It seems like science-inspired music is a common theme around here. Discover Magazine recently announced the winners of their “Evolution in Two Minutes” video contest. Top-pick went to this rock-anthem by Fresno, California high-school teacher Scott Hatfield.
The rest of the top-5 are here, along with a message from the contest’s judge, internet science-blog polemic PZ Myers.
The other day I opened my pride-and-joy to discover, horror of horrors, a Matrix-like green splotch of dead pixels, precipitated by a large crack in the LCD. Apparently my almost total disregard for the well-being of my electronic devices is not without its consequences.
Although the patches of dead pixels are relatively small, when the screen itself is only 8.9″, that’s a significant chunk of screen real-estate! Now, the good thing about netbooks is that they are relatively cheap, but not quite cheap enough to treat like disposable appliances! So I began to search for a replacement screen, and to my great pleasure found a company selling super-cheap authentic replacement screens based in Vancouver: ScreenCountry.com, where I was able to buy a screen, complete with shipping, for about $90. And it arrived within 36 hours of me ordering!
Now everywhere I read said that replacing LCD screens is a simple process, but for the life of me I couldn’t find any guides for the Acer Aspire One. But being an enterprising sort of chap I thought I’d dive in anyways, and hopefully pass on my wisdom to others who might find themselves in a similar predicament. The process is really simple and doesn’t require any technical skill beyond a steady hand. Here, then, without further ado are the steps needed to replace the LCD on you Acer Aspire One:
Disclaimer: This is an easy process, but by providing these instructions I accept no liability for damage to your netbook which might result from your attempts to follow these instructions.
Before you do any of this, make sure to turn off the computer and remove the battery!
All done! Now all I need to do is think of something cool to do with the old, slightly damaged LCD. Any ideas?
On a related note, can anyone tell me why AdBlock Plus has stopped working for me in Firefox 3 for Windows Vista?
Item the First:
Item the Second:
Item the Third:
Item the Fourth:
Conclusion:
Exeunt.
(via Pharangula, via This Blog Contains Caffeine)
I haven’t seen Julie vs. Julia, but this is the best thing to ever appear on the interwebs.
Julia Childs teaches about the possible conditions which created the so called “Primordial Soup” in contemporary theories of Abiogenesis. The video is from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Life in The Universe gallery which opened in 1976, but is now closed.
Abiogenesis is a fascinating topic. Another prominent theory is that some of the precursors of life were created elsewhere in space and brought here via asteroid or comet. This theory (sometimes called, panspermia) was recently bolstered by the discovery of an amino acid on a comet.
It is a shameful story that few know. Alan Turing, known as the father of modern Computer Science, and largely responsible for the Allied victory in World War 2 thanks to his decryption of the Enigma code, was prosecuted by the British government for his homosexuality and forced to undergo chemical castration. This humiliating treatment ultimately led to his suicide at the age of just 42, a humiliating end to a hero who had given more to his country and the world than can possibly be measured.
Now, 55 years later, and in what might be the only recorded case of an Internet petition achieving anything worthwhile, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has released a statement on behalf of his government officially apologising for the treatment this great man was forced to endure.
Here is that statement in its entirety:
2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.
Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.
I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.
But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.
So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
Gordon Brown
When UBC’s own Edward Slingerland gave a guest lecture to my Cognitive Systems class last year, I was intrigued by the world-view he advanced. His explanation of a reductionist-physicalist, but not eliminativistic formulation of embodied cognition seemed to provide the solution to a problem which I had been troubling me – how I could reconcile the empirical supremacy of physicalism (which had recently been illustrated forcefully to me by Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” and Dennett’s “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea”) with the undeniable attachment I feel to human-level truths – emotions, art, and the illusion of free will – which seemed, at first blush, to be contradictory to a strictly materialist world-view. Since then it has been my intention to read Slingerland’s book “What Science Offers the Humanities“, and this past week I have finally done so. What I found was an embellishment and explanation of the themes which first intrigued me, in a wonderful book which far outstripped even my hopeful expectations.
There seemed to be two major themes of the book. The first – alluded to in the title – is Slingerland’s quest to close the gulf between modern Science and Humanities; to create a “true University” from what is currently a “Biversity” (a distinctly “Terry-istic” goal!) He argues that postmodernist institutions such as extreme cultural relativism and epistemic skepticism have overstayed their usefulness, and have caused the Humanities to stagnate in recent decades, and to lose relevance outside their tight-knit circles. On the other hand, those same postmodenist movements have rightfully put to bed the naive Objectivism of the Enlightenment.
What is necessary is an account of human-level truths which is firmly grounded in the physical sciences, but which can account for the cultural diversity celebrated in the humanities and the undeniable “special quality” of human-level phenomena. This can be achieved through “vertical integration”, which places the Humanities in their rightful place at the top of an explanatory hierarchy grounded in the Sciences:
Despite their variety and “disunity,” the disciplines of the natural sciences have managed to arrange themselves in a rough explanatory hierarchy, with the lower levels of explanation (such as physics) setting limits on the sorts of explanations that can be entertained at the higher levels (such as biology). To move forward as a field of human inquiry, the humanities need to plug themselves into their proper place at the top of this explanatory hierarchy, because the lower levels have finally advanced to a point that they have something interesting to say to the higher levels. (p.261)
To illustrate this point, Slingerland provides a survey of the recent work in the Cognitive Sciences which shed light on the nature of human thought, and provides a convincing account of a schematic blending-theory. He then illustrates how this theory could be applied to Humanistic endeavours through an analysis of a series of fourth-century BC Chinese philosophical texts (his area of expertise).
This is the main thrust of the book – as the title suggests, Slingerland’s mission is to convince his colleagues in the Humanities to start listening to what the Sciences have to say. He gives a broad introduction to the various objections to this integration and then critiques these evaluations in light of the empirical evidence – providing through this a great review of the past three or four decades of philosophy of cognition. I found his conclusion to be very satisfying, but I am ultimately not the target audience, being a Cognitive Systems major I did not take much convincing!
What really impressed me about this book was the world-view Slingerland espouses, one in which we have have our Materialist Cake, but eat the Fruits of Human Kindness, too. Unlike hard-line materialists like Dennett, who seem to argue that mentalistic concepts like free-will and beauty are illusions of conciousness which will ultimately lose meaning once the consequences of physicalism are fully realised, Slingerland shows that these fears are ungrounded; human-level concepts like these are part of our engrained perceptual systems, built into us by evolution in such a manner that we cannot help but see the world this way. None of us, no matter how firmly committed we are to an empirically grounded physicalist ontology, can help but live life at human scale.
…we can say, qua naturalist, that our overactive theory of mind causes us to inevitably project intentionality onto the world – to see our moral emotions and desires writ large in the cosmos. It would be empirically unjustified to take this projection as “real.” Nonetheless, the very inevitability of this projection means that, whatever we may assert qua naturalists, we cannot escape from the lived reality of moral space. As neuroscientists, we might believe that the brain is a deterministic, physical system, like everything else in the universe, and recognize that the weight of empirical evidence suggests that free will is a cognitive illusion. Nonetheless, no cognitively undamaged human being can help acting like and at some level really feeling that he or she is free…. Similarly, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, I can believe that the love that I feel toward my child and my relatives is an emotion installed in me by my genes in accordance with Hamilton’s rule. This does not, however, make my experience of the emotion, nor my sense of its normative reality, any less real to me. (p. 289)
Slingerland thus avoids the pitfalls of both naive Objectivism and postmodernist relativism, and provides a convincing and immensely satisfactory answer to those who, it would seem, would reject physicalism solely out of fear of what it might entail. This thesis, combined with Slingerland’s engaging personal style, gives this book a firm place in my “List of Books I Can’t Urge you Strongly Enough to Read”, alongside the afformetioned Dawkins and Dennett.
I swam out to this island today. It was farther than I had anticipated. There seals sunning themselves on the rocks eyed me with detached curiosity as I doubled-over in pain, gasping for breath.
As a student of Cognitive Science, I am primarily concerned with the nature of consciousness and the mind. Like many in my field, I am a physicalist – consciousness, emotions, and other mental states can be reduced to purely physical phenomena which can, in principle, be observed and studied like any other natural occurrence. This stands opposed to the dualistic belief that mental phenomena are of an entirely different kind – perhaps the result of some immaterial “soul” or “human spirit” which is not governed by physical principles and perhaps cannot even be understood by scientific methods. (I have briefly explained elsewhere why I judge this position to be entirely incoherent, as opposed to just unconvincing. A refutation of Dualism is not the purpose of this piece.)
A common fear that I encounter when explaining this physicalist position to others is that reducing the richness of mental experience to physical interactions, we destroy the “special quality” these experiences have. “If things like love, beauty and music are reducible to physical interactions of inert particles, what a bleak world that would be!” My knee-jerk reaction to this objection is “What does it matter?” The truth of a given empirical claim has nothing to do with how you feel about it (the fact that you might consider a leprechaun-based explanation of rainbows to be more beautiful than the optical/physical explanation does not contribute one whit to the veracity of the former). But ultimately this response is just me being cantankerous – I can understand the fear one might feel at the spectre of a inert, meaningless particle-world, and ultimately my commitment to physicalism is not based solely on hard-headed empiricism, but also because it is my experience that human-level phenomena such as love, beauty and music are not eliminated by a reductionist, physicalist world-view, and can, in fact, be enhanced therein.
So how can we begin to allay the fears of those who feel that by seeking to understand the mind we are destroying beauty? I think these fears come in two major flavours, the first being that by studying a thing we remove the mystery or beauty from the thing. I will assume that readers of Terry have an appreciation for the joy of intellectual pursuit, and will therefore not spend much time on this objection, but it is worth a mention all the same. First of all, the claim that by understanding a phenomenon of something at the physical level we eliminate its beauty seems to me entirely unsubstantiated even in common experience. If that were the case that understanding (in the “Erklärung” sense) meant destruction of the wonder one felt at the phenomenon itself, we should expect that those individuals who know the most about a given subject would eventually become the least attached to it. Of course, quite the opposite is true! How many biologists lose their sense of wonder at the beauty of nature once they understand the “merely” physical processes which underlie it? Those who study music theory and know the mechanics and rules which helped Mozart structure his Requiem might be expected to lose interest once these details were understood, but of course this is not the case. As someone who has studied Computer Science I can tell you that my love of computers is far greater now that I understand how they work than back in the days when I viewed them as mystical magic-boxes (I’ll spare you the details of how excited I got when I first understood how physical interactions in transistors could give rise to higher-level logic!) Clearly, understanding how something can be reduced to physical interactions does not eliminate our sense of wonder at the higher-level epiphenomenon.
The second, and more nuanced version of the fear of reductionism is the claim that once we admit that all mental phenomenon are the result of physical interactions, human-level truths lose all meaning. If everything is just the result of the physical interactions of inert particles, how can it make any sense to talk about ethics or beauty or love? Do free will and personal responsibility for one’s actions disappear if we understand ourselves as “merely” physical phenomena? Do ethics or feelings disappear?
It is my claim that this line of reasoning is the result of an unnecessary conflation of reductionistic physicalism (which I support) with eliminativism (which I do not), and a confusion of the levels of analysis at which we view different phenomena. Simply because we can reduce human-level phenomena to physical interactions does not mean we eliminate those phenomena, or render them meaningless.
To illustrate this point by way of analogy, consider the act of composing a sentence. To do so, you must put words together in a certain way, governed by the rules of grammar. One such rule (at least in standard modern English) might be “An adjective must be placed before the noun it modifies”. For example it is grammatical to say “The green ball is over there”, but not “The ball green is over there” (there may be exceptions to this rule but this is not important in the context of this discussion). Here, then, is a rule that is formulated at the level of words (or actually one level higher – the level of Parts of Speech). But notice that words are composed of letters (at least in English) – that is to say a word can be reduced to a collection of letters organized in a certain pattern. But if we now try to formulate our grammatical rule at the level of letters we run into trouble. How can we formulate this rule which holds for nouns and adjectives into one expressible at the level of letters? To do so would be very difficult, and would require that we already had a complete set of rules specifying how letters clump together to form words, and how these words are classified into Parts of Speech. But this does not invalidate the fact that words are a collection of letters, or prove that Parts of Speech somehow possess some ethereal, non-physical property, but merely that it becomes conceptually very difficult to apply a POS-level rule at the level of letters! There are rules and phenomena which are best understood at higher-levels of evaluation, where underlying complexities are grouped together into higher level categories, but this does not suggest that these phenomena are irreducible, merely that they are complex.
Those with any familiarity with Computer Science will be well very familiar with the kinds of levels I am talking about – although we might talk about Objects or Classes at the high-level programming strata, we know that these can be reduced to machine-code, and ultimately to the physical interactions of circuits and transistors. We would of course not expect to find Objects manifested at the physical level precisely because they are epiphenomena of a higher level of abstraction. We of course could in principle explain Object-oriented principles in terms of physical interactions but such an explanation would be far too complex for anyone to understand.
So it is that the reductionism of physicalism does not entail eliminativism with respect to mental phenomenon or human-level truths. Just because we can reduce conciousness to physical interactions does not eliminate it as a phenomenon in its own right, one governed by its own principles. These principles come into play at a level conceptually abstract from the physical, but still reducible. We should of course not expect to find love or ethics at the level of particles, because this is not the level at which they are manifest – but that does not entail that they have been eliminated. It may be true that your actions are governed by physical laws, which would seem to render free-will an illusion. But of course this defence will not stand up in court, because here at the level of conciousness you have a choice.
What, then, is there to be afraid of? If we can explain love in terms of physical interactions, will that change how it feels? Will understanding the neurological effect of music on our brains change the fact that it makes us want to dance? Of course not! We know that consciousness exists and feels a certain way to us – explaining it in terms of physical interactions will not change that.
To paraphrase Edward Slingerland in a presentation given last year – Just because one might know that love for ones children is the result of chemical and ultimately physical interactions in their brain, does not make that love any less real or potent. Seeking to understand the mind as we seek to understand anything else will not destroy any of its beauty. The word “mere” is a red-herring. Consciousness is a physical process – but what a remarkable and wondrous physical process it is!
(image taken by the author at Kitsilano Beach)
Despite my great ambitions, I have managed only a fraction of the reading I had hoped to achieve this summer. In fact I’ve really only read about 1.5 books since the school term ended. This is an embarrasing state of affairs, and is in spite of the recent addition to my room of a giant comfy chair perfect for reading.
The fact is that I have not been making enough time for reading, something I want to change. In order to facilitate this I am trying out a new rule for myself:
On any given evening, I will undertake no other leisure activities (TV, computer games, music etc.) unless I have read for at least 30 minutes.
I think I will extend it to say that if it is before 9pm I must read for at least an hour. I just read for a solid three-quarters of an hour, so the rule is a success thus-far!
This blog is an aggregation of my writing on other sites, as well as a few extra personal entries. Clicking on a post will take you to the original location of the article (complete with comments).
