how to think already".
Oh, and goodness, I am a pompous writer...I have to work on that too.

Ethics and skepticism

Why to be a skeptic? Is it a matter of being right? Of debunking preternatural claims? Of laughing at poor reasoning and swear that we will never do the same?

And while we are at it, how do we apply our skepticism? Are we armchair skeptics that blast against the perceived overall decrease in rationality of our society, but do nothing to affect it? Or should we stridently shout our convictions to our interlocutor faces, telling them how subhuman they are because they are not able to reach similar conclusion to us when faced to similar facts? Maybe meeting with friends in a pub to discuss the skeptical topic du jour around drinks is the right approach to it.

I don’t know. And I don’t drink alcohol, which makes these questions harder, as I can’t disolve them with spirits.

It is not only that I don’t know. I doubt my own capacity to answer these questions. Which feels ridiculous, because they are part of the philosophical basis of a position that I have identified as mine. Skepticism. But feeling ridiculous do not make the doubts disappear. Maybe I should fall into philosophical skepticism, and believe that knowledge is not possible. But I’ve always felt that position is lazy, so as a good biased human I solve this position by ignoring it because I don’t like it.

So how do I answer these questions? Well, here is where Ethics come into play. If you look up  what the Oxford English Dictionary says about ethics, you will find this definition:

“Moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour or the conducting of an activity”

That seems exactly what I am looking for! Well, then let me elucidate this as I tend to do in this day and age. With a quick internet search. Sadly, either due to my poor searching technique, or to the lack of baseline material, I don’t find anything besides the post for the essay contest, and the excellent (but preliminary) post by Daniel Loxton in Skeptiblog. So no easy way out for me.

I know what to do. Steal and borrow from philosophers. Not money, they don’t seem to have much. Moral theories they do have. “All” I have to do is just check the main ethic theories and see if there is one that fits better with skepticism than the others. Should be simple.

So I start with Virtue Ethics. The four classic virtues seem to apply very well to the ideal skeptic. Temperance to make sure that we don’t rush into a conclusion and that we take a look at the evidence around the topic. Prudence to use our practical decisions in favor of our skeptical goals. Fortitude to defend our positions even though they may not be popular or easily chewed up into “soundbites”. And obviously Justice, to be able to give a position the appropriate value that it has due to the evidence, even if we don’t like it.

But Virtue ethics is very much centered in “me”. In my qualities, that I may or may not have, that I may improve or not. In my mind Skepticism has also the interaction component, with other people (skeptics or not), and other social entities, which doesn’t fit with Virtue Ethics.

I follow with Utilitarianism. I saw that it is the complete opposite to Virtue ethics in regard of the interaction part. As Utilitarianim looks at the consequences of our actions, it directly deals with the interactions we have with the other people. And is that aspect that is both the strength and the weakness of this theory when applied to Skepticism. To obtain the best results for a particular situation, the skeptic may have to bend some of his principles. Why to explain the situation completely, when a nice quote will do much more to turn believers into skeptics? Lots of explanations with the risk/benefit ratio laid down in front of the people may bring either boredom or panic. This may affect the adherence of the “masses” to our positions as skeptics. So lets NOT do it.

ut this goes against the prototypical skeptic, that is characterized for his/her resistance to be pulled into a particular direction only because it gives better results (the “herding cats” meme, etc).

So I have the Deontological ethics to go. And how fast I go through it by realizing that Skepticism can never be separated of its rationalist roots. And these roots would be intoxicated by an ethical approach that only cares about the characteristic of our action, but not the result. Because rationalism should always win! Not because there is a rule (which deontologists love) that says that, but because by definition if you were rational, you should have chosen the path that would have given you the best outcome.

At this time then, I am confused. I am in the dark, and I can’t find the keys to solve the problem.

So I do as I should do, and look where the light is. And my keys are named David Couzens Hoy. So I find him. These keys are tortuous, and quite hard to understand and at least half of it is way over my head. But the most popular parts are not.

He defines ethics as obligations that present themselves as necessarily to be fulfilled but are neither forced on one or are enforceable. These obligations are due to the ethical resistance of what he calls the “powerless ones” to our ability to exert our power over them. This definition intrinsically has the relationship between the skeptics and the “believers” in it.

And it has our attitude and responsibility also integrated. The “believers” are powerless against the forces of ignorance/irrationality. That is why they ended up believing them. We support them, because their lack of power makes them unable to resist to these forces, making it necessary for us, that have some power against these forces, to use it in favor of the powerless. Complicated much. Yeah, I agree with you. Let me put it from another point of view.

The obligations can’t be forced on them or us, as this would place the obligations outside of the realm of ethics(ought to be like this), and it would put it on the realm of law(it is like this). An example of it is how we don’t discuss the ethics of raping women or children,  because it’s integrated in the social structure of society, but we discuss the ethics of the use of placebo, because there is no law structured prohibiting it.  And because the ”believers” have no power, they can’t enforce them on us.

But even Hoy does not solve the largest problem of all. How to do it? I would say that, as any other complex problem in nature, the response is multi-factorial. We will have to realize that our basic neurology has some concepts of “virtues” intrinsic to it, and that we will have to temper their influence by internalizing that the outcomes we consider important will be affected if we don’t. All of this under the framework of rules established by either us or society in general, which may or not be optimal for the satisfaction of our endpoints or our idealized representations of ourselves.

Bashing myths and misconceptions is fun, but at the end of the day, we have to remember our obligation to the powerless that are in the grasp of these fallacies. Because they will not remind us, as they can’t get out without help.

I have met the helpers, and he is us

To the victor belong the spoils

Recently I was reading an old article, The Croonian Lecture 1991 about Genostasis and the Limits to Evolution , and I realized that the fact that evolutionary biology is a historical science (in the general sense of the word) colors how some of the reasoning about it. In this article, A. D Bradshaw remind us that even though the current natural world is the result of the different evolutionary processes, we have to remember that it only represents the species of organisms that survived, and that the majority of the species in the history of the planet are actually dead.
One of the main logical errors that people commit when considering the theory of evolution is to ascribe a teleological function to it. That is, that the evolutionary process is a "force", that guides "purposefully"  the organisms to be better adapted to their environment. This goes against the concept of genostasis, and against most of what we know about evolution per se. It is very hard to conceive that the directionality of the evolutionary results is due to the fact that the results that were not compatible with the environment simply died off. They disappeared.  Therefore the one remaining, the one that we are able to see, seems to have received the effect of the "force" of evolution. To this species belong the spoils.
How does the concept of genostasis illustrates this fallacy's errors? Well, A.D. Bradshaw shows it very nicely, with several examples taken from real environments. Some of the environments described have very tough conditions for the organisms (extreme salinity, copper toxicity, etc), and even though the organisms around have had all the time in the world (literally) to adapt to those conditions, they haven't. Because evolution is not purposefully trying to push the organism to adapt to that particular condition. If the organism has a mutation that gives it a differential reproductive advantage over others when it is placed in the tough environment, well, then it will survive. But if it doesn't (and most of the times we could say they don't), then simply the organism will die off, or just never go into that environment, even thought the resources in that environment could help the organism to thrive.
 If there was a teleological purpose behind evolution, we would expect that it would be pushing the organisms to evolve towards a better optimization with the environment. What happens in real life is completely different. In a real environment, the organisms may or may not adapt to a change in the condition. It all depends on preexisting variations, or in newly formed mutations that give place to new variation. But as A. D. Bradshaw shows, in a lot of organisms, this variation never happens, either because it is too hard to evolve the characteristic, because it never had enough time to evolve it, or because the variability for that characteristic implies a worsening in other life sustaining features, therefore making it harmful (at least in the short run) to evolve in that direction. And when they are not able to
So while we do have to marvel to all the "power" of evolution in our planet, we  also  have to remember that evolution always hides its failures under a mantle of dirt.

The Einstellung effect or why are you doing that in autopilot?

I am again reading through the excellent The Edge series of answers to What important tool should you have in your cognitive toolkit? . This is one of the most important series or articles/post that I've ever read online or offline. Not only because they found legions of really smart people, which gives you, predictably, lots of good answers, but because you can contrast what is important to each one of them, and how one tool interacts with the other.
At this time, I just finished reading Evgeny Morozov post, about the Einstellung effect. To summarize, this is the realization that as pattern recognizing machines, we always have the tendency to try to solve a problem with the tools that have worked on previous seemingly similar problems, without stopping to think if the problems are actually the same.
After reading his contribution, I realized that this is actually a meta-cognitive tool, that you have to use on top of the other ones. And it is very important because it has to counteract so many of our natural tendencies. It has to fight against cognitive dissonance (we used this solution before for something that looks just like this, so if I use another one I will look stupid, therefore I have to use the old solution), against confirmation bias (yeah, this old solution worked great for that problem...what? it didn't? Nah, that must be wrong) and so many other cognitive biases.
And I also realized that it is very hard to use, unless you do it on a systematic way, as it will always add extra time to your thinking, and it may not give you any benefit (you may actually be right in selecting the old answer). Therefore in our never ending battle for efficiency, we may be confronted to the hard decision to either use this tool and expend more resources than expected, or ignore it to our own peril.
Then just after this last paragraph I realized the most important realization brought to me by Mr. Morozov post, which is that due to the bound nature of our rationality, we may need to ignore in some cases some cognitive tools. Which ones and when? Well, that's why we have Science and Philosophy. And that is why these two disciplines are always liked to have other people criticize you, because their bounded rationality may have used the tool that you missed, and discovered the hole in your reasoning.

Hidden assumptions

Earlier in the week, I stumbled upon this article, Unearthing deeply rooted plant 'myths' . It is about Dr. Henry Oakeley, the garden fellow for the London's Royal College of Physicians, and his view about herbal medicine.
He posits that most plants are actually trying to harm us, or at least are neutral, going against the usual view that "herbals" are more "natural" and therefore better for us.
While reading the article, I realized that I had never thought about this before. I have evaluated the evidence for specific herbal remedies (and found most of them wanting, from the scientific standpoint), but I never thought about it in a global way. I even had the hidden assumption that we have to prove that they are not useful/that they are beneficial as my baseline, instead of having a probability based assumption.
Let me explain that better.
When you have a large variation for a character(the place in the beneficial-harmful spectrum for hundreds of thousands plant species), and very tight constraints to fulfill (human biology) it is logical by probabilities that most of the variations will be either null or harmful (similar to the relationship between mutations and organisms). Therefore multiple generations of humans had to go to the trial and error process to find the ones that are useful. And these would have been very few, relatively speaking.
But then, why do we have this assumption that "herbals" are good for us? Human selection and availability bias, I would say. Whenever we find  a plant that benefits us in any way, we will select it and plant more of it around us. Therefore we see them more, and when we have to think about the relationship between plants and us, we will think about the ones that we plant ourselves, and give them predominance in our mental representation of how plants interact with us. Dr. Oakeley is able to escape this assumption, because he takes care of thousands of different varieties of plants, and not only for alimentary or health reasons. He is able to realize how infrequent are the ones that actually are useful to us.
This illustrates how even when you are trying to be rational about a topic, like I was when I  evaluated the claims of different herbal medications, you may have some non manifest assumptions that may color not only your perception, but how you interact with that aspect of the world. It makes even more important both the systematization of how you evaluate claims, but also your exposure to people that have very different backgrounds, to use them as a detection machine for your own hidden assumptions.

Response

As Monty Python used to say: And now for something completely different...

I recently read a great post by Jade at http://www.labspaces.net/blog/1304/Why_I_am_not_a_SciMom

It made me think. And it made me write. Not very well, but what can we do. I wish I could have done honor to Jade's post. But I tried my best. And I really want to have this somewhere.

So here is my reply to her post:

mmm. It seems that your experience with your mother has clearly colored your perception about parenthood, Jade. I am very sorry about that.

I think that the fact that you wrote this post shows that you have thought about this, and you are baring your feelings to us. 

So I will return the favor. Nothing personal, as I don't know you. But also everything personal, because I do have children. And I love them so hard that it hurts.

Here I go.

The thing is...you DON'T  have to be perfect. You WILL want to throw your kids through the window. Sometimes.

Because, well, they are little selfish monsters. Sometimes.

And because you (and I) are big selfish monsters. Sometimes. 

But most of the times, they and you will be...humans. Resilient and weak, sentimental and rational, stupid and genial. In a world...Complex. 

The excuse of being afraid that you will affect their lives because you do x or y and that will affect them for the rest of their lives is exactly that. An excuse. And a very self important one.

If you extended that reasoning, you would have to live your life in a cocoon, because you would be to scared to offend someone, or butt-in someones way. You could affect their whole life!

But in real life you do that. You are not perfect. You cut in line in the supermarket. You honk in a hospital zone. You vote without having read about the candidate. You are petty to your coworkers. You curse the delivery guy because your pizza is cold. You ignore the guy asking for money in the corner of the street. And society goes by.  

Your kids will do (mostly) fine, because even if you are their parent, in this day and age, you are NOT their whole world. They will interact with other members of your family, with the daycare teacher and the other kids there. With the weird cartoons on TV. And if they don't do fine, most probably you were not the total cause for that.

Can you be a complete monster and scar your kids for life? Of course you can. But most probably you won't. You will just be a fallible, out of style, mumbling and bumbling parent, that will never reach the idealistic goals that you thought you were going to attain before you had your kids. But also you will never be the terrible monster that your worse nightmares seemed to imply you were. Because yes, you are a special unique snowflake. But you are most probably very similar to all of us. Human. And not really that important in the grand scheme of things.

Most of the times, when people that don't have a biological reason not to have kids tell me that they don't want kids, I realize that the issue is NOT with the (theoretical) kids. The problem is with the people themselves. With either their self image or the image that they have about the world. They want to be perfect. Or to have a perfect world. And they are scared as hell that having a kid is going to screw that up. So they make all these nice rationalizing argument not to have kids. And you know what? All their arguments are completely and absolutely right.

There is no rational reason to have kids anymore, unless you live in an agricultural society. Children take your resources and time, they don't give back any income to the family, they don't let you pursue your dreams, etc. Let somebody else have kids.

But you know what?

There is no rational reason to be a scientist. It is much easier to have a bunch of other professions with better return on investment for your time. Let somebody else be a scientist.

There is no rational reason to start an artistic carreer. Statistically speaking, the chances of being successfull are very low. Let somebody else be an artist.

There is no rational reason to be, as an individual, altruistic. Statistically speaking, as long as there are other around you that are altruistic, you can be as selfish as you want, and you will do better than them. Let somebody else be altruistic.

But we do all these completely irrational things, because we are irrational. Thankfully. Because human rationality is bounded, and there is no way we can predict all the good/bad things that will develop from our decisions. So we just jump. And when we don't jump...well we give ourselves excuses (the water was TOO cold today!, I'll ask that girl out another day, Kids are really expensive, etc). I am not condoning making completely illogical decisions, but there are some decisions that you can't be completely rational about them, because you don't have the information to do so. So most of the time the statistically/heuristically answer is the correct one. Obviously an artist always will say it better than me so I would recommend you (maybe you have heard it already) to listen to Jonathan Coulton. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-8hrKb8SAQ . Much better than anything I could say.

"I don't judge at all because I know that the parent is stressed out. They are doing the best they can in that moment. I know they don't realize how impactful their words are on that little mind, how absorbent children are to painful words and actions.  How lasting it will be. Oh sure, the child will forget- this time. Maybe the next time. But at some point it starts to change their self-perception and feelings of self-worth. They get the message that they are a burden and that love is based on conditions. I'll love you as long as you do as I say, behave, be quiet, stop crying, etc.

No parent can escape having a few episodes of this kind, I am sure. No one is perfect. And many people think that parents are too soft or too easy on kids today."

Therefore everybody in the world is a screwup and we all are the worse possible human beings they can be. You don't judge the parents? Of course you do. Read your own words. And one of the problems is that YOU don't want to be judged. Because you will do all those things. Like all of us.

"How lasting it will be" you said. Yes, as you know perfectly well, the world is not made of fluffy colored pillows and rainbows. We get hit, but still we persevere. We are great, and terrible.  We are Shakespeare and Gandhi. We are Watson and Crick.  We are Hitler and Stalin. We are sons and parents. We hurt each other, but we also give strength to each other.

"But I am glad I won't ever have to be in that position. I'll never have to punish, spank, yell at, or threaten a child. This is a big relief to me. I don't envy the job of parents". I have no way to know what is in you head. But just by reading this it gives me the feeling that your relief is that you don't have to put yourself in the risk of being flawed. Not that you are afraid of doing those things, but that you are afraid of what YOU will think of yourself when you do them. You prefer not to confront that side of you, so you can be perfect in that aspect. So you don't have to be like your mother.

But that is also part of growing as a human being. Like it or not. Of course you can learn most of these things by other situations in life. But being a parent makes you realize WHO you are more than anything else in life, or at least it did that to me. Because you can't hide your warts. Because the other side(your kids) has no social skills to avoid telling you that, well...the emperor has no clothes. And there you stand naked. In front of yourself. Without a way to escape from the evidence of your imperfection. You won't have the "relief" of avoiding the realization that you are a horribly and terribly flawed human. Just like everybody else. Oh, yes, you can see your defects in other aspects of life. But only with kids you have to pay the consequences of them, and learn to live with them.

When I finished reading your post, I had the feeling that this sentence "What is it like to want to be a parent? I guess that is emotion I am missing- I don't even know what that feels like." is complete BS. Obviously I have my biased glasses on. But the emotion that I felt you transmitted in this post is not ignorance. The emotion is longing.

For the road not taken.

Thanks for writing this post. 

Sorry.

After I wrote this post I started thinking about why Jade's provoked such reaction in me. 

From the rational standpoint, I remember that some studies have shown that parents tend to overestimate the pleasure/benefits of having kids while downplaying the side effects/problems. This makes sense to me, as it is pure cognitive dissonance to have kids. We don't realize that as much as we want to be hoity-toity rational beings, we are at the root of our existence, biological entities with instincts of reproduction. As we don't want to be reduced to only that, we make up reasonings for why to have kids, to resolve the dissonance. But the error in the reasoning is that we can be the biologically determined machines, controlled by our instincts, but this in no way impedes that we have other layers to us (partner, worker, hobbyist, etc), that makes us more complex. It's like saying that having a motor that pushes a boat forward implies that the boat can't turn in circles. 

Loved to see myself being triggered like that. And loved the self examination afterwards. Although it's hard. The advantage is that I have an even stronger sense of my love for my daughters.

Which is helpful when they break something at home!

Examining the man behind the curtain

I was reading earlier on "The man behind the curtain"
http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/num2/2011/3/the-man-behind-the-curtain/2 , where Tony Rothman describes how the lay person understanding of physics ascribes a higher level of clarity to them than what they really have, and that the scientist have been hiding this, equating it to the way Dorothy saw the Wizard of Oz for the first time.
But I wonder...Is this description truthful? It seems to me that some of the most famous science popularizers of physics have always described this state of lack of knowledge as the most intriguing part of physics (and of science in general). Feynman was the greatest at stating this, in multiple ways, like  "Do not keep saying to yourself, if you can possibly avoid it, "But how can it be like that?" because you will get "down the drain," into a blind alley from which nobody has yet escaped. Nobody knows how it can be like that." (Source of Quote: Wikipedia). Even more modern ones like Brian Greene don't hide this. He even has a section called "Puzzles and Progress" in his book, The Fabric of Cosmos, and I would say that he is one of the most "positive" physicists in regards to the possibilities of science. 
So, where does this perception comes from? I would use Mr. Rothman's quote from Eugene Wigner's book, "The Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the Natural Sciences"  to find an answer. Well, the thing with physics is that it works (http://xkcd.com/54/) . To an unreasonable level. The fine structure constant has a precision of 0.37 parts per billion. We have now quantum clocks that won't get out of synchronization of more than 1 second in one billion years. And I could go on and on with examples of superbly precise levels of knowledge.
And for most of the general public, the "science" part that they see is what will affect them, not what it explains of nature. So they see the great advances, the absurdly precise measurements, and they do not care about the little details. I do agree with Mr. Rothman that we should probably increase the public understanding about the real nature of science, which is to constantly doubt what you think is certain, and to constantly look where you haven't before. This would help us a lot when parts of science that have high probability of certitude but not the complete details of reality (like climate change for example) are being attacked due to "lack of 100% certitude.

Another point where I disagree with the article is in his tirade against the freshman/pre graduate level text books, and their lack of precision. Yes, they overgeneralize, and smooth out the rough points that are present in the edge of physics. But you know what? At the edge of physics (or any other science) there SHOULD be rough edges. That's why it's called research. Because we don't know what we are going to find!. But just as you don't teach the ballet beginners of all the issues that they may have on their joints/muscles on the first class (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11567921, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7618011, and lots of other ones), you don't expect that freshmen in any area of knowledge will see the doubts that arise in the harshest of the intellectual environments. It's not the way that you teach people about anything.

There is also the issue of the conflating the present with the future. Yes, we may not know now how/what it is exactly happening, but it's a logic error to think that this will always be the case, that we will always remain completely ignorant.

And following this point, what he seems to be approaching is the issue of the possibility of knowledge, and how detailed can we get before we can't go further down, and if the fact that we can't have complete knowledge of anything without using unproven priors nullify the possibility of knowledge. As Feynman said "We can't define anything precisely. If we attempt to, we get into that paralysis of thought that comes to philosophers… one saying to the other: "you don't know what you are talking about!". The second one says: "what do you mean by talking? What do you mean by you? What do you mean by know?" (Source of Quote: Wikipedia) That is more for philosopher's to discuss than for physicists, although when the field becomes so advanced, it would probably benefit the physicist to dabble in philosophy, to clarify exactly are the epistemological issues of what they are doing. I don't think that the fact that we don't understand a problem completely means that we don't know anything about the problem. That ignores the fact that nature seems to have magnitude scale differences.  Even if  you don't know what happens in the lower scale, you can  KNOW what is happening in the upper scale.
He finishes saying that we should not confuse description with understanding. I would say that he shouldn't confuse incompleteness of knowledge with lack of knowledge.

Procrastination

A couple of days ago, I was listening to the podcast "Philosophy Talk", about procrastination. As probably anybody that has ever blogged in their life knows, it is so easy to leave a post for "later on", when you have more time to "concentrate" on the blog post, when you can "really write" what you want.
Most of the time, this means..., well, no post.
Some of the concepts in the podcast that tickled my fancy were "short term mood repair" and "unfairness to your future self". Let me explain a little bit.
The first one, short term mood repair, has to do with one of the possible reasons of why we procrastinate. And it has to do with our natural tendency to favor things that will make us feel better, in the short run. It may be by eating, having sex, sleeping, etc, but the important thing is that we give undue importance to these short term advantages, even when you are completely conscious that you will pay the consequences afterwards (obesity, divorce, being late).
 This is very important, as it is an underlying concept not only of procrastination, but of multiple other concepts. For example, you could define maturity simply as a transition from caring only for the short term mood repair to realizing the importance of long term goals.
Also this could be one of the main factors affecting our current economy troubles, as most large publicly traded corporations need to have their quarterly earnings showing improvement, even at the cost of long term investments (unless you have other checks and balances, which are very weak in this day and age.
The second concept, unfairness to your future self, has to do with the morality (or lack of it) of procrastination. Most people consider procrastination as an issue dealing with the question of free will and/or how the different decision modules of our brain coordinate a final decision.
But rarely I've heard the morality of procrastination being discussed. I don't mean that people don't consider this factor, but I have the impression (not based in data at this time) that most people intrinsically consider procrastination as a "bad" moral action, without thinking "why" is it bad. Here is where the concept of unfairness to your future self comes in. Because by not doing something you actually ARE doing something, that is you are affect the time distribution of your own self in the future, restricting its freedom, just because of your procrastination. And it's even worse, as you are doing it on purpose!. This argument really made my day, as I had never hear it before.
I do think this argument is not completely airtight, because the you in the future is completely dependent on your actual self, and you can't avoid going to the future, so even if the side effect of procrastinating is in the future, taking the decision in the present is appropriate. Negating this would imply that you don't have much rights over your own self, and things like private property, the right of suicide/abortion/healthcare decisions should not be left to us,
Anyways, I have to go do something else. Or play this nice video game here....

Coevolution and "species"

Reading this article (http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-instant-evolution-whiteflies-bacteria.html ), about how a group of sweet potato whiteflies increased their fitness after being infected by a bacteria (Rickettsia, to be specific), made me think about how we define organisms and "species".

In today's evolutionary biology there is a large discussion of how to define "species"(Jerry Coyne wrote a great blogpost about that here http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/more-on-species-part-1/). But most people don't really have this fine appreciation of the difficulties in using the concept. In most places, the equivalence of species to one of the "platonic" (in quotes, because I don't think people use it consciously) types is what people use. So a dog is a dog is a dog. People don't realize that there is a large degree of variation, and lots of dogs are more similar to a wolf than other, the same way that a lot of wolves are more similar to a dog than other, depending on the population.

And things like this symbiosis between a bacteria and a whitefly makes it even more confusing, as you could always argue that the whiteflies that have the bacteria are a completely different species, to the point that they replaced almost all the ones without a bacteria. But then you would have to say that just by symbiosis you changed your species! This obviously would make even more interesting (conceptually at least) the study of the microbiome (the ecosystem of microorganisms) of the human gut, to see if you have subpopulations that have a significant different microbiome to the others, to the point that they have different functions. How interesting it would be if we could manipulate this to give ourselves extra abilities (Yes, sir, take an enema of this microbiome, and your cholesterol level will drop by half).

I think that as the thinking species in our world, we have to start becoming more open to use the symbiosis that we have available to modify our health and our intrinsic characteristics as the "human" species.

3 moral quandaries to think about

Reading this article "Expertise in Moral Reasoning? Order Effects on Moral Judgment in Professional Philosophers and Non-Philosophers", by Eric Schwitzgebel, I had to review some of the most interesting thinking points in morality. Even more because I've realized that everytime I think about them I reach different conclusions.

Moral Luck: You can be declared morally responsible for something that is not completely under your control...or not? Typical example is the drunk trailer truck driver. If he arrives home without an accident, do you blame him as much as you would if he, completely by chance, runs over a little girl instead? If you do, then you would have to have a very severe application of moral guilt, for a lot of actions that all of us take almost every day. But if you don't, then you are saying that the action that he did by volition (drinking) is not determining the morality endpoint, but the action that he did by chance (running over the little girl) is. Therefore you could have morality decisions depending of random situations.

Double effect: Is it worse to harm a person as means to save others versus harming that person as a side effect of you saving them? This to me it is a specific case of the moral luck dilemma, because if you know in advance that the side effect is going to happen, then you knowingly are harming the patient. On the other hand, if you don't know, then we are going into the moral luck question again.

Action and Omission: Is it morally worse to cause somebody to drown, or to not save that person (taking into account that saving the person wouldn't affect you in a significant fashion) if you are able to?

One of the problems that I see with answering these questions (and I suppose it is one of the main ones with any kind of philosophical questioning) is that it has a large number of suppositions integrated in the questions. And this makes it difficult to think and discuss with others, as they may have different assumptions about the same premises. It has to do with how do you view determinism versus free will, and the responsibility of the individual over the societal ones.

Again, an interesting read.

How to divide your pirate map.

Say you have 5 pirate descendants(you are the pirate King after all). You want them to remain united, at least 3 or more.

You left them a map of your treasure. How do you make sure that only one or two can't find it?

Make a circle, with the treasure at some point of the circumference (for example the southernmost). Mark 5 points on that circle. Give the direction of a point to each of your descendants. Now by geometry they HAVE to have 3 or more points to find where is the treasure (as 2 points can't really reconstruct a circle, you need at least 3!)

Genius.

http://edge.org/q2011/q11_9.html

Trying new approach

Well, clearly blogging once a year is not the best.

I'm going to try something different. Put one idea/concept that I thought it was great/interesting and discuss it a little bit.

This will help me also to remember it and have it for reference later.

Twitter thinking

As millions before me, I've discovered twitter (at www.twitter.com). For those who don't know, Twitter is a way of exchanging short messages (of 140 letters or less) between you and your "followers", that is, people that has subscribed to your list of comments. I have to admit that it's a very entrancing way of communicating with other people. The immediacy of it gives you a feeling of personal interaction that you can't find in most of the other media. But there are other things to consider about it.

While you can use it as a information gathering tool, or just a a blog advertising venue, a lot of people utilize Twitter to post comments or short thoughts about a particular topic. And this is the factor that I don't like. Due to the 140 characters' limitation, your comments on a particular topic have to be, by the nature of the media...up to 140 characters. And while this has the laudable characteristic of making you be more concise and precise in your thought pathways(something that I approve completely and don't apply sadly most of the time!), it has the negative effect of oversimplifying the issues. 

This characteristic makes Twitter a tool only to publish "first level" thinking (see previous post of September 29, 2008). That is, the most basic and rough conclusion that you can come up for a particular problem. While this is avoided when you only publish a link to a more extensive article, what this makes in most of the cases, is to make people complacent on their thoughts. They publish this rough idea, and a lot of times you will not continue developing it, because...well, because you already talked about it!. 

One possible objection to this line of thinking is the conception that if you can't explain something in a short sentence or couple of sentences, then you don't really understand what you are talking about. While I may agree with this premises for certain type of explanations, like basic concepts or definitions that you need to know for a problem, I disagree completely that you can explain a multi layered thought pathway in 140 characters. Saying it in another way...you may easily make a screwdriver with 2 pieces, but the car that you are building with it will by necessity need many pieces. 

What can be the consequences in the long run? Well, if you get used to this way of exchanging ideas, you have the risk of becoming used to it, and start self editing your thought pathways away from Twitter, and making decisions based on this poor amount of evidence. And due to this our grasp at reality will become much more basic(in the bad sense of the word) and tenuous. 

Also this may foster non productive discussions, when 2 members discuss different points of views, without realizing that each one misinterpreted the original statement due to the lack of clarification.

So for myself, I will try to control my impulse of publishing all my thoughts there, without further polishing in a more extensive media...like this blog! Also, I don't want to be unfair with Twitter. I think it's a great tool for exposing yourself to different experiences and thought pathways of people in very different areas of human culture. Just know that you may not be getting their whole depth.

This post is obviously more than 140 characters, I think now it's time to think another thought!

Non conscious misconceptions about value propositions

I was reading Borges "Otras Inquisiciones" (Other Inquisitions) http://www.amazon.com/Other-Inquisitions-1937-1952-Texas-American/dp/0292760027/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1238039277&sr=8-1 , and I hit the essay about the cult of books.

He postulates that we have a very different perception today of the relative importance of written knowledge over spoken one. One comment really opened my eyes. He was talking about the burning of Alexandria's Library, and saying that for some historical figures it was not such a problem, because it was written word. It was not spoken word, that was the way that most people acquired their knowledge at that time. So losing some books was not a big deal.

That blew me away! One of the things that has always frustrated me is that if we could have missed the Obscurantism period, we may be at this time much more technologically advanced, and events like the burning of Alexandria's Library are very representative of the trigger (although far in the future) of this period...But then Borges made me realize that I was ascertaining the value of that destruction as if the cultural situation at that time was the same as now! 

I realized that when I start my different thought pathways I have to be very careful about the value propositions that I use as starting points. A lot of times I take them "as is", instead of realizing that they ARE value propositions, so per se they will have multiple factors that modify them, as in this case, the historical time where they should be applied. I will have to make sure to be more sistematic when I use a value proposition to base a thought pathway, as even if I consider something is "obvious", I may be (and will be most probably!) wrong.

Well, it's time to think another thought!

Still Alive

So I have not updated my blog in more than a month...that is not very good. 

I think I have the wrong psychological approach to it, as I try to hammer down as many of the deficiencies in any of the thinking pathways that I am exposing.  While I still think that this approach is worthwhile, it's making me write down tens of ideas but not expanding them, as I never have all the time I need to go through them in the detailed way that I would want.

For this post I wanted to talk about a very interesting book(actually there are two novels but I read the collection of 2 of them)

By Olaf Stapledon, the books are the Last and First Men and the second one is The Star Maker.

From the standpoint of literature per se, these are very dry  Sci-Fi books, so if you are somebody that gets bored very fast, I wouldn't recommend these to you. Also sometimes it can be a little bit repetitive and slow in the flow of ideas, so also if you are intolerant to these characteristics, I would say you will be better at reading something else. But if you do that,  you would be missing some of the best conceptual futurology that has been ever written. 

The concept behind this book is the exploration of how would intelligent life evolve over long periods of time. If you are reading attentively you may have realized that I didn't say "human" intelligence. That is right, he actually kills off human civilization, several times, but in the most internally consistent way. Also when I mention that is over long periods of time, we are talking billions to trillions of years, going from "now"(that is in 1930s) to the end of the universe, when the entropy has gone up to the point that there is no differential of energy in between any part of the universe.

The other interesting characteristic is that there is not a specific protagonist, as in a central personage. There is an omniscient narrator that comments about the evolution of this or that culture/civilizations, but not somebody to relate directly. This can be a little bit bothersome, as is difficult to become sentimentally attached to the book.

But man, the imagination of Mr. Stapledon is superior most of the Sci-Fi authors. His descriptions of how a population evolves both culturally and physically, or how they reach different settings in their civilization lifespan is so engaging that you can't remain unmoved. 

Also the analysis that he makes of the evolution of human civilization in "near" future (meaning approximately now) is very, very on the spot. Some parts are actually scary to read, as he pinpoints the factors that guided us to the situations we can see in this day and age, in a fashion that makes me wonder if he was actually possessed by an entity from the future (as this is part of the "explanation" of where the information comes from).

This book made me think about futurology and the possibility of predicting the evolution of our culture/civilization from general principles. We all like to think that we do have free will, but maybe when we gather in a group, there is an emergent property that makes us predictable. If you follow the reasoning of Mr. Stapleton, you can actually see where he wants to go very easily, and also come into grips with our group "predictability" as a possibly testable characteristic. 

It would be interesting to study this, to see there is such an emergent property of human groups that deviate our thought processes to adjust the evolution of the society, maybe without us noticing it...

Interesting and disturbing.

Hopefully if you read this you will be interested in Mr. Stapledon books. They are more than worth the time involved in reading them. Your perception of humanity, of time and of universal evolution will grow exponentially

Well, it's time to think another thought!

Levels of Thinking

The high gas price is due to the war in Iraq, he said. No, no, says another, it is due to the OPEC countries gaming the system. That is false, says a third, it is due to faerie's dust making disappear the oil reserves in the world...
This is only a sample (although slightly ironic) of multiple discussions that we carry with other human being every day. We seem unable to reach an uniform conclusion about multiple topics, and it doesn't make sense, as we are living a similar reality, so we should be able to agree...or shouldn't we?
There are a lot of different explanations on why this happens. Some explanations are sociological, that depend on our separate cultural backgrounds, where we process the same evidence with different mechanisms and priorities. Some linguistic, due to our inability to transmit our concepts in an appropriate fashion to another human, or if we are able to do so, then that human may be unable to input that information into his thought patterns in an appropriate fashion(yes, it is YOUR fault), and therefore he/she is not able to understand their interlocutor. Even emotional factors could affect this understanding, as those who have kids that have done something dumb/illegal/costly for you can attest!
But this is a blog about the thinking process in general. So in which aspect I consider our thinking patterns and processes affect our argumentation and foment the discordance between individuals and their capacity to analyze reality?
One concept that I was playing in my mind earlier with was the concept of levels of thinking. The best way I could define it is the depth of analysis that you have applied to a particular thought pathway. For example, if there is no toilet paper in your toilet, a first level thinking would be ...mmm, the last person that used the toilet finished it and didn't replenish it. If we tried to use a higher level of thought then we would consider other options, like there is no toilet paper at home, your young kids took it as a prank, the toilet paper actually is misplaced and it is behind you, etc. That is to say, you take a multi step approach to a thinking issue.
One of the ways that I thought to expose the problem with first level thinking is to establish its characteristics, and from them obtain the possible consequences from each of them.
First of all, first level thinking is common. It's the most frequent way that we appreciate reality. It may have to do with the way our brain is wired, as we are not able to maintain more than 5 or 6 different concepts at a time without losing track of them. So when we try to process our thoughts, we are unable to use more than 2 or 3 factors in the thought pathway (in a spontaneous form of thinking, as some forms of structured thinking will use other techniques or outside help to overcome this limitation). By itself, this factor makes us to use the first level of thinking with a preference that is structural in nature.
Second, the first level thinking is practical. Yes, it is very nice that you can think of multiple causes of the lack of toilet paper, but at the time of resolution of the problem, looking for another one in your house's reserve batch will solve this problem, most of the time. This characteristic of our main way of thinking could be due to a couple of factors that have to do with evolution. First of all, if exposed to a dangerous situation, you may not have the time to develop second level thinking about an issue (the typical "the tiger is going to eat you, run away, you dummy" example). Also it could be due to resources constraints, as we may have to decide between using our time for obtaining a second level thinking to obtain a better outcome, factor that is not for sure until you actually apply your second level of thinking, as you could be wrong, no matter the level of thinking that you reach, versus just obtaining a mediocre outcome with first level thinking and having more time (and resources!) to go to another problem.
A third characteristic would be linearity. The first level thinking tends to depend in a direct or inverse fashion to a X or Y characteristic. This characteristic is obviously not intrinsic to a first level thinking, as you can have reality based phenomena that are linear, so it wouldn't matter what level of thinking you are using, you are not going to obtain a different result if the nature of the experience you went through . What I meant for linearity as a characteristic is that first level thinking can't deviate from this pattern, by its intrinsic value of non complexity. It has trouble seeing how a reality based phenomena could be non linear, multi factorial or simply correlated but not causal to our "explanation".
The fourth characteristic is that first level thinking is usual. This is not the same as saying that it's common. The commonality has to do with factual happening, while the usual characteristic has to do with the tendency that we have for using it. That is, because it's common and practical, we "like" (even though it has nothing to do with preferences most of the time) to use that mode of thinking and we need to make an extra effort to stray away from it, even voluntarily. Again, this could be due to our internal "wiring", but that is only hypothetical, and not relevant to our discussion. Also another factor to take into account in the "usual"ness of the first level of thinking is that we tend to thread on previous thinking patterns that we have learned from somebody else, or patterns that we have gone through for a similar thought process, kind of recycling your thought pathways. This is obviously seen when you watch/read the news from different sources and you realize that the editorial content is very repetitive. This is going to happen for issues that are very straightforward, obviously, but a lot of complex issues are treated this way too. Interestingly the "best" editorialists usually distinguish themselves by actually going into a deeper level of thought.
The fifth characteristic is inflexibility. Due to its own nature of straightforwardness, thinking of the first level is not able to accept or be modified by other points of view. You are "right", so why should you change your thought process. The problem is not in the correctness, because the goal of refining your thought processes is to reach the truth(or as much as approximate to it we as human can do), but in the lack of adaptability. Some first level thinkers even coat this inflexibility with a cover of "righteousness", saying that if you modify your thought process by taking another pathway you are actually admitting that it was wrong, so by definition your conclusion has to be corrupted by this. This is one of the main "political" arguments that you can see used in our current day and age. If a candidate changes his position with respect to any issue, he or she is a flip-flopper...instead of being a mature adult that may have received better input and decided to change his/her opinion in respect of that issue. This has nothing to do with the political opportunists that change their opinion only due to polling results...that is one of the worst types of parasitism that you can find in a human, sadly.
So we have that the first level of thinking is common, practical, linear, usual, and inflexible. These characteristics do not sound that bad, right? Again, I want to make sure that I communicate clearly. First level thinking is not by definition wrong(or right by that matter). It is the correct level to analyze most of the situations that occur around us. But we should go through the list of characteristics above each time we move through a thought pathway, and realize that if one of those characteristics are limiting the scope of possible conclusions we may achieve, then we should be flexible enough to take those factors into account, and broaden our pathway.
Well, this post is already long enough, so it's time to think another thought.

Teach your child how to think

I've been meaning to comment about a book I read recently, it's an old book by Edward de Bono, called Teach your child how to think. Mr. de Bono is a fairly known "thinking" teacher, with several famous techniques (like the six hat reasoning system). I was able to get this book second-hand, so I gave it a try. As most books by de Bono, it's thin, and can be a quick read.
My value thinking at the end of the read is very ambiguous. I loved the book and I hated the book. I will try to express the pros and cons of the book in a more detailed fashion, that hopefully will be more helpful for any prospective reader. I will start with the cons.
First, you have to realize that the "kids" part of the title is a partial misnomer. It is not directed to the kids, but to the adult member of the family. He obviously gives a small introduction where he talks about how to use the book more effectively depending on the age of the child, and how to go through the examples with your child, but after this he "forgets" the focus on the child part, concentrating only on the tools and mechanisms of thinking, but in a decidedly adult pedagogical style. His examples on how to use the thinking tools are clear (most of the times), but their are not focused on children experience, so you are given the task to adapt this to your child. I don't think the loss of focus in children is detrimental, and he tells you very early that it's NOT for teaching very young children, instead he wants you to use his book when the child is able to construct abstract thinking processes (around 7 or 8 years or older). The advantage is that probably you as an adult will use and benefit from what he is postulating without feeling that the author is condescending to you, a problem that plagues a lot of the books that are directed to/made for children.
Second, this is a book to read with an open mind. If you have a thought process pattern already, you may get "mad" at the way de Bono exposes his ideas, mainly the organization of the book. He, in what I consider is a very interesting approach, starts describing the "tools" that he considers are necessary for developing your thought process, but does not give you any structure on how to apply each tool (although he gives you plenty of exercises to do with each tool), even suggesting that you can use them separately or in combination. If you are an adult, and you have acquired already a thought process pattern, you may find this shocking (i know I did), and a little bit irritating. But I would recommend you to keep on reading, as he will coalesce these tools in certain types of structure where they are more orderly placed, which permits you to get the "bigger" picture of his methodology.
Third, it is an uneven book. de Bono explains multiple thinking tools, but the detail that he offers for each one is very erratic, to the point that in some tools he actually forgets to give an accurate description of them!(the APC tool comes to mind) Most of his thinking tools are straightforward, but there is a lot of overlap between them. I don't consider redundancy a problem in thinking, as it tends to give you a more solid thought process, but his overlapping tools tend to use the same initial information and process them with almost the same approach, so it's repetitive instead of redundant. It gives you the feeling that certain of this tools were developed before he created others that are significantly more powerful, making the original worthless, but he never took them out of the book. This seems to be the case with his six hat thinking process. Obviously his most developed technique (he actually has written a book only about this), you can see that multiple of his smaller tools are simply partial aspects of this megatool. He explains that you may decide to use whichever tool you like the best, but due to the overlap, several of them have no enticing reason to use them, and gives you more mental clutter that obstruct adequate mental organization of the tools.
Fourth, Mr. de Bono has a very particular style of writing. If you have read other of his books, you may already know this, but he is a very forceful "seller" of the de Bono "concept". He will always mention his qualifications for writing a book on this topic, with all the projects that he has created or helped/counseled in. I understand perfectly why he would do this from the commercial standpoint, as he wants to demonstrate a good reputation, and also from the psychological perspective, as we tend to disagree less and accept more what somebody that is successful tells us. But after a while it gets somewhat heavy to read those detailed descriptions as they don't give you any benefit for your thinking process and they don't advance the concepts in the book
Fifth, there are some thinking errors in some parts of the book, that even if they don't detract from the general point, they invalidate some of his conclusions. His chapter of logic and perception is slightly unfair toward logic, as he is applying what he thinks logic "is" to domains of reality where it should not be applied, at least not in the form he is referring to, something that he does again in his chapter about Truth, logic and critical thinking. He also seems to be unaware that logic as a "thinking" discipline has more than one form or mechanism, and that he doesn't take in account some other subtheories of logic, like paraconsistent logic, that is designed to deal with inconsistencies (a fault that he attributes to "logic" as a whole). This is probable the point where I was disenchanted, as he seems to construct a straw man of logic, and afterwards he proceeds to fight against this misconception of logic. He also tends to correlate his success as a propagator of his ideas to the correctness of them, and this is obviously an erroneous thought pathway, that you can see repeated several times in the text.
Sixth, the book it's mostly expositional, he "tells" you which tools there are, how to use them, but he doesn't go very much on the underlying thought process mechanism that explain why you can/should use the tools that he is suggesting. This doesn't really affect my general appreciation of the book, as he is a very practical type of author, and in this case he may not want the explanations to interfere with the flow of the book.

What about the pros?
First, it's a short book. I don't say it in a derogatory fashion. It's short because he focuses on his main point in a very efficient way. Besides his self promotion tangents, he does not drift from the main topic. So it makes for a very dense book of ideas, a very refreshing change from the 1000+ pages that other thinking experts publish.
Second, it's a practical book. He suggest multiple exercises to use each one of his tools, and even if they may be overlapping, he is able to find examples where you can apply each tool separately. I think this is the strongest feature of the book, and where he demonstrates his genius. Multiple thinking books are better at explaining the origins of the thought processes, but fall flat on their faces when trying to make something directly useful to the reader. de Bono makes sure at all times that his readers will learn something, and gives straightforward directions on how to use his examples (or create new ones from his guidelines)
Third, it's a book that maintains its value. Due to the fact that he gives you the tools and not only rambles around (yes, like I tend to do...I'm thinking about how to fix that!), he is eminently re readable. And for a learning to think book, that is one of the main characteristics, as you can't learn it all at once.

You may see this book commentary and say that the book has more bad points than good ones, but in general I would say that the weak points are smaller in breadth and applicable to smaller portions of his general argument, while the good points are sufficient to carry the book to a very good level.
My final thought about the book: Read it...several times. For yourself and for your kids.
And now it's time to think another thought

Thought blindness

I haven't had as much time as usual to think, due to illness of a family member. Thankfully, that problem seems to have resolved, so I tried to take a thought pathway that I had started a couple of weeks ago but stayed underdeveloped due to the situation previously described.
The baseline where I started this thought pathway is based on the fact that I am partially color blind. The pigments that should absorb the red light wave and send the signal to my brain to interpret it as red color, are defective or in lower than normal amount in my eyes, so this makes me see red objects as brown or green, even though I know from other people descriptions that it's not the case.
So from there I started generalizing this idea to a bigger concept. What if there are people that are simply thought blind? This would not be a reflection of their lack of knowledge of a particular culture or their general grade of intelligence, but simply an effect of an abnormal wiring of their brains when it was formed.
If you look at the medical literature, there are some reports of phenomenon similar to this, the so called "Neglect". This usually happens after a stroke or a traumatic injury to the brain, causing the patient to lose some superior brain functions, and they are not able to notice a certain portion of reality, for example the left side of their bodies, or one of their legs. It is not that they are not able to "see" that part, it is only that the wiring of their brain is affected thus that they simply "ignore" that area. There are also focused defects like in reading (called alexia) or writing (agraphia).
The difference between this phenomena and my "thought blindness" concept is that usually the defects that are noticed are in big areas of functionality, and that they are not congenital, but acquired. I don't see any particular reason why the thought blindness causes should all be congenital, so that is not a problem with our thinking pathway, but the extension of the defect that we are able to detect can be a problem.
Let's think for a moment, what would happen if for example you are not able, by the wiring of your brain, to understand some particular concepts, for example, to be provocative, religion, or even more interesting, the lack of religious feeling. Think about it...how would you explain it to the person that has an structural deficit concerning that concept?
Obviously you may say that brains do not work like that, that there is not a religion center, or a belief center, because our brains are capable to absorb a much bigger amount of concepts that what you would expect from the physical capacity of it. I understand that point and after looking at the medical literature, I am sure that that counterargument has complete validity.
But I can change a little bit my approach, and postulate the hypothesis in a somewhat different fashion that still lets me discuss the same general topic. Let's see...
OK, I concede the point that probably there is not a specific "idea" center that people can "NOT" have, but what if they lack an intrinsic pathway/neuron/whatever you may call it that is necessary (but not sufficient, to avoid the "one place one idea error from before) for you to be able to process that concept? I am sure that a lot of different concepts, due to intrinsic brain plasticity, are able to be processed in multiple ways, but what if some of them (and I am sure that by statistical reasons there must be at least a couple) actually pass through this rate limiting area? An easier way of explaining this would be to say that in the city of my brain, that is comprised of multiple concept-islands linked by bridges, there are no specific "idea" buildings that can be bombarded to make my brain city lacking, but there is the possibility that if I destroy the bridge that helps the people to go from one island to the other, the products that are made in that island are not able to be exchanged with the rest of the islands,even though the rest of the city island is completely able to function . I don't really see a logical reason why this couldn't happen. I understand that the brain has innate redundant systems, but I am also sure that there are points that are immutable. If not, there would be no irreversible damage during strokes, and sadly, in most of them there is.
So if we accept this premise, then we would have a person that is not be able to think a particular concept, while being able to otherwise maintain really complex thought pathways that don't involve this limitation. The interesting thing with this situation is that just as somebody that has post stroke neglect, they CAN'T realize that there is a lack in their thought processes, simply because only with your brain you can realize this, and in this circumstance the brain itself is affected.
Could this be a factor that affects the difficulty that fundamentalists of any kind have in seeing the other "side" point of view? It would be completely unrealistic and reductionist to think that it's the only element of importance here, but it strikes me that it could be one of the important questions to answer, because if this actually happens, then some situations can't actually be discussed with the other "side", simply because they are physically unable to understand your point.
Also knowledge of this could help us to improve our tools for discussion in the cases of lack of conciliation between parties. If we are able to detect that there is some "thought blindness" in play, then with other thinking process' tools we can indicate to the person that there is something lacking, even if they don't perceive it, just as for post-stroke patient you do "imagining" training, where you tell them that even if they don't "have" (in their personal realities) a right side of the body, they should "imagine" that they have it, and behave like this "imaginary" side is real. You can pinpoint to consequences of their neglect that they can notice, like not being able to go through a particular space, to help them imagine that they actually have the "neglected" part. Can we invent thought process' tools for this purpose? I am sure we can, as there are thought pathway verification tools that use extrinsic tools (for example lists of thought process errors that you can check) that exist at the moment.
I estimate that this topic can be applied to multiple other purposes, from educational to business related, but for now I've only reached this portion of the thinking pathway. Probably I will explore in the future some more of the implications, but for now...
It's time to think another thought.

Language and thinking

Last week I had to travel by plane, going from one time zone to another that was 2 hours earlier, and then back home, so I had the curious sensation of time dilation where 3 hours converted themselves into 5 hours. Funny if you think about it, but if you apply relativistic considerations to my flight I can actually be dilating the time slightly more, but the effect would be probable imperceptible to my mind ,but not unmeasurable, so interestingly even if it doesn't exist in my consciousness, it still exists in reality. As always, depending on your basal philosophy you could say that the difference is only made when you actually measure it, or you could say that even the non measured events exist...but I don't really want to go that direction today.
Most of the times that we consider the relativistic events we don't realize that as much as we would like it not to happen, this is actually one of the factors that is keeping us from contacting alien cultures. Yes, that means extraterrestrial cultures, not cultures outside the united states...and I will use this nice segue to go towards the topic of philosophical language differences affecting our capacities to transmit the content of our thought to other peoples.
One interesting difference is that for example in Spanish you would NEVER have any confusion in between an alien (extraterrestrial) and an alien (foreigner). You can always say that there are synonyms that you could use and that would take away the confusion, and that is right, but the fact is that the meaning that can cause the confusion exist in the language can tell us something about the culture behind it.
Is this cultural factor taken for granted when I communicate with somebody else in English? The problem is that if you are a native speaker you may never see this factor coming and it could shape the way you think, even if you are trying to have an adequate mechanism of thinking. Everybody always refers to the fact that if you just use logical phrases you can avoid this, and there are people that have tried to make a language where due to the structure of the language you can't actually tell lies or make illogical statements, but you have to realize that our rate of success with the introduction of made up languages is pretty bad. Esperanto is probably as know today as the language of the Klingon, and I am almost sure that "Klingonian" is probably being taken care of better than Esperanto...whatever that can signify of our priorities as a culture.
Another thought that crossed my mind while I was writing this is that we could use the changes of a language over time to track the changes of thought pathways of the population that uses it. I am sure that this must not be an original ideal (remember, there is nothing new under the sun!). But I am always a little bit more Machiavellian...what if we could use this the other way around. What if we could have a group of peoples that are introducing a change in our language use with the purpose of changing our perception of reality. Again, you could say this is not that original, as in 1984 they had double speak and the restriction of language to force the population to obey and restrict the pattern of new ideas possible. But I think that Gene Wolfe in the Book of the New sun demonstrated brilliantly that even with a small range of expression, only by varying the context of a phrase, you can express many more ideas than what you would expect, something the author of 1984 didn't consider. See the part when they interact with a member of the "enemy" culture that is indoctrinated to only talk with phrases taken from a "sacred" book. The implementation by Wolfe is so astute, that I was floored the first time I saw it in action (read it in action?)
No, what I am going for is the idea of slowly modifying some impressions of the reality only by changing the perception of some words/groups of words. One example would be, if I may be ironic for a moment, the transformation of "alien" and "foreigners " into a dirty word. Only leaving another more difficult word or expression like "non X-country citizens" as the acceptable word usage. You could have a group of people respond to every usage of the word in printed/verbal/electronic media respond to an appearance of these words in a very negative fashion. After a couple of months/years, you could see the transference of the negative connotation to the actual alien people.
This phenomenon may sound familiar to you, as it did to me the first time I thought about it. Yes, it could be a sociological use of the politically correct language. The fact that words like blind, dumb, mute are becoming non-PC could also alter the perception that people have about this minorities. I am not sure if the people that decided to use this reductionist language were doing it with this purpose, but it has a good likelihood of doing this, even if it's not intended. Think about the "N" word, that I can't even put in my blog unless I want to become a target of all the hate mail of half of the country. The fact that we construed that word into a "bad" word carries the underlying effect of demonizing the word, and by verbal/mental correlation, making the people to whom you may apply this word carry a negative connotation that they don't deserve at all.
Now think all the subconscious messages that our words carry. Obviously some of them are due to forces of society that we all construe to (i am happy that calling somebody a Klansman is derogative). Notwithstanding that, the fact is that a lot of those messages are not very nice. What if there is a group of people that actually is voluntarily doing this. I understand that the general forces of society can't be reliably fought, but what about focused groups of people. Should we have a group for preventing the subversion of the meaning of words?
You may think that this is just conspiracy theorizing at its best, but I can see very nice commercial applications of this concept. I am sure that at this time the ad industry is using this concept, although it may still be more in a correlational stage instead of in a change of meaning stage. What I mean with this is that the industry right now wants us to correlate their products with a particular word that denotes or implies a concept. Think Apple products or IBM and its "think" motto. That is an obvious correlation of word to the product. But can they change the meaning of the words not to facilitate the selling of their product but to make our thinking patterns more accessible to buying them? If that is possible, and I think it is, the potential for abuse is huge, as we would NOT be able to combat it with rational thought, because it would be integrated in the modus operandi of our brains and as multiple persons that study reasoning have said, you can't really use the tool to detect the defects of the tool.
After all this digression, then I actually found a point to come back to my argument of being a multiple language user and the fact that this alters my perceptions or my thought patterns. Unless the Machiavellian group modifies multiple language at the same time (that would take serious money/manpower) then somebody that uses more than one language can actually detect this pattern of change and could actually contrarrest these modifications, by noting the slight discord between the intrinsic meaning of a word/concept in different languages.
So yeah, that is another good argument for having us aliens (not the extraterrestrial ones!) here to help...mmm...maybe I have something here...the protector of English language...Pedro Perez and Wi Xiang Fong...
Well, it's time to think another thought
Bye