Encefalus

Hey, I return after nearly missing for a month. This time, I won’t write about my current interests which revolve around computation in social sciences. This time I am writing to revisit politics. Actually, I don’t know why, after a month not having published an article I feel the urge to throw some random rant. So please, bear with me.

You know what, people are stupid. People are utterly stupid. And the problem is that they are so stupid that they don’t even realize it. I’ve started thinking that people are not much smarter than monkeys. Sometimes, I feel like stranded on an island with monkeys as my sole companion.

Home…

It wouldn’t be an overstatement if I said that most people resemble airplanes with deficient auto-piloting systems. They go straight to nowhere without even realizing where they are.

Now, let me tell you why. Psychology exists as a science for over a century (1879). Through its existence we have started to uncover many of the mechanisms that we use to survive in our every day environments.

But, why do I use the word mechanism instead of something other word? Because, you don’t have to see people as something more than that. And let me explain myself.

Why don’t you hear very often every day people arguing with mathematicians and physicists about science? Because no-one really cares about maths and physics in their every day lives. But, the huge amount of self-help and pop psychology books shows clearly how much interest exists about psychology in our every day lives. This is natural, since in order to interact in a social setting we all have to become amateur psychologists.

Your everyday logic

In our efforts to do that, we create theories about others and how people interact. We create theoritical notions like "free-will" and some of us end up using political theories in our cognitive arsenal, as a means to explain social phenomena.

However, while we believe that these theories are correct, in fact, science has proven most of them to be absolute crap. Yes, they might help us get through the day, but they are not correct.

Of course, being scientifically correct is not what life is all about. Life is just about one thing: survival. Yeap, so simple. This is what the theory of evolution teaches us. And this is why people are so utterly stupid. We don’t need anything too much sophisticated to survive in our environment. We just need some simple heuristics to survive.

Yet, this is exactly the very reason everything seems to go straight to hell. Our brains have built societies and civilizations that are far more complex than anything our brain has been evolved to face. This is why we need to start trusting science when we are making big decisions. However, I haven’t seen too much science in politics. I haven’t seen too much science in warfare. I haven’t seen too much science in the recent economic crisis.

John Rambo knows how to survive even though he knows jack about science

Someone will surely argue that science is indeed present in all these three occasions: politicians speak with scientists, warfare is based on technological advance and economics is a science in itself. Yeah, but it’s pretty obvious that this is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about how we can use psychology or any other scientific means (like computation sociology I have explored in previous articles)  in order to make decisions that are based more on facts, than on theory.

The problem here is that we have a giant gap between society and science. Psychology has experienced the major paradigm shift of subconscious non-logical mechanisms of action that govern our lives, decades ago. On the other hand, society and politics have not. The most tragic of all is that I am not sure even if they are able to do that. It seems more probable to me that most people are not able to grasp some concepts that will be used by corrupt officers in power in order to create their own vision of society, rather that people can abandon archaic concepts like free-will and spiritualism.

Fuck yeah

Maybe we can see many things in the police state of Great Britain and in the juridical system of the USA, where stupidity reigns supreme above all reason and logic. The fight against terrorism in the recent years has created many comical examples of cops raiding homes or goverments spying on their citizens. Somehow, many people believe this will make the world safer, while if you think about all the terrorist strikes that have happened in the last 10 years, you will see that they are not that many at all.

I can’t really tell what course shoudl society take. I can only tell what I observe: that we are creating policies based on irrational decisions, ignoring all scientific evidence.

The title of this article was inspired by an article on Cracked: What is the Monkeysphere?

You can find more articles about irrationality and human stupidity in Encefalus:

Subliminal messaging, subliminal advertising and subliminal learning for a subliminal post

A different view on economics: maybe all we really need

Lotteries, poverty AND credit cards this time along with the proper social and scientific analysis

Lotteries, poverty and social implications

As I had said in my previous post, I am very busy this time. Now, you are going to see why

Lately, I decided to learn more about computation models. This will probably be reseach focus in the upcoming years. I created two models, which I want to present to you. The models were created using NetLogo. NetLogo is a very simple language based on Logo. It is specifically for creating agent-based models. The two best features are that its programs can be exported and run on the internet in a simple java interface and that it can be connected to mathematica via tha MathLink. Mathematica not only is a very powerful application, but, it can also be connected to other computer languages, like those of the .NET protocol. This expands the horizon of possibilities.

The first model I made, is called the Three Species model. It’s a model where there are three species, the sugar eaters, the meat eaters and the grass eaters. These species, eat resources on the map, kill each other and reproduce asexually like bacteria. The model has many parameters and may seem a little bit confusing at the beginning. The reason I made so much parameters was to study the functions of NetLogo.

Don’t get too confused. I have incorporated detailed instructions on how to use the model inside the model.

The Three Species model: http://encefalus.com/the_three_species.html

The other model I created, is called the Walker Traffic model. It was based on a native model of NetLogo called traffic (simple). It has an one way road, and walkers that want to go across. It is simpler than the previous model. Not only it has fewer parameters, but it’s behavior is simpler as well. The three species model contains many stochastic interacting elements that produce all sorts of interesting dynamics. In fact, you’ll see that even if you hold all the parameters the same, the results each time change. On the other hand, the walker traffic model has simple dynamics that, I suspect, could be described by a stationary law.

The Walker Traffic model: http://encefalus.com/walker_traffic.html

My models are top baby!!!

First of all, I’m sorry for not having written for so long, but I am really busy. Anyway, this time was not wasted, since I have passed a large part of my free time dealing with new ideas.

These ideas revolve around computation and a possible formal framework of methodology in social sciences.

In this article I want to discuss some thoughts that came to me after reading A New Kind of Science.

In this book, what Wolfram is essentialy proposing, is that simple programs like cellular automata can be the answer to all our prayers He believes that they could replace mathematics, or work alongside with them.

This is an interesting approach (even though its claims have been criticised as overly too extravagant) . What I want to discuss here is if this could be possible in social sciences.

Stephen Wolfram

The main idea behind A New Kind of Science is what is called the Principle of Computational Equivalence. This means that all systems that are not obviously simple (therefore hold some complexity), have been produced by a set of rules that are simple.The additional complexity is due to the additional computation that has taken place, not to more complex rules. More complex rules, as Wolfram says, as he presents many examples (but no formal proof), do not lead to greater complexity.

This means for example, that the evolutionary process that has given birth to millions of species is not governed by zillions of factors as one might have imagined, but rather, by a simple set of rules that have been simply interacting with the environment.

Furthermore, Wolfram, through the study of complex systems with simple rules, is lead to some more conclusions. For example, the reverse engineering (reducibility) of complex systems belongs to the NP-complete class of problems, which means is practically impossible. This means that one might have thought that we can just create an algorithm to analyze a system and discover its rules, Wolfram says that this is higly improbable.

Rule 110 one dimensional cellular automaton belongs to Class 4 rules (complex ones)

According to Wolfram, most systems in nature are complex and irreducible, but we haven’t realized it until now, because mathematics have been used only in occasions where we knew they would be successful beforehand. According to Wolfram, even systems in mathematics belong to this classification.

For example, the solutions of polynomial equations of higher degrees in algebra are complex systems, according to Wolfram, and therefore there can never be a solution for them. The only thing we can do, is to run the program and witness its evolution.

The Principle of Computational Equivalence creates more problems than solves. And this, because, it poses strict limits on what we can learn and what we cannot. However, on the other hand, Wolfram, through the study of simple rules and complex systems, tries to create a new kind of research. While, like we said above, complex systems are irreducible, Wolfram proposes that we should do pure NKS (New Kind of Science). That is, to study computational programs as they are, without any direct reference to something, pretty much like we study mathematical equations and functions, without any direct reference to a system.

The book leaves many questions unanswered, since Wolfram doesn’t clearly explain how this would exactly help us to create better models of reality. So, let’s be a little more specific in this article, by providing some thoughts on this framework.

Let’s take the case of agent based models. It is obvious that these are computation models. However, all agent based models are based on parameters that can become even more complex as the models advance. What if, as Wolfram proposes, these systems are governed only by a set of simple rules and the interaction with the environment. These rules, if Wolfram is right, will be simple than the zillions of rules computer scientists tend to use in complex simulations.

Agent based modelling

This would essentialy mean that we could create a new kind of social science, where we are not based on any human notion, but rather on simple rules. Additionaly, what Wolfram proposes, these rules could be abstract representations, like mathematics. A function can be used in econometry, but it can also be used in physics. If programs, like the ones Wolfram proposes, are indeed ubiquitous, then we could use them to analyse, and predict, social procedures, without caring about specific notions.

So thing for example, of an artifical community, where it advances via simple cellular automaton rules on a grid that represents a certain geographical region. If what Wolfram proposes is correct, maybe we could create a simulation of the core of evolution of this society, just based on a few simple rules.

I don’t know if this idea holds any truth, but it is certainly interesting. It actually proposes that we can formalize the study of social systems with computational programs that hold no inherent meaning. If this is true, then it could mean a revolution in social sciences, which, probably, hold the greatest envy towards physics, than any other sciences, because of the complete lack of any formal framework of research or methodology.

However, what really concerns me is the degree of accuracy between abstract computational models and real life. So, for example, while simple rules can generate complexity, we can’t be sure if a certain set of rules is enough to create some specific kind of complexity.

When modelling car traffic for example, we don’t simply care about finding a bunch of simple rules that create complex behavior, but, rather, we want to find rules that create complex behavior that is like the one we observe in real life traffic.

It is actually a question between general complexity and specific complexity. If general complexity is just the fact of a system being complex, specific complexity represents the fact that this system can provide an abstract, but accurate representation, of a specific process.

Let’s consider, for example, every system as a computational one, just like Wolfram proposes. We can think that are brains are performing computations or the weather performing computations, as they represent systems that interact with their environment based on a certain set of rules.

Then, we can say that the system of car traffic holds general complexity and is specifically complex to the system of car traffic. This means that it represents itself and is tautologous, pretty much like proofs in logic and mathematics.

However, rule 184 has often been used to represent traffic. It is generally complex, but it is not specifically complex to any specific traffic of any specific city.

Therefore, the question of whether we can implement A New Kind of Science in social sciences, is how specific our generally complex models can be.

Further Reading:

A New Kind of Science Online

What is a cellular automaton: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CellularAutomaton.html

The NKS Blog: http://thenksblog.wordpress.com/

Hi there guys It’s been a long time that I haven’t written an article. The reason is that I have SO many things to do, that I really don’t have the time to update all my projects as often. Between my new projects, like Raskolnikov’s Dream and Musikality Net, I had to deal with university exams, as well! But, as you see, I still post updates when I can

Today, we are going to talk about a concept I was thinking about the other day. That concept is called the "E" factor.

The E factor is a concept I created to describe evolutionary fitness. Evolution is a pretty simple theory. It revolves around only survival and reproduction. However, there has never been a single factor that determines the evolutionary fitness of an organism.

Of course, the reason is simple. Evolution, while a simple theory, describes a complex procedure. Let’s think for a moment about IQ for example. IQ is a scale that psychologists never actually managed to describe what measures exactly. There is also the so-called g factor, which determines general intelligence, and has been related to all sorts of stuff, but never has there been any real definition of what this "g factor" actually is.

The same goes for the E factor. Could there be an E factor? And how can we define it?

Pretty complex stuff

Let’s start by hypothesizing that the E factor is not a quantitative value. How can we know that an organism has a high or a low E factor? The easy answer would be to say, that once an organism has lived its life, we can deduce that if it reproduced successfuly, it has a high E factor, otherwise it does not.

However, this would be the logical fallacy of petitio principii, or cyclical argument. This means that we know that something has a high E factor, because it survived and we know that it survived because it has a high E factor. This is absolute non-sense. Our E factor should allow us to predict whether an organism has chance of surviving and what is that chance.

In order to calculate that chance, we start with the simplest case possible: we ask the question if this organism has a probability greater than 0% to survive. This would allow us to give an E factor of "0" to all organisms without a reproductive system. Of course, nowadays we got nasty things like cloning and stuff , but for the argument’s sake we have to keep it simple.

Now, how could we determine the chance of an organism surviving and reproducing, that is, its E factor? He would have to get all the factors down, calculate them and use computational approaches to find the result. However, this seems somewhat improbable to happen. It looks like the equivalent of the determinists’ dream of the 19th century that we could determine the course of the universe.

Nevertheless, an E factor is an interesting philosophical idea. First and foremost, concerning evolutionary psychology. Should we be able to identify an E factor, maybe we could validate the theories of evolutionary psychology. Furthermore, we could determine the evolutionary efficacy of behaviors as they happen.

Maybe not only that, but the very idea of an E factor, can help us contemplate which behaviors help us adjust to our environment and which ones don’t. Many of the behaviors that we deem in high esteem, are culturally promoted, while others, are shunned upon. However, the shunned ones, might be a lot more adaptive than the promoted ones.

For example, let’s compare and contrast two different cases: A geek with a Phd and a playboy bunny. Alright, this is the clash of the century

The Phd geek, has a lot of studying to do. He must miss many parties, and many opportunities to find mates. However, he is willing to sacrifice all that in order to become a university professor. This feat requires an above the average intelligence, discipline and concentration.

On the other hand, the playboy bunny, is simply beautiful by society’s standards. She doesn’t really have many things to do. She just participates in a few contests, or photos, and BANG, she earns more money than the guy above.

VS 

What this could mean, is that while intelligence and education are highly-esteemed in our society, beauty might be all more important. The problem that most people face however, is that beauty is a genetic gift, while qualities like intelligence and discipline, are thought  to be more flexible (even though they might not really be).

Maybe it is a self-esteem mechanism like the one that Leon Festinger proposed, that works here. However, should we have an E factor, maybe we could see that our playboy bunny really owns the professor

One nice thing about evolution, is that it is a nihilistic theory. It really doesn’t matter who you are, or what you do. There is only on law: survival and reproduction.

All of society’ structure can easily crumble down like dust in the face of evolution. However, every scientific explanation crumbles down like dust as well, in the absence of evolution.

That’s one nice reassuring thought. You can see disputable things like art under a new light, through evolution. For example, it is a fact that each one has his own taste about art. Maybe some people dislike it all together. You have surely participated in meaningless conversations about who is the best singer/painter/actor/anything.

Evolution might help you understand that all this really doesn’t matter. Art was for the artists a means of increasing their E factor. Ancient art that can now be found in museums, is a way for a bunch of other guys to increase their E factor: art professors, art lovers and museum security guards

A nice attempt to increase one’s E factor

I find this kind of thinking really liberating. Marx for example had created a social theory of everything based on the struggle of classes and economy. Freud tried to create a social theory of everything based on his dark mechanisms of the subconscious. Why not create a theory of everything based on evolution?

After all, evolution doesn’t constitute a simple theoritical model through which we face a set of events.

Through the theory of computation, most theories impose a certain set of simple rules, which we have to discover and let the whole thing compute itself to find the similarity with reality in order to test and validate our theory.

Evolution describes a process. It not based on equations, but rather on the fact that some agents survive and reproduce and some do not. Evolution doesn’t predict, it describes. We are the ones who have to try and make the predictions based upon a theory of E factor.

Therefore, I believe evolution to be much more valid than the social theories above.

Maybe a social science of an E factor is all we really need after all

Of course many will say that evolutionary psychology does exactly that. I disagree, because evolutionary psychology is based on the premise that old behaviors, held by our ancestors, are still alive in our genes today. What a science of the E factor should do, is to alow the study of evolutionary adjustable behaviors as they happen, not on hypothesis on the past. It is a study of the social evolution of present, not of past adjusted to the present.

So, I hope this article increased your E factor

This little lolcat is happy after it increased its E Factor

Sorry for not having written for so long time, but I literally have SO many things to do, especially with my new projects, that I really don’t have time for anything!

Anyway, I am writing this post to comment on an article I found on Scientific American: Exploring Consciousness through the Study of Bees

This article is written by Christof Koch. If you remembered we have dealt before with him in past articles (Introducing Scholarpedia and the Neural Correlates of Consciousness)

Christof Koch

Christof Koch is neuroscientist whose main interest is consciousness. In this article he presents the following argument. We don’t have a complete theory of consciousness, so we should follow an agnostic approach on the subject, since we can’t say for sure which things posess a consciousness and which do not.

His discussion starts with bees. We all consider insects to be utterly stupid. After all, insects are so much different than us. They are small, they have a different social structure, since they are not mamals, and their appereance seems alien to us.

Nevertheless, they are capable of some interesting feats

Bees live in highly stratified yet flexible social organizations with group decision-making skills that rival academic, corporate or government committees in efficiency. In spring, when bees swarm, they choose a new hive that needs to satisfy many demands within a couple of days (consider that the next time you go house hunting). They communicate information about the location and quality of food sources using the waggle dance. Bees can fly several kilometers and return to their hive, a remarkable navigational performance. Their brains seem to have incorporated a map of their environment. And a scent blown into the hive can trigger a return to the site where the bee previously encountered this odor. This type of associative memory was famously described by French novelist Marcel Proust in À la Recherche du Temps Perdu.

Our new conscious friend…

Koch presents a very nice argument here. Our criteria about what is conscious and what is not are highly subjective and instictual. His argument calls us to take a look at the functions and the structure of the species that we know that have consciousness (this is us) and compare it with that of other creatures (like bees).

Based, on this new criterion, we don’t have any reason not to accept that bees have consiousness. On the other hand, we don’t have any reason to accept that bees have consciousness. And this for two reasons: Bees can speak to us, to ascertain our hypothesis and, secondly, we don’t know of what use consciousness would be to the bees.

However, these arguments are not absolutely right. Concerning the first argument, we can’t take communication as a proof of consciousness. A possible artificial intelligence life-form could communicate with us, but this wouldn’t mean that it is conscious.

The second argument is a little trickier, since we don’t know in what consciousness is useful. Maybe consciounsess is useless and it is just an epiphenomenon of neural processes.

Furthermore, we can’t even rule out the case of zombies, which connects the two arguments. The zombie-case in consciousness makes the assumption that a being that we consider conscient, let’s say another human, is exactly as it is, but doesn’t have consciousness. If such a creature could exist, then we maybe we could accept that consciousness is just an epiphenomenon, and it is useless. We would also be sure that communication would not mean that a creature is conscious, even though we have verified this hypothesis with the AI argument above.

The undisputable future of neuroscience…

So, we are at the point we just began this conversation. We don’t know jack about consciousnes , and so, we don’t any reasons to accept or reject the hypothesis that bees are have consciousness and are our friends .

However, at this point I want to make a connection with an older post: Can computation be the answer? The violation of the second law of thermodynamics

At this post, we had talked about Stephen Wolfram and his approach to science that circles around simple systems and cellular automata. If simple systems can describe the neural networks that govern our brains, maybe they could explain the existence of consiousness as an emergent phenomenon.

Complexity out of simplicity

Cellular automata are characterized by the fact that by a set of simple rules, complex patterns emerge. This explanation doesn’t require consciousness to be evolutionary adaptive (even though it might be). It doesn’t require consciousness to perform some special functions. It only requires that neural networks are governed by some simple rules, and these rules eventually, seem to give rise to the phenomenon of consciousness.

So, that was it for today! Until next time, try to be more gentle with the little bees. They might conscious you know!

As you may know, I also run two more projects, besides Encefalus.

I am a musician, not only a psychologist, and my first project, can be found here: Raskolnikov’s Dream.

It is a melodic electronica project. In the official site you will find more information and you will be able to listen to samples of my music.

The other project I am currently running is Musikality Net, a blog with resources for independent musicians, including articles and tutorials on various, subjects like music theory, software and promotion.

I’d be very happy if you could just pay a little visit to see what these are all about

I found this interview in scientific american the other day: Inside the Savant Mind: Tips for Thinking from an Extraordinary Thinker

This interview is with Daniel Tammet, a world-known savant.

Daniel Tammet

For those of you who don’t know what a savant is, they are autistic people with extraordinary abilities. If you’ve seen the film Rainman, then you’ll understand what we are talking about. Dustin Hoffman represents in the movie the archetype of a savant. In fact, this movie was based on a real savant, Kim Peek.

The savant syndrome is defined by wikipedia as follows

Savant syndrome—sometimes abbreviated as savantism—is not a recognized medical diagnosis, but researcher Darold Treffert defines it as a rare condition in which persons with developmental disorders (including autism spectrum disorders) have one or more areas of expertise, ability or brilliance that are in contrast with the individual’s overall limitations.^[1] Treffert says the condition can be genetic, but can also be acquired,^[1] and coexists with other developmental disabilities "such as mental retardation or brain injury or disease that occurs before (pre-natal) during (peri-natal) or after birth (post-natal), or even later in childhood or adult life."^[1]

According to Treffert, about half of persons with savant syndrome have autistic disorder, while the other half have another developmental disability, mental retardation, brain injury or disease. He says, "…  not all savants are autistic, and not all autistic persons are savants."^[1] Other researchers state that autistic traits and savant skills may be linked,^[2] or have challenged some earlier conclusions about savant syndrome as "hearsay, uncorroborated by independent scrutiny".^[3]

Random image I found by googling "savant", apparently referring to a pen and paper rpg

What is so interesting about savants, is that while they have deficits in some basic areas of functioning, they have abilities, that the average human, can never be able even to approach. So, for example, Daniel Tammet which we cited above, has completed the following feats

• He holds the European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes
• Tammet claims to speak eleven languages including English, French, Finnish, German, Spanish, Lithuanian, Romanian, Estonian, Icelandic, Welsh, and Esperanto.
• He learned Icelandic in one week

He is also a synesthetic, which means he has some of his senses tangled together. To make things clearer, Tammet, actually, (citing wikipedia) "experiences every integer up to 10.000 as having its own color, shape, texture and feel". He can "sense" whether a number is prime or composite. In his interview in scientific american he says

TAMMET: I have always thought of abstract information—numbers for example—in visual, dynamic form. Numbers assume complex, multi-dimensional shapes in my head that I manipulate to form the solution to sums, or compare when determining whether they are prime or not.

For languages, I do something similar in terms of thinking of words as belonging to clusters of meaning so that each piece of vocabulary makes sense according to its place in my mental architecture for that language. In this way I can easily discern relationships between words, which helps me to remember them.

In my mind, numbers and words are far more than squiggles of ink on a page. They have form, color, texture and so on. They come alive to me, which is why as a young child I thought of them as my “friends.” I think this is why my memory is very deep, because the information is not static. I say in my book that I do not crunch numbers (like a computer). Rather, I dance with them.

None of this is particularly surprising for me. I have always thought in this way so it seems entirely natural. What I do find surprising is that other people do not think in the same way. I find it hard to imagine a world where numbers and words are not how I experience them!

Timothy B Layden-Synesthesia 2007 

So, in Tammet’s mind, information is not abstract, but visual, and, in some strange way, "concrete". What is so amazing about synaesthesia, is that we can have no clue about what it feels like to be like that. It is a phenomenon that belongs purely to the hard problem of consciousness(Split Brains, Consciousness and Michael Gazzaniga). The feelings and procedures that accompany Tammet’s mind are unaccessible to us in a direct level.

Daniel Tammet, however, as a highly function autistic, gives us some descriptions of what is going on inside his mind, as in the interview cited above, but in no-way can we ever really "feel" what it feels like to be him.

All these abilities, however, come with some disorders. Tammet also suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome and epilepsy. Asperger’s Syndrome is a highly functional form of autism. It so highly functional, in fact, that many people can suffer from this syndrome without them or the others, ever realizing it. People with it can just be considered as eccentrics or strange, while not knowing that they suffer from it, can make their lives more difficult, while, however, allowing them to function in a modern society.

Hans Asperger

The savant mind is one of those cases that you know you’ve just stumbled upon something important. Savant minds break many of the barriers of human intelligence, and of the limitations we think that exist, because most of us live with these limitations. While many geniuses throughout time, like pop icons like Albert Einstein, have made discoveries that to most of us seem difficult to grasp, the thing that is amazing about savants, whatsoever, is that their skills are not focused on discoveries, but on raw ability.

However, while the savant mind, obviously causes awe, there are almost no clues, on what is really going on inside their brain to produce such results. Daniel Tammet has a theory of his own which he presents in his interview in Scientific American

LEHRER: You advocate a theory of creativity defined by a cognitive property you call "hyper-connectivity." Could you explain?

TAMMET: I am unusually creative—from visualizing numerical landscapes composed of random strings of digits to the invention of my own words and concepts in numerous languages. Where does this creativity come from?

My brain has developed a little differently from most other people’s. Aside from my high-functioning autism, I also suffered from epileptic seizures as a young child. In my book, I propose a link between my brain’s functioning and my creative abilities based on the property of ‘hyper-connectivity’.

In most people, the brain’s major functions are performed separately and not allowed to interfere with one another. Scientists have found that in some brain disorders however, including autism and epilepsy, cross-communication can occur between normally distinct brain regions. My theory is that rare forms of creative imagination are the result of an extraordinary convergence of normally disconnected thoughts, memories, feelings and ideas. Indeed, such “hyper-connectivity” within the brain may well lie at the heart of all forms of exceptional creativity.

Kim Peek, the real "Rain Man"

While the theory is a psychological one, and it is highly interesting, nevertheless, I believe that when we encounter such amazing feats we also have to look into the brain in a neuronal level.

Cognitive psychology has always proposed a module theory of mind, meaning that the mind (and the brain thereafter) is seperated into different modules, that complete different functions. This could explain why savants can show extraordinary abilities on one domain, while impaired on others, since these domains, according to the theory, are not connected.

However, this doesn’t explain how savant abilities are formed in the first place.

The only thing we can say for now, is that savantism, is one the most amazing phenomena of the human brain. We can only hope that future research will shed more light into this.

I haven’t written for sometime due to time constraints, but I decided to come back today to comment on an article I just read, before I lose my track of thoughts.

The article was published in Scientific American and is this: Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology

This article is written by Philosopher of science David Buller who is known for his critical view on evolutionary psychology. He was appeared before in Scientific American: Psyching Out Evolutionary Psychology: Interview with David J. Buller.

For those of you who don’t know what evolutionary psychology is, it is a field of psychology that tries to explain human behavior based on explanations concerning human adaptation in older times. As we all know, Darwin’s theory of evolution says that all species develop various mechanisms to adapt to their environment through the generations. Evolutionary psychologists have taken this concept further, by saying that these adaptations are not only biological, like for example immunity to a disease, but also, behavioral.

Evolutionary Psychologist David Buss

A very simple example is jealousy. Jealousy is considered an evolutionary adaptive trait. The reasoning behind this is the following: If a male, for example, knowingly lets his female partner mate with another male, then it becomes less likely that he will have children with her and, thus, it is less likely that he will transfer his genes to the next generation. Therefore, males who were jealous, had higher chances of transfering their genes and, so, jealousy has been transfered as an evolutionary behavioral trait in modern times.

Evolutionary psychology has been disputed many times. The main problem with evolutionary psychology is that, unlike other branches of psychology, like cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology theories are difficult to falsify.

Buller’s criticism focuses on 4 points. The first one concerns that we can’t really falsify or verify the theories, because we don’t have data on our ancestors. This is a subject I’d like to address. While we don’t have a completely clear picture of the way our ancestors lived, we still have some kind of an idea. Furthermore, this claim made me remember my last article: Can computation be the answer? The violation of the second law of thermodynamics. The world of computation is one based on repetition, chaotic patterns, and constraints or borders. What all this means, to make it simpler, is that while we can’t travel in the past to see how our ancestors lived, we can, however, create a picture of what life back then would be. Of course, a perfect situation would be to compute the past from the present (which can be is impossible at this point). However, we can still gather data from various sciences concerning these times, like geological and anthropological, and try to find the challenges the early homo sapiens faced.

Evolutionary psychologist pioneer Leda Cosmides

Furthermore, don’t forget that evolutionary dynamics, are not much different than economics. It is a system governed by agents with limited resources, and with the purpose to reproduce one’s genes. Pretty much like in economics we have used games, like the prisoner’s dilemma, to try and find the best strategy, maybe we can compute certain games based on the constraints of the environment we created based on data from other sciences concerning these ancient times, in order to find most successful evolutionary strategies. We could then, statistically, infer the probability of each strategy surviving after some thousands of years, until now. Should these strategies agree with the finding of evolutionary psychology, then we could say, with some certainty, that evolutionary theories are valid.

Evolutionary psychologist John Tooby

This argument I just presented, can also be the answer to the second fallacy that David Buller finds in evolutionary psychology, that we can’t know how a trait was evolved, because, we need to have a similar species, but in a different environment, to compare the two, between them.

The third point Buller makes, have some truth in it. David Buller says that the popular evolutionary psychology phrase "Our modern skulls house a stone age mind" isn’t so right. He cites that have seen human evolutionary adaptations in 450 years, so we could expect that some behavioral adaptations could also have happened since the early days of homo sapiens. The degree, however, up to which these adaptations have taken place remains to be seen.

The final argument D. Buller makes is that the psychological data gathered don’t provide a verification of the theories of evolutionary psychology. If you read the article and you have some experience as a psychologist, you’ll probably see that this is not a really good argument. Psychological experiments face problems many times, but scientists always try to make their best to avoid any problems that could hurt the research’s credibility. Buller provides an alternative explanation to the evolutionary explanation of jealousy differences between males and females.

Evolutionary psychology supports that males are mostly bothered by the sexual infidelity of their partner and females by the emotional infidelity of their partners. David Buller says that homosexual men, in the concept of jealousy, are more like women, than men, thus this proves the theory wrong. D. Buller obviously has never read the recent research that presents findings that homosexual men’s brains are closer to women’s brains, than men’s. He then offers the classic explanation that culture shapes the human mind, and jealousy is perceived differently among cultures. He is right about this one. However, while culture is a factor, evolution is another one. This means that the weight of the different factors can, and should be, compared statistically, not on vague writings and catchphrases that have been coming and going in the last century like mantras, based on a silly debates like nurture vs nature.

Nurture versus nature…

Of course, not everything in evolutionary psychology is right, like you may have suspected I believe by this article. Check this blog out for example in Psychology Today Blogs: The Scientific Fundamentalist. This guy is Satoshi Kanazawa, who has written why Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters. Satoshi Kanazawa has a tendency to make extravagant claims and create various evolutionary theories about everything. He also has a tendency to disturb people. While evolutionary psychology itself has a tendency to disturb people, I think that mr. Kanazawa does this on purpose. If you remember we had written in Encefalus about a post of his in the past: The biggest crap I’ve ever read: The road to freedom of expression? where he tried to convice us that throwing atomic bombs in Japan during the second world war was an act of compassion. Just reading this sentence makes me want to kill myself.

While many of his theories are valid, others are extreme unscientific claims about all kinds of controversial issues, with the only purpose to piss off people.

Satoshi Kanazawa

There is another one evolutionary psychology blog, ran by a gay, which makes it even more interesting, since evolutionary psychology hasn’t yet found a convincing theory of human homosexuality: Quirky Little Things. He even has presented evolutionary theories on homosexuality: The Sneaky F*cker Theory (and Other Gay Ideas)

Well, anyway, I think that we have talked about many things today. We have certainly covered some important issues in evolutionary psychology. It is a highly controversial topic and I urge you to read some more to form your own opinion on the subject.

Encefalus wishes you a happy new year!! This blog started near the end of july 2008 with a 100 visitors and now has over 140.000 unique visitors! I want to thank you all for your support, e-mails and comments. Let’s hope this year will be better than the last one.

Let there be new synapses into our brains!

Stephen Wolfram

Lately I’ve been reading Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science. As you can guess from the title, Wolfram makes a few great remarks about the future and the methods of science.

Traditional science uses mathematics. What mathematics do, is to quantify problems, find regularities and then use equations to describe these regularities. What this means, is that mathematics lie in a continuum, upon which we can jump from one point to the next.

However, this approach has met various difficulties. For example, mathematics never had any real chance in social sciences, or in biology. Mathematics have worked wonders for physics, where systems are characterized by stability to a very large extent, but for other systems, where we are faced with a high degree of randomness or complexity, mathematics have failed to us to a great extent.

Encefalus, for example, has written some articles on the problems that mathematics had to deal with in economics and what this has to do with the recent economic recession: A different view on economics: maybe all we really need, Behavioral economics revisited in the face of the recent economic crisis

What Stephen Wolfram proposes as a complement (or replacement) to mathematics, is computation.

Wolfram studied a set of systems called cellular automata, and other similar systems. What these systems have in common is that they are compromised by a set of discrete steps and a few simple rules.

What Wolfram proposes is that every system, no matter how complex, can be represented by a set of simple rules, which through the evolution of the system, can create complex and emergent phenomena, like certain shapes or the phenomenon of continuity.

Of course, what Wolfram proposes, while it may seem very interesting, it could also be false. After all, computational models are just that, models, and they could be completely wrong and oversimplifying. However, somewhere in the middle of the book I found something that intrigued me. In chapter 9, in section 3 (http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/section-9.3), Wolfram shows a computational proof concerning the violation of the second law of thermodynamics. What Wolfram says, is that, throughout the evolution of a system, there can be trends towards increased order and towards increased randomness other times, while the second law implies that all systems move towards entropy.

Example of cellular automata

Well, that may seem interesting, but still, cellular automata might not agree with reality. A New Kind of Science was written in 2002. In November 2008, this article came out in Scientific American: Does Nature Break the Second Law of Thermodynamics? In the key points we read

1. Evolution leads to a homogeneous state.

2. Evolution leads to a set of separated simple stable or periodic structures.

3. Evolution leads to a chaotic pattern.

4. Evolution leads to complex localized structures, sometimes long-lived.

It is class 4 that Wolfram considers the most interesting. In this class, simple rules create complex structures, and any more complexity in the rules does not lead to more complex behavior.

Note: Wolfram’s classification scheme is believed to face some problems which Epstein tried to correct in his own classification scheme (see here: Classification).

It was originally thought that systems capable of universal computation would be found among Class IV automata – since only they exhibited interesting behaviour and signal propagation mechanisms such as gliders.

However, as Eppstein pointed out rules in all of the classes actually support gliders, and some non-class IV rules also look as though they exhibit universal computation e.g. see here. Since they contain gliders, universal computation may well show up among the other classes as well.

Eppstein’s scheme is as follows

1. No pattern expands: If no pattern can never expand, no gliders exist, and the rule is not universal. A similar phenomenon occurs with rules which remain within a finite bounding box – though they may compute functions which only require bounded resources to calculate;

2. No pattern contracts: If no pattern can ever shrink, no gliders exist. However universal computation could still occur in other ways; for instance the boundary of an expanding pattern could simulate the behavior of a 1d universal automaton.

3. Both contraction and expansion possible: Only in the remaining cases can gliders and universality exist. Our investigations show that a large fraction of the remaining cases do indeed support gliders; much more work would be required to show that they are universal.

Well, certainly there are many things we didn’t cover in this article. What I wanted to show, however, was that maybe computation can indeed be proven to be that new kind of science that Wolfram dreams of. Only time (and science) will tell.

In the latest post we talked about the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos: The death of Alexandros Grigoropoulos (drugs, guns, cops and tasers part II). Since then, Greece continues to be shocked by riots, protests and various forms of resistance against authority.

Some people even managed to occupy the national tv network, at the same time, that prime minister Kostas Karamanlis, was speaking in front of his political party.

Link: www.youtube.com

These protests and actions have caused similar demonstrations in other parts of the world. However, all these protests raise some very important questions. In european countries for example, we don’t see such actions. We don’t see violent protests happening every day. Many of these actions are could be considered unacceptable by western standards. Nonetheless, these "uncivilized" protests, have found imitators. Even in USA, a country where police authority holds supreme, we saw the occupation of the New School University in New York: http://www.newschoolinexile.com/.

What is considered acceptable or not is usually determined by the current authority. And it is authority we will discuss about in this article.

One can see authority in many different ways. In a first view, we can say that authority is something that has appeared in one form or another in most human societies throughout time. It can serve many purposes, and certainly, plays a major role in the shaping of societies and civilizations.

Most people in western societies view authority as a protective and beneficial force. Authority is there to preserve law and order so that we can continue with our peaceful lives. All offenders are caught and punished. However, we must not forget two things about authority. First, authority is compromised of people. Secondly, authority can be described as a system unto itself.

When we say that authority is compromised of people, we try to state something that many people forget. Authority is not to be treated like a supernatural alien entity, but rather, as a group of people which can be studied like all groups. Many times we tend to refer to notions just as the juridical system as something that lies in some higher plane, and we forget that it is controled by people which possess the same limitations and abilities as us. Additionaly, the institutions which control authority constitute certain environments. Wherever we have a certain environment, we have a certain set of attributes which are deemed adaptive. Whatsoever, these abilities, might not be the ones that are most productive for general happiness and social prosperity.

A very nice view on the subject can be seen on this video on youtube, concerning the concept of Pathocracy (even though I disagree with many of the things this guy says, the core concepts he describes are quite good)

Link: www.youtube.com

When we say that authority is a system unto itself, we mean that it constitutes an entity that forms its own laws that shape its interaction with itself, the members that consitute the system and the other systems which are affected by it.

Furthermore, man, as a social being, has evolved, through natural selection, various evolutionary traits that determine its attitude towards authority.

It is now that we must refer to the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch concerning obedience and conformity. Detailed explanations of the experiments can be found in wikipedia: Asch conformity experiments, Milgram experiment

What Asch’s experiments have shown, is that subjects many times changed their beliefs in a task that constituted in a simple task of deciding which straight line, among three, was the longest, due to peer pressure. Even though Asch considered his experiments to show that man can resist peer pressure, nevertheless, they have been stable hallmarks in the scientific literature of obedience.

Solomon Asch

Milgram’s experiments showed how someone under the guidance of an authority figure, which in the experiment was a scientist in a white coat, could torture someone. The experiments raised a lot of uneasiness, since they had been done only 15 years after the end of the second World War and showed some evidence that nearly anyone could become a torturer, as long as he was ordered by a figure in authority. Wikipedia quotes

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Stanley Milgram

Of course, we can’t leave out Philip Zimbardo’s experiment on imprisonment (Stanford prison experiment) which has also been transfered in the movie Das Experiment. Wikipedia quotes

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early. After a graduate student Zimbardo was dating objected to the inhumane conditions in the prison, and realizing that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his direct supervision, Zimbardo concluded that everyone including himself had become too absorbed in their roles and terminated the experiment after six days.

Philip Zimbardo

As you see, many elements are combined to create a strange mixture which has evolved through time into modern societies, where self-claimed democracies, ruled by chaotic bureaucratic institutions, allow various groups with different and opposing opinions and forms of actions to survive, while at the same time, trying to supress their existence to allow the existence of the system of authority.

The line between right and wrong is highly blurred, due to the many interacting groups. The western states dissaprove the use of violence, while at the same time they use it to control their citizens. What is beneficial for society is confused with what is beneficial for those in power. In this article we presented some very basic stuff concerning notions and scientific facts about authority. In future posts we will delve deeper into the subject, presenting additionaly political views on this matter.

One of the first articles I had written was this one: Drugs, Guns, Cops and Tasers. I promised to write part 2 some day. There is not better occasion to write this article, than this one.

In the previous Saturday, on 6/12/08, Alexandros Grigoropoulos was murdered in the greek district of Exarchia in Athens.

Alexandros Grigoropoulos

Since then, Greece has been shocked by a series of violent riots and civil unrest (2008 Greek Riots). Meanwhile, the greek goverment does nothing to solve the situation, refuses to quit and the cops continue to attack violentely against protesters.

What better time to write about the nature of the current "democratic" states and law enforcement than this one?

Greece has to see such an appraisal since the riots in 1973 that led to the fall of the junte. Local and global newspapers have some really good analyses of the current events. However, what is also very intriguing, is the fact that some of these protests spread around the Europe (and even outside of it), as demonstrators were gathered outside of greek embassies in many countries, including Moscow, Barcelona, even New York.

But why does this happen? Certainly, cops here have murdered people many times before. To understand that, we must first look at the order of recent events, as well as how the current states work.

First of all, concerning the role of law enforcement, many people wonder why cops murder this boy, or why cops treat like that citizens, throwing tons of illegal chemicals (in about 5 days, the cops here had thrown about 4 tons of tear gas). What these people don’t understand is that the very nature of law enforcement is to torture and kill. The raison d’être of law encorcement is the preserve the current state as it is. If a cop catches a thief, then he does so, because his has been given the job by the state to preserve the law, and thus, the current state.

This is the same reason, that while corrupted politicians and bankers that have stolen the money of millions of people in the recent crisis are free, the cops are all too eager to send junkies to jail. The system has been created by those in power, for those in power. The junky threatens the system, while the banker is there to benefit from it. So, in the light of this analysis, we can understand clearly why murders are justified in modern "democracies".

 "It was not an accident, it was the very nature of the state"

Now, we need to comment on why this upraisal started and as to why other states in Europe are afraid that similar protests might start there.

The first decade of the 21st century saw a series of never-seen-before historical events. First, we saw the fall of the twin towers. After that, we saw the fall of neo-leoliberalism in the face of the recent economic crisis and then the election of the first black president in the United States.

The recent economic crisis was what led to a global unrest, but no protests or riots like those in greece happened. One of the reasons, is that european and american goverments have turned their citizens into sheep, with the meaning that Friedrich Nietzsche gave to the word. People are afraid of violence and this works in favor of an oppressing state.

Modern "democracies" are governed by bankers and social elites, while the average person can’t say a thing on the state of affairs. The only power he has, is his vote every 4 or 5 years. Whenever a protest happens, police controls it, to preserve law and order.

Epaminondas Korkoneas, the cop who killed Alexis Grigoropoulos

However, Greece is not a european country. Surely, it belongs to the european union, but it is not european in the sense that its civilization and culture are not like that of the average european country. It has the worst economy in the euro zone (maybe the only worst is that of Portugal’s) and it is the second most corrupted country after Italy. The greek state was established in 1829. Before that, it was under ottommann rule and in the greek culture, many turkish elements are still preserved. The two most obvious are those in the greek vocabulary, which contains many turkish words and in nepotism and corruption.

While the greek goverments have tried to establish a capitalist state, they have failed to do so. Money does not flow like in the american society and people don’t get a job based on their qualifications, but rather on connections and people they know. Greek youths study in greek universities, travel to Europe (usually in Britain) for one or two years to get a master’s degree and then they come back in their country to face poverty and jobs that give a salary of 600-700 euros, while everyone knows at least one person who got involved in politics and became rich because of their involvement.

So, while the greek goverments never quite managed to turn the economy into a capitalistic one, the greek culture never turned into a european one either. Protests and riots are quite common. The murder of a young greek boy from a middle-upper class family could not be ignored. It was the event that sparked a chain reaction. Of course, the cops had murdered other people before, but they were either immigrants or anarchists. This time, the murder happened in cold blood.

What makes this upraisal different from other ones is that in the riots there were not only anarchists and leftists. There were also students 14-years old and middle aged family men and women. People of every age and status were angered against the cops and the state for what had happened and for the living conditions we all face here everyday. People started to embrace violence. They started to realize that the only way to resist an oppressing state is not through peaceful demonstrations, but through violence against the oppressor. The only way for the cops to understand that they can’t kiil anyone they like, is to be attacked at every corner and every street, until none of them remains and those who remain realize that no-one wants, nor no-one needs them.

Greek prime minister Kostas Karamanlis and his gang

However, while the living conditions may be the worst in Europe, they are quite similar with that of other countries. What makes Greece so different, is that people here still take their politics to the streets, finding the original and ancient meaning of democracy. However, the european goverments are afraid that people there might start to protest too. The politicians that are most afraid are those in France who had faced violent protests in the ghettos a couple of years ago. They are afraid that the people might wake up from their sleep.

Well… I better hope they will…