The Infinite Loop

2003-10-13T02:17:00.000-04:00

2:15, hit return. New idea: kappa-opioid and sigma-1 receptor antagonists as putative antipsychotics. Also new idea: cheap home (low-resolution) fMRI machine that give the user auto-cerebroscope type feedback, e.g. feeding the output to a display, then applying a few stochastic processes to a musical sample to present a subject the composite of their brain and the random music visualization.

2003-10-13T02:03:00.000-04:00

This is the next plateau, the advance--plugged back in but enjoying it. Hedonic overload. Blow out every dopaminergic nerve terminal in your CNS. Less than reality, less than clarity, but more than nothing...more than the past, the backdrifts. I am still in the loop, but now I have given in to the hedonic engineering that is oh so common in the loop--ethanol, cannabinoids, phenethylamines, 5-HT_2A agonists, 5-HT reuptake inhibitors, anything that is not neurotoxic and guarantees a good ride. A quick soulless, mindless fuck, a few mLs of ethanol and the loop seems so much more liveable...hit reset...it's 8:15, Monday--the week begins..better luck next week. Sex seems so clearing, ameliorating the inexorable fade to third-person...outside and safely detached from the harness of this putative reality.

Hamming in My Head.

2003-10-06T18:27:00.000-04:00

Whoa, shit, I'm back...for a moment there, I thought I lost myself. A great number of things have happened in the last month--more items than would be possible to enumerate here. Hence, I will just pick up from here on out.

2003-08-31T02:24:00.000-04:00

The Camel sizzled as it was extinguished--asphyxiated by an almost empty can of Miller High Life, "the champagne of beers." My ass. The high life is a life of rippling beer bellies, trailer parks and domestic disturbances. Football every Sunday. Belching and Brandine bitching about having to work a double shift at Walmart. Cheap undistilled ethanol encapsulated in aluminum is the lowest common denominator, the drink of choice for those who are trapped in the loop, yet not cognizant of the nature of the loop. Caged animals.

Still, I liked the sound--that quick hiss as the cigarette gasped for oxygen. The high life was all around me, asphyxiating my cigarette and I alike. People had finally started to trickle back after their long summers on Safari, or saving North Ukrainian orphanages from destruction, or whatever the fuck sounds good on a resume. I was slightly drunk, but not drunk enough to enjoy the scene. The people around me seemed alien and unreal, perhaps they were constructs or holograms in an elaborate illusion to deceive me. Females and males all clustered together, holding hands in that oh so innocent second grade way, pretending that tonight might be the start of something significant (levels set at .05, of course, as is the standard). Fuck them. In fifteen years, they too will be living the high life. After a while, they all started to look the same. The same prototypical engineered models--different texture maps, same geometry (and vice versa). Their motto: live fast, die pretty.

No calls, no messages, no one cares. There were supposed to be messages--all of the constructs were getting messages, dialing and talking via an ethereal network. I have the technology to access said network, but mere technology is moot without a use for it. Why am I here? Why am I following these people like a fucking lapdog? I don't even know them. They don't want to know me. There is a megaphone-esque voice in the background--"the party is in this house, on the corner." Am I experiencing auditory hallucinations, or is there really a megaphone? I can no longer tell. I don't think it really matters--the situation is just as absurd either way.

02:07 and I return to my apartment. A weekend full of false hope and pretense. It must be the start of a new semester. Live fast, die pretty.

2003-08-14T21:12:00.000-04:00

Last night I went to the Radiohead show. Overall, I thought that the show was simply wonderful. The acoustics were excellent--the show was outdoors, so there was no distortion, echo or feedback that so commonly plauges indoor shows (most indoor concerts sound like they are being performed underwater and broadcast through a tin can on a string). In fact, I would say that it was the best sounding concert I have ever been to. Thom was quite intense (almost manic), but I do not think that he was happy to be performing. He said almost nothing to the crowd, mechanically playing his set like a hyperactive wind-up toy. I would assume that he was perturbed about touring in the USA, with our facist politics, neocorporatist government and braindead malevolent (not to mention intoxicated, disrespectful and violent) citizens. I am truly embarrassed to be an American when I see some of the things that my fellow countrymen do just for the sake of being obnoxious fuckers. And since the concert was in MA, there were a large number of "massholes" in attendance (many people say that MA has the largest per capita number of obnoxious fuckers of any state in the US), which ment that the crowd was not as enthusiastic as it should have been. The lead singer of the back-up band called us a B+ audience, however, I would say that a C+ is more appropriate.

The setlist was as follows:

01 2 + 2 = 5
02 sit down. stand up
03 paranoid android (phenomenal rendition, I might add)
04 kid a
05 backdrifts
06 morning bell
07 my iron lung
08 where I end and you begin
09 the gloaming
10 sail to the moon
11 climbing up the walls
12 creep (they actually played creep, and it was great: 15000 people chanting “I wish I was special, you’re so fucking special...but I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo” was quite an experience)
13 like spinning plates
14 go to sleep
15 scatterbrain
16 the national anthem
17 there there

encore #1:
18 lucky
19 a punch-up at a wedding
20 airbag
21 everything in its right place

encore #2:
22 no surprises (there was a huge amount of applause after "bring down the government...they don't speak for us," and a bunch more after “A job that slowly kills you, bruises that won't heal...I'll take the quiet life and a handshake of [carbon monoxide].”)
23 idioteque

Radiohead definitely used a full array of instruments: 5 different types of guitar, glockenspiel, piano, foot piano, MIDI synth, 2 types of drums, electric violin, organ and of course, the Powerbook G4 (to do all of the digital effects and voice morphs in real time).

For those of you who missed the show, a bootleg is already floating around the net in both SHN (overkill, this is a bootleg of a live show, it already sounds like shit, why try and preserve the shittiness bit-for-bit with a lossless format?) and MP3 formats.

There were many highlights during the show. My personal favorite moments were "There There" and finale of "Ideoteque." The only songs that were underrepresented in the setlist were "I might be wrong" and "Karma police," two classics that show have been played.

Other than that, the loop continues...

This is a quote from the show for all you lovers out there: "Just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's there."

2003-08-05T23:07:00.000-04:00

Waiting patiently for the next semester to start, I know that I am going back in. For several brief intervals over this sojourn of a semester (and for the first time that I can readily recall), reality was real--as if someone finally ripped the cable out the back of my neck and welcomed me to the real world. But that feeling is quickly receding as unreality drifts in like the coming fog. I can see the walls closing in again, ever so slowly asphyxiating me. I am slightly out of sync with the rest of the world: a few milliseconds outside of their time--a few milliseconds in the past (just enough to create a sense of lag, 30 msec, isn't that the average JND of the human visual system, right?). I can only hope that my motivation, perhaps 'will' would be the preferred diction, will be greater in this coming semester than it has been thus far (I seem to have lost my leaves before the fall). A fear closely related to motivation, or lack thereof, is the fact that I am still haunted by the prospect that one error, one lapse in vigilance in the present (or past, in which case I am already unknowingly fucked) could have irreparable impact on the future. Entire manifolds open and close depending upon my daily monotony, those events that I barely pay conscious attention to at the time (or worse, rationalize myself into ignoring--i've gotten shamefully good at that lately).

"All for the sake of momentum, I've condemned the future to death so it can match the past." -Aimee Mann

2003-08-03T14:28:00.000-04:00

"Wasn't this supposed to be the future?" I saw this message on the back of a man's shirt yesterday and found it quite telling. No, I will not bore you with the typical "popular science in the 1940s vs. what actually transpired" requiem for a lost rocket-car. Frankly, I don't give two shits about rocket-cars: given the attention span, reaction time and intelligence of the average driver today, rocket-cars would be among the most dangerous devices ever invented. No, instead, let us discuss the society of the future. Consider what has already happened: the infinite loop and its power over us all. What, might you ask, is the infinite loop (other than the title of this blog)? The infinite loop is the circuit-track that has come to describe our modern existence: the loop is living the same week over and over again, endlessly performing the same meaningless actions, living a life of perfect predictability. The loop is homogeneity, of people, of experience, of life itself. It is the lifestyle that has become the norm in this country. Individuals in the loop commute off to work at a job that they do not care about: each week performing the same boring tasks, responding to the same emails, attending the same meetings, placating the same boss, ad infinitum... Exhausted (mentally) and desensitized, each night, they return to their plastic-fantastic home life and vegetate in front of a screen. On the weekends, they walk aimlessly through malls, conditioned to want what is just (financially) out of reach for them. The loop is about hopelessly striving for that which is just out of reach: the perfect body, the perfect life, happiness itself. Hence those in the loop buy--whatever, the content of the purchase does not matter as much as the fact that they made a purchase--and bask in the pseudohappiness that their purchases provide, think that they are closer to their goal. Like an opioid injection, however, the pseudohappiness provided by these purchases quickly fades into withdrawal symptoms and leaves nothing but a lasting depression and a desire for more. This is the paradox of the loop: it provides no longing sense of purpose, achievement or accomplishment but provides just enough fleeting visceral pleasure to justify its own existence and ensure that those within it stay within it. In the loop, there is no "love," whatever that means. Of course, those in the loop still fuck, producing offspring that subsequently enter the loop themselves (although this is becoming rarer and rarer, as the loop is a significant source of stress, hence glucocorticoids, and extremely high glucocorticoid levels are associated with an ablation of sexual function), but they are not "in love." Like happiness and perfection, love is a mental state that is oft presented to those in the loop (mainly by the media), but it is forever intangible, just out of reach. Hence, those in the loop settle for the next best thing: lust.

And this was supposed to be the future.

2003-07-23T22:23:00.000-04:00

Good lord, it's been a long time. I still exist. Not living, but still existing. To borrow a quote (after all, isn't that how this blog started): "the rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated." I received an objection to one of my posts (yes, I know, someone was actually reading this shit, I'm shocked too)--that is, "I read a blog of yours on pain...that leads to an interesting question, what is computer pain like? How do you even know if the pain I feel is the same pain you feel. In all likelyhood if you accept, as you say, that pain can be different in the same creature at any given moment in time than it is very likely that I do experience a different pain then you. Thus computer pain (existent or non existent) seems to be no more elusive that any other creatures pain to understand."

True. I wholeheartedly accept this. The phrase "what is computer pain like" was a rhetorical question, and I was in a whimsical mood. Realistically, I cannot know what it is like to feel your pain, I never will be able to. That, however, should not present a problem for type-physicalism, as long as we accept that my pain is different than your pain, and my physiology is different than your physiology, both highly plausible premises, I believe.

"All emotions are things that must be processed in some way--stop the ability to process and the feeling goes away. All words describing feeling are irrelevant since it is actually the processing that is the important bit. Pain is an input, the question is what is the output... That is what defines it. Inputs are meaningless; outputs matter. Thus, since you can control the computer's processing of pain, you can make if have whatever output you want and thus make it feel whatever you want."

Interesting. However, is pain really an input? I would argue that pain is actually the processing itself, processing which in turn produces an output (e.g. avoidance behavior, saying "Ouch, that hurt," etc...) in response to a noxious input stimulus. According to this paradigm, it is the processing itself that is the "feeling." Thus, our question, albeit a bit rephrased, becomes: what is the nature of the processing and what purpose does the processing serve? By purpose here, I refer to the fact that we might eliminate the so-called quale of pain, linking the input (noxious stimuli) directly to the output (avoidance behavior) via a conditional statement and not affect the behavior of the organism in any way. This leads us to, as you brought up, a question of meaning. That is, is pain (you say 'inputs,' I say 'processing') meaningful? I don't think so. I don't believe that folk-psychological terms actually refer to any one thing (the old Kripke "rigid designator" game again), hence, they are meaningless in the context that we use them in now. If we were to use them to identify individual states (i.e. states specific to the individual at specific times) then they would be meaningful (and correlating them with physiological states would not be such a problematic issue). I also find it interesting that you say that we might make a computer feel whatever we want it to. Since we control the inputs and the processing, we should get a deterministic output (or, since I equate the feeling and the processing, we might simply say that if we control the processing, then we control the feeling). I agree with this. But it seems to me that this view is a bit chauvinistic. What if we don't control the processing? What if we make a computer--or even better, a computer makes another computer--so powerful that it can (to a limited extent) control and alter its own processing, much as parts of our brain can control and alter other parts, engendering psychical change. Such a computer would have plenty of automatic (autonomic) processes and it would certainly have stochastic processes; however, it would also be able to instantiate long term changes in not only its software, but its hardware as well.

2003-06-11T00:49:00.000-04:00

Sony is introducing a new line of custom-made products--made only after an order has been placed and funds have been secured--called "Qualia." This is quite an amuzing name, but ironically appropriate for a company that focuses on ultra-high-definition simulated audio and visual stimulation. Imagine that, a phenomenology company, that is, one that sells only the ability to experience certain phenomenological states. The idea is not as bizzare as it sounds, it has existed in cyberpunk fiction for years. Often called simstim (simulated stimulation), it takes the form of some sort of machine-brain interface that stimulates the user's neurons in the correct way necessary to provide the user with any possible phenomenological state. In these fictions, many companies exist solely to provide "software" for these interfaces--to provide experiences. In the novel IDORU, for example, Gibson introduces a protagonist that has her eyeballs (and retina) swapped for miniature Ziess digital cameras. Her job, so to speak, is to record and sell visual qualia for other people to experience. Ever wanted to perform action X? Is X socially unacceptable, dangerous or illegal? If you are wealthy enough, you can hire a "qualia whore" to perform X in your place and record the phenomenological experiences associated with X.

This raises an interesting question. Qualia are always thought to be "private," that is, from the first-person perspective. I can never feel your pain, or truly understand what it is like to feel your pain. Nagel, of course, thinks that this presents a big problem for reductive materialism. But what if we lived in the world of IDORU, where it is possible to "share" phenomenological experiences? Let's say that I want to X, so I hire a qualia whore to go out and X it up for me. We might also stipulated that I and my qualia whore have different neural conformations, call them N and N*. How, then, might we expect me to be able to share experiences? If having the same qualia depends on having the same neural state, then "qualia sharing" is indeed impossible. Of course, we could concede, accepting this, but that seems unsatisfactory. We could accept that I could be feeling something close to what it is like for the whore to X. This really isn't an argument per se, as its a bit wishy-washy or non-deterministic as to what "close" really means. I am not sure that I can resolve this issue, or even begin to take a real stab at it. Multiple realization stikes again.

2003-06-10T01:38:00.000-04:00

I bought a new 600-Watt receiver yesterday, as well as 5.1 digital surround system and a small (17") progressive-scan TV (it's progressive scan 480p/component-in with a perfectly flat tube). It's a nice system and I can now listen to my music from 6 different channels (the receiver has Dolby ProLogic 2 to separate red book digital audio into 5.1 channel surround). I am quite impressed with the performance. Listening to music is one of the only nonacademic things that I still enjoy. While I lack the skill necessary to play an instrument, I have tremendous respect for those that do.

Hail to the Thief should be officially published in the US later today: even if you downloaded the unmastered leak, buy a fucking copy!

"Just because you feel it doesn't mean it's there..."

2003-06-06T19:01:00.000-04:00

My precious PowerBook has returned from it's cross-country visit to the mechanic. They replaced something called a "P88 MBL Assembly." I don't really care what that part does (although I am mildly curious, considering I opened the 'Book up myself and couldn't see any problem whatsoever--the machine has the same serial no., so they obviously didn't replace the entire mobo) as long as it does. Hence, I can now continue updating the least read page on the internet.

Same old shit, different day...

Unfortunately, regression continues unabated. It's as if I lose millions of neurons each day (which is probably not far from the truth) and am consistantly and constantly losing abilities that I once had.

I read two more books over the last couple days: Electroboy by Andy Behrman and An Unquiet Mind by Kay Jamison. Both books are first-person accounts of bipolar disorder. Behrman's book is far more phenomenological than Jamison's. That is, Behrman concentrates most on the feeling of what it's like to be in a manic state. The style is--as to be expected--stream-of-consciousness: throughout the book, we follow Behrman, observing his reations to events, feeling his manic urges and watching his life unravel. This is much like the experience that the protagonist of Being John Malkovich had when he was "inside" Malkovich's head. Jamison, by contrast, focuses more on how bipolar disorder has affected her interpersonal relationships and her professional interests. Ironically (or perhaps not), Jamison is on the psychiatry faculty at John Hopkin's (a Berkely before that). Both books are interesting case studies of manic-depression (especially the "manic" compenent).

I have never had a manic episode (I'm obviously not bipolar), but I have always been facinated by the disorder--both the neuroscience and the phenomenology of "mania."

The Neuroscience:
Mania sounds much like being on amphetamines or methylphenidate (or any other non-selective, high potency NE/DA reuptake inhibitor, pick your favorite): (1) the need for sleep is decreased; (2) physical energy and mental concentration are increased--motor stereotypies are often seen; (3) self-confidence is increased; (4) sociosexual behavior is increased; and (5) effects are dose-dependent (or, by the same token, dependent on the magnitude of the manic state): as dose (or magnitude) increases, psychotic-spectrum (delusions, hallucinations, sympathic activation, paranoia) symptoms start to appear. I have always wondered why amphetamine psychosis was used solely for a model of schizophrenia instead of acute mania. Psychotic-spectrum behavior only appears briefly in amphetamine models, and only at high doses. Mania-like behavior (in different magnitudes), is, however, demonstrated in a wide spectrum of doses.
Interestingly, no one really understands the mechanisms of the various pharmacological treatments of bipolar disorder. Lithium appears to inhibit the activity of the intracellular 2-nd messanger ligand inositol triphosphate (IP₃). There is quite a bit of dabate over whether lithium inhibits the IP₃ molecule itself, prevents IP₃ from binding to intracellular IP₃ receptors (ionotropic calcium channels that let calcium from the ER into the cytosol) or blocks the IP₃ receptor. Also, there is much debate over the consequences of chronic IP₃ receptor antagonism (or IP₃ downregulation): some say that it paradoxically leads to a buildup of IP₃ and hence facilitates the PIP₂ cascade. In addition, lithium has neuroprotective effects: it protects cells from apoptosis in response to a variety of stimuli, such as NMDA-mediated excitotoxicity, super-oxidative stress and ischemic stress (and even MPTP/MPP+). Strangely, so do divalproex and other anti-convulsants that enhance sodium channel inactivation, block calcium channels and increase GABA turnover. Weirdness. Is mania due to neurodegeneration (apoptosis) or just overstimulation of certain clusters of neurons? I would like to support the neurodegeneration theory, on prima facie grounds, because manic states, if untreated, usually get worse and occur more frequently.

The Phenomenology:
I could use a little mania. Or, at least a little hypo-mania. Hypo-mania is mania without the volume cranked to "11." In a hypomanic state, there is no psychosis, no severe perturbation of thought process, just increased concentration, physical energy, sociosexual behavior and confidence. And they speak of this as thought it's a bad thing? Sounds kind of fun to me, as long as it's just hypomania and not a full-blown psychotic attack or a mixed (mania and psychosis with depressive/suicidal overtones) state.

2003-06-02T01:45:00.000-04:00

I am in my apartment, around 21:15 and I get what is best described as a "tingly" sensation. You know those dandruff sampoo advertisements where half of a man's head turns green and "tingles?" Well, this happened to my entire body. I decided I had to get out of there--I felt trapped, the walls are closing in. I often get this feeling, but during a usual semester, I cannot do anything about it, other than hope it passes. So I get in the car. What to do? I should see a movie... I walk into the theater and catch the latest showing ("late" here is a relative term, considering that this is Sunday and the area is still under a fair amount of influence from the all-mighty Christian hypnoray) of X-Men: 2 to calm my nerves (this is a fun little statement, to "calm one's nerves," I suppose, since everything has a nerual etiology, it's a valid statement...but usually the word "nerve" refers to a peripheral neruon--and my sensation had nearly nothing to do with peripheral neurons). The movie actually wasn't half-bad, in fact, for a comicfilm, it was really well-done. Dare I say better than Reloaded? I dare.

After the flick, I get back in the car and get on the freeway. I realize after about 10 minutes that I missed my exit. Oops. So I take the next one and keep driving. After a while, I am twisting and turning through seedy liquor stores, encased in metal, ready for the nightly battle against theavery. I pass Diamond Pawn & Loan, Instant Cash, Quick Loan, State Capital & Pawn, Check City and Mike's Bail Bonds & Pawn--all similarly encased in an aluminum facade (kind of like the batmobile in the Micheal Keaton movies). I then suddenly realize that I have absolutely no idea where I am, or where I am going. But at the moment this seems perfectly normal. I'm just driving along and everything seems fine. Eventually pawn shops and liquor stores give way to churches and Walmarts...I slipped into the suburban zone without even noticing the difference. There was no gradient, no easy transition, I just instantaneously stepped into a Disney movie after being in a Quentin Tarentino film. I keep driving, ever increasing my speed. I leave even suburbia...settling onto something called State Service Road 5. I must be going 70 at least by now. Bang. Frontal cortex kicks in. I have to go to work tomorrow, what if I end up getting totally lost. Wait, I am totally lost, so what does it fucking matter. It's alright, if need be, I can park in a town and take a bus into work...or I can drive all they way to south station and take the commuter rail in from the red line. No that won't work. Yes it will, then you can take the rail back, pick up your car and drive back. But why all that hassle, just for the sake of being lost. This battle between the frontal cortex and the basal ganglia continues for a while. I cross the state line. Wow, i'm in another state, now I'll never find my way home. 80 and climbing. Cortex wins. I flip a bitch in the middle of Service Road 5 (or whatever the other state's equivalent nomelature calls it) and head back. But wait, I'm still completely lost. Retracing the last 20 minutes, I finally see a sign that says freeway. Cortex says not to fuck around. I get on the freeway--I can see the top anti-aircraft tower blinking of the monolith (University medical library, the highest point in the state) and use it to guide me back.

Phew, for a while there, I though lost myself...

2003-05-31T16:13:00.000-04:00

A week later I am back on the east coast, in a new apartment and with a new job. Everything changes. But still nothing changes: I am me, and unfortunately, I always will be me. I've tried this before...dramatic lifestyle changes in the hope of achieving some lasting inner change. I live on a four year (in this case, it's been two years, but I digress) circuit: every four years, it is imperative that you change everything around yourself. Jam your shit a suitcase, stuff your bed-bath-and-beyond lifestyle into the small trunk of your Volvo and move. Get a new job. Get a new haircut. Eat at new restuarants. Swear that you will work out like you used to, 7 days and 45 miles a week. Swear (at yourself) because you don't have the self-motivation necessary to do it. Tell yourself that you are going to start lifting weights. Never do. Try to meet new people (that's a tough one, one I've never quite gotten the knack of). Get drunk. Stay up until 5 in the morning listening to Radiohead over superlative Grado cans--just take it in, every little nuance--and wonder why you are a little late for work at 9. If you smoke, quit. If you don't, then there's never been a better time to start.
Is this the cure for life in the infinite loop? I wish. I firmly believe that there is no exit from the loop--this is an ameliorative therapy, like quinine for Malaria, but not a cure. It makes things better for a week and a half--until the new routine settles in and you start repeating "same old shit, different day." This doesn't help the isolatation (in fact, it further accentuates how isolated you really are: in a city of millions, no one knows you are there and even fewer people care). The birds singing outside emit the noise that steel cable does when it is dancing in the wind, on the verge of snapping.
It's odd to move into an apartment just for the summer, knowing full well that the previous occupant is coming back in just three short months. The previous occupant left much of his stuff here, so I simply take over his life. I park in his space and piss in his toilet. Outside, it rains. It always rains.
All of the stores here close early. What if I want chow-mein noodles, tofu, a box of Metrx bars and 12-pack of Diet Mountain Dew at 3:30 in the morning? I guess I'm SOL.

I still haven't finished Gravity's Rainbow, it's so confusing. The diction is fabulous and at times absolutely hilarious, but the plot is hard to follow. It might just require a second pass-through. I would like to try and conquer Ulysses sometime during this summer, but doubtless I won't.

2003-05-23T03:20:00.000-04:00

Eariler, I wondered whether or not a dysjunctive functional/identity theory of intentional and phenomenological states, respectively, would work out. But what about all of the objections against functionalism? Does functionalism satisfactorily explain every intentional state? Today, a friend hit me with this one: the belief in God, that is, some sort of higher power(s). This is a belief that is shared by nearly 80% of the population, so it is obviously important that a theory of mentality be able to account for it. Let's say that p believes in God. Under Lewis-Ramsey functionalism, the statement "p believes in God" is equivalent to the Ramsey sentance: "p is in some state x such that x is caused by {c₁, c₂, ... c_n} and x causes p to perform actions {a₁, a₂, ... a_n}" where {c_i} are events in p's life, for example, p's parents explaining their belief in God, p going to a religious secondary school, etc... and all {a_i} are behaviors, such as praying, attending a religious service, reading religious texts, etc... But this seems quite unsatisfactory. Consider, for example, another person called q. Q is exposed to the same {c_i} events that p is--q has parents who raise her in religious context, q and p attend the same school, the same church, etc... Q also performs several of the same {a_i} behaviors as p--she prays, reads texts, etc... But despite all of this, q does not believe in God. This isn't exactly a new objection to fucntionalism, many philosophers have brought up similar arguments (e.g. Chalmer's, 1993 "Zombie" argument).

These types of arugments seem to slay functionalism, even functionalism that is only applied to intentional states. But what if we were to say that all intentional states are also phenomenological states. That is, if P is the (infinite) set of all phenomenological states, then I, the set of all intentional states is a subset of P. This means that for an intentional state to actually be considered a mental state, it must have qualitative or conscious character: no unconscious intentional states can really be considered mental states. If we couple this with the idea that no two subjects (even conspecific subjects) share the same phenomenological states, then we might propose an identity theorem for intentional states as well. That is, my belief feels different to me than your belief feels to you, regardless of the fact that our beliefs might contain the same intentional content.

Justifying this would be difficult. The domainant paradigm in psychology for the last 150 years has held that people have unconscious intentional states. But realistically, how can one plausibly hold a particular belief without being aware of said belief?

Quote of the day: "It's the devil's way now, there is no way out. You can scream, you can shout...it is too late now."

2003-05-22T02:03:00.000-04:00

Reading through the past, I have realized last that last post was extremely pedantic and downright paranoid--what was I on? Anyway, I should talk about something other than my own depression and annoyance with minutiae of life in the 'loop. Summer reading anyone?

Some (possibly) interesting titles I am reading now:

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson): My RDA of fiction after a year of neuropharmacology and philosophy articles. Overall, I was less than impressed by the setting and characterization depth in this novel. Gibson's other novels (especially the classic Neuromancer) have such vivid descriptions of environment that the reader nearly experiences the dystopian scenery along with the protagonists. Also, Gibson's characterization usually gives his protagonists psychical depth--the reader feels intimately familiar with their personalities. I did, however, enjoy Gibson's prose. As usual, his diction is fabulous--he uses modern day terminology (as well as tech-sector jargon) in novel ways and often creates neologisms (would we expect any less from the man who coined the terms cyberspace and the matrix). The plot? Well, I have always felt that the plot of a Gibson novel is completely ancillary to the verisimilitude of the prose: his intricate characterization, description of setting and his novel diction. Hence, I really didn't read the novel for its plot--and that's probably a good thing. The plot is certainly interesting at first, but starts to drag and becomes rather implausible at the end (unfortunately Gibson fell victim to the 'start a good plot and end it in one or two chapters' technique that has become so popular).

The Art of Writing Reasonable Organic Reaction Mechanisms (Robert Grossman): A classic. I wish I had bought this text before taking organic, it would have certainly been a great reference for mechanisms--especially esoteric cycloaddition reactions like the inverse-electron-demand Diels-Alder reaction (on the final) and polar 1,3-dipole/dipolarophile reactions. This one will stick with me through graduate school. If you think that organic reaction mechanisms are aesthetically pleasing and should be displayed in MoMA, this one is for you.

The Will To Power (Nietzsche): I've read it before, but I wanted to give certain areas a close reading.

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari): I am slowly working my way through this one and I still can't tell if the authors are actually saying anything. Is this book total bullshit? Well, the language isn't exactly reader-friendly, so if there is a message in this text, I feel that much of it is lost in a sea of purple prose. But, it is important to point out that I know next to nothing about critical literary theory, so I am approaching this text like a kindergardener would approach integral calculus. I am reading the book strictly for its artistic value, not its philosophical value. If I get fried by the circuitous arguments and radiostatic prose, I can always cower in the relative safety of dry yet sublime organic reaction mechanisms.

Only 72 more hours until I am back on the east coast. I can't wait, considering how much I love flying. That, and my laptop has been acting up lately. Occasionally, my screen becomes overwhelmed by weird "lines," as if perturbed by an EMP. Often the machine freezes after this happens. Or stranger...everything except the mouse cursor and the audio freezes. Trippy shit. I hope my internal video cable isn't loose or damaged, but I already know it is. Fate. Murphy's Law. Call it what you will...after the wear and tear of a semester, my poor sexy machine is about to meet it's maker for a much needed repair.

2003-05-19T19:20:00.000-04:00

Our parthenogenic future?

The latest issue of Businessweek Magazine contains an interesting story about the putative decreasing importance of males in our society. That is, the possible squelae of the past quarter century of emphasis on women's education. Granted, the story doesn't present the topic in the most objective light--it contains quite a large helping of prejudicial language and a nearly endless stream of decontextualized statistics. Flaws notwithstanding, however, it raises an important point. That is, elimination of educational support for males coupled with preferential treatment for females is not the best solution to the problem of sexism (the same argument could be made for an other type of -ism as well, again, pick your favorite). Children of the Boomer generation might be the first to exhibit a professional culture composed almost entirely of single females. What then? Males of the future might conceivably be significantly developmentally, intellectually and emotionally set back in comparison to females. What could they possibly contribute to this fast-paced society? The answer might soon be "nothing." In fact, does humanity even need males at all? Considering the advances in genetic engineering, parthenogenesis is already a viable option. How difficult would it be to simply exercise that option? Human males could soon become an endangered species by design.

Okay, so that was a bit of a slippery-slope fallacy--in all honesty, that scenario would never be played out. The reason that I mention it is to illustrate a point. That is, we have over-corrected. In its infancy, the feminist movement preached equality, a wonderful goal. Now, however, the movement seems to have shifted from a non-zero-sum paradigm to a zero-sum one: males must suffer for their history of paternalism. But why should a strive for equality entail the marginalization of an entire population? I believe the problem is that humans think in a fundamentally zero-sum manner--for every winner, there must a loser. I don't really hold much hope that we will ever escape this thought process; all natural processes seem to be zero-sum. For every organism that receives nutrients, there is one that does not. Hence, even though equality should be the goal, it might never be achieved: we might forever promote one group at the expense of another.

2003-05-19T04:21:00.000-04:00

Listening to the radio, I can't stop but wonder about what Cobain had in mind by the line "all we know is all we are." Is that really true? Are epistemic states the totality of our being--what about phenomenological states? I suppose that phenomenal states can't really be said to contribute anything to our "being," aside from their eventual contribution to various epistemic states (I could say intentional states here as well, since epistemology deals mainly with intentional states). We might imagine a person p with complete anterograde and retrograde amnesia. That is, p is completely unaware of any episodic memory whatsoever and has no ability to form new episodic memories. But, for the sake of argument, let's assume that p's perceptual abilities are unperturbed. Could we really consider p a person? If we also assume that p has no semantic memory, then I believe the answer is relatively straightforward: no. Why? Plenty of computers and artificial sense organs might be perfectly capable of having phenomenological states, but perfrectly incapable of having intentional states. Hence, pure phenomenology cannot be the measure of our being. What about if p has semantic memory? That is, p has knowledge of the meaning of words (and other non-first-person phenomena, pick your favorite); hence, p can understand language and interact with others, but have no memory of any particular interaction. Is p really a person, that is, does p have mentality? I doubt it. P might have perception, even reasoning skills, but without episodic memory, p wouldn't be aware of having any desires or beliefs. I'm afraid Brentano was right, intentionality might be the mark of the mental. Althought intentionality seems to have died off as a 'hot' topic in philosophy, it is still a fundamental problem. That is, how do we reduce or, to quote Dretske, "naturalize" the intentional? Of course we adopt a functionalist point of view. But functionalism just seems unsatisfactory. We need a way to justify some sort of indentity theory for intentional states.

2003-05-15T16:25:00.000-04:00

Three hours New York jetlag and I wake up on the west coast. They bounced me through Phoenix, which, as I now know, does not abide by daylight savings time like the rest of the nation. Hence, during the long flight, I had my watch set for +1 hour. This means that I experienced a bit of psychical time dialation on the flight--my 5.5 hour flight was 6.5 hours. No wonder it was such a mind-numbing experience (I feel like I left half of my suprachiasmic nucleus on the east coast). That, and my flight contained but two types of people, crying babies < 18 mos. of age and dirty old men with neurological disorders (their constant dry throaty laughs haunted the cabin). No single-serving friends for me. I think we should have a new policy in the air. That is, all young children (age 3 and under) should be xanaxed. In fact, why stop there? We could just xanax every passager on the plane. Think of it--no more jetlag, no more boredom, no more air terrorism (I'd better not mention that one too loudly, in case one of Ashcroft's soulless minions of orthodoxy is listening in).

Once I got back, I immediately saw Reloaded. Was it everything I had hoped for? No, not really. Philosophically, it was rather pseudointellectual and unfulfilling (except, perhaps, for the Frenchman's speach about causality, which I rather enjoyed). Philosophical nonsense nonwithstanding, it was still a good film. Yes, the much touted effects were amazing, especially the freeway scene. Before seeing the film, I firmly believed that adding a car chase scene would only hurt the integrity of the film, giving it nothing but a cliche feel. I was wrong. The chase was well orchestrated, to the degree that it was difficult if not impossible to tell which parts were "real" and which part were completely CGI. This film blurs the line between CGI and actual footage--the multi-Smith scene, for example, was almost veridical. One thing I will say is that "Zion" scenes were gratuitous--especially the spiritual festival/rave/orgy scene--as was the Neo/Trinity sex scene. These scenes added nothing to the film, except about 15 total minutes of time-killing filler. In summary, this film was not about plot, nor was was it about characterization, it was about the specticle, pure and simple. Parts of this film would have made a perfect technology demonstration for a real-time ray tracer or 3D video card, however, the "film" as a film was rather weak. It appears that we will have to wait for Revolutions before we get any real plot...

2003-05-13T02:45:00.000-04:00

And it all recedes. With failed exams and a kilometer-long paper trail gently fading into the backdrifts, I feel strangely calm, in that delirious, nervous-twitchy-laugh kind of way. I now turn my attention (hopefully) toward my research. The project starts soon and I need human subjects (brains, Igor, bring me brains). The university is beginning to die, its leaves are falling as it prepares for its long winter ahead. Will I succeed this semester? I shall discover my fate soon enough--will I get another pass? Even if I do, will that even mean anything. To shamelessly borrow from Joseph Heller: "Success and failure are both difficult to endure. Along with success come drugs, divorce, fornication, bullying, travel, meditation, medication, depression, neurosis and suicide. With failure comes failure..." So which do I choose? Is there a third option: mediocrity, perhaps? In superposition between success and failure? Do I really want to be mediocre? In truth, I cannot bear the thought of it--mediocrity is failure and I'd rather be a posthumous success than a living failure. At least I will leave this room, its been like a holding cell for me over the course of this year--I've walled myself in, like a spider in her den. I am haunted by the thoughts that perhaps this year was for not--that perhaps, in addition to my courses, I am receding as well.

2003-05-06T01:55:00.000-04:00

Disjunction it is. Maybe someday I'll write another bad paper about why all intentional states are phenomenological. Until then, I'm now a scary hybrid of a functionalist and an identity theorist. I really don't want to be a functionalist--fucking multiple realization of intentional states--but I digress.

What does it feel like to experience one's first psychotic break? This is the right time for it, right, early to mid 20s? I've had my share of panic attacks before, but nothing quite felt like this. Right now, I am starting to remind myself of the protagonist of Darren Aronofsky's Pi--except without the brilliant mathematical insight (or any brilliant insight, for that matter). As my time grows smaller, I am filled with a profound apathy--an affectless, numb, almost floaty feeling--yet also a sort of paranoia or agitation. More than anything, however, I am riddled with guilt for all the time that I have wasted. All of these variables interact to produce a pathetic entity that does nothing and does it slowly, then feels paranoid about loosing his cognitive and intellectual abilities.

"The pessimism of active energy: the question 'for what?' after a terrible struggle, even victory."

A digression:

What is this intoxicating phenomenological experience that they call "love." I don't understand it--I'm through the looking glass. Is it sensualism, sexual desire, mesocorticolimbic dopamine system activation, tonic oxytocin receptor stimulation, tonic vasopressin receptor stimulation? Does it even exist? Is it just misinterpreted lust? I don't think it actually exists--not the way popular culture portrays (aggrandizes) it. Perhaps it's just the most primitive animalistic desire to fuck, albiet spread out over a chronic time course. Hedonism. Pure and simple.

2003-05-04T20:08:00.000-04:00

If we are to accept that no two mental states are alike (see below) in support of my odd token-identity theorem hyrbid, then must we exclude intentional states? It just seems bloody weird to say that no two humans have ever had the same belief or desire. And by the same token, it sounds even weirder to say that subject S has never had the same belief at two separate times t₁, t₂ in her life. People have long lasting beliefs that "stand the test of time," don't they? Like the belief that water is H₂O? (And please, don't Putnam me to death, not yet anyway...)

So, we can do one of two things:

(1) Accept that every intentional state is a phenomenological state (that intentional states are a subset of phenomenal states). This way, S's belief at t₁ would not feel exactly the same as her belief at t₂.

(2) Use some sort of quirky conjunctive hybrid of classical Lewis-Ramsey functionalism for intentional states and my token identity-theory for phenomenological states.

I am still undecided where I stand on this issue.

2003-05-04T00:27:00.000-04:00

There was something peculiar about yesterday's post. That is, my premise that no two psychical states are alike, even those of conspecific entities (or for that matter, even two psychical states of the same organism). Meaning that my neural state N₁ can safely be said to be identical with my pain state at time t₁ and your neural state N₂ an safely be said to be identical with your pain state at time t₁ , that is, as long as our phenomenological pain experience is dissimilar in any way. With this idea--that no two psychical states are alike--we can rid ourselves of multiple realization and accept an identity theory. But (there's always a but), we lose the ability to say that computers will ever be able to experience something like human pain. Let's say a computer is in a physical state P₁, which is identical to some pain state for the computer. It then follows that the computer cannot be in a pain state that is isomorphic with any pain state ever experienced by any human, as humans are organic life forms and the computer is presumably an inorganic life form. Am I becoming like Searle and supporting vitalism? No, I don't think so. I admit that there is something that it is like for the computer to feel pain. It's just that that something is not at all like the pain that any human has ever experienced. That leads to an interesting question, what is computer pain like?

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

2003-05-03T01:09:00.000-04:00

I finished reading Kim's (1998) book Mind in a Physical World. While this isn't exactly a major accomplishment on my part (the book is quite short and approachable, it's a very quick read), it is, however, a dramatic achievement on the part of Prof. Kim. This little book is extremely lucid--it's invaluable reading for anyone interested in physical reduction of mentality (or current issues in philosophy of mind).

Kim argues (contra Fodor, 1989 and Van Gulick, 1993) that non-reductive physicalism does not and cannot save mental causation. Indeed, the three premises:

(1) Mental causation, in particular mental-to-physical causation is real: some mental events cause physical events.

(2) The physical world is causally closed. All physical events have physical causes.

(3) Mental events--intentional states and phenomenological states--are distinct from physicochemical states of the brain and not reducable to them.

Are incoherent together. Fodor's arguement that psycho-physical laws exist and need not be strict (see Davidson's paper Mental Events) and can instead be ceteris paribus is flawed, as it violates premise (2). Recall from earlier discussions that premise (2) is the most important premise to save, as Kim says "it is safe to assume that no serious physicalist could accept such a prospect" (p. 40). I agree wholeheartedly. With Fodor's proposal, we have, at the very least, causal overdetermination with respect to physical events. That is, a physical event P₂ could be said to have been doubly sufficiently caused by both P₁ and M₁. Moreover, as Kim points out, we might remove all physical causality from a possible world without endangering mental-->physical causation. In doing so, we clearly violate the principle of causal closure of the physical domain. A world with no physical causality should have no causality involving physical properties whatsoever, hence should be questionable even from a conceivability point of view (but I digress).

If we want to be non-reductionists (and hence accept premise (3)), then it all seems to come back to the fact that we don't need mental causality--the mental just doesn't seem to do anything. Hence, we are trapped into epiphenomenalism.

The best option, as Kim points out, is to simply bite the bullet and accept reductionism. However, as it is current described, reductionism has some problems. Namely, those of reducing or "functionalizing" (Kim's term) phenomenological states. The mental state of my red quale has no function (see the many descriptions of the 'inverted spectrum' problem), hence, it has no reduction. And, of course, without a reduction, it is epiphenomenal. My view is that this ceases to be a problem if we bite another bullet and accept an identity theory. That is, mental properties just are neural properties. But wait, you cry out, what about multiple realization? Doesn't multiple realization preclude identity theories, like Smart's infamous "brain-state" theory. Identity theory has become a four-letter-word in philosophy. But it shouldn't be. Why can't we just say that human pain = physical state N₁, monkey pain = physical state N₂, octopus pain = N₃, ad infinitum... Or, for you fans of Lewis's Mad Pain and Martian Pain out there, we could even say:

my pain = N₁; your pain = N₂; her pain = N₃; my friendly pet octopus' pain = N₄; her pet octopus' pain = N₅...

After all, why should we expect members of the same species to have the same neural structure. Prima facie, it seems very logical (from both a priori and a posteriori perspectives) to say that my neurodevelopment was quite different than your neurodevelopment. Hence, it follows that our brains have different neual conformations. Also, since the brain is a plastic organ, it makes little sense to say that the neural state I am in when I experience pain at time t₁ is the same at time t₂ (we can assume t₁ and t₂ are well-separated temporally.

But wait, isn't this just token physicalism? Keep your pants on, let me finish my point... If members of the same species have different neural conformations, then why might we expect them to manifest the same psychical states? Why do have to posit that pain is pain is pain? Maybe monkey pain is different than octopus pain, and by the same token, human pain. Moreover, maybe my human pain is different (phenomenologically) than your human pain.

Now, multiple realization seems to be a moot point. If my pain and your pain are different in even the slightest way, then we can correctly say that my phenomenological pain (my neural state N₁) caused my behavior. We can also say that my red quale caused my behavior, as my red quale is simply the firing of retinal ganglia cells and cells in the occipital cortex, which, in turn, cause the firing of other neurons.

2003-05-02T12:38:00.000-04:00

A little digression from our typical fare here:

In today's issue of Science Magazine, Bai, et al. (2003) report that they have synthesized an inorganic analogue of Fullerene (C₆₀). The cluster reported by Bai et al. is icosahedral with two basic segments: 20 six-membered P₄Cu₂ rings and 12 pentagonal P₅ rings. Hence, despite its complex composition, it contains the basic 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons of C₆₀. Is that not the coolest thing you've heard all day?

Linkage

2003-05-01T23:29:00.000-04:00

Aphasia and The Art of Penis Enlargement

After I submitted the last blog entry, I noticed something interesting on my screen: a banner ad. proudly proclaiming "Aphasia & Head Injury--Effective treatment, proven methods for patients and professionals." This truly struck me as odd. Advertising a neuropsychological syndrome that is most often due to an organic brain disorder? Aside from whether or not their "treatment" works, it is interesting to see that type of advertising. Doubtless, whenever a website has banner ad popups, one them involves lengthening of the penis. Inexorably, the more websites one visits, the more likely one is to get attacked by the penis enlarger--it's been after me for years (need notwithstanding, ahem). Instead, however, I get a treatment for aphasia and head injury. Aphasia (there are many types, however, I am referring simply to any disorder of spoken lanuage) is an interesting disorder. Consider, for example, the following sentance, generated by a patient with what is called semantic jargon aphasia: "tape recording and automatic winding voice and the very very recording, typewriting the memorandum and tensioning and dialing and winding and balancing very very good" (Kinsbourne & Warrington, 1963). And the same people that promise to enlarge your penis can treat that? The wonders of the Internet!

2003-05-01T23:09:00.000-04:00

With the first of May, a fog slowly rolls in, setting an appropriate tone for what has preceded and what is undoubtedly yet to come. We can't control the fog, can't dictate its arrival time--we can only recognize its slow creep as it envelops us. It doesn't envelop us in darkness, as we might have expected prima facie. No, instead, it brings only numbness, an everlonging grey. It blocks out both the sun and the darkness (alighted by the twisting of streetlamp photons, in an aurora-borealis fashion), leaving us awash in a perpetual twilight. I'm starting to realize that inhibition of monoamine reuptake is neither as fun nor as useful as it's made out to be.

From the deck of an aircraft carrier (an apropos venue), the President rallies support, creating optimism where there is none--say the right things when electioneering. His speach is slow and cautious, it must somehow be transformed into boldness by the TV. He cites some loose associations between events of yesteryear and our bold imperialist future. The people eat it up, cheering and hollering in support of false hope. We love him, we love him with all our hearts and brains (who were we fighting again, Eurasia or Eastasia?).

Quote of the day: "I don't know why you bother, nothing's ever good enough for you..."

2003-04-30T23:06:00.000-04:00

Orgo and failure. Again, I feel unreality creeping in, mounting an attack on my mind/brain. They told me I could go to medical school. But as always, they lied. It's kind of unfortunate, to see a manifold of one's future life so abruptly collapse. I need a reason to continue in the neurological sciences, or in anything, for that matter.

I am attempting to write another paper in favor of the identity theory (it's getting harder and harder to be a type physicalist these days). For example, Fodor (1987) says that these three premises are not inconsistent together:

(1) Mental causation, in particular mental-to-physical causation (or mind-->world, as Searle puts it), is real: some mental events cause physical events.

(2) The physical world is causally closed. All physical events have physical causes.

(3) Mental events--intentional states and phenomenological states--are distinct from physicochemical states of the brain and not reducable to them.

Obviously, we need (2)--rejecting the laws of physics to explain mentality is a very Cartesian thing to do. In that case, I believe that either (1) or (3) has to go. If we reject (1), we arrive at epiphenomenalism. While I do like epiphenomenalism (and it seems to work from a neurological point of view) it is not very constructive from a philosophical point of view. Moreover, I believe that all mentality is physicality, so I need not resort to epiphenomenalism. Hence, I obviously reject (3). Fodor (1987) thinks that mental causation is indeed real, and that mental events do cause physical events. However, unlike Davidson, who demands that all causation be bound by strict, basic laws (i.e. fundamental laws of mathematics and physics), Fodor claims that causation can be fulfilled adequately by ceteris paribus laws--meaning that psychophysical bridge laws do not have to be 100% normative (if the ceteris paribus clauses are satisfied). Hence, I guess we could say Fodor rejects (2), but then again, Fodor is a physicalist, so he believes in mental-physical supervenience. Thus, I'd would really say that he accepts all three as being consistant.

This kind of seems ridiculous to me. Why should we need ceteris paribus clauses and the like simply to say that some mental state m (which is caused by some token physical state p)
causes another physical state p*? What we need to do is give up this non-reductivist paradigm and say: "of course m causes p*, after all, m just is p."

2003-04-27T22:04:00.000-04:00

An unproductive day, indeed. I used to work with such fervor, now I fight to even achieve mediocrity. I seem to be beyond the state of "burned-out," as it is often called. I was burned-out last year, now I am but cooled embers. I used to consider myself intelligent--not standardized test intelligent (I have never believed in the existence of 'g' anyway), but able to quickly learn, apply and integrate new information. With each passing semester, I find my cognitive and pneumonic abilities decreasing. I look back upon tasks I did as soon as last semester and wonder how I ever had the energy, motivation and intelligence to complete them. In the words of Thom Yorke: "I would like to change back now, to the shadow of, the shadow of my former self" (2000).

I sound like an cantankerous old man, preaching the tired old sermon of youth long lost. Of course, I am not an old man. Realistically, I am in the neurobiological prime of my life--it's all downhill from here. This is even more depressing, come to think of it. I know, "bitch, bitch bitch," you've heard it all before and don't want to hear it again. The same old story on a different night; the same old story every night. You think that I have it better than most, so I should just shut my fucking mouth. In truth, you're probably right. There, is that what you wanted to hear: you're right. You know you're right.

2003-04-26T15:01:00.000-04:00

Why do we need an a priori argument to support the identity theory? I mean, neuroscience is certainly not an a priori endeavor, why then, should we be expected to describe the identity of neural and phenomenological states in terms of an a priori argument. In light of modern empirical studies in the neurosciences, type-physicalism certainly appears plausible, at least on prima facie ground. Pain is nothing over and above a neural state; being in pain is being in that neural state. As Smart (1959) discusses, when we show that one phenomenon reduces to another--as type-physicalists claim to do--we both satisfy parsimony and gain explanatory power. Why, then, is type-physicalism--of any variety--rejected so quickly in favor of ridiculously weak token physicalism? While there are several arguments against type-physicalism, the arguments of Saul Kripke (1980) are perhaps most damning. Kripke argues that mental and physical types are simply contingently, rather than necessarily related. How does Kripke do this?

Let’s introduce some terminology: call P a pain sensation and N a neural state, say, c-fiber stimulation. We may reconstruct Kripke’s argument as follows:

(1) Assume P and N are rigid designators.
(2) Assume P = N.
(3) From premise (1) and the definition of a rigid designator, we must conclude that the identity of (2) is necessary, that is, universally true across all logically possible worlds.
(4) Prima facie, it appears possible that we can imagine a world in which a subject experiences a pain without experiencing c-fiber stimulation (P ^ ~N). Such a subject might phenomenologically experience pain, report that he is in pain and engage in pain avoidance behavior, yet if subjected to a neural scanner of some sort, would exhibit no increase in c-fiber firing rate.
(5) Conversely, prima facie, it appears logically possible that a subject could experience c-fiber stimulation without experiencing any pain sensation at all (~P ^ N). Such a subject might be a zombie (Chalmers, 1993), who experiences all of the same neural states as a regular subject without having any mentality or phenomenological awareness.
(6) Therefore, by premises (4) and (5), P = N is a contingent identity.

Fine, so the identity is contingent, big fucking deal, that doesn't make it any less true, us type-physicalists might respond. As Kripke sees it, however, if we respond in this manner, we contradict ourselves. By premise (3), the identity of P and N must be a necessary identity. Thus, if this argument is sound, we must either conclude that P is not identical to N or that P and N are not rigid designators, as those were our initial assumptions. Kripke concludes that P is not identical to N, given that he asserts that pains and c-fiber firings are clearly rigid designators, the only valid conclusion appears to be that the identity between P and N is not a true identity.

Type-physicalists have responded by running the argument above with different phenomena, in an attempt at reductio. As above, one of the phenomena must be a folk-term--like pain--and the other must be a scientific term. The classical examples in philosophy of mind are heat and molecular motion, two obviously rigid designators. Let’s refer to heat as ‘H’ and molecular motion as ‘M’. Thus, if we posit that H = M, then we might say--as we have above--that this identity is necessary. However, it is certainly possible to imagine a world in which heat is not identical to molecular motion. Therefore, according to Kripke's argument, we must conclude that this identity is contingent, again violating our notion of rigid designation. This violation would seem to entail that H != M. What is wrong with this picture? Obviously, we know that heat is identical to molecular motion--an attempt at proving otherwise would be ludicrous. Hence, we have a seemingly contingent identity of rigid designators. Are heat and molecular motion merely accidental designators? This seems implausible. Have we then succeeded in demonstrating the fallibility of Kripke's argument?

Kripke, not surprisingly, asserts that we have not. When we imagine heat, or the concept of heat, what are we really imagining? As Kripke says, we are imagining the phenomenology of heat, that is, the "sensation [that] heat causes us (call it 'S')" (Kripke, 1980., p. 150). S is neither identical with M, nor, as Kripke sees it (and I concur) with H, that is, heat itself. Thus, while we might imagine a world in which molecular motion or heat does not cause us to feel S, this does not mean that we have succeeded in imagining a world in which H != M. This is due to the fact that S != (H or M); hence, it makes sense that there is no transitivity, as S is not identical to H . What about pains and neural states? When we imagine pain, it makes sense that we are imagining the phenomenology of pain (as is the case with heat). Kripke, however, contends that, unlike heat, the phenomenology or sensation of pain just is pain. Since pain is a phenomenological state, "no sensation" entails "no pain." Stated differently, the sensation of pain (again, call it 'S') is identical to pain: S = P. Hence, we are left with the same problem that we encountered before . That is, the fact that P (or S) is not identical with a neural state N.

The simple idea that phenomenological states like pain could be considered rigid designators is preposterous to me. Phenomenological states are by their very nature qualitative states. As Block (1978) and Shoemaker (1980) showed with their inverted-spectrum thought experiment, qualitative states are inter-subjectively variable. For example, it is possible that person A could experience pain in a completely different way than person B. The simple fact that it is logically possible for two subjects to be in a state called ‘pain,’ which has a different reference in each of the subjects seems to provide ample evidence to cast doubt on the rigidity of ‘pain.’ Thus, we may reject Kripke’s assumption that pain is indeed a rigid designator, making his argument against type-physicalism unsound.

Or, if you don't like type-physicalist identity theorism, then, I argue, the only other possible view you might take (without positing gods, Cartesian souls and other dualist hogwash) is epiphenomenalism, and as Fodor points out, no one likes an epiphenomenalist.

2003-04-26T03:03:00.000-04:00

I just returned from a film, Better Luck Tomorrow by Justin Lin. Overall the film was well done, I haven't walked out of a movie with that type of feeling since Fight Club. What do I mean by that feeling? The feeling that consumerism, achievement and a drive for perfection will lead ultimately toward self-destruction. In short, I took this film (as I took Fight Club) to be a warning about the nihilism that modern materialism brings. Granted, the film had some weak moments. For example, the ending was cliché, and as a whole, the film was rather derivative of many of the bildungsroman and social-criticism films and novels out there (Clockwork Orange comes to mind--the novel, not the film). Doubtless the film had racial motivation, but that is not what I would like to focus on, as defiance of racial stereotypes has itself become somewhat of a cliché...

The film opens with a typical high school scene: two friends hear a mobile chirp out, immediately look down at their Nokia 8800s (the all-chrome phone featured in The Matrix) and utter "not me." This is the first inclination of the materialist overtones in the film. The boys discover that the phone indeed belongs to a dead body, shallowly buried in what appears to be one their backyards. Cue flashback (a la Fight Club), complete with a "how did I get myself into this situation" voiceover: "You never forget the sight of a dead body...but then again, I was experiencing lots of things for the first time. I guess it's just a part of growing up..." Compare this to the opening voiceover scene of Fight Club "with a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...we have front row seats for this theater of mayhem...and then I realized that all of this...had something to do with a girl named Marla Singer. Wait, let me back up..."

The protagonists of Better Luck Tomorrow are ambitious, driven, narcissistic and absolutely obsessed with the college application process. This characterization especially struck me, considering that I was similar (albeit not as driven or ambitious, for example, in order to get a perfect score on his next SATs, the protagonist learns vocabulary words, one per day, by repeating them several hundred/thousand times per day: "They say if you repeat something enough times, it becomes part of you") just a few years ago. The protagonists live solely to pad their college application resumés. JV Basketball, Ecology Club, "Community Service," Math Club, Chess Club, Academic Decathlon, all are simply check-marks on the application to the Ivy League. Sound familiar?

While their lives are filled with activity, they are, at base, psychically hollow and unfulfilling. This juxtaposition is the subject of the remainder of the film. That is, the film, much like American Beauty satirizes the plastic-fantastic "suburban" life by revealing the psychical emptiness of the so-called "happy" life. The protagonists are nihilistic, lacking the ability to experience a state of "contentment," but perfectly capable of enjoying hedonic pleasure (at least in the short term). Interestingly, much like myself, the protagonists seemed to have some tacit idea of what contentment is (or is supposed to feel like), even though they paradoxically have never experienced it. The line that struck me more than any other in the film was Steve's monologue concerning happiness (this might not be veridical, my memory is not perfect): "Happiness, yeah, I'm happy. I'm so fucking happy I could scream. Why wouldn't I be, I've got everything? It's a never ending cycle. When you got everything you want, what's left? You can't settle for being happy, that's a fucking trap. You gotta take life into your own hands, do whatever it takes to break the cycle. That's what it is, breaking the cycle."

There is a reason that this blog is named "The Infinite Loop."

2003-04-25T13:26:00.000-04:00

It has been a while since I have updated. I suppose this makes my blog a "sloblog," that is, a blog that is updated far too infrequently to be meaningful (pun intended, of course). However, I have a good reason for not updating: I had an organic chemistry exam. Since the class focuses largely on synthetic organic methods, it follows that my exam was almost entirely synthetic problems. This part of the exam was alright--I like synthesis (I can usually see a 5-9 step synth problem in my head with little problem...) The problem I had was with the mechanism questions. We had some hard mech. questions involving organometallic oxidations, organoborates and all sorts of happy horse shit. I probably failed because of these questions. After the exam, I listened to this song over and over again on repeat until I finally passed out of exhaustion some time after 03:00:

"It's not what you thought, when you first began it. You got what you want, but you can hardly stand it now...by now you know it's not going to stop, it's not going to stop...so just give up" (Aimee Mann, 2000).

Struggle to get out of bed at 10:30, rise, rinse, repeat.

This semester, I have felt like I am sleepwalking--nothing is real and it takes a while for things to hit me, like there is some sort of barrier betwixt myself and all of the other people here. This has happened to me on and off for the past several years. In fact, years ago I deemed the condition "third person syndrome," as it caused me to feel as if I were following my body around, watching it behavioralistically perform actions from a third person vantage point. And no, I am not on ketamine (as many ketamine users report feeling of depersonalization and unreality). I don't have any idea what causes this--I have exhaused contemporary clinical knowledge. However, in the past, even when I was in the midst of "unreality," I still managed to work efficiently, now I have lost even that. I am behind in everything and going nowhere slowly (as opposed to going nowhere quickly, which might be better, at least it would be done sooner).

That, and the phoniness of the people here is really starting to get to me. Most people here are quick to befriend you--as long as it is convenient for them and they need something from you. In actuality, they could care less about you, they simply want to improve their GPA or pad their resume. My friend (in this case, a first-order friend) called me a pathetic Holden Caufield-esque whiner, that is, a person who complains ad nauseam but does nothing to change his or her situation. His analysis was that no one has "real" friends (as opposed to the plastic-fantastic fake people I spoke of above) but that most people are not analytic enough to see the truth (or, if they do, to care).

This is a disturbing trend, that of anti-introspectionism. This country is notorious for its anti-intellectualistic disposition, but here--in one of the most intellectual places in the entire country--anti-intellectualism has taken a bold new form: anti-introspectionism. I take anti-introspectionism to be a form of nihilism. True nihilists are often highly perturbed by the lack of meaning surrounding them, hence, they fight against nihilism or at least attempt to elucidate people to its harm (consider Nietzsche and most of the existentialist philosophers of the 18th and 19th centuries). Anti-introspectionists, however, willfully ingore the lack of meaning, living their lives in a blissful ignorance.

Nihilism (in whatever form) is truly damaging us today. Of course, by 'nihilism,' I do not mean a lack of religious belief (religious belief has a provincial, divisive influence that is far more dangerous than atheism), no, I mean a fundamental inability to live a meaningful life. In our world today, meaning has become quantified, determined solely by coldhard. Unfortunately, it seems that the more technology and automatization we create, the more we condemn ourselves to capital-driven nihilism. Our world of technological safety and security has become too safe, too secure. In security, and by equating money and meaning, we have removed all spontaneity from life: no alarms and no surprises, please.

This is a paradoxical turn of philosophies for me, a self-professed early adopter of whatever technology may come and the true epitome of a capitalist. I am certainly no Luddite (nor Marxist), I love technology and cannot imagine living without it, I simply think we are using its power in the wrong way. It is sad that in our society, technological change and nihilism seem to be directly relational: the higher we rise technologically, the lower we fall psychically.

Again, enter neuroscience and the bold future of hedonic engineering.

2003-04-21T14:25:00.000-04:00

I think I am a determinist. 'I' am not in control here, but I think I am. Is that good enough? I am faily amoral anyway, so a lack of agency doesn't really change my stance on morality. I guess I, like everyone else, want to know simply for knowledge's sake. What actually is in control? Random fluctuations of sub-sub-atomic particles? Will we ever be able to tell?

A 2nd-order friend (friend of a friend) called me the most pathetic person she had ever met last night. She claimed that depression and bitterness (caused either by real events or imagined/delusional events) are abolutely pathetic and juvenile mental states. This is probably true, but it doesn't really help me. I know I am pathetic--you don't have to tell me. You don't have to tell me how to change either, because I already know how to, I just can't execute said change. No matter how hard I try to affect change it myself, my old self keeps following me around (allusion intended).

This is why I like neuroscience. It's safer. I don't have to change, my neurons do. For some reason, this seems an easier transformation to achieve. We understand how to affect physical and chemical systems; hence, it follows that someday we will be able to affect personal change in manner of days/weeks rather than years/decades (if ever). I am obviously hoping that "someday" is the near future. But what if it is not?

Then I guess I'll continue to be pathetic. As Vonnegut would say, "so it goes..."

2003-04-19T01:17:00.000-04:00

Quelling Qualia

Like most people, I used to be a strict believer in free-will and human causal agency. My belief in free-will stemmed (most likely) from my reluctance to believe in any sort of omniscient power. Free from the confines of God-based understanding of mentality and causality, I simply assumed that 'I' was the one in control here. Now I am not so sure: free-will seems to be just a phenomenological illusion. Building on Libet's (1985) (in)famous experiment, many cognitive scientists have proposed that so-called 'conscious intent' or 'intentionality' (in the causal sense, not the Brentanian-sense) is simply a "slight of mind" (see e.g. Wegner, 2003 in the latest issue of "Trends in Cognitive Science"). Adopting this view, we might be more successful at slaying the beast of consciousness. Doubtless this is where all of the "higher-order" theories (like Lycan, Rosenthal, etc...) and epiphenomenal theories (like the Churchlands, and possibly Lewis) of consciousness have come from. The problem--as many "qualia freaks" would be quick to point out--is that simply stating that consciousness itself is an epiphenomenal "monitoring system" for automatic unconscious "stimulus-->action" processes does nothing to explain why intentional action has a particular "feel." However, if the "apparent causal process" of intention, as Wegner calls it, has a demonstrable neural etiology, then I think we might be in a better position to quell the qualia freaks. How so? Well, many qualia enthusiasts (non-reductive physicalists) argue that a complete theory of consciousness will never be explained, because we can imagine a being with a biologically identical conformation to a human that has no phenomenological experience whatsoever. Chalmer's calls such a being a zombie. Zombies are really just a version of the classic Cartesian 'disembodied mind' argument, albeit the converse of said argument (a "dis-em-minded" body?). However, if the raw feel of intentional action is causally innert, but still has a neural etiology, then any zombie in a neurally similar state to a human would ipso facto have to possess the "feeling" of free-will.

This is not exactly a great argument (its probably not even sound), but its the best I can do at nearly 2 in the morning...

2003-04-16T02:32:00.000-04:00

On Mental Masturbation...

I hope this pilot experiment works. If it does, I'll be scanning peoples' brains in no time flat. That's a scary thought--me, scanning brains. Well, actually, I won't be scanning them, i'll just be there observing the experiment while said brains are scanned. I had a brain MRI once, last year, if I recall correctly. Wow, that was off-topic. Wait, is there a topic? There should be a topic: if this blog is to become anything more than epiphenomenal, then it must have a topic! I only have one more synthetic organic chemistry lab left. That should be my topic--that is, my hatred of microscale organic labs.

I love theoretical synthetic chemistry--those reaction mechanisms look so pretty on paper (really, certain organic syntheses are true works of art)--but the labs are drudgerous. First, they devour an entire day. Second, the syntheses are always microscale. Trust me, it is dramatically easier to fuck up a reaction of 20 microliters of compound A and 50 microliters of compound B in 1 mL of solvent than it is to fuck up a macroscale synthesis. I've had yields that were smaller than the measurement instrument's margin of error. All lab experiences thus far have taught me that I like theory but hate practice. This shouldn't come as a huge suprise: I've always been a big planner, with plenty of desires and beliefs (hence, intentions) but a poor executer (the intention --> action stage never quite works for me). This could mean that I have a different psychology than most, or it could mean that I am just a lazy bastard. The later is more plausible, but let's suspend disbelief and consider the former. Thus, what I need is a job that pays me to think of ideas (intentions) but have someone else carry them out. I need an employer that pays me to mentally masturbate.

Most will argue that mental masturbation does little to improve society--much like this blog, mental masturbation is thought of as epiphenomenal. One look at any postmodernist, post-structuralist--whatever these terms actually mean--journal (e.g. Social Text) should serve as evidence of the soundness of this arguement. However, most modern masturbatory products are epiphenomenal simply because they are over-stuffed with jargon. While syntaxically perfect, this jargon-filled text is often semantically inaccessible to anyone other than the author. If mental masturbation more often resulted in clear, well-focused and well-argued points--as it often does in philosophical papers--then perhaps society as a whole would deem it more valuable.

2003-04-13T20:48:00.000-04:00

Do propositional attitudes have corresponding phenomenological character? If I claim that I believe that it is raining outside, is there anything that it is like for me to hold that belief? Most philosophers say no, partitioning mental states into the intentional and the phenomenological. However, proponents of a representational theory of mind claim that all states are intentional: my itch is merely an intentional state representing the phenomenal character of the itch. This state is demonstrated by a PA, such as, "I believe that I am itchy." This makes little sense. If I have an itch, then I must be experiencing an "itchy" quale. Hence, when I say "I believe that I am itchy" without experiencing an itchy phenomenological state I am clearly uttering an untrue sentance. This is in contradiction to the whole concept of intentionality, which is why many people have abandoned the representational theory of phenomenal consciousness.

But can we say that all intentional states are phenomenological? It would be pretty cool if we could. Is it true that we can are only aware of what we perceive? Also, aren't all perceptual states phenomenological. Thus, to be aware of a PA, should there not be some phenomenological character that accompanies it? If I were better at this, I'd write a paper. I'm sure someone else has already attempted to defend this view (and failed, else why would we still consider phenomenal and intentional states two separate entities) but it would still be a fun paper.

2003-04-12T11:25:00.000-04:00

Rain down, rain down
Come on, rain down on me...

On a lighter note, check out We Love The Iraqi Information Minister.com. This hilarious site features some of the notable propaganda that the infamous information minister has been spouting during this war. This should not be taken as an indication that I support the war, but these quotes are simply too good to pass up. For example:

"We will welcome them with bullets and shoes."

"It has been rumored that we have fired scud missiles into Kuwait. I am here now to tell you, we do not have any scud missiles and I don't know why they were fired into Kuwait."

"When we were making the law, when we were writing the literature and the mathematics the grandfarthers of the blair and little bush were scratching around in caves."

A logistician this man is not.

2003-04-11T13:34:00.000-04:00

When it rains, it pours.

The madness and anarchy of EtOH weekend continues. And the rain drops. I celebrated this madness by going to my cognitive neuropsychology class. That's right, I'm one badass motherfucker. While I was running yesterday, listening to Radiohead's "There There," one of the lines of the song struck me. That is, "just because you feel it, doesn't mean it's there..." Obvious connections to substance dualism and brain-in-a-vat idealism aside, I feel that this line exemplifies the point I was speaking of yesterday: the phoniness and meaningless of interpersonal relationships. If I believe that subject S has some sort of intentional state directed upon me, it doesn't follow that S actually does. My belief can be false. This is nothing new or interesting--I have false beliefs all the time. What I find interesting is that my beliefs regarding S's intentional state are almost always false. Say, for example, that I believe that S considers me to be his or her friend. This believe will almost always turn out to be false. S is in actuality, completely indifferent towards me. That is, S has no intentional state directed at me whatsoever.

According to many psychologists and philosophers (e.g. Dennett, Flavell, etc...), I should have a reasonably good grasp (that is, I should be able to make a good prediction of) S's intentional states. Presumably, if I have a theory of mind, then this ability allows me to detect, predict and interpret intentional states. Why, then, am I always wrong? Is it possible that I do not have a well-developed theory of mind (see, e.g. Premack and Woodruff, 1978)? That could be possible, but it is unlikely, as I have passed all of the neuropsychological tests designed to query theory of mind that I have come across in the literature.

I see two possible explanations for this phenomenon: either S could be deceivinge me, or S herself lacks a theory of mind. While the later would explain the phenomenon--S has no ability to recognize S's own mental state, nor the mental states of others, hence she is incapable of predicting how her behavior will affect others--it is not very plausible. Why? Most individuals, excluding those with severe Autism, do possess a theory of mind, it is simply a hard-wired human ability. Could it then it be that subject S is engaging in active deception? This is far more plausible, as well-practiced deceivers are able to fool just about everyone, even those with exceptional theory of mind abilities.

The point? If S is engaging in deceptive behavior, then it is futile to enter into an interaction with S, as it is impossible to determine S's true motive. Even if said interaction appears to be meaningful, it is likely not.

And the rain drops.

2003-04-10T12:49:00.000-04:00

This weekend is Ethanol Intoxication Weekend at the University. That is, a time to celebrate "spring" (in -3 C weather no less) by doing what individuals at many other uniersities do every weekend: consume large quantities of EtOH. Last year, I spent most of Ethanol Weekend in the basement of the monolith, obviously not having any fun. I will probably end up doing the same this year. Why? First, I am not a big fan of GABA-A receptor potentiators (EtOH, Benzodiazapines and zolpidem, Barituates, etc...) It has been demonstrated that GABA-A antagonists (actually inverse agonists) have beneficial cognitive effects. Thus, wouldn't be logical that GABA potentiators have deletarious cognitive effects. Again, I digress.

Fear of GABA itself is not what's holding me back, however. My problem is that I cannot have fun. No matter what I do, I see it as hollow, phony, a worthless endeavor. Based upon this mental state--that is, being unable to relax or enjoy 'time off'--I feel that it is better for me to simply work all the time. But now even my ability to work is fading. Concentration is at all-time low and I really don't know how much longer I can continue this charade. What charade, you ask? The charade that everyone seems to put on every day. Everything and everyone is so phony. They pretend to be friendly, pretend to care. But they don't: no one cares. In this generation, we are monomaniacally concerned with one thing: ourselves. This weekend is the perfect realization of said phoniness. Doubtless this weekend, people will relax and little, pretend to be friendly, even talk to each other. But it's all an act. Monday, everything will be back to normal. No one will give a shit. We will all go back to our selfish little lives. The inifite loop will continue unabated.

This is why I can't have fun like some other people. I can't inhibit the prepotent thought that it is all a lie. Introspection and anhedonia are often directly correlated. To top it off, I can barely work anymore. I get maybe 3 hours of real work done per day. I used to get 9, even more. Now, I sleep too much (see below) and I can't focus to save my life. In the somewhat plebian, but acurate words of Trend Reznor, "can't fix this broken machine...watching it burn in my steady, systematic decline...after all I've done, I hate myself for what I've become..."

It didn't turn out the way you wanted it, did it?

2003-04-09T22:47:00.000-04:00

Rebound sleep. Not a good thing when one has a painfully long synthetic organic chemistry lab. But I digress. I was thinking (or hallucinating, although, admittedly there is not much difference in the two, at least for me) this morning, that I shouldn't have been born yet. I think I would be enjoying life more if I lived in the fantastic world of the not-so-distant future, say 2037. Imagine all the technological, pharmacological and epistemological fun I could have. I could experience sim-stim, I could ingest a psychoactive chemical that veridically emulated the mental state people claim they have when they experience "true love." Not, lust--that was done to death in the 20th century--but the (putatively) more sophisticated mental state of love. I don't even know if such a state exists, but people talk about it. I know, that is a weak argument. Wittgenstein showed us that fallibility of public language. Perhaps the phenomenology of love is just another Beetle.

I think about the world of 2037 a lot. But then I think about my academic future and I wish not for the future, but for the past. Considering that academic disiplines are getting more and more specialized, more and more refined, it is becoming harder and harder to do something both novel and groundbreaking. Hell, it is getting harder and harder simply to do someting novel. No matter what I am interested in, someone has beat me to the punch, so to speak. Perhaps this is why so many academics spend their entire careers squabbling over semantic issues and minutiae: there is simply nothing new to be said. I realize this kind of sounds like McGinn--we have reached the limit of our conceptual forming power--and I also realize the irony (see my post from a couple days back). Anyway, I think about this, then I imagine how glorious it would be to wake up (with my current knowledge) in 1870. At that time, even a pathetic little guy like me could have made big impacts. I'd have principles of quantum mechanics named after me. All of the basic principles of neuroscience, organic chemistry and molecular biology: they are named after me. This is kind of a fun, albeit solipsistic and self-indulgent, possibility.

A friend of mine tells me that post-humous name recognition is worth nothing (afterall, you're dead.) His philosophy is pure hedonism, which is ironic, because he is one of the most un-hedonistic people you will ever meet in your life. In a way, I agree with him--the point of life is to enjoy it while you are alive (as you obviously can't enjoy after you die). However, if hedonism were the only motivational factor, wouldn't we all be heroin junkies by now. And heroin is so passe...

2003-04-09T02:28:00.000-04:00

I've now been up for 56 hours. This lack of sleep thing is starting to get a bit out of hand. I wish that modern pharmacology would simply arrive at a solution to the whole sleep problem, that is, having to sleep. Eliminating the need for sleep has long been a dream of the human race. Hence, we have searched for both natural and synthetic wake-promoting compunds. Stimulants have played an interesting and might I argue, vital, role in the development of many societies throughout history. For example, Weinberg and Bealer (2001) argue that caffeine was partially responsible for the renaissance and the scientific revolution. Their point? In the days of poor sanitation, water was a highly unsafe beverage. Thus, most beverages contained alcohol for the antimicrobial effect (although, obviously, this was not explicitly known at the time). Alcohol is, of course, a potent GABA_A receptor potentiator, making it an excellent sedative and inhibitor of several cognitive abilities. The authors argue the gradual introduction of caffeinated beverages and the gradual withdrawal of alcoholic beverages disinhibited much of the population, facilitating leaps in productivity and creativity. While there a number of flaws in this argument (not to mention the fact that it is impossible to disambiguate the effects of caffeine introduction and alcohol withdrawal, respectively), it's still kind of a fun way of thinking about history. I mean, caffeine has been shown to have beneficial cognitive and motivational effects.

Now, back to modern pharmacology. Most stimulants today are phenethylamines or derivates of that particular structure (notable counterexample being 3,4-methylene-dioxymethamphetamine, which does not have a highly significant stimulant effect, but instead a euphoric effect and an anxiolytic effect). These drugs all inhibit the reuptake of dopamine and norepinephrine (and to a lesser extent, 5-HT--again, MDMA is a notable counterexample). However, newer drugs are not phenethylamines. Take modafinil, for example, that has a really wonky chemical structure. While no one is really sure what the in vivo pharmacodynamic profile of modafinil is like, it apparently has no rebound sleep penalty. Rebound sleep refers to the phenomenon that after chronic multi-day amphetamine usage, the user will over-compensate for lost sleep and end up sleeping 12-36 hours straight. With modafinil, apparently the user can stay for extended periods of time without suffering a severely perturbed circadian cycle. In addition, modafinil has a milder side-effect profile than amphetamines. Sign me up.

Then again, caffeine is a nonselective adenosine receptor antagonist and it works well and has virtually no side effects. Thus, maybe if we combine the two, we will have our perfect drug (C).

2003-04-08T18:23:00.000-04:00

If I were a neurotransmitter, I think I'd be substance P: my effects are very pronouced, but I have a short-half life, am quick to burn out and cause depression everywhere I travel (see e.g., Bondy, et al., 2003 and Ahlvers, et al., 2002).

What neurotransmitter would you be?

Dopamine: You are full of energy, highly motivated, always 'up' and ready to go. Other people love you and choose to be around you rather than others. However, too much exposure to you is indicated in a number of psychotic-spectrum disorders.
Glutamate: Again, you are full of "oomph" and excitement. You also have a nearly veridical memory. However, too much exposure to you has been known to cause seizures, and eventually, death.
GABA: You are nice and mellow, albeit clumsy and forgetful. You sleep well, but tend to sleep more than 12 hours per night. People know you as one of those rug-on-Valium types.
5-HT: You are paradoxically responsible for a number of phenomena, but directly cause nothing. People like you, and spend vast sums of money to keep you around as long as possible. However, you have negative gastrointestal effects and may cause psychosis as well.
(Nor)epinephrine: You are intense, anxious, always on the tip of your chair. You will likely die of a cardiovascular problem.
Nitric Oxide: You only think about sex, all day long, all the time. However, you have a fairly decent memory and well-formed vascular tissue.
Calcium: You are the center of the universe, exerting at least some influence over every important decision made. Without you, everyone else couldn't even remember their own name.
One of the chronically under-appreciated wacky neuropeptides: No one really knows you exist. You might cause people to be fat, you might cause people to be thin, you might even do nothing at all...

2003-04-08T16:37:00.000-04:00

Well, I actually finished my paper--it was due at 13:00 today and I finished in the "nick" of time. I have been up for approximately 48 hours now. I feel like Jack Bauer (sp), except without all of the (putative) radiation poisoning. Doubtless some will accuse me of procrastination. However, it is important to note that the paper itself was started a long time ago, it simply wasn't perfect until around 12:47 (not that it is perfect now, but it is better than it was). The paper focuses on McGinn's (1989) cognitive closure argument and Levine's (1983) explanatory gap argument. As a strict reductive materialist (yes, a real-live type-physicalist, there are some of us left, even thought this one happens to be an incompetent novice) I felt compelled to present arguments against this "mysticism" doctrine. I present some theories about the possibility of directly introspecting one's brain states (apparently I can indeed feel my serotonin transporters being inhibited) a la Churchland (1985) and I also discuss the possibility that we might successfully gleam some intersubjective phenomenological knowledge from neurophysiological data. How does this work? Well, I used Goldman's (2001) "simulation theory"--which was a big flop in its own field of developmental psychology, but might work here--to argue that a subject with a full repertoire of neurophysiological data concerning a target subject's phenomenal experience might be able to successfully emulate the target's state by "putting herself in a state resembling that observed in the target." This idea was briefly touched upon by Nagel (1974) and Hill (1997). Of course, there are plenty of counterexamples. It would probably be easier to give in and be a non-reductive physicalist, but that would just plain suck.

Oh well, at least it's done and the panic does not start up again until it returns from whence it came.

On an angrier note, I look outside and see lots and lots of snow. My thermometer says -2 C. What the fuck? This is April and the overnight low is around -15 C, not to mention the 6" of snow that hits every fucking week. This is insane. I know, bitching about the weather is so hackneyed, but really, drastic times call for drastic measures (speaking of hackneyed).

On a non-academic, non-kill-all-humans-rant note, Radiohead's sixth LP "Hail to the Thief" is really quite well-done. If you haven't downloaded it already, do so (it is currently available as an unmixed, unmastered, studio leak from your favorite sublegal channels). I am sure the real release will be better (remember the advanced leak of Amnesiac), but still, this should hold you over until 9 June 2003, at which point the album officially goes on sale (I'll be at a disc store at 0:00, yes, I am aware that is pathetic, and no, I don't care). Enjoy.

2003-04-07T21:10:00.000-04:00

Added some links for your edification.

2003-04-07T19:53:00.000-04:00

I just set this up. Perhaps eventually there will be some scintillating content here. Perhaps someday I will publish a complete and irrefutable treatise on the reduction of psychical states to physicochemical states of the brain on this blog. Or perhaps I will simply bitch and moan about the pointlessness of daily mundanities. Either way, I'll keep writing and you'll keep not reading...

For reference, here is the piece that inspired this blog, it started as an email. It was written on 1 Jan 2003, around 12:06--I have just been to lazy/busy/mentally dead to actually start up the blog.

"Choose life, choose a job, choose a career, choose a family, choose a fucking big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage payments, choose a starter home, choose your friends. Choose leisure-wear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suit in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you've spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future, choose life?"

But I chose not to choose life. My reasons? Well, unlike the film so shamelessly plagiarized above, my reasons do not include heroin, or any other opioid receptor agonist. For whatever reason though, I simply can't seem to enjoy living the way other people do. Why I am writing this? Well, taking 4-5 science and lab classes a semester, I feel I never get to actually say something. I simply write technical literature, recycling what has already been said, adding a small bit of "research," and calling it an "original research article." That is isn't writing, that is just shuffling paper in creative manner.

So all too often, I bitch about my life, or lack thereof. That's what I am good at, bitching. Some ceaselessly tell me--to borrow from another film--to shit or get off the pot. But that's too drastic. As much as I'd like to believe that I can run away every couple of years, assume a new persona, a brand new name and a newfound sense of 'life,' I know, deep down, that this is fallacious. So what do I do? Get a haircut and get a real job? Smile? Fake it, fuck it, live and learn to live in the infinite loop. Spend my days in front of a screen, typing data into a computer with a gigabit line into oblivion? Spend my nights in front of Mr. Idiot Box, watching Dick-fucking-Clark drop the slowly-moving Discover Card ball onto another year? Watching them all kiss, tongues entangled, spiraling and wrapping around each other? And it’s all brought to me "live" in one thousand and eighty interlaced lines of superlative digital resolution. Lucky me. Do I sit there alone on that fucking couch, listening to the sound, that hideous visceral sucking-slobbering sound, amplified by a factor of ten thousand because it's "delivered in 5.1 Dolby Surround Where Available?"

No.

Instead, I just sit here, smoking, sipping coffee and spouting pseudointellectual bullshit. I never used to smoke. I should quit--for the New Year. No, that’d be too trite. I don’t want to be one of those comfortable 47 year old, minivan-driving, middle-class republican managers with six kids and an overweight wife at home who proudly pronounces "all right, this is the year!, this is the year I will get in shape; if anyone needs me, I'll be at the gym...four times a week..." to all of his drunken, uncaring coworkers at the company Christmas party. No. I'll quit on the 17th of February. A perfectly queer day, the 17th of February--the perfect day to change my life. Fuck his minivan, his lazy, content, Midwestern ass--I am better than him, and on the 17th I'll prove it. One might ask why I started smoking in the first place? I know the consequences, the horrible fate befallen upon me by the Surgeon General and his cronies. I read the journals--every journal with the word “cardiology” in the title has at least one article about how smoking rigidifies the arterial walls, making it harder and harder for the heart to beat. Every journal with the word "pulmonary" in the title expostulates upon chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder and the downward spiral. So why did I start? The journals told me to. Honestly. Not the "Journal of Cardiology," mind you, but several theoretical neuropharmacology journals. One night, while studying madly in the basement of the monolith (read: medical library), I saw it right there in Ashcroft’s (2000) classic monograph, Ion Channels and Disease: nicotine, an obvious high-affinity nicotinic-cholinergic agonist, increases working memory, learning, attention and overall cognitive function in rats and mice. These chain-smoking, Ph.D. candidate mice were kicking the shit out of controls at every mouse-geared cognitive test. Interesting, I thought. I was curious--the chant of "better living through chemistry echoed through my head."

On the way home from the library that night, I walked by a Store24, a paradoxical name for a store that is only open 18 hours per day. "Do you have any of those transdermal nicotine patches, you know like 'Nicotrol' or something?" I asked the clerk. "We got the gum--55 bucks," he replied in his raspiest I-don’t-give-a-fuck-because-I’m-a-New-York-City-cab-driver voice.
"Fifty-five dollars," I let the 's' kind of hang out there, feigning severe sticker shock. I wasn’t really that stunned. I knew that nicotine was expensive for a reason--if it weren’t, then people would simply get addicted to the gum. I can see it now--a psychiatrist asks me if I smoke. I say, "no, but I about chew six to nine pieces of nicotine polacrillex gum—4 mg every day." She scribbles everything down a little notepad, smiling, trying desperately to keep from laughing at me. "Alright, pack of Marlboro lights, then."

"Trying to cut back."
"Something like that…"
"Dose things a’ll kill ya."
"Fun ways of killing yourself slowly."

I have never owned a cigarette lighter. In high school, I always wanted to have a classy lighter, maybe a small matte silver Zippo--shaken, not stirred--however, obviously, I had no reason to buy one. "Clack, click-click...fucking childproof mechanism, I need a real lighter." That Zippo was soon mine. My first cigarette was a mere mean to achieve a greater end, the greatest end--higher exam performance. I really only wanted the fucking nicotine. What a racket. The generic pharmaceutical companies were probably being paid under the counter by the Tobacco industry, in order to keep the price of over the counter nicotine patches inflated. Another huge conspiracy, Chris Carter was right. Why didn't the FDA approve that nicotine water that was in the pipeline a few years ago? Nicotine water--that would be the solution to all of my problems.

Wow, wasn't that the mother of all digressions. The point? Well, I guess there is no point. There never was, there never will be. I suppose I bitch and bitch and bitch, to no end. Nothing is ever resolved and nothing ever changes.

Incidently, I didn't quit on 17 Feb. Looks like Mr. Minivan wins again.