Radiolab : Words

In case you missed it, Radiolab has a wonderful episode on the connection between language and thought, and what it is like to exist without language. What I found most fascinating was the evidence for how language facilitates certain types of thought. I was also moved by the emotional story of an adult learning language for the first time, and subsequently being unable to regain or relate the nature of his subjective experience before language.

Collect Intelligence

As part of my day job, I'm setting up a futurism blog called The Prevail Project (it's in early alpha, so don't look). I have a backlog of interesting articles to work through, and the cool ones will be cross-posted to We Alone.

No matter how smart you are, you can't fix the problems of the world by yourself. Teamwork is the order of the day, and a new study by MIT suggests that the skills of effective teams might be more universal than previously thought. Researchers put small teams of two to five people through a battery different assignments, while monitoring how they interacted.

“We did not know if groups would show a general cognitive ability across tasks,” said Thomas W. Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, one of the authors of the paper. “But we found that there is a general effectiveness, a group collective intelligence, which predicts a group’s performance in a lot of situations.”

That effectiveness, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. Groups whose members had higher levels of “social sensitivity” — the willingness of the group to let all its members take turns and apply their skills to a given challenge — were more collectively intelligent. “Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,” said Malone. “In groups where one person dominated, the group was less intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed.”

The average intelligence of the individuals in the group had no effect on their performance. And interestingly, teams with more women were more effective than male dominated teams.

What's the take away? Now that scientists have the tools to study how groups work in detail, we can make smarter, more effective teams. The skills of social sensitivity, listening and taking turns, could be taught. Depending on how much technology a group was willing to accept, the methods of the MIT researchers could tell groups when they're being "collectively stupid" and cutting members out of the loop.

Small teams are particularly important for Prevail because teams can bring many different skills and perspectives to the table, and can adapt to the specifics of a new problem. While it takes years to master a body of knowledge, teams that can effectively integrate new members who are already experts can respond rapidly to emerging threats. Knowing how small groups work, and how they can be made to work better, is one way to Prevail.

Paper Review : Neural Plasticity and Consciousness

For neuroscientists, treating "The Hard Problem of Consciousness" outside of bar-room speculation is a risky career move. This is why we have true doctors of philosophy, and why the philosophy paper "Neural Plasticity and Consciousness" by Susan Hurley and Alva Noë is a good thing. Hurley and Noë's thesis relates to some recent activity on WeAlone [1,2, maybe 3] , so I will attempt to summarize the article in a language that makes most sense to me.

First Hurley and Noë note that the "hard problem of consciousness" is equivalent to what they call an "absolute gap", i.e. "why should we assume that neural activity is solely responsible for conscious perception at all ?". My interpretation is that Hurley and Noë say "we can't, this is a leap of faith", and for the purposes of the paper accept as an axiom that neural activity corresponds to perception. The meat of the paper then, discusses why some neural activity should take on a particular quality, like seeing, and other neural activity should take on a distinct quality, like hearing.

Lately, I've been throwing around the term "neural topology" and "manifold structure" in an embarrassingly non-rigorous manner. I'd like to say "the topology of qualia acquires the topology of stimuli via learning of the intrinsic statistical structure of the stimuli, and in a sense, the stimulus stimulus model constitutes the nature of qualia", but this is vague. Hurley and Noë express, I believe, a similar sentiment clearly and without abusing terms from mathematics :

It is argued that the different characteristics of input activity from specific sources (visual vs. auditory) generate not just representational structure specific to that source but also source-specific sensory and perceptual qualities.

That is to say, when the brain learns the topology of stimuli ( possibly in union with the topology of motor outputs as they modify stimuli ), the brain acquires the qualia corresponding to said stimuli.

Earlier we talked about the possibility of defining an algebraic structure representing the shape of information coded in the brain. The take-away point was that it might be possible to rigorously say "these two areas have effectively the same abstract structure, since you can relate them by some structure preserving relationship". The Hurley and Noë paper provides anecdotes which suggest that, when two physically distinct neural circuits have the same abstract structure (topology), then the subjective experience (qualia) are also the same. Specifically, they discuss experiments in which blind patients were able to acquire visual qualia through a tactile stimulation device that translates camera images into stimulation of the skin.

After a period of adaptation (as short as a few minutes), subjects report perceptual experiences that are distinctively non-tactile and quasi-visual. … However, Bach-y-Rita emphasizes that the transition to quasi-visual perception depends on the subject’s exercising active control of the camera. … Perceivers can acquire and use practical knowledge of the common laws of sensorimotor contingency that vision and TVSS-perception share. For example, as you move around an object, hidden portions of its surface come into tactile-visual view, just as they would if you were seeing them."

This experiment suggests that giving a system a new topology induces qualia of that topology, and that learning the new topology does not necessarily require expensive and lengthly re-wiring. That camera control was necessary for inducing visual qualia from tactile stimulation suggests that the structure of visual stimuli and the experience of seeing must necessarily incorporate how our actions : movement of the eyes and head, and translation in space, alter the content of visual stimuli. Thus, when we talk about the "topology" of a stimulus, we must also incorporate how our actions change the stimulus (how our motor operators transform the stimulus space).

Hurley and Noë cover a number of other interesting anecdotes, including what happens when the brain fails to adapt its structure to reality, and pointing out that, in a left-right reversal of vision, reversing the interpretation of visual data is topologically equivalent to reversing the coordinates of motor output and proprioception, such that many different possible explanations of neural adaptation may be topologically equivalent.

So, I really do feel like, if we can make this notion of "neural topology*" more rigorous, we will have a satisfying answer to the portion of "the hard problem" that is amenable to scientific and mathematical investigations.

*neural topology : the idea that, in high dimensional sensory spaces, the distribution of probable stimuli occupy a reduced subset of said high dimensional space, and that one can move about this subset in a differentiable manner to transition smoothly between probable stimuli. This is a vague notion. It is related to "statistical structure" and "manifold", although I should note that we don't have enough information to say that the space of probably sensory-motor states is actually a manifold.

Brains at DARPA

The gnomes at the Pentagon are always pushing the limits of science, and these days they're looking into brains. A leading DARPA initiative investigates the possibility of telepathy. I can't say that faster communication between soldiers is the wave of the future. While it'd be useful to be able to communicate well in a squad that was split up, there are probably easier ways to do this. While I'm fairly sure general emotional states could be transmitted, the only one that seems useful militarily is 'danger.' Extracting enough information out of an EEG to allow tactical command seems like a major challenge. For a good look at how a developed system of this type would work, see Scalzi's The Ghost Brigade.

Where I see this coming in handy is in therapy, negotiations, and relationships. If these machines allow better interpersonal emotional understanding, i.e. empathy, they offer a path to peace. By becoming more in tune with our emotions, we can better understand ourselves and each other, reducing tension in this world.

BONUS LINK:
Techer could be new DARPA chief.

Penetrabit: Slime-Temples

by Rob Hardin

Life is a disease of matter.
--Goethe

I
30 cm. of creeping protoplasm,
absently gibbering spirals, hexahedrons, hillocks, trills
may indicate an autocatalytic reaction.
And the hypnotic figurations of nerve axons-

Receptive, active, quiescent-
turn like scrolls of electrolyzed plasma.
Both substances reveal a talent for spatial organization:
their dead thrashings trace patterns of cerebral complexity.

Similarly, the contractions of human heart muscle
resemble a wave spreading outward.
When the wave is broken, heart fibrillations
exhibit persistent patterns. And, often

these autocatalytic spirals of disease
are attended by failure and death.

II
The surface of the brain
may also erupt in a necropolis of spirals.
Reverberating cortical depression
brings with it a pattern of self-propagating forms.

Even a disc galaxy follows this rococo pathology:
its tentacles of stars are ragged whorls.
A parahuman architect is endless sketching cochlear temples to its own vacant energies.

If god is dead, he is dressed as a tendrillar Louis XIV,
and his fingers are twitching.

David Darling: Equations of Eternity

Subtitle: "Speculations on Consciousness, Meaning, and the Mathematical Rules that Orchestrate the Cosmos." In my defense for checking it out of the library, the subtitle of Crick's Astonishing Hypothesis is "The Scientific Search for the Soul," and that was the publisher's fault.

It turns out, though, to be just as amusing as the subtitle would suggest. In particular, it contains the first serious exposition of the homunculus fallacy I've ever read:

Not least, the forebrain serves as the brain's "projection room," the place where sensory data is transformed and put on display for internal viewing. In our case, we are (or can be) actually aware of someone sitting in the projection room. But the fish's forebrain is so tiny that it surely possesses no such feeling of inner presence. There is merely the projection room itself, and a most primitive one at that.

This occurs, thankfully, on page 7; and it's a determined reader who's made it through manglings of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the word "evolve." But if you can stomach any more of this guy I'd bet the rest of the book is hilarious.

On a side note I don't know if the following argument makes any sense:

Say you have a perfect digital model of a finite universe containing conscious beings. Assume anything that appears random in our world (i.e. exact positions of subatomic particles) may be modeled as pseudorandom. So we have an extrinsically explicit representation of the world, but not identity; characteristics of one particle are represented by the states and relationships of many other particles. The way the data is organized, from our point of view as programmers, can't possibly make the difference between whether the simulated creatures are actually conscious or not. Either they are, and perhaps we should consider the ethics of writing murder mysteries, or they are not, and there is something very special about the most efficient form of information storage. Or our universe isn't finite and so we don't have to care.