I’ve decided to consolidate my various blogs in one place: yohanjohn.com
I’ll probably still cross-post neuroscience-related entries here, but that will be my main online presence.
I’m also going to try out substack. For those who haven’t heard about it yet, it’s sort of like blogs+rss but you sign up by email and get posts delivered to your inbox.
Expect a magpie’s hoard of shiny bits from neuroscience, philosophy, history, music, and whatever else catches the light.
First post coming soon!
Some tentative conclusions based on my reading of epidemiological models and qualitative reports:
1. The most effective strategy so far involves a combination of widespread testing, social distancing, elevated hygiene, and tech-enhanced contact tracing. If these steps are done well, lockdowns might be fully avoidable. This has been the strategy of Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong.
2. Many if not most countries simply do not have the resources for widespread testing yet, and may not have the political will for invasive social monitoring.
3. Given the situation, lockdowns should be understood as a way to buy time for manufacturers of testing kits, and for vaccine and treatment researchers. For both economic and psychological reasons, lockdowns cannot continue indefinitely.
4. Vast sections of the world may have to practice periodic lockdowns, until either (i) governments are ready and willing to enforce widespread testing *and* contact tracing, or (ii) a vaccine or effective treatment becomes widespread. Privacy concerns and economic concerns will have to engage in a direct debate if this stage is reached. Also, lifting a lockdown prematurely can cause a bounce-back of the infection rate.
5. A lockdown does not necessitate economic collapse or starvation: countries, provinces, and communities can do a great deal to ensure money and food reach people. The policies enacted in the UK and Denmark guarantee 75-80% of wages, and preserve crucial employer-employee relationships, enabling a speedier return to employment. And even a poor country like India always has vast amounts of foodgrain in storage (which often goes to rot). International cooperation is needed to ensure distribution and prevent wastage. Protection of farmers is also essential. Cash crop growers will be particularly badly hit by the almost inevitable collapse of demand for non-essential products.
6. Some form of basic income is essential for workers in what is known as the ‘gig economy’ in advanced countries, and the ‘unorganized sector’ in poor countries. An additional challenge in poor countries is that many people still do not have bank accounts.
7. Given that the economic consequences of the shutdowns are already being felt, there is little to be gained for the time being in speculating about whether governments have overreacted in the recent past. Governments clearly underreacted in January and February, but there is nothing we can do about that now. Having convinced ourselves of this, we might ease our anxieties a little by leaving detailed analysis of should-haves, would-haves, could-haves and might-haves for the post-crisis reckoning, and focus on what is in front of us. Less what-ifs and more what-nows.
8. The very concept of over- and under-reaction is too blunt an instrument when planning actions in the present. Each region and polity faces unique challenges, so there cannot be a one-size-fits-fall response to the pandemic. Instead of a one-dimensional ‘scale of reaction’, the key for the present is the alignment between responses and the specific circumstances they are responding to.
9. The crisis now is not just the coronavirus, but a causal web that includes our prior reactions to it. This is inflammation at the level of the body politic.
Interested in participating in a (totally unscientific) survey on consciousness and related questions? The link is in the preceding post. Once you complete the survey, you’ll be able to see the results. It should take between 20 and 45 minutes to complete, and will hopefully be stimulating, at least somewhat.
The password for the post is the last name of the philosopher who coined the term “Hard Problem of Consciousness”. It is very easy to google the answer. Capitalize in the standard way.
Cheers!
I was asked a question on Quora about a recent study that talked about high-dimensional ‘structures’ in the brain. It has been receiving an inordinate amount of hype, partly as a result of the journal’s own blog. Their headline reads:
‘Blue Brain Team Discovers a Multi-Dimensional Universe in Brain Networks’
As if the reference to a ‘universe’ weren’t bad enough, the last author, Henry Markram, says the following:
A Quora conversation led me to recent paper in Neuron that highlights a very important problem with a lot of neuroscience research: there is insufficient attention paid to the careful analysis of behavior. The paper is not quite a call to return to behaviorism, but it is an invitation to consider that the pendulum has swing too far in the opposite direction, towards ‘blind’ searches for neural correlates. The paper is a wonderful big picture critique, so I’d like to just share some excerpts.
Interesting interview in the Atlantic with cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman:
“I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind. Here’s a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So it’s not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet it’s also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when they’re split. I didn’t expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. It’s conscious agents all the way down.”
[…]
Here’s the striking thing about that. I can pull the W out of the model and stick a conscious agent in its place and get a circuit of conscious agents. In fact, you can have whole networks of arbitrary complexity. And that’s the world.
[…]
“As a conscious realist, I am postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives, the most basic ingredients of the world. I’m claiming that experiences are the real coin of the realm. The experiences of everyday life—my real feeling of a headache, my real taste of chocolate—that really is the ultimate nature of reality.”
I don’t agree with everything in the article (especially the quantum stuff) but I think many people interested in consciousness and metaphysics will find plenty of food for thought here:
Also, the “conscious agents all the way down” is the exact position I was criticizing in a recent 3QD essay:
The diagram above is from a science fiction story I was working on, back when I was a callow youth. It closely related to the idea of a network of conscious agents. Here’s another ‘version’ of it.
Not sure why I made it look so morbid. 🙂
My paper is finally out in PLoS Computational Biology. It’s an open access journal, so everyone can read it:
Here’s the Author Summary, which is a simplified version of the abstract:
“Emotional experiences grab our attention. Information about the emotional significance of events helps individuals weigh opportunities and dangers to guide goal-directed behavior, but may also lead to irrational decisions when the stakes are perceived to be high. Which neural circuits underlie these contrasting outcomes? A recently discovered pathway links the amygdala—a key center of the emotional system—with the inhibitory thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN) that filters information between the thalamus and cortex. We developed a neural network model—the Emotional Gatekeeper—that demonstrates how the newly discovered pathway from the amygdala to TRN highlights relevant information to help assess threats and opportunities. The model also shows how the amygdala-TRN pathway can lead normal individuals to discount neutral but useful information in highly charged emotional situations, and predicts that disruption of specific nodes in this circuit underlies distinct psychiatric disorders.”
Here’s the full citation:
John YJ, Zikopoulos B, Bullock D, Barbas H (2016) The Emotional Gatekeeper: A Computational Model of Attentional Selection and Suppression through the Pathway from the Amygdala to the Inhibitory Thalamic Reticular Nucleus. PLoS Comput Biol 12(2): e1004722. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004722
An answer I wrote to the Quora question Does the human brain work solely by pattern recognition?:
Great question! Broadly speaking, the brain does two things: it processes ‘inputs’ from the world and from the body, and generates ‘outputs’ to the muscles and internal organs.
Pattern recognition shows up most clearly during the processing of inputs. Recognition allows us to navigate the world, seeking beneficial/pleasurable experiences and avoiding harmful/negative experiences.* So pattern recognition must also be supplemented by associative learning: humans and animals must learn how patterns relate to each other, and to their positive and negative consequences.
And patterns must not simply be recognized: they must also be categorized. We are bombarded by patterns all the time. The only way to make sense of them is to categorize them into classes that can all be treated similarly. We have one big category for ‘snake’, even though the sensory patterns produced by specific snakes can be quite different. Pattern recognition and classification are closely intertwined, so in what follows I’m really talking about both.
Creativity does have a connection with pattern recognition. One of the most complex and fascinating manifestations of pattern recognition is the process of analogy and metaphor. People often draw analogies between seemingly disparate topics: this requires creative use of the faculty of pattern recognition. Flexible intelligence depends on the ability to recognize patterns of similarity between phenomena. This is a particularly useful skill for scientists, teachers, artists, writers, poets and public thinkers, but it shows up all over the place. Many internet memes, for example, involve drawing analogies: seeing the structural connections between unrelated things.
One of my favourites is a meme on twitter called #sameguy. It started as a game of uploading pictures of two celebrities that resemble each other, followed by the hashtag #sameguy. But it evolved to include abstract ideas and phenomena that are the “same” in some respect. Making cultural metaphors like this requires creativity, as does understanding them. One has to free one’s mind of literal-mindedness in order to temporarily ignore the ever-present differences between things and focus on the similarities.
Here’s a blog that collects #sameguy submissions: Same Guy
On twitter you sometimes come across more imaginative, analogical #sameguy posts: #sameguy – Twitter Search
The topic of metaphor and analogy is one of the most fascinating aspects of intelligence, in my opinion. I think it’s far more important that coming up with theories about ‘consciousness’. 🙂 Check out this answer:
Why are metaphors and allusions used while writing?
(This Quora answer is a cross-post of a blog post I wrote: Metaphor: the Alchemy of Thought)
In one sense metaphor and analogy are central to scientific research. I’ve written about this here:
What are some of the most important problems in computational neuroscience?
Science: the Quest for Symmetry
This essay is tangentially related to the topic of creativity and patterns:
From Cell Membranes to Computational Aesthetics: On the Importance of Boundaries in Life and Art
* The brain’s outputs — commands to muscles and glands — are closely linked with pattern recognition too. What you choose to do depends on what you can do given your intentions, circumstances, and bodily configuration. The state that you and the universe happen to be in constrains what you can do, and so it is useful for the brain to recognize and categorize the state in order to mediate decision-making, or even non-conscious behavior.When you’re walking on a busy street, you rapidly process pathways that are available to you. even if you stumble, you can quickly and unconsciously act to minimize damage to yourself and others. Abilities of this sort suggest that pattern recognition is not purely a way to create am ‘image’ of the world, but also a central part of our ability to navigate it.
My latest essay for 3 Quarks Daily is up: Me and My Brain: What the “Double-Subject Fallacy” reveals about contemporary conceptions of the Self
What is a person? Does each of us have some fundamental essence? Is it the body? Is it the mind? Is it something else entirely? Versions of this question seem always to have animated human thought. In the aftermath of the scientific revolution, it seems as if one category of answer — the dualist idea that the essence of a person is an incorporeal soul that inhabits a material body — must be ruled out. But as it turns out, internalizing a non-dualist conception of the self is actually rather challenging for most people, including neuroscientists.[…] A recent paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience suggests that even experts in the sciences of mind and brain find it difficult to shake off dualistic intuitions. Liad Mudrik and Uri Maoz, in their paper “Me & My Brain”: Exposing NeuroscienceĘĽs Closet Dualism, argue that not only do neuroscientists frequently lapse into dualistic thinking, they also attribute high-level mental states to the brain, treating these states as distinct from the mental states of the person as a whole. They call this the double-subject fallacy. ( I will refer to the fallacy as “dub-sub”, and the process of engaging in it as “dub-subbing”.) Dub-subbing is going on in constructions like”my brain knew before I did” or “my brain is hiding information from me”. In addition to the traditional subject — “me”, the self, the mind — there is a second subject, the brain, which is described in anthropomorphic terms such as ‘knowing’ or ‘hiding’. But ‘knowing’ and ‘hiding’ are precisely the sorts of things that we look to neuroscience to explain; when we fall prey to the double-subject fallacy we are actually doing the opposite of what we set out to do as materialists. Rather than explaining “me” in terms of physical brain processes, dub-subbing induces us to describe the brain in terms of an obscure second “me”. Instead of dispelling those pesky spirits, we allow them to proliferate!
Neurologism 