the evolving mind

It seems to me that much of human existence is about chasing pleasure. Or at least relative pleasure–moving away from unpleasant experiences toward more pleasant. Bored at your desk? Have another cup of coffee. Listen to some music. Home life not stimulating enough? Maybe a top-shelf home entertainment system will bring you greater pleasure. Etc.

As regular readers might guess, a recent news release of the science kind got me thinking about pleasure. Here’s the lead:

Many cancer patients in Europe are being denied access to adequate pain relief because of over-zealous regulations restricting the availability and accessibility of opioid-based drugs such as morphine. [source]

It additionally seems to me that many people have a biased view of pleasure, including relative pleasure (moving away from suffering), and when and how it’s okay to pursue it. For example: the upper-class guy who buys a powerful jet ski and spends an afternoon thrill-seeking before retiring to a bar veranda for a couple cold cocktails — perfectly acceptable. The dude in the depths of the slums taking drugs and consorting with his pals in an abandoned building — not okay.

Certainly, it’s not a simple issue. And in a well-functioning society we do need shared values. But black and white thinking about drugs, or jet skis, for that matter, is just not very enlightened. And in my estimation, not very humane, either.

Technorati Links: culture, drugs, pleasure

Do human beings have free will? Well, what do you mean by will and what type of freedom? Seriously.

Students of psychology understand there are a number of things that severely challenge the notion of free will. First and foremost among these is the fact that we are social creatures that have been shaped by others and continue to be influenced by them. Socialization, enculturation, myriad types social learning experiences and events…. Social context has a strong influence on our behavior — even cognitive behavior — an influence we are largely ignorant of.

Recent research into altruism, of all things, demonstrates how our behavior can be influenced outside of conscious awareness.

I wrote, “of all things,” because by definition altruistic behavior requires putting aside selfishness to help others. Which in a sense implies free will, for how else to you put aside selfishness?

As reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, and as it appeared in this EurakAlert news bulletin — Pay it forward: Elevation leads to altruistic behavior — the simple act of watching a video clip of other people expressing an inspired, caring attitude can change the likelihood that a person will choose to behavior altruistically.

The results revealed that participants who watched the uplifting TV clip were more likely to volunteer for another research study than volunteers who saw the neutral TV clip, suggesting that elevation may make us more willing to help others. However, anybody can say they will volunteer for a subsequent study or would be willing to help another person. The researchers wanted to see if elevation can result in actual helping behavior…..

The results of this second experiment were striking — the participants who viewed the uplifting TV clip spent almost twice as long helping the research assistant than participants who saw the neutral TV clip or the comedy clip, indicating that elevation may lead to helping behavior.

Additionally, when it comes to free will — the question whether I am ultimately free to do x or y, this important issue also surfaces: Where did and does the “I” come from? The whole notion of free will rests upon an illusion of pure agency. And in the case of altruism, how truly altruistic is it if the individual behaving unselfishly doesn’t have a fully autonomous self in the first place?

No man or woman is a psychological island. Beneath the sea of conscious awareness lies a substrate of social connectedness. One that shaped the present self and still influences it today.

Technorati Links: free will, social psychology

I can’t remember where, but yesterday I encountered the old canard, “Science can only answer ‘how’ questions. The ‘why’ questions are beyond its scope.” Rather than being philosophically profound, that attitude reflects a cognitive conceit. Or maybe a cognitive “myopia.”

Consider the above photograph of the backside of a hibiscus blossom (backside to potential pollinators and those that don’t reside in the depths of the bush, as some insects do). Science can certainly better answer the question “How do we find it beautiful?” than it can “Why is it beautiful?” The reason? Subjectivity. In why questions we find lurking a subjective stance. How is it meaningful . . . to me, the subject. Because science strives for objectivity, it shuns such subjectivity. Yet it can answer the subjective question more accurately than can religion or art, etc., so long as the perspective is specified and not assumed to be absolute.

How? Once the subject of the “why” is specified, science can roll up its sleeves and determine the “how” that subject perceives the phenomenon as it does.

Back to the hibiscus blossom. Simply asking “Why is the blossom beautiful?” is an unscientific question. Unrefined. “Why is the blossom considered beautiful by humans?” or “Why is the blossom attractive to bees?” — now these are questions science can more readily go about answering.

True, science is not as good at answering the relatively vague “why” questions. But in this case, the problem is not with science, but with the question.

Technorati Links: epistemology, science

Whoa! In a previous post about Dawkins’ book, didn’t I criticize the use of “fact” to describe the Theory of Evolution? Yes I did. How then, in the title to this post, can I refer to the facts of evolution without contradiction?

Allow me to explain. The philosophical wordsmith in me believes that a theory cannot be a fact. While a theory can be be true, or valid, or empirically substantiated beyond the shadow of a doubt (as in the case of the Theory of Evolution), theories belong in different categories than facts.

So no, I don’t believe it is contradictory to refrain from referring to evolution-theory as a fact, but freely refer to the empirical measurements and observations that evolution has occurred as facts.

Dawkins himself illustrates the difference by using this metaphor throughout his book: a detective objectively examining the evidence for evolution will surely come to the conclusion that evolution is a fact.

What are detected? Facts. What is the result? A conclusion. However, I do stop short of calling a conclusion a fact. Yet there are undeniable facts supporting the conclusion. If Evolutionary Theory itself were the case of a simple fact, would you need a detective to detect it?

One of the things Dawkins’ book does extremely well is to share some of the most substantial facts that reveal evolution to us. Bits of evidence that lead to one conclusion. Evolution is true.

In Chapter 5, “Before Our Very Eyes,” of his most recent book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Dawkins presents evidence of evolution in our time. And the cases of bacterial evolution and guppy evolution are very compelling.

Evolution on a Petri Dish

Richard Lenski & co. followed not 2 nor 20, but a mind-boggling 45,000 generations of bacteria in their lab. As a selective pressure — a “fitness hurdle” that the evolution of the bacteria surmounted — they manipulated the food supply, the amount of glucose in the environment. This was a controlled experiment. A test. And evolution passed the test. Undeniably so. Read the account in his book. You’ll be impressed.

Evolution in a Stream and Lab

In another bit of slam-dunk research Dawkins shares, an experiment produced measurable phenotypical change in populations of guppies. In as little 9 months! The presence of predatory fish provided the fitness hurdle subsequent generations of offspring were “selected for” (a problematic term, for no external agent did any selecting).

What about the fish changed? The average number of male decorative spots, the overall size of the fish, and the number of offspring. In both the predator-free and predator-limited environments, the fish grew larger and had fewer offspring of larger size. This is a distinctly different reproductive strategy, at least on the spectrum of “fewer with greater chances of survival vs. or more with lesser.” Additionally, it seems sexual selection favored spots in the males. But only in the predator-free and predator-limited stream environments. This is a great example why we speak of selective pressures. Just as sexual selection is not an all-or-nothing proposition, neither is the selective pressure applied by the presence of predators. Every generation lives and dies within an environmental context replete with pressures, plural. Which are the most important? Wait a generation and the answer may change.

Very significantly, the guppy study has been replicated in a controlled lab environment. Experimenters manipulated a variable, the presence of predators, to see if it would cause change in another — the phenotype of the small fish. It did.

The Conclusion

There is only one sensible way to describe what happened to those many generations of bacteria and guppies: They evolved. It is an inescapable conclusion. No denying it.

Evolutionary theory passed those two tests described above. As it has many others. You reasonably say say that controlled experiment has confirmed the validity, the truth, of Evolutionary Theory.

What test has any other theory about the origins and development of life on Earth passed? None. And that speaks volumes.

Technorati Links: evolution, Richard Dawkins

I took this photo in a small Sicilian church. Relative to the rest of the church, the altar was quite large and ornate.

What are altars all about? Here’s the etymology of the term:

O.E., from L. altare (pl. altaria), probably originally meaning “burnt offerings” (cf. L. adolere “to worship, to offer sacrifice, to honor by burning sacrifices to”), but infl. by L. altus “high.” [source]

Today millions of people will go to their “high place.” The place where transcendant forces are supposedly manifest. Will they make sacrifices to their most high being? Their ancestors likely did.

Historically speaking, altars got splattered with blood. While the talk of body and blood sacrifice is purely metaphorical today, does that make the ideology any more lofty? In my opinion — to the contrary.

Technorati Links: freethought, religion

People fond of simple answers would prefer if there were a clean line in the sand, so to speak, between life and non-life–between what we categorize as “alive” and what call “inanimate.” But the more you examine the boundary, and refine the definition that creates the boundary, you encounter many problems. Like the virus. And, more recently, the prion.

An article I found over at ScienceDaily illustrates the point. The ground-breaking news:

…prions, bits of infectious protein devoid of DNA or RNA that can cause fatal neurodegenerative disease, are capable of Darwinian evolution.

Prions evolve?! If not ground-breaking, this news is at least sand-sweeping. Where’s that clean line between life and not?

Here are some important points drawn from the article:

1. Infectious prions (short for proteinaceous infectious particles) are associated with some 20 different diseases in humans and animals, including mad cow disease and a rare human form, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.
2. Prions have the ability to reproduce, despite the fact that they contain no nucleic acid genome.
3. In viruses, mutation is linked to changes in nucleic acid sequence that leads to resistance. Now, this adaptability has moved one level down — to prions and protein folding — and it’s clear that you do not need nucleic acid for the process of evolution.”

As a final exclamation point, the tail section of the article carries this sub-head: “Quasi-Species.”

If there is a line in the sand, it is quite quasi.

Technorati Links: biology, evolution

I guess I have a bucket-list of sorts: there a number of experiences I’d like to have before I “kick it.” High on the list is traveling to Africa to walk the soil of Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. By the time I can afford it, I’ll probably have to bring an aluminum walker. But what the hey, just to be there and imagine the lives of my “deep ancestors” — that would be something.

Further down the list are destinations such as Alaska and Belize. Absent from my bucket list, however, are physical challenges such as sky-diving or planting my flag atop Everest-sized mountains. Though I do enjoy climbing mountains.

That said, I do have some challenges I’d like to confront and possibly overcome in my remaining decades (if all goes well). These are intellectual goals. And although I have no formal 1-2-3 of these, the other day I was made aware that I do have an intellectual bucket-list of sorts by this article:

Entropy Alone Can Create Complex Crystals from Simple Shapes; Tetrahedra Packing Record Broken

In specific, these two sentences prompted my formal commencement of keeping an intellectual bucket-list:

Entropy is a measure of the number of ways the components of a system can be arranged. While often linked to disorder, entropy can also cause objects to order.

In terms of the physics, the hard science of it, entropy is a fully comprehended and documented phenomenon. Yet in terms of how we think about entropy, the language we use to speak about it in general, the philosophy or metaphysics of it, well, the concept is still largely a puzzle. At least to me it is.

I first got to thinking about entropy when chasing the what I would designate as the number one element on my intellectual bucket list: a satisfactory understanding of the nature of time. Entropy is considered one of primary “arrows of time,” one of the reasons why there is a uni-directional flow (so the wording goes) to time.

But what is entropy? For years the working definition of entropy consisted of the measure of disorder in a system. It is a pillar of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which states that in any closed system, disorder can only increase, it cannot decrease. Concentrated energy will always becomes more diffuse over time.

Other understandings of entropy include concepts of energy distribution, probability measures, and even our knowledge of a system.

What is entropy? As a pure physicist might say, “I know it when I measure it.” But what more can we say of it?

The measure of disorder in a given system. Yet, as quoted above, in some cases entropy can increase the order of a system. How can something cause what would actually refute or negate it?

I clearly have some reading and thinking to do before I can cross entropy off my list.

Technorati Links: education, entropy

Consciousness befuddles me. If it doesn’t you — you probably haven’t given it much thought.

I wonder, for example, how my consciousness would differ, if exist at all, were I to lack short-term memory.

You: Did you see those flower buds?

Me: What buds?

Actually, without short-term memory of the sensory sort, by the time you emitted the final phonetic element of your question, “buds,” the “did you” would have long left my mind.

My semi-educated hunch is that short-term memory of some sort plays a crucial role in what we call consciousness.

But maybe you shouldn’t ask me, for I am a being critically limited by the nature of my own consciousness. Whatever that is.

Oh, and by the way, the “figure” and “ground” of the title refer to memory and real-time sensation.

Technorati Links: philosophy, psychology

The weather forecast for today: rain. Oh look, it’s raining right now. Current temperature: 67 degrees.

While I like the rain, I’m not fond of the muted light.

Philosophical query of the day: Because weather forecasts are probabilistic (60% chance of rain, etc.) are they then a-causal?

Of course not.

Then why do some scientists speak of causality breaking down in the quantum realm? Those events, too, are probabilistic. Does that (and a lack of known mechanisms influencing the probability) make them a-causal? I don’t know. I tend to doubt it. This is such an important topic that a friend of mine and I plan on getting together next week to discuss it. We will roll up our intellectual sleeves, gulp down a few beers, and, armed with a slew of articles pertaining to the topic, attempt to advance our understanding. Forecast for success: 20%, depending on how you define “success.” (The probability for getting buzzed is quite a bit higher.)

If I attain enlightenment on the topic, I’ll be sure to share it.

Technorati Links: nature photos, philosophy, quantum theory

What does the above NASA photo suggest to you?

A spinning, sunny-side-in galactic egg?

An embryonic potentiality for goodness in the vastness of uncaring space?

The awesome greatness of (my) Gawd?

Finding meaning in the cosmos is more individualistic/poetic (at least in a multi-cultural setting) than it is scientific. Why?

Excuse my unabashed speculation here, but it seems to me that jumps to Universal Meaning skip over the essential element of how, precisely, we get from isolated facts/experiences to grand conclusion.

Technorati Links: cosmos, philosophy