Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 4)

 Chapter 6: The Empathic Ego

This chapter adds more complexity to the ego model. In previous chapters, Metzinger assembled up from minimal phenomenal self, to minimal subject, to minimal agent, and now he would describe human egos as agents with extra modules for living in a human society.

Metzinger gives a shocking observation that suggests even emotional self-consciousness is learned, rather than innate:

Have you ever watched a child who has just learned to walk run toward a desired object much too quickly and then trip and fall on his face? The child lifts his head, turns, and searches for his mother. He does so with a completely empty facial expression, showing no kind of emotional response. He looks into his mother’s face to find out what has happened. How bad was it, really? Should I cry or should I laugh?  

The toddler does not yet know how he should feel; therefore he looks at his mother’s face in order to define the emotional content of his own conscious self-experience. His self-model does not yet have a stable emotional layer to which he could attend and, as it were, register the severity of what just happened. The fascinating point is that here are two biological organisms that just a few months ago, before being physically separated at birth, were one. Their Egos, their phenomenal self- models, are still intimately coupled on the functional level. When the toddler gazes at his mother and starts to smile in relief, there is a sudden transition in his PSM. Suddenly, he discovers that he didn’t hurt himself at all, that the only thing that happened to him was a big surprise. An ambiguity is resolved: Now he knows how he feels.

Neuroscience of empathy

What are mirror neurons? According to Imitation, empathy, and mirror neurons (2009):

neurons with motor properties in premotor and posterior parietal cortex that fire not only during action execution, but also while observing somebody else performing the same or a similar action.

 and 

Empathy is implemented by a simulation of the mental states of other people. A large-scale network for empathy is composed of the mirror neuron system, the insula, and the limbic system. Mirror neurons were selected because they provide the adaptive advantage of intersubjectivity.

Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 3)

Chapter 4: From Ownership to Agency to Free Will

Review

In chapter 3, Metzinger used OBE and other disruptions to self-consciousness to sketch out a 3-part model of consciousness:

• Physical body model. This is a model of the physical body, with joints, bones, meat, weight, velocity, shape, etc. It is put into a model of the physical world, and it cannot occupy the same volume as other solids. So for example, the arm of the body cannot sink into the desk.
• Astral body model. This model has the same shape as the physical body model. However, it has no weight, is not affected by gravity, has no organs, and though it has a volume, it cannot exclude anything else from the volume (it's like turning off collision in a game). It is basically a ghost in the shell of the physical body model. It is usually a bit smaller than the physical body model.
• Viewpoint model. A point in space augmented with a Cartesian frame, to represent the orientation of your viewpoint. It represents your "true location". It is perched between the eyes of the astral body model, facing straight forward. 
  It is used to model where the sound you are hearing is coming from. So for example, if you hear a noise on the left, that would be modeled as a sound source to the left of the viewpoint. 
  It is also used to model where what you are seeing is. So for example, if you see a ball straight ahead, that is modelled as a ball straight ahead of the viewpoint.
  Note that even in a blind-deaf person, there is still a viewpoint model. It is simply not used to assist in inference of audio and visual input. Even a blind-deaf person must feel like they are somewhere in spacetime. That "somewhere" is the location of the viewpoint model within the world model.

Metzinger further contends that to create a thing that feels, it is necessary and sufficient to make a "minimal phenomenal selfhood". A minimal phenomenal selfhood is made of these parts:

• A model of spacetime.
• A point in the spacetime model, indicating "here I am".
• A model of the body (usually humanoid) centered around the viewpoint.
• A global workspace, that is, a buffer memory unit like the RAM. 

And to augment a minimal phenomenal selfhood into a minimal subject, it is necessary and sufficient to add:

• A self-attention control module. The three components of the minimal phenomenal selfhood should appear in the global workspace, and the self-attention control module's function is to emphasize/deemphasize parts of the self-body-model into focus in the global workspace.

This whole system for making a minimal subject is called a phenomenal self-model. It is reasonably easy to construct even with today's technology. It is probable that the self-driving cars in 5 years will have phenomenal self-models.

Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 2)

Chapter 3: Body Image, Out-of-Body Experiences, and the Virtual Self

This Chapter is fairly easy. It studies some disruptions of human self-consciousness and explain their meaning. The disruptions include OBE (Out-of-Body Experiences), autoscopy, heautoscopy, rubber-hand illusion, full-body rubber-hand illusion, phantom limbs.

Let's get the conclusion first:

You are never in direct contact with your own body. What you feel in the rubber-hand illusion, what AZ feels, or what Philip feels when his left arm is “plugged in” is exactly the same as what you feel when you attend to the sensation of your hands holding this book right now or to the feeling of pressure and resistance when you lean back in your chair. What you experience is not reality but virtual reality, a possibility. Strictly speaking, and on the level of conscious experience alone, you live your life in a virtual body and not in a real one.

Yes, everything we experience is virtual. We never experience reality directly, but only the brain simulation.

So what is the self in this simulation? The self is a complex construction of several parts, all of which usually stays together, but might come apart. The components are:

• Model of the physical body: the arms, the legs, the joint-angles, the head...
• Model of the inside of the physical body (interoceptive self): temperature, fullness, heartrate...
• Model of the viewpoint: a "camera" in the model of the world. It is usually sitting between the eyes of the physical body model, but it can move around.
• Others.

Metzinger wants to get to the bottom of things: find the "minimal phenomenal selfhood", the bare essentials for making a self.

We know more: A seeing self also is not necessary. You can shut the windows in front of the little man behind your eyes by closing your eyelids. The seeing self disappears; the Ego remains. You can be a robust, conscious self even if you are emotionally flat, if you do not engage in acts of will, and also in the absence of thought. Emotions, will, and thoughts are not necessary to the fundamental sense of selfhood. Every meditator (remember chapter 1) can confirm that you may settle into a calm, emotionally neutral state, deeply relaxed and widely alert, a state of pure observation, without any thought, while a certain elementary form of bodily self-consciousness remains. Let us call this “selfhood-as-embodiment.”

Minimal self-consciousness is not control, but what makes control possible.

Let's Read: The Ego Tunnel (Part 1)

The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (Metzinger, 2009)

Start with six questions.

1. One-World Problem, or the unity of consciousness; 
2. Now Problem, or the appearance of a lived moment; 
3. Reality Problem, or why you were born as a naive realist; 
4. Ineffability Problem, or what we will never be able to talk about; 
5. Evolution Problem, or the question of what consciousness was good for; 
6. Who Problem, or the issue of what is the entity that has conscious experience. 

One-World Problem

Metzinger is a philosopher that can really read, and he once set out to 

photocopy all existing encyclopedia articles on the topic I could find and track down the historical references. I wanted to know whether in the long history of Western philosophy there was a common philosophical insight running like a thread through humanity’s perennial endeavor to understand the conscious mind. To my surprise, I found two such essential insights.

The first is that consciousness is a higher-order form of knowledge accompanying thoughts and other mental states... in an important sense, consciousness is knowing that you know while you know.

This, Metzinger skips over.

The second important insight seems to be the notion of integration: Consciousness is what binds things together into a comprehensive, simultaneous whole. If we have this whole, then a world appears to us. If the information flow from your sensory organs is unified, you experience the world. If your senses come apart, you lose consciousness.

Why do we see one world only? Why can't we consciously multitask? Why can't we consciously multi-see, multi-feel, multi-think? (Certainly, we can multitask unconsciously, as in, talking while bicycling while balancing the groceries in one hand, but only one task might occupy the consciousness at one time.)

Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher

This post is a translation of a review of Après la finitude (After Finitude), the debut book of Quentin Meillassoux. The original is Quentin Meillassoux: A New French Philosopher (Graham Harman, 2009).

Meillassoux is sometimes funny and witty, as a continental philosophers aspire to.

It offers bold readings of the history of philosophy—Aristotle is not realist enough, Hume not skeptical enough. It shows bursts of scathing wit, as when drawing wry parallels between the anti-Darwinian reveries of creationism and major schools of present-day philosophy.

What is this wry parallel? We will see.

The very title After Finitude will be enough to  startle  present-day  continental  thought, since human finitude has been perhaps the central credo of the field from the time of its birth.

Okay. How does that work? Basically, "continental philosophy" has been based on the idea that humans are finite and can know nothing absolute, since absolute knowledge should be true everywhere, everywhen, and to know that requires one to check it for an infinite amount of time, at an infinite amount of places, and after thinking an infinite number of thoughts about it.

But what about math?

No Platonism! Math is just thought-patterns that humans have managed to reproduce faithfully through the years. It does not point to a higher reality, and it does not lead to absolutely true knowledge, only knowledge that is currently useful.

"After Finitude" means just "Get over this talk of finitude! Humans can know absolute things.".

One of the typical features of recent continental  thought  is  its  contempt  for  so-called “naïve  realism.”  The  human  being  is  now firmly established as the point of entry for all serious philosophy... The notion of an objective world-in-it-self  seems  to  elude  our  grasp.  Nonetheless, few authors have faced this predicament with full-blown absolute idealism à la Berkeley—if not  quite  “naïve,”  such  extreme  idealism strikes  most  of  us  as  gratuitous  and  bizarre amidst the undeniable blows of the world. This leaves philosophy in an ambiguous position, neither realist nor idealist.

How to be happy

The equation of happiness

Let's imagine a happiness meter, calibrated so that if we measure the happiness of everyone on earth, the average happiness is exactly 0. If you get -1, you are sadder than average, and if you get +4, you are much happier than average.

Then we can imagine an "equation of happiness": given a person P's genes, memories, current job, current activity, friends, etc, predict what their happiness is.

Happiness(P) = ?

Well, to start with, we can do the laziest thing possible:

Happiness(P) = 0

After all, that's the global average. Can't be too wrong! But that's boring. What is interesting is to account for the variation of happiness level between people. So let's try that. What accounts for variation in happiness?

Next, remember that people seem to have a set level of happiness that they return to after a while. Good things make them happier than the set level, and bad things make them less, but they always return to it.

Happiness(P) = SetLevel(P's personality) + EventsHappiness(P's history)

Next, remember the general lesson: for personality traits, usually half is based on genes, half based on environment. 

Happiness(P) = 0.5 GeneScore(P's genes) 

+ 0.5 EnvScore(P's environment) 

+ EventsHappiness(P's history)

And we have a fairly workable model of happiness! 

Actually, the current best model for happiness is roughly this:

Happiness(P) = 0.5 GeneScore(P's genes) 

+ 0.1 CircumstanceScore(P's circumstance) 

+ 0.4 ActivityScore(P's activity)

where "circumstance" stands for

the national, geographical, and cultural region in which a person resides, as well as demographic factors such as age, gender, and ethnicity. Circumstantial factors also include the individual’s personal history, that is, life events that can affect his or her happiness, such as having experienced a childhood trauma, being involved in an automobile accident, or winning a prestigious award. Finally, circumstantial factors include life status variables such as marital status, occupational status, job security, income, health, and religious affiliation.

and "activity" stands for things that you do intentionally, non-automatically. Some activities particularly useful for happiness include meditation, exercise, practicing a valued skill, helping others without asking for reward.

How to eat parasites: a guide for the perplexed

Let's continue our cursed journey of learning all about parasites! Today we will learn how to eat parasites: what to eat, how to eat them, and what to avoid.

The main source I rely on is

Overstreet, Robin M., ‘Presidential Address: Flavor Buds and Other Delights’, Journal of Parasitology, 89.6 (2003), 1093–1107 <https://doi.org/10/dv2tdk>

Tapeworm diet

Kind of a meme really. The tapeworm diet idea is simple: if there's a tapeworm in your intestine, they would eat your food and get fat for you, so that you won't get fat.

Typical advertisement from early 20th century

While tapeworms usually do not make one sick, they can block the intestine if they get too big or too many, which is life-threatening. That, and they don't work that well for losing weight.

Also this delicious factoid:

The cysticerci of the pork tapeworm, Taenia solium, have been fed by unprincipled medical advisors to unwitting Hollywood actresses in the 1930s as "slimming pills," producing adults in the intestine (Russell-Hunter, 1979).

Let's Read: Parasite Rex

Let's read through Parasite Rex (2001), chapter by chapter.

Prologue

Parasites are much more prevalent and important than people give credit for. A majority of species of multicelluar life are parasites.

The biodiversity of parasites is astonishing and there is so much to learn, especially since biologists have long considered parasites as a freakish side-show to the spectacle of life.

Chap 1. Early history of parasitology.

Caduceus is probably based on the primitive therapy for guinea worm.

Renaissance doctors think that parasites are internally generated tissues/spontaneously generated organisms, symptoms, not causes, of diseases.

Spontaneous generation is falling out of favor in the 18th century thanks to experiments on rotten meat (disproving spontaneous generation of maggots) and meat soup experiment of Pasteur (disproving spontaneous generation of microorganisms).

Parasites posed theological problems:

1. If parasites are truly spontaneously generated, then it'd be accrediting bodies with the power to create life, which is playing God.

2. Theodicy. Darwin's quote about parasitoid is relevant:

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars...

The familiar animals (fish, cats, humans...) have their young looking very similar to their adults. This is not so for parasites. Most of them have complex life-histories, with vastly different body shapes. Japetus Steenstrup was the first to propose that they travelled from host to host, changing their body shapes as they do.

Friedrich Küchenmeister proposed that bladder worms (little worm hiding in cysts in animal muscles) would develop into tapeworms in the digestive tract after being swallowed (usually when the host is eaten).

In 1854, then 1859, he proved his theory by feeding death row inmates with bladder worms (hidden in food), then dissecting the corpses and finding developed tapeworms.

Some Zhuangzi stories

Who is Zhuangzi?

莊子 Zhuangzi ("Master Zhang") is a Chinese philosopher of Taoism in 4th century BC. The main source about him and his students is the book Zhuangzi. His original name is 莊周 Zhuang Zhao, but as traditional for great Chinese thinkers, he was called "Master Zhang". Due to romanization issues, you might see his name written as Chuang Tzu, Chuang-tzu, Chuang Chou, etc. Same as why Mao Zedong is also referred to as "Mao Tse-tung".

Taoism, if talked about at all in Western countries, is usually by quoting something witty from the 道德經 Tao Te Ching, a terse philosophical poem by 老子 Laozi, the legendary founder of Taoism. This is unfortunate, since Zhuangzi, the second classic of Taoism, is far more fun and approachable than Tao Te Ching.

The Book of Zhuangzi is one of the most entertaining as well as one of the profoundest books in the world. 

— Arthur Waley, English orientalist and sinologist

Well, not anymore. I'll compile fun stories from Zhuangzi in this post!

The Wuxuan cannibalism frenzy, China 1966

In 1968, during the cultural revolution in Wuxuan of Guangxi, a case of widespread cultured cannibalism occurred. This is a quick post compiling the best quotes from Consuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, China, May to July 1968 (1995). This paper is itself heavily based on the book Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China (1993).

Wuxuan in 1966 was a fairly remote county reporting a population of 221,786.

From May to July, struggles were held in all or the great majority of the 114 brigades (villages and streets [jie]), and no fewer than 90 had one or more struggle meetings that terminated with on-the-spot execution. Of a total of 524 executed, 64 (later amended to 75 or 76) were eaten throughout the county's municipality and nine communes, according to the official investigation (Zheng 1993:58, 96). 

His second chapter is closely based on the official report of what happened, dated May 1987, and a separate list of 64 victims, dated July 4, 1983. Fifty-six had their heart and liver cut out; 18 were completely consumed (down to the soles of their feet), 13 had their genitals eaten, one was decapitated after being eaten, and 7 were actually cut up while they were still alive (Zheng 1993:96).

Only 15 were punished by jail sentences, for only up to 14 years.

Let's read: Meltdown by Nick Land

In this post, I rewrite Meltdown into readable text.

Earth is stuck on a trajectory towards a singularity of technology and capitalism. It has been stuck on this trajectory ever since the renaissance, when humans started doing rational thinking, global trade over the ocean, and making commodity products. The global economic and technological sphere is getting more complicated, faster, self-improving, threatening old social order. The markets are getting smarter, and making AI and robots. Meanwhile, human governments are forced to adapt, modernize, and get paranoid, trying to keep up with the complications and figure out what is happening.

Global capitalism destroyed many empires and political systems, sometimes via massive wars. It has killed the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet Union. This political destruction keeps happening, faster and faster, especially in cyberspace.

Biological engineering is a new and serious threat to the human security system. Think about all the terrible and new ways genetic engineering can mess up with what it means to be biologically human!

Neo-China arrives from the future. China will be powerful, technological, capitalistic, and more advanced than all other countries.

The Anthropocene

The Annual Review is a pretty good magazine for review articles. The Concept of the Anthropocene (Malhi, 2017) is written by a proponent of the concept of the anthropocene.

At its core, the Anthropocene is an encapsulation of the concept that modern human activity is large relative to the basic processes of planetary functioning, and therefore that human social, economic, and political decisions have become entangled in a web of planetary feedbacks.

Or, "Actually, the earth is small, and the ocean is not an infinite garbage dump."

How it started

The modern use of the term Anthropocene began in 2000 with Crutzen & Stoermer's paper in the Global Change Newsletter, simply entitled “The Anthropocene.” This was followed in 2002 by Crutzen's high-profile piece in Nature (“Geology of Mankind”), which gained much wider circulation and attention.

Crutzen is a 1995 Nobel Laureate for research on the ozone hole.

A pivotal event in terms of gaining wider scientific acceptance and adoption was the publication of a thematic issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2011. This issue covered a range of perspectives, including conceptual and historical antecedents (6), biosphere transformation (10), sediment fluxes (11), and the geological case (12).

That issue is 13 March 2011, Volume 369, Issue 1938. It's a very fun issue, plenty to read!

Let's Read: Scale (Geoffrey West, 2017)

Scale (Geoffrey West, 2017) has the full title of Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies, and it's a beautiful book. To get an overview, watch

Note

Geoffrey West has his own opinions which are largely orthogonal to what the book is actually about. Here I collect them. When you read the book, feel free to subtract these opinions from the book. It would not affect your understanding of the central point of the book, which is the scaling theory.

• No scientific field is complete without some simple theories. All fields should be like physics. Big data, model-free theory, mere collection of data... those are not enough.

"All science is either physics or stamp collecting." -- Ernest Rutherford

• 21st century is the century of biology.
• Reductionism to the fundamental theory of everything is not enough. Because it is impractical to derive complex phenomena, like life, from the fundamental theories of particles, it is wrong to pay too much attention to it. A full theory of the universe needs several layers, all equally important.
• Most biologists are too interested in "stamp collecting". There are easy discoveries are missed because not enough biologists are thinking like physicists. The physicist way of science is to pick a few key ingredients, make a mathematical model out of those, that can successfully predict a lot. Once that's done, they add more ingredients ("perturbation theory", "second-order theory", etc), making the model more precise but less elegant.

Let's Read: Jorge Luis Borges's Dreamtigers

In this post, we summarize every single entry in  Dreamtigers (Borges, 1964). We also add commentaries on particularly obscure references.

Dreamtigers, first published in 1960 as El Hacedor ("The Maker"), is a collection of poems, short essays, and literary sketches by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. Divided fairly evenly between prose and verse, the collection examines the limitations of creativity. 

Let's Read: A Problem

In this post, we read through Borges's story A Problem, which is about Don Quixote, a story written by Cervantes:

The story follows the adventures of a nobleman named Alonso Quixano who reads so many knightly stories that he goes insane and decides to become a knight-errant, reviving chivalry and serving his country, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire. 

His name means "Don Quixote, of la Mancha". La Mancha is a region in central Spain, where Don Quixote lived in.

A Problem

Jorge Luis Borges

Let's read: Dead Men's Dialogue

In this post we read through Borges's story Dead Men's Dialogue, which, other than the usual kind of maddening riddles that writers play, where they only say half of what is said, and I have to fill in the other half, is extra hard to read for me because it is full of references to South American history that I don't know.

So I'll fill in all the blanks here.

Dead Men’s Dialogue

Jorge Luis Borges

Let's Read: Avoiding a Tragedy of the Commons in the Peer Review Process (2018)

There are just too much to read, too much to learn. We try our best but still fall short of reading 1% of all we want to read. And people keep writing.

This deluge of reading is worsened for paper-reviewers, who not only have to read very difficult papers, but also have to read closely, check their validity, and write reviews. Today we read about how to deal with a deluge of papers to review. Today's paper is presented in a video too:

Let's Read: Nassim Nicolas Taleb's Skin in the Game (2018)

Today at the airport I picked up Taleb's book Skin in the Game (2018). After reading about 40 pages around it, I got quite irritated by the rhetoric and gave the book away. Then I opened a webpage to see what the book is actually about without all the rhetoric.

In short, Taleb argues for two aspects of a "survival first" philosophy:

• Value: survival is the only sacred value. Big survival (survival of the species) is more sacred than small survival (personal survival). All else are profane and infinitely smaller than survival. From this comes his disdain of cost-benefit analysis and his obsession with ruins, deaths, and "black swan events" (rare but big events whose probability can't be expected before they actually happen).
• Knowledge: trust evolution, not human thoughts. If something have survived for a long time, it is most likely correct. Untested human thoughts (except by rare geniuses) are certainly wrong. From this comes his hate of intellectuals, theories, and short-time lab experiments, and his revere of traditions, and long-time players.

Let's Hilariously Read: Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (2009)

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (2009) is a collection of 40 short stories about how afterlife could work.

Imma just comment on each of them with 1 sentence, then with more if it seems needed.

Like THIS.

Let's read Attention and consciousness (2006), Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes (2006), Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya. This paper argues that attention and consciousness are different.

This paper in an expanded format is viewable on Scholarpedia.

Attention in this paper always means "selective attention". Think of it as "shining a spotlight" on something, like a face, a melody, a word. It does not mean general arousal and alertness.

We argue that events or objects can be attended to without being consciously perceived. Furthermore, an event or object can be consciously perceived in the near absence of top-down attentional processing.