Praise and blame: real or not?

Today's Tricycle Daily Dharma comes from this article by The Dalai Lama.

If we really stop to think about praise and criticism, we will see they do not have the least importance. Whether we receive praise or criticism is of no account. The only important thing is that we have a pure motivation, and let the law of cause and effect be our witness. If we are really honest, we can see that it makes no difference whether we receive praise and acclaim. The whole world might sing our praises, but if we have done something wrong, then we will still have to suffer the consequences for ourselves, and we cannot escape them. If we act only out of a pure motivation, all the beings of the three realms can criticize and rebuke us, but none of them will be able to cause us to suffer. According to the law of karma, each and every one of us must answer individually for our actions.

This is how we can put a stop to these kinds of thoughts altogether, by seeing how they are completely insubstantial, like dreams or magical illusions. When people praise us and we glow with delight, it is because we think that being praised is beneficial. But that is like thinking that there is some substance to a rainbow or a dream. However much benefit appears to accrue from praise and acclaim, actually there's none at all. However convincing it seems, it is as unreal as a magician's illusion.

He may be right, but he is ignoring the fact that we have built into us emotional reactions to how people view us. That's part of our evolutionary heritage. To say that we shouldn't care what people think misses a human element that is central to how we are. Our emotional reactions to other people are as real as anything in the world. To say that they are a magician's illusion ignores part of our fundamental nature. Perhaps we can stand back from our emotional reactions and see them as just that, emotional reactions. But to dismiss them as unreal is simply not correct.

Like a hair pulled out of a slab of butter: a meditation on death

From The Heart Treasure of the Enlightened Ones by Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche (1910-1991) as quoted in Tricycle Magazine.

Be careful—a powerful enemy is approaching. Not an ordinary enemy, but an invincible one: death. No plea, however eloquent, can persuade death to hold off for a few years—or even for a second. Not even the most powerful warrior, at the head of all the armies of the earth, can make death turn a hair. Death cannot be bribed by wealth, however vast, nor stirred by even the most enchanting beauty. …

We were born alone and we will die alone. …

We came into the world without husband, wife, friend, or companion. We may have many friends and acquaintances at the moment, and perhaps many enemies too, but as soon as death falls upon us we shall leave all of them behind, like a hair pulled out of a slab of butter. Not one of our friends and enemies will be able to help us; we have no choice but to face death all alone. This body of ours, which finds even the pain of a pinprick or a tiny spark of fire really hard to bear, is going to experience death. This body of ours, which we cherish so dearly, will turn into a corpse that our friends and relatives will only want to dispose of as quickly as possible. …

Never forget how swiftly this life will be over, like a flash of summer lightning or the wave of a hand.

Creating Identity

Tricycle's Daily Dharma has this about "Creating Identity."

When the Buddha confronted the question of identity on the night of his enlightenment, he came to the radical discovery that we do not exist as separate beings. He saw into the human tendency to identify with a limited sense of existence and discovered that this belief in an individual small self is a root illusion that causes suffering and removes us from the freedom and mystery of life. He described this as interdependent arising, the cyclical process of consciousness creating identity by entering form, responding to contact of the senses, then attaching to certain forms, feelings, desires, images, and actions to create a sense of self.

In teaching, the Buddha never spoke of humans as persons existing in some fixed or static way. Instead, he described us as a collection of five changing processes: the processes of the physical body, of feelings, of perceptions, of responses, and of the flow of consciousness that experiences them all.

Our sense of self arises whenever we grasp at or identify with these patterns. The process of identification, of selecting patterns to call "I," "me," "myself," is subtle and usually hidden from our awareness. [Paragraph breaks added.]

-Jack Kornfield, A Path with Heart
from Everyday Mind, edited by Jean Smith, a Tricycle book

This is an interesting extract since it lays out two ways of looking at self. The first, which it dismisses as "grasping," consists of identifying with the patterns and processes which are ourselves. The second way, the five processes, are exactly those processes. They are just as real and just as valid as a way of understanding self.

To dismiss the notion of us as entities by referring to it as grasping at or identifying with patterns or processes is just as misleading as presuming that we consist of static components.

We consist of processes rather than things. But processes are just as real as things and qualify as entities just as well.

Tune-Deaf People May Hear a Sour Note Unconsciously

From NIH

Tune deafness [occurs] in an otherwise normal, uninjured brain,” said James F. Battey, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., director of the NIDCD. “[THis may make it possible to use] tune deafness … to study consciousness.”

A person who is tune deaf is unable to perceive pitch, reproduce melodies, or identify deviations in a melody. According to geneticist Dennis Drayna, Ph.D., one of the study authors, not only is music not enjoyable for people with tune deafness, many of them don’t fully understand what music is. “For severely affected tune-deaf people, Yankee Doodle is no different than traffic noise in Manhattan. It’s fairly meaningless to them,” he said."

Volunteers [half tune deaf and half controls] listened to 102 familiar melodies, roughly half of which were correct, and half of which contained [an] errant last note. The researchers then sifted through the EEG data to isolate the brain’s response to a specific stimulus—in this case, the right or wrong note.

Of principal interest were two signals that brains normally generate when they are presented with a stimulus that doesn’t match what the brain expects to hear, such as the wrong note in a song. The first, the mismatch negativity (MMN), is a large negative signal that occurs roughly 200 milliseconds after the unexpected stimulus is heard; the second signal, the P300, is a large positive signal occurring roughly 300 milliseconds after the unexpected stimulus.

Because tune-deaf people consistently don’t recognize when a wrong note is played or sung, the researchers hypothesized that their brains would not generate the MMN or P300 signals, and as expected, this was true for the MMN signal. However, in the case of the P300 signal, tune-deaf volunteers were processing the wrong note in the same way as the normal participants, even though they weren’t consciously aware of the deviation. [emphasis added] Other brain signals demonstrated that correct notes were being processed equally well for both tune-deaf and normal volunteers.

I didn't know there were brain signals for unexpected stimuli.

Thought police? US supreme court upholds child pornography ban

From guardian.co.uk. What I find most interesting about this decision is the extent to which it depends on what people think they are doing. [All emphases added.]

[In a 7-2 decision the] court found that the language of the statute requires that the offender believe him or herself to be offering child pornography, and the offender must intend that the listener believe the material to be child pornography. …

The statute does not require that an offender actually possess child pornography, but criminalises promotion and advertisement of child pornography, for example an internet post describing child pornography available for trade or sale. …

Justice David Souter wrote the dissenting opinion, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. They were troubled that the act could conceivably be used to punish someone for promoting images that didn't in fact portray children, so long as the person believed them to.

The Neural Buddhists - New York Times

A nice column by David Brooks

The atheism debate is a textbook example of how a scientific revolution can change public culture. Just as “The Origin of Species reshaped social thinking, just as Einstein’s theory of relativity affected art, so the revolution in neuroscience is having an effect on how people see the world.

And yet my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible.

Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development.

Researchers now spend a lot of time trying to understand universal moral intuitions. Genes are not merely selfish, it appears. Instead, people seem to have deep instincts for fairness, empathy and attachment.

Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a decrease in activity in the parietal lobe, which orients us in space). The mind seems to have the ability to transcend itself and merge with a larger presence that feels more real.

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

I think Brooks is right that the debate will be between theology and "spirituality." It's been popular for a while for people to describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious."

What Brooks hasn't realized is that spirituality is also a subjective experience; it takes place in one's mind and doesn't necessarily imply anything about the world. "[Feeling] the existence of the sacred," as Brooks put it, doesn't imply the existence of "the sacred," just the ability to have certain feelings.

The realization that these feelings are not necessarily connected to any particular religion is progress—at least in my opinion.

But distinguishing between subjective experience and external reality is—also in my opinion—the real truth of Buddhism. It's also the fundamental truth of science.

Francis Collins, again

I haven't posted in a while, but this Pew Research interview with Francis Collins presents a good opportunity.

For Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and an evangelical Christian, scientific knowledge complements rather than contradicts belief in God. In his 2006 bestselling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, Collins argues that advances in science present 'an opportunity for worship,' rather than a catalyst for doubt. Recently, the Pew Forum interviewed Dr. Collins about his views on science and religion.

For the most part, I'll just present Collins' answers unless there is some ambiguity.

If you see God as the creator of the universe – in all of its amazing complexity, diversity and awesome beauty – then science, which is, of course, a means of exploring nature, also becomes a means of exploring God’s creative abilities. And so, for me, as a scientist who is also a religious believer, research activities that look like science can also be thought of as opportunities to worship.

As I've said a number of times previously, the most sympathetic interpretation I have found for religious faith — other than dismissing it as an unconscious externalization of subjective experience — is that the subject matter of religion is outside empirical determination and is therefore not relevant to the material world. This seems to be more or less Collins' position, although I doubt that he would put it that way. This first answer suggests this position, namely that science explores nature and since God created nature, i.e., the universe, science explores "God's creative abilities." It doesn't seem to matter in any real sense whether "God created the universe" has any real meaning or truth value. Science certainly explores nature. The rest is outside of the realm in which we can say what the sentence means.

One can look at Genesis 1-2, for instance, and see that there is not just one but two stories of the creation of humanity, and those stories do not quite agree with each other. That alone ought to be reason enough to argue that the literal interpretation of every verse, in isolation from the rest of the Bible, can’t really be correct. Otherwise, the Bible is contradicting itself. …

If Augustine, who was one of the most thoughtful, original thinkers about biblical interpretation that we’ve ever had, was unable to figure out what Genesis meant 1,600 years ago, why should we today insist that we know what it means.

This is another subject I've written about. How should one do religious epistemology, i.e., how does one decide which statements to believe. Collins acknowledges that there is a problem, and he doesn't have an answer. But that doesn't seem to bother him. If I were confronted with a doctrine that included a number of self-contradictory statements, along with other statements that contradicted current ethical principles or empirical evidence, I would be bothered — or at least concerned about finding some approach to deciding which statements to believe. So I don't understand why being in such a situation doesn't bother Collins. But that seems to be the religious answer to everything. The less sense something makes, the more it confirms the mystery.

If God has any meaning at all, God is at least in part outside of nature (unless you’re a pantheist). Science is limited in that its tools are only appropriate for the exploration of nature. Science can therefore certainly never discount the possibility of something outside of nature. To do so is a category error, basically using the wrong tools to ask the question.

This brings us back to the first point: belief in God is outside science. But since science investigates everything which is within human experience, belief in God refers to something which is outside human experience. If that's the case, it doesn't matter whether one believes or not since we are unable to experience what belief is about. To my mind, that's a good definition of either fiction or meaninglessness.

Editing tools that make images more subjectively real

From New York Times

Mr. Cohen said his tool would produce photos that were closer to the reality that we perceive than a photograph.

“We’re assembling what’s really there — just not from one-hundredth of a second, but longer,” he said.

“Think of an axis from the purely objective to the purely subjective,” he said. “At one end is a photograph, a recording of what really took place. At the other end is our internal experience of an external event. There’s some place that is a little bit subjective. It’s not quite real. But if you and I looked at it, we would agree on it.”

This story is about tools that let users edit images to make them look more like we remember them. For example, one tool will combine multiple pictures of a group of people so that no one is blinking—even though in each individual picture at least one person is blinking. An effect I've noticed is that telephone and electric wires seem much more prominent in pictures than they do in reality. When we look at a scene, we tend to ignore foreground telephone wires. But when those wires appear on a photograph, they're a lot harder to ignore. these tools attempt to make pictures more like we see them subjectively.

The top picture is the original. The second one stretches the scene to fill a larger area, e.g., for use as a screen saver, but it doesn't stretch the dog's face. You'll notice that the trees behind the dog look the same in the two pictures, but the trees to the left and the right are wider in the second picture. The point is that the subject of interest, the dog's face, is retained as we remember it. The other parts of the image are stretched but in ways we don't notice or don't care about.

The way the stretching works is by finding a path of pixels from the top to the bottom where adjacent pixels are the same, or as closest to the same as any other path. Then that line is replicated, adding a pixel width to the picture. This is repeated until the picture is stretched as much as one likes. Presumably the software checks to ensure that it doesn't repeatedly insert pixels in the same places over and over.

More on consciousness

I mentioned my Abstraction abstracted paper to the CAS group. In responding to one of the comments I wrote the following.

Thanks for looking at the paper. The issue I was attempting to address is what is abstraction. I don't think we have a good answer. We all regard it as very important—especially in software and computational thinking. If you were going to define abstraction, what would you say? That's where I was going.

It wasn't where I was planning to go. (I'm not sure I knew where I was planning to go when I started.) But I kept getting pushed in the direction of attempting to understand what we mean by abstraction. I would up by saying that "abstraction" and "concept" are more or less the same. One contribution of the article (if there is one) is that "concept" depends on consciousness. Of course there is a very large philosophical literature on conceptualization. I can't claim to know much of it. (For example, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has this article on concepts, which I haven't mastered.) But it does seem to me to be useful to say that a concept is a distinction that one is aware of making or being able to make--and hence depends on some level of self-awareness. So a concept is our way of making discrete chunks out of our experience.

It's not clear how widespread the ability to form concepts is. For example, dogs can recognize their masters. So they have a concept (an abstraction) of their master in some sense. (So even proper nouns are abstractions—of the thing named.) But do we know whether dogs can mentally refer to their masters? Can a dog think to itself something like, "I wish my master were home so she could take me out for a walk." Or is that too abstract? So perhaps some animals have the ability to form concepts but not to manipulate them mentally? Obviously I don't have all the answers.

So I guess that one of the important characteristics of concepts/abstractions is the ability to manipulate them mentally, to think with them, to use them to model the world. Apparently this is discussed in Rational Animals? by Susan Hurley and Matthew Nudds (Eds), including this paper by Ruth Garrett Millikan.

A further thought. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. Emergent phenomena are epiphenomenal. But we experience consciousness as real. (The qualia problem.) Why is that?

Squirrels use rattlesnake scent as camouflage and fake burying food

From Scientific American

California ground squirrels and rock squirrels from New Mexico have both shown the ability to chew up sloughed-off rattlesnake skin and smear it on their fur, thus masking their scent from one of their biggest predator threats.

In a recent paper, I suggested that a particularly human characteristic is the ability to reify experience as concepts. I can't argue that I know that no other creature has that ability, but I would guess that squirrels don't conceptualize what they are doing and don't "know" that they are rubbing rattlesnake scent on themselves—and especially don't know that they are doing so as camouflage.

Here's another example of squirrel intelligence.

To protect their winter food stocks from potential thieves, [grey squirrels] put on an elaborate show of burying non-existent nuts and seeds, a study has shown.

Scientists say the fake burials are designed to confuse any rival squirrels, birds or humans who might be watching.

The level of deception has astonished animal experts who say it shows a rare form of animal cunning and intelligence. …

The squirrels go to elaborate lengths to keep up the pretence of hiding food.

Once they have dug a small hole in a flower bed, woodland floor or lawn, they act as if they are thrusting a small object into the gap.

They complete the deception by covering the fake cache of food with a layer of soil or leaves.

The incidence of fake burials goes up when they think their food is under threat.

Dr Steele recruited a group of undergraduates to follow the squirrels and find out where they were burying food. The number of bogus interments shot up as soon as the human volunteers began to raid the food stocks - suggesting that the creatures were becoming even more deceptive as a reaction to the raids.

He believes that the bizarre behaviour suggests a far more advanced thought process for grey squirrels than scientist previously thought.

But experts are divided on whether the latest research means they are capable of reason or whether they simply get into routines which work for them.

Dr Lisa Leaver at the University of Exeter said: "They may just have learned through trial and error that certain behaviours protect their food from theft."

Do they know what they're doing?

More on consciousness

What does it mean to say that consciousness (really subjective experience) is an illusion? An illusion implies the ability to have illusions. So it doesn't make sense to me to say that consciousness (subjective experience) is an illusion. The experiencing of the illusion is subjective experience. Not quite Descartes, but close.

This isn't saying that I am proving my existence because I experience myself thinking. But it is saying the having of an illusion by definition is a phenomenon that requires consciousness.

It may also be that the experience of thinking (in Descartes' version) similarly (again by definition) establishes the existence of the thinker. That is if one grants that one experiences oneself thinking then by definition whatever is experiencing the thinking exists.

[CAS-Group] Shadow emergence

There is a discussion of consciousness on the CAS mailing list. I posted the following.

On an abstract level I agree with Telmo that saying that consciousness emerges from neurons does not lead to a theoretical problem. The problem it seems to me is that we experience consciousness. The 'hard' problem is all about qualia, which is subjective experience. We don't have any way of explaining how that comes about. Either it's 'just' emergence, which doesn't provide a satisfying explanation for our subjective experience, or it's something else, which obviously doesn't explain anything.

The problem with subjective experience is that we all have it. It seems so real. Emergent phenomena don't quite have that quality of personal immediacy. Yes we see ant colonies doing their things. That's real. But it doesn't have the sting of a pin prick. It seems to me that it's at the level of understanding how qualia can seem as real as they do that we're stuck.

The 'emergence' answer is that it's all an illusion. But that's no answer. Other than saying that we are built so that we experience these emergence effects as subjective experience it doesn't seem like much of an explanation. Perhaps that's the best we will be able to do.

Belief is so complicated

An article in the New York Times discusses Mormonism and Romney. The primary focus is on how the rest of the country treats Mormonism. It's worth reading. But I want to comment on how religious beliefs seem to make life so much more complex than it need be. And I don't mean complex in the sense of richness but complex in the sense of unnecessarily and overly complicated.

Faced with the allegation that they do not believe in the same God as ordinary Protestants, or that their beliefs are not truly Christian, Mormons find themselves in an extraordinarily awkward position.

This reminds me of the recent story that the Malaysian government objected to the use of the word Allah by non-Muslims when referring to non-Islamic gods. They claim that Allah refers to the god of Islam and not to the Christian god. Christians and Muslims all claim to believe not only in "one God" but in the same "one God." Yet at least some of them want to restrict a word to be used as a reference to their "one God" and not to the other "one God," who is presumably the same as their own "one God." Do they really worry about keeping it straight?

Romney has felt the need to minimize the centrality of Mormon scripture by saying that he reads the Gideon Bible when he is alone in his hotel room on the campaign trail.

The formulation may be seen as a clever hedge: to the ordinary Protestant listener, it sounds as if Romney is saying that he reads the same Bible that they do. To the Mormon insider, however, Romney is simply saying that when he travels to the hotel and finds himself, presumably, without a handy copy of the Book of Mormon, he reads the text of the Bible that can be found in the drawer beside the bed. Some LDS insiders have been heard to wonder quietly how Romney could come to be traveling without his own copy of the Mormon scriptures — or why he isn’t staying in Marriott hotels, where the Book of Mormon can be found in the nightstand drawer alongside the bible.

This is the same issue but approached with more subtlety. Heresy, I suppose, has always been a problem for people who feel strongly about what other people believe. But that makes life so difficult for them. First of all, one has to spend the time to figure out what the other person believes and whether it is different in important ways from what one believes oneself. This may matter when beliefs determine action: I'll shoot you if you do this or don't do that. But in the case of Mormonism vs. mainline Christianity we're not talking about actions. We're talking about beliefs that (a) are basically the same — they all believe in a trinitarian "one God" — and (b) by definition are outside the realm of evidence and verifiability in any case — or they would be science, which they aren't.

It's my understanding, based on conversations with someone who is very committed to religion, that belief is not the essence of religion, that belief is a final step in adopting a religion, not a first step. The essence of religion is a search for a connection to something fundamental. The connection is an experience, not a fact claim. Beliefs as fact claims may arise from the experience, but they aren't the experience. In my opinion it's unfortunate when people attempt to express a religious experience as a fact claim. It's really just an experience. So the fact claims are (or should be) secondary. (There's a good Buddhist story about this. Someone sees a glimmering of fundamental reality. Mara, who is cynical about mankind and doesn't wish us well, is asked by his attendants whether it worries him that the man has seen a bit of reality. His answer is "No" because the man will just turn it into a belief. I quote the whole thing, which is not much longer, at the bottom of this post.)

So many people put so much weight on variants in statements of belief. It seems so strange to see people who claim to hold the same fundamental beliefs finding themselves so at odds about the details. It seems to make their lives so unnecessarily complex.

Piet Hut on Explanations

Piet Hut on Explanations

So for each insight there is at least some explanation possible, but the same explanation may then be given for radically different insights. There is nothing that cannot be explained, but there are wrong insights that can lead to explanations that are identical to the explanation for a correct but rather subtle insight.

I think that the reason there can (almost) always be an explanation is that if an idea makes sense in one person's mind, it is an idea that can make sense in a human mind. Therefore unless the mind in which it makes sense is so enormously different from other minds, it should be possible to convey that idea to other minds. The trick, of course, is to figure out what to say so that the right idea forms in the in of another.

Varieties of subjective experience

In this posting about why men get turned on by seeing female flesh, I hypothesized that it was because our mirror neurons are triggered and reverberate in sympathy with how (we imagine) the woman feels. I said that we aren't interested in what she's thinking, and we're not interested in any deep emotions she may be feeling. We're just interested in the subjective experience of the sensations that are transmitted through her skin. (Isn't that sentence itself a bit of a turn-on?)

[In talking this over with a female friend, I was told that many women (who wonder whether it's normal or whether it shows signs of latent lesbian tendencies) are more turned on by watching women in sex scenes than by watching men. Apparently that's fairly universal and doesn't signify lesbian leanings. Perhaps we as human beings are wired to see women as sensation carriers — perhaps the mirror neurons of all human beings respond to seeing women's skin.]

This suggests that there are at least three domains of subjective experience: thought, emotion, and sensation. There are probably more. Is there a separate domain of subjective experience for each sense: i.e., vision, hearing, taste, and smell, besides skin sensation? Some people feel ravished by music or visual beauty. Great chiefs (and wine connoisseurs) undoubtedly have great senses of taste and small. Can we isolate these subjective experiences? Is there a subjective experience for proprioception? What about the unifying subjective experience of pure awareness? Has anyone done any work on this? What do the Buddhists, the masters of subjective experience, have to say about this?

If there are these different domains of subjective experience, then it's likely that animals have similar subjective experience to ours in a number of domains, even if not in others. So our intuition that animals are like us is probably more right than wrong.

8 important consumer trends for 2008

OK. Perhaps I just couldn't resist the picture, but trendwatching.com lists premiumization in its latest trend report. This one is about premium water. For example, the middle bottle is

Evian's limited-release Palace bottle, available only in high end bars and restaurants. [It] features a specially designed pouring top and is accompanied by a stainless steel coaster, selling for USD 15-20 per bottle.

To bring our attention back to the picture, one rarely hears anyone talk about what it is about pictures of women's bodies that turn men on. Is that too trivial a question? Of course men are turned on by women's bodies? Do we know why — from an experiential perspective. Certainly we know why from an evolutionary perspective. It helps us persevere as a species. But what's the mechanism of the turn on?

My sense is that the primary mechanism is an imagining of how the woman feels, that is her subjective experience, but subjective experience in mainly a physical sense — not what she's thinking about and not what she's feeling on any deeply emotional level. I think we men are turned on by imagining all the sensations that (we suppose) are being transmitted by the skin we see and what it feels like to the woman to have those sensations. Is that too obvious?

In saying this I haven't explained how imagining how a woman experiences her physical sensations turns men on. While writing this it struck me that mirror neurons must be involved. So I looked up mirror neurons and came across this NYT article by Sandra Blakeslee from about 2 years ago.

The ability to share the emotions of others appears to be intimately linked to the functioning of mirror neurons, said Dr. Christian Keysers, who studies the neural basis of empathy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and who has published several recent articles on the topic in Neuron.

When you see someone touched in a painful way, your own pain areas are activated, he said. When you see a spider crawl up someone's leg, you feel a creepy sensation because your mirror neurons are firing.

The article's final paragraph is as follows.

In yet another realm, mirror neurons are powerfully activated by pornography, several scientists said. For example, when a man watches another man have sexual intercourse with a woman, the observer's mirror neurons spring into action. The vicarious thrill of watching sex, it turns out, is not so vicarious after all.

Unfortunately, that was the end of the story. I suspect that men's mirror neurons are triggered not only by watching another man having sex with a woman but simply by looking at a woman whose body is depicted in such a way that it's easy for the man to imagine the sensations she is feeling.

Now for the most important question: why is she wearing that string around her waist?

More at peace than you

I've read some of Henepola Gunaratana and found his writings useful. But sometimes, some of the Buddhist writings I see seem to strike a more-at-peace-than-you attitude.

Go to a party. Listen to the laughter, that brittle-tongues voice that says fun on the surface and fear underneath. Feel the tension, feel the pressure. Nobody really relaxes. They are faking it. Go to a ball game. Watch the fans in the stands. Watch the irrational fit of anger. Watch the uncontrolled frustration bubbling forth that masquerades under the guise of enthusiasm or team spirit. Booing, catcalls and unbridled egotism in the name of team loyalty. Drunkenness, fights in the stands. These are people trying desperately to release tension from within. These are not people who are at peace with themselves. Watch the news on TV. Listen to the lyrics in popular songs. You find the same theme repeated over and over in variations. Jealousy, suffering, discontent, and stress.

The Famous Gorilla Video

An article about this past summer's meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) points to the famous Gorilla video. ASSC will have this year's meeting in Taipei.

Dogs can categorize pictures into those that contain dogs and those that don't

From New Scientist

Four dogs were simultaneously shown photographs of a landscape and of a dog, and were rewarded if they selected the latter using a paw-operated computer touch-screen. When the computer-savvy dogs were shown unfamiliar landscape and dog photos they continued to identify those containing dogs. And when shown an unfamiliar dog superimposed on a landscape used in the training phase, they were still able to pick it out in preference to an image of just a landscape.

Is this surprising? It would be if one thinks of dogs as computers and marvels that they can do image recognition. It isn't if one thinks this asks whether dogs can recognize other dogs. It may be if one thinks this asks whether dogs can understand that they are being asked to select pictures that contain other dogs. Can dogs distinguish pictures of collies from pictures of Beagles? Can they distinguish pictures of other dogs from pictures of their masters? Can they distinguish pictures of squirrels from pictures of rabbits? The experiment, at least as described, didn't ask useful questions.

Absent from Annapolis

Tom Friedman notes:

One of the most telling but little-noted ironies of the U.S.-sponsored peace summit in Annapolis, Md., was who on the Arab side didn’t attend. Syria, a country we barely talk to, was there. Saudi Arabia, which never meets with Israelis, was there. No, the two no-shows were the two Arab countries liberated by U.S. troops from the grip of Saddam Hussein: Iraq and Kuwait.

That’s right — Iraq and Kuwait, the two Arab countries hosting the most U.S. troops, and the two Arab countries with probably the most active elected Parliaments, were both absent.

Friedman doesn't draw any profound conclusions from this — only that Arab countries have lots of internal divisions, which must be healed before any sort of lasting peace is likely in the Middle East.

What strikes me is that he noticed this at all. Noticing an absence or a non-event is much harder than noticing an event. I'm sure the administration didn't point it out. I wonder whether he noticed it himself or if someone else told him about it. Either way, good for Tom Friedman for making this observation public.