Freedom of speech and academic freedom

I’m not sure I can give this the treatment the topic deserves, but I’ll at least sketch out the issue.

Up until recently I’ve seen myself as a bit of a free speech absolutist. This has been driven a lot by the discussion on Dispatches from the Culture Wars, an excellent blog that I encourage people to read. This is in the context of the States, but I feel a lot of the talk (the comments are usually worth at least skimming) is generally applicable.

The major argument for a broad view of free speech is that we don’t really want the government determining what counts as allowable speech. Since the government is made up of people who are neither all-seeing nor all-knowing, nor neutral arbiters of the Law, there is the potential for controversial speech that you support also being banned. This is a particularly convincing argument for me, coming from an anarchist political background, given the censorship, and public, media, and governmental approbation this pretty harmless political philosophy has faced.

There are some particulars. In most cases, private bodies have some ability to restrict speech in their own domain, much in the way they have a certain amount of control over who they allow on their premises and who they hire. However, there are some constraints there. Private bodies have a limited ability to restrict who they allow and who they hire, because of various laws which make it illegal to discriminate while doing so. One might argue that this puts an undue burden on the private body, by preventing them from exercising full control over their property. But it also puts an undue burden on potentially unpopular minorities, especially visible ones. Thus, suggestions from Rand Paul and other libertarians, that governmental enforcement of no “whites only” venues was an illegitimate restriction of private property rights, ignores the vital role this played in changing entrenched social attitudes.

Back to free speech. Lately I’ve gotten myself in a bit of trouble. In two cases, I’ve taken an anti-free speech position that I’m not entirely sure I can support.

In one, a school was banning students from wearing shirts that said “Be happy not gay” during the Day of Silence. But some workplaces also have rules about non-discriminatory speech. Anti-sexual harassment rules are increasingly common, and they are intended to prevent a disempowered group from what are still seen as socially acceptable forms of discrimination. So I’m not sure how a “no harassing queer students” rule isn’t also acceptable. It could be that the shirts in question were not directed against a specific student, but that doesn’t seem like a good argument, since they’re directed at all students who are queer or queer-friendly. I read them as a form of intimidation, but that’s as someone who faced severe bullying problems throughout most of his time in public school.

In another case, a street preacher was detained for following a lesbian couple while engaging in anti-gay speech. In this case and the one above, I’ve argued that the speech in question acted as a threat, intimidating a non-privileged group which is frequently the subject of violence at the hands of people not unlike those engaging in the speech. And in the former case, schools already restrict speech to some degree, which I usually disagree with. Some of those I was arguing with suggested that these were not useful standards. Technically, anyone can claim to feel threatened by speech; as an atheist, and again with anarchism, I have often seen people claim to feel threatened in some way by speech that seemed entirely non-threatening to me. But I also think a judge ought to be able to decide, based on evidence, that a threat is valid or not. Do people not have the right to walk down the street without feeling threatened and harassed? But then again, I can’t honestly argue that people necessarily have a right to feel secure. Much of the last decade of politics in the States has been driven by an obsessive need to make people feel more secure, at a huge cost of liberty. And people often feel insecure when their beliefs are challenged, which can occur by someone soapboxing. I think the following thing is important here, but again, I don’t think it’s a clear-cut question of free speech.

Segueing into academic freedom, I’ve seen two more cases. In one, J. Michael Bailey had his class on human sexuality discontinued after an event where some speakers had sex in the classroom during a post-class workshop. Here, I’m a bit unsure. I don’t think Bailey should be teaching a class on human sexuality period, given his conflation of sexuality and gender; too, the people he invited to conduct the workshop are hardly pro-sex. One of their jobs involves given sex tours of their city, including a game of “spot the ho” while driving around, which hardly seems sex positive. So here, I suggested I was just glad that Bailey wasn’t going to be teaching students dubious things about sexuality. That being said, it’s true that the class was cancelled for the wrong reason. I’m not sure if I would have come down on the school’s side if the researcher had been one I supported. And even if it was for the right reasons, does the school have a right to shut down a class if they feel the teacher isn’t competent to teach it? They aren’t obligated to give everyone a class to teach, and the school, having limited resources, decides which classes to offer and which to reject. But then again, I would have been mad if they’d shut down a class by a teacher I considered truly sex-positive. I think part of my motivation was due to a lot of people I read going on about this awesome sex class being shut down, without mentioning that the guy’s an ass. It was being made out as an unmitigated evil; no one was really approaching the issue as one of a principled stand for free speech, but as the school harming someone we ought to support because they’re a maverick who challenges conventional attitudes towards sex.

This lastly brings me to Satoshi Kanazawa. Now, let me say firstly that the guy’s a bit of a nut, and he’s been castigated repeatedly by scientists and laypeople both online and in the literature. Just recently he claimed that data from the Add Health study showed that black women are objectively less attractive than other women, in his view likely due to higher levels of testosterone. The “objective” data were collected using a Likert scale by several interviewers; the “subjective” data were collected by self-scoring on a similar scale. This was published on his blog on Psychology Today. There have been a bunch of good takedowns of his work, but in the interest of fairness I’ll point out two from other Psychology Today bloggers. One deconstructs Kanazawa’s use of “objective” and his description of factor analysis, as well as discussing why the work counts as pseudoscience and needs to be refuted. It is this pseudoscience, the author says, that needs to be confronted, and that the confrontation is motivated by the desire for good science, rather than bad, and not by “political correctness”. The other re-analyzes the same data, using more competent techniques, and suggests that investigations or re-assessments of Kanazawa’s positions at the LSE and on Psychology Today are valid, because “academic freedom does not entail the right (1) to misinterpret data and (2) to ignore empirical findings that go against stated claims.” I strongly suggest reading both.

This is an interesting thought to me. Academia is often a somewhat parallel world. I wonder how free speech and academic freedom on the one hand measure against academic responsibilities on the other. If what you’re saying can definitively be shown to be false, or if it can be shown that you have wilfully ignored, misinterpreted, or manipulated the data your claim is based on, how much protection should you have? And should this idea apply only within academia, or more generally?

I’ll leave with a quote by Hunt and Carlson (pdf):

“When scientists deal with investigations that have relevance to immediate social policies, as studies of group differences can have, it is the duty of scientists to exercise a higher standard of scientific rigor in their research than would be necessary when the goal of the research is solely to advance exploration within science itself. We do not, at any time, argue that certain knowledge should be forbidden on the grounds that it might be used improperly. We do argue that when there is a chance that particular findings will be quickly translated into public debates and policy decisions it is the duty of the scientist to be sure that those findings are of the highest quality.”

A little bit of a few things.

Wow, more than a month since my last post. I’ve been a bit braindead as I try to finish up my thesis. I’m going to be continuing in my current lab next year, only I’ll be doing my PhD. So that’s pretty exciting.

I’ve seen a couple interesting talks in the past while, and figured I’d post on a couple of them, briefly.

Imaging and intelligence: The presenter is a big g theorist, which given that this appears to be the current consensus isn’t such a big deal, but see a list of discussion links here and an excellent critique of the origins of g-factor theory. I need to look up my notes, but essentially the presenter’s group used various tasks and controls to find activation via fMRI for what they claim to be g in various brain regions, including that magical region, the IFG.

I went to a workshop/seminar on rhythm in music and speech. It was neat, and there was some discussion of comparing musical compositions to speech. The main problem I saw was that a lot of the studies seemed to compare compositions to spontaneous speech, or novel reading aloud. The two aren’t really comparable. A better comparison would be a composition with a composed and practised speech, or improvisational jazz with spontaneous speech. There was a talk after, where they discussed the use of tabla drumming as a speech-like code. The cooler part was a discussion of language-specific differences in supposedly universal aspects of acoustic perception. Apparently, when humans hear a continuous stream of tones which proceeds long-short-long-short-long-short-long-short… we order it short-long, rather than long-short. And when we hear a continuous high-low-high-low-high-low… we parse it as high-low rather than low-high. And this is thought to reflect inherent biases of auditory processing. But the speaker’s group found that this is true in very young Japanese and Canadian infants. But by the time phonemic pruning occurs, infants begin to acquire language-specific biases, and so Japanese infants will hear long-short and sometimes low-high.

Then there was a cool talk on emotion and speech. This one got me thinking, since it dealt with the minimum amount of an utterance you need to hear before you can accurately identify the emotion being expressed, assuming the words themselves are neutral, or if the sentence uses pseudowords. But I’ve been thinking that interjections like “Ugh!” or “Argh!” bypass this to some extent, and may also be culture- or language-specific. It’s part of a broader interest I’ve been developing in socially stereotyped behaviours, which posses a kind of social exemplar. We can all picture, and even imitate, a stereotypical sneeze, and I think this cultural idea of a ‘sneeze’ actually shapes how people sneeze. The same for laughter, stubbing our toes, wiping our eyes when crying… I think this idea of stereotyped behaviours is important, and could be studied in the context of verbal or gesture+speech communication as an efficient communication code or cipher. I need to bone up on my ethology.

I went to a comps presentation on universal grammar and connectionist accounts of language transfer. The speaker pointed out that neither camp makes sufficiently different predictions here for either to be falsified. I’m still sort of amazed that there are still UG people around, but I guess the theory has some explanatory power.

Monday there was a talk on detecting white matter activation in fMRI. I’ll explain sometime why this is generally treated as improbable, but essentially while there’s a good explanation for why we see changes in blood oxygenation levels coupled with grey matter activity, there’s no real explanation for what it would mean to see the same changes associated with white matter.

Tuesday I went to CRIUGM to see a talk on machine learning applications of multivariate pattern analysis in resting-state fMRI (where the participant does nothing except be scanned) and real-time fMRI. I need to go through my notes and do something more thorough, but it was pretty exciting, and showed some ways that we might eventually be able to combine fMRI with real-time conversations, and note relevant activations with specific parts of the discourse.

Alright. That’s enough for now. Things are coming together, so hopefully I’ll get back to posting more regularly.

Not Born This Way.

So I went to this talk last night.

It was called “Not Born This Way – The Intersection of Biology, Culture, and Queer Politics”. It was formatted as a discussion panel featuring Dr. Alanna Thain, from the culture studies group in McGill’s dept of English; Dr. Richard Montoro, from McGill’s Sexual Identity Centre; and Myles Gaulin, the Policy and Equity coordinator for Queer McGill.

Now, I’m always vaguely wary of these things, as a pretty hardcore science advocate, and I often particularly find anything associated with ‘cultural studies’ a bit of a red flag, especially given the discipline’s role in the science wars. And given that doctors can be a mixed bag at best, I expected to go through the talk disagreeing quite a bit. Still, a friend had told me about the talk, and it’s a topic I find pretty interesting, so I went with a couple other people.

The talk was actually quite good. The basic premise was linked to Madonna’s – er, Lady Gaga’s – song ‘Born This Way’, which was kind of funny as nearly the entire panel weren’t big fans of the song. The consensus seemed to be that while it might be useful at one level of engagement, it carried some problematic issues with it too, including, as one audience member pointed out, a certain commercialization of queer culture by someone who’s not entirely a part of it.

Most of the questions for the panel, by the moderator, were on biological essentialism, politics, identity, and narratives of being “born this way.” I felt there was a fair bit of repetition in the questions, though it might just have been an attempt to be thorough.

I’d say the general consensus of the panel was that the narrative that queer, trans, etc. people are born the way they are is a tactically useful one in political terms, but doesn’t necessarily reflect the potential fluidity of sexuality and gender (for everyone – they made the point that for many people they feel they’ve always been the way they are, but that it’s not true for everyone). I think this bit was best articulated by Drs. Thain and Montoro, with the former pointing out that expression of gender and sexuality can be heavily influenced by cultural factors as well as biological ones, and the latter agreeing and including examples from his own clinical work. Gaulin contributed to this discussion as well, talking a bit about past and current conceptualizations of queerness, and it was nice to see someone closer to the current generation bringing their perspective to the table. In particular, he argued that the ‘born this way’ argument was probably more useful during the earlier periods of civil rights when it was very useful to link sexuality and gender issues to racial issues, despite their lack of correspondence when you get down to details.

The idea of tactical usefulness came out particularly for medical, insurance, and political reasons. The latter I just mentioned, but the former two are particularly relevant for trans or otherwise non-gender/sexually normative people who might require allocation of resources to facilitate their identities in current society. Gender dysphoria, etc, in the DSM was discussed, and the conflict between those who want to de-pathologize vs. those who wish to be able to put something down on an insurance form was mentioned as a way in which identity conflicts with limited resources and limited public understanding about gender.

I’d wanted to raise the question of the ways in which ‘born this way’ is a reaction to religious arguments about sin, which are still surprisingly common even in political discourse today. One of the audience brought it up, and they took it one further by pointing out that it doesn’t really matter which side you argue. If you say sexuality is a choice, then you’re choosing to sin and should stop. If you’re born that way, then God has set you with a challenge, and you should be sure to stop yourself from sinning. The audience member argued, as did Gaulin if I recall correctly, that ‘born this way’ isn’t a useful argument to make long-term, that it ultimately casts being queer or differently gendered as something negative to be explained or excused, rather than being part of one’s identity in the same way as being straight or cis.

One of the reasons I enjoyed the talk was the attitude towards science. There were a few times, particularly at the beginning of the talk, where I felt a bit twitchy about where they were going with something; in particular, there were a few times where something was declared outside of science, or that science couldn’t meaningfully inform us about something (including apparently Huntington’s, but I understood what was meant). Most of the criticisms of science were of two sorts:

One, that a lot of the public’s understanding of science is filtered through the media. This, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, and as the panel pointed out, leads to over-simplification, removal of caveats, distortion, or outright misrepresentations of scientific ideas and conclusions. Thus, sometimes people think ‘science’ says one thing, but it hasn’t said that since the 1970s, or only says it about mice.

Two, that scientists are not divorced from their culture, and this shapes and frames the way they ask questions and how they interpret their findings. This is a criticism that gets most scientists’ backs up – not just because we like to think of ourselves as pretty objective, but because it often leads into the “all science is cultural, truth is relative, science isn’t useful to inform us about the world” argument. Both arguments come pretty much from post-modernism, and the first part is why I defend post-modernism in my scientific and skeptical circles. Don’t get me wrong, I think a lot of nonsense comes out of post-modernism as well, but there are valid criticisms to be made, particularly when it comes to science which deals with people, and especially when it comes to psychology, sociology, and neuroscience.

It was also nice to see some discussion, though brief, about how there’s not a lot of science to support gender or sexuality essentialism, and that the perception that there is, is largely a function of leftover Freudian tendencies in popular culture (and since scientists are part of popular culture, some of us are susceptible to the same tendencies).

I managed to get a question about Blanchard, Bailey, and Lawrence, and Kenneth Zucker; the first two have an unfortunately popular theory of trans identity (here), and the second one conducts sketchy clinical and research work on gender identity in children (here). Dr. Montoro, who as a clinician in gender and sexuality was well-placed to give his perspective, said that while he’s seen people who might fit the BBL concept, in his experience they only represent a sub-set of the trans people he’s worked with. As for Zucker, he disagreed in strong-but-diplomatic terms with what he does and how he does it, which was nice to hear. The panel talked a bit about the need to open up gender and sexuality spaces for children, whether those children presented as sexually or gender normative or not. So they suggested that one should include stories with two princesses, for example, or two princes; stories with non-’manly’ princes, or more ‘masculine’ women, or heroes who ID differently altogether. The more children understand that there can be places in society for someone like them, whoever that is, the more progress we can make towards breaking down categories and limits on identity.

So, that was pretty much the talk. I didn’t take notes, so I’ve only been able to write about broad generalities, but it was a good discussion and pretty informed in general. I might have left out some key details, so if someone has a problem with something I’ve written above, their point might have been discussed and I’ve just forgotten about it.

Brief updates.

Well, I’ve been focused more on political things and my thesis than science lately, as shown by the month gap between this post and my last. Hopefully I’ll be getting back up to speed soon.

In the meantime, here’s a clip of Joseph Bronowski, talking about science, dogma, and human fallibility.

An exciting life

The discussions I had in my lab today:

Q: Should you align your functional images to your anatomicals, or vice-versa?
A: Anatomicals to functionals, since I’m looking at activity patterns.

Q: Why the hell is everything misaligned in the GUI now?
A: Who cares, once everything’s been aligned to standard space it won’t matter.

Q: Should you warp your images to standard space before or after convolving your hrf with a piece-wise linear spline and polynomial baseline model with autocorrelation matrix?
A: Further argument. Warping your betas afterwards means there’s less interpolation of data before the analysis, but doing it before makes things easier when doing lots of group comparisons. The argument is left unresolved.

Q: Should I be taking functional ROIs computed from a conjunction analysis of another study, or paint anatomical ROIs on my individual subjects.
A: Man, that last one sounds like a lot of work. We’ll try the first option for now.

It was actually all pretty exciting. I’m actually getting to know enough to have these discussions.

The Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium on Pseudoscience

So, Monday and Tuesday were the Lorne Trottier Public Science Symposium, a yearly event at McGill which provides a free public forum for people to watch scientists talk about science. Basically.

I’ve not gone before, but this year it was on pseudoscience, so how could I resist? The Friday event I mentioned last post kicked it off.

Monday afternoon there was a ‘press conference’ at the McGill Faculty club (which is posh as hell), which was really more of a student Q&A with the speakers: Michael Shermer, David Gorski (of Science-based medicine and the blog of a friend of his), and Ben Goldacre of Bad Science.

It was pretty good. There were questions about what ought to be covered by health insurance, the placebo effect, the infiltration of quackery into academics, how to engage with people, and so forth. It was a nicely intimate setting.

After that myself and a friend met up with some folks from the CFI to talk about events before heading into the Monday night talk.

The event was opened by the Dean of Science at McGill and the Provost, with the introduction by Joe Schwarcz of the OSS.

Shermer was up first. I don’t know him as well as the others, and I’ve never read any of his writing besides a blog post or two. He was very brash and pugnacious, and did a good talk on how cognitive issues in humans make it difficult for us to think and act skeptically. Useful talk, though up here he comes across as very American.

Gorski was after him, and he gave a talk focused on breast cancer quackery, and gave some good advice on how to deconstruct cancer testimonials. He’s definitely as big a nerd as the internet indicates – while I enjoyed his talk, I think he’s still getting used to addressing large public audiences instead of medical-scientific groups or individual patients.

Goldacre was probably the best speaker that night, though since I have the usual Canadian love for an English accent I might be biased. He did a brisk talk on supplements and quacks, and some of the legal trouble he’s had.

Shermer was the only one who managed to keep it pretty light. People dying of cancer is rarely funny, so Gorski’s speech ended up being a bit of a downer, and Goldacre ended up talking about Matthias Rath, who’s basically one of the more evil people walking the earth today. And the only reason I can write that is because I’m in Canada and not the UK.

There was a question period too! Sadly, the only questions I remember were from nuts. The first was a self-proclaimed lawyer who said that he’d examined each and every alternative and mainstream medical treatment, and knew that all alt-med was bunk. Except, of course, for Rrrroyal Rrraymond Rrrrife, whose experiments in the 1930s were never replicated! The frequencies were lost sirs, and why has the scientific community never embraced this great man’s work I ask you yes you sir what are you afraid of, that you will not reconstruct the great work of Rrrroyal Rrrraymond Rrrrife? Even Gorski ended up butting in to ask if he was going to ask an actual question, which he spent 10 minutes doing. Given Gorski’s a cancer surgeon/researcher and had spoken on the topic I was impressed by his restraint.

The other one was told he could ask a one-sentence question, and bargained for 30 seconds. He then proceeded to ask Shermer at great length about the Kennedy assassination (!), for 39 seconds. I was impressed, both because he’s clearly been on about this for 40-some odd years at least, and that he managed to pack a question into 39 seconds. If only the first nut had been so brief…

I hung around after and got to meet Ben Goldacre, who’s a great bloke. Very friendly, easy-going, and pleased to sign something for me. And I got to meet David Gorski! You’ll have to forgive the fannish-ness, but given the huge influence his writing has had on me in the past few years I was pretty excited.

A bunch of us CFI and Freethought types went out after for a few drinks after, and had some good conversation.

Tuesday James Randi gave a presentation at McGill. Though I’ve not read any of his books, I knew who James Randi is, and he’s a living legend. Much like Harry Houdini, he started out as a stage magician and ended up as a skeptic and investigator, even working with scientific committees to critically examine claims which scientists are not always equipped to investigate.

The talk was excellent. Randi is tiny, but he has an amazing stage presence. Lots of old-but-good jokes, some conjuring tricks, and an explanation of why he’s so devoted to skepticism. Long story short – charlatans and frauds hurt people by preying on their belief. He showed how he exposed Peter Popoff, how he demonstrated psychic surgery, mentalism, etc. I was impressed. Magic fascinates me, though I’ve never really been tempted to take it up, and I always love to find out how the trick was done.

I’d talk more about Randi, but as I don’t know him as well as the Monday speakers, I don’t have as much to say.

If you’d like to see or listen to the talks, you can go to the following link:

http://bcooltv.mcgill.ca/ListRecordings.aspx?CourseID=3113

The Universe does not conform to our desires.

So not much today. I went a pretty interesting lecture on music and pleasure, focusing on the dopamine reward system in the brain, especially the dorsal and ventral striatum. Anyone interested should check out one of the papers discussed there, which can be found here.

It was a good talk, and there were some interesting questions about combining PET and fMRI, and some speculation about physiological effects of music. Plus Brenda Milner was there, which is always like seeing a living legend.

While I try to think of a hypothesis that can be answered using a combination of unconnected fMRI studies, here’s a video of one of my favourite segments from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

A view of the brain.

I’m going to give this short post thing a try, without just posting a video.

So there’s a lot of different ideas about the brain. One of the more popular could be called “localized modularity,” and it’s been around since at least the late 70s, and especially since Jerry Fodor published Modularity of Mind. In it he describes the requirements of a modular system, which is how he sees the brain.

1. Domain specificity, modules only operate on certain kinds of inputs—they are specialised
2. Informational encapsulation, modules need not refer to other psychological systems in order to operate
3. Obligatory firing, modules process in a mandatory manner
4. Fast speed, probably due to the fact that they are encapsulated (thereby needing only to consult a restricted database) and mandatory (time need not be wasted in determining whether or not to process incoming input)
5. Shallow outputs, the output of modules is very simple
6. Limited accessibility
7. Characteristic ontogeny, there is a regularity of development
8. Fixed neural architecture.

Now, I have varying views on these. Bear in mind that I’m at a stage where I’d have trouble seriously defending my positions. But I have them none the less, so here goes.

1. This idea seems suspect to me. Why would it make sense for brains to have specific regions devoted only to language, or to tasting only food, or to recognizing faces? The fusiform face area is supposedly specific to facial recognition in normal orientation, but there’s evidence suggesting it’s really involved in processing any categorical visual information on familiar objects.

2. This just sounds like nonsense. Language doesn’t need to be informed by motor systems for producing speech? We don’t integrate multi-sensory information when viewing a scene? We don’t need to reference our motor system when perceiving ballistics? There’s plenty of evidence that many brain functions draw on a variety of functional regions for processing, not just a single encapsulated module. These days we should be thinking about broad, parallel networks, not single processing units.

3. I’m a bit softer on point 3. I think there are a lot of mandatory processes, both low- and high-level. I think the direct realists make a good point when they suggest that while we can choose to attend to proximal stimuli (cool temperature, smoothness, rigidity) we are obliged to attend to distal stimuli (a can of pop).

On the other hand, we can exercise top-down control of perception as well. This means that we may be able to exert conscious control over certain mental processes – whether Fodor would claim that those portions simply aren’t modules is unknown to me.

4. Again, I feel that this is true for some things and not for others. Perceptual functions might be more obligatory than motor functions, but I’d definitely argue they aren’t strictly encapsulated either.

5. I’d actually agree that network outputs tend to be simple, and that more complex effects are due to multiple network outcomes overlapping in time.

6. I do think we have limited access to mental processes, so I’ll let this one stand.

7. Again, I don’t have a huge problem with this, though I’d caution against genetic interpretations of this for neural development. I think the common brain development patterns (in terms of broad functional localization) is due to a combination of genetics, epigenetics, and massed Hebbian connective wiring.

8. No, no, and no. I can’t imagine anyone defends this one these days. While I think it’s still a bit of a buzzword, our current understanding of neuroplasticity really doesn’t allow us to support any model that includes fixed neural architecture. Use it or lose it seems to be the rule of the game, at least within certain broad bounds.

I’ve given some criticisms that might seem to accept the modular model of the brain, so let me explain briefly how I see things.

I think brain functions are conducted from broadly localized functional regions, made up of networks of non-domain-specific computational units. I think Broca’s area is involved in general sequencing functions, not just linguistic syntax. I think the pre-SMA is involved in new action sequencing, and the SMA proper is involved in voluntary execution of learned action sequences. I think the hippocampus is involved in long-term episodic memory storage.

I do not think that there is any true double-dissociation for precise, domain-specific functions. I think anyone who expects to find anything other than broad functional associations, using our current level of technology, is in for disappointment. And I think if we are able to locate domain-specific functional networks, that the neurons involved will be mixed in among neurons involved in other related functions.

But I could be wrong.

Morality of chemical enhancement.

So, what do we all think of drugs?

This has been stewing in my head for a while, ever since I saw a poster presentation on MPH use among university students. This post itself was sparked, rather geekily, by an episode of Star Trek TNG. I’ve never watched the show before, so please forgive me if some of my posts are inspired by episodes as I go.

This ties in a little with my question of the natural fallacy from before. Take MPH, for example. Is it wrong or immoral to use the drug to enhance your studying (because it assists with attentional function)? If so, why? We enhance ourselves with glasses, for example, or with clothing in winter. But are those just corrective? Is the main argument that one shouldn’t use things intended to correct a disability when you don’t possess that disability yourself?

I don’t think that’s the main argument. Otherwise, there would not be the strong social taboo against mood-changing drugs. There is a strong effort to help people with schizophrenia, or anxiety, or bipolar, or major depression, off stabilizing or mood-enhancing drugs. I think there is a rational argument to be made there because these drugs often have undesirable side-effects, but there is also a prominent note of wanting people to experience life ‘naturally’. People don’t even want to take pain medication if they don’t absolutely have to.

I’m not sure what it is, entirely, and I’m straying a bit far from my point, so let’s go back to my original thought. MPH and students. We use caffeine to stay awake and alert when studying or writing papers. We use alcohol as social lubrication. We use computers to facilitate our studies. The objection seems to be that drug use to aid in studying is somehow cheating, like using performance-enhancing drugs in sports. But even there, how is it cheating? Other athletes could use enhancing drugs too?

Is the argument that those who choose not to use drugs will thereby be at a disadvantage? But those of us who choose to have social lives have a disadvantage over those who choose to focus all their efforts on their studies. Those of us who choose to take public transport instead of driving will get places more slowly.

The only real arguments I can see are economic – that those who can’t afford it will fall further behind; or medical – that those who are compelled to use drugs to stay competitive will open themselves up to health problems from side effects.

So.

Let’s say someone invents a drug with no physiological side effects, which is inexpensive, and which enhances cognitive and academic performance.

What would be the problem with using it?

Human demarcation

I’m wrestling with a post on Popper and manifest truth, but in the meantime, some thoughts on drawing species lines.

What came first, the chicken or the egg? I read an answer somewhere which was quite good – ‘a slightly different egg.’ The first hen, you see, would not have been recognized as such. This is because you cannot point to a single animal and say ‘See? That’s the first chicken.’ Individuals do not evolve, and they do not found whole species. Eve is a myth. (The case of the modern domestic chicken (Gallus gallus domesticus) is a bit confused, as it might have come about due to deliberate cross-breeding between related species, so let’s just say ‘chicken’ to denote a generic bird of a definite species.)

In fact, new species are almost entirely noted in retrospect, when you can say ‘This chicken descended from this chicken-like ancestor.’ The ancestor is not a chicken, and likely cannot breed with modern chickens (an sufficient but not necessary aspect of a distinct species). Many proto-chickens likely bore young which were very similar to modern chickens, many of which bore young which were even more similar to modern chickens, until eventually without realizing it you have ancestral chickens and modern chickens, and aren’t quite sure when in the last hundred/thousand/more years it happened.

This is entirely the same with humans.

An amusing pastime is watching ‘creation scientists’ try to demarcate archaeological finds of hominid (Hominidae refers to all of the great apes, including Homo sapiens) as either ape or human. By ignoring the various gradations, and the fact that any shift from ‘more ape’ to ‘more human’ is obvious only because the fragmentary nature of the fossil record gives us snapshots rather than a continuous view of hominid evolution. This game can be played all across the internet (and in real life), but some good examples of it in play are here, here, and here.

What is human, and what is not, are not clear distinctions. At the risk of digging myself a deeper hole that I can write myself out of in the next year or so, I plan to return to this concept, that in science while there are categories they are non-rigid categories. Something similar applies to sex and gender, but that’s whole other kettle of fish.

But – since this was on my mind today – how do you draw the distinction between human and cyborg? I know this might seem something of a non-sequitor, but it’s something of great interest to me. I and many of my friends read sci-fi, and have played games, in which the characters are part-human and part-machine. These media typically assume that as you add artificial limbs or functions you become less human.

Are we less human now? Because much of the speculation in the books revolves around things we already possess and do. Artificial eyes? (We have them). Are they somehow different than looking through a camera with your own eyes, aside from considerations of rejection or infection? Does wearing night-vision goggles make you a cyborg? How about surgically implanted memory storage? It’s no different than storing information on a computer, which becomes an accessory to your memory function. Computers in fact make much of this debate possible, as for many people in developed countries they are a daily necessity for their jobs. If I lose a tooth and have it replaced by a plastic tooth, am I a cyborg? What if I receive a hip replacement? An artificial leg?

At what point am I no longer human? The answer, I think, is so long as my brain is intact I will remain human, for all intents and purposes – or at least enough of one to pass a Turing test.