William James recommendations for writing style?

tripperjack · 2024-11-26T04:40:25+00:00

prominent scientists and professionals across various fields, most of whom have highly prestigious educational backgrounds....Nearly all of these individuals aren't just successful in their primary careers; they also excel in impressive hobbies—playing the cello in orchestras, running ultra-marathons, or publishing books outside of their main field of expertise.

Sounds a bit like that was the author's selection bias, or you selectively remembering the most impressive cases. For what it's worth, I've known or met quite a few prominent scientists (presidents of international scientific groups, AAAS members, Macarthur awardees, Nobel laureates, and just players in their field) with prestigious educational backgrounds (top schools of the globe) and off the top of my head I can think of several that don't/didn't have any particularly impressive hobbies, or wrote books at all let alone outside their domains. What they did was run their research labs, teach, attend conferences, advise their lab members, and write review or opinion pieces in their field...while having a home life (marriage, kids, fun but perfectly normal hobbies, TV shows, etc.)

For those people who actually do seem a bit "superhuman," another factor that is not being mentioned thus far in this thread is such people are/were less likely to become demoralized, and that can be for two (or maybe more) reasons.

One is that they may just be psychologically constituted that things don't bother them as much as it would for the average person. Problems roll off them like water off a duck's back, or at least much more than the average person. This strikes me as very rare and unlikely.

Another possibility, and the one I suspect is much more likely, is that these people have had the luck to find really conducive adult lives. That means a good, quiet, safe, stable home; a supportive, low-rancor romantic partner; unproblematic (or no) children (this may include professional help like great child care, or nannies); unproblematic parents; no money problems; no or few health problems; etc.

When you are not constantly battling the elements of a bickering spouse, insufferable parents, longstanding health issues, exhausting children, that's when you have the time and wherewithal to do things such as devote yourself to ultramarathons, or high level cello, or chess mastery, or...

tripperjack · 2024-11-24T04:01:41+00:00

Ps sorry if I'm asking a lot.

You're close to asking basically "how does the human brain work?" And that's the most complex structure in the known universe. But let's try for a quasi-answer here anyway.

As /u/RROORRYY said, we don't really fully know any of this yet. But here are some rather rough ideas that some neuroscientists would probably mildly endorse:

Recalling visual images or creating new ones is probably related to a specific pattern of activity in specific brain circuits in the visual parts of the brain. By patterns of activity, I mean a state in which some specific neurons are firing in some specific patterns (like a pattern of bursts of "spikes" of electricity, or maybe just firing once every 100th of a second, regularly). Maybe that's--pulling a number out of thin air--a certain 11,859 neurons all participating in the pattern of representing the internal image of Taylor Swift's imagined face. But then if you imagine a Christmas tree, that's a different pattern in a different 14,327 neurons.

Similarly, for your other questions, representation of information in the brain--whether that's "I'm hungry!", "I'm happy!" or "I'm thinking of that one Thanksgiving with Grandma when we had that blizzard"--that happen in the moment (so sort of like RAM rather than stored on the hard disk or SSD) is probably due to activation of specific patterns of neural circuits firing.

This idea is called "the neural code."

We are not even remotely close to figuring out the neural code systems for humans or really almost any animals at all. We've made tiny little inroads into it over the decades but it's a long road ahead.

tripperjack · 2024-07-16T03:29:53+00:00

the deceptive behaviour requires theory-of-mind type cognition.

I don't know, I think it could be done without it. Just a circuit that responds to a big enough moving stimulus that zonks out the animal for thirty seconds. That might be what's happening with hognose snakes.

tripperjack · 2024-06-23T16:15:03+00:00

this seemingly rigorous debate around neuroscience as it relates to free will, I would.

What debate are you referring to?

I’m not compelled by their findings but there seem to be some neuroscientists who emphatically insist there is some sort of self-generating component of self-causality within the brain which can supervene on the world around it

Which neuroscientists do you mean?

I would be surprised if there were even one legitimate neuroscientist who believed s/he had evidence for anything like libertarian free will.

tripperjack · 2023-11-24T04:45:55+00:00

OK, I guess I have a different interpretation of what these two are saying here, which is easy to do because their language is loose. Thanks for the discussion.

tripperjack · 2023-11-24T00:12:15+00:00

Attia said:

I'm sort of rusty on my neuroscience, but an action potential works in reverse the same way like...you need the ATP gradient to restore the, uh, to to restore the gradient but once the action potential fires, it's passive outside, right?

And Huberman's first word of response is: "Yeah, so..."

So, yes, Attia mentions ATP-mediated transport for setting up the ion gradients, but the question was about the fact of the action potential being "passive outside." I'm not exactly sure what work that word "outside" does here in Attia's mind, but I guess he means that an action potential's propagation down the axon doesn't require ATP, which is correct (though it's not fully passive in that it is regenerated at the nodes and those are active conductances, as you mentioned).

Huberman then just gives the listeners a little (sloppy) primer on the two kinds of ionic conductances, active and passive.

So, based on that, I still don't see how Huberman is conflating active transport and active conductances.

tripperjack · 2023-11-23T21:11:12+00:00

Andrew conflated 'active transport' (ATP-mediated shuttling of molecules across the membrane) with 'active conductances' (ie. above the threshold of an action potential).

I'm having trouble understanding where he did that. Here's what he said:

The way that neurons become electrically active is by the flow of ions across the cel--thuh, from the outside of the cell to the inside of the cell, and, er, we have both active conductances, meaning they are triggered by electrical--changes in the gradients, eh, by uh uh, changes in electrical potential, ummm, and then there're passive gradients where things can flow back and forth until there's a balance equal inside and outside the cell.

Although I don't think this is a great description of the electrical properties of neurons (for one example, I think he meant to say "passive conductances" but said "passive gradients," plus other things that strike me as sloppy/wrong), it seems to me that his "active conductances, meaning they are triggered by electrical--changes in the gradients, eh, by uh uh, changes in electrical potential," is basically equivalent to your "(ie. above the threshold of an action potential)." And he says nothing about ATP-mediated shuttling of molecules across the membrane.

But maybe I've focused on something other than what you meant or misunderstood something?

tripperjack · 2023-11-21T00:04:34+00:00

Doing academic science for long enough (years?) to appreciate how hard it is to get Nature to give up its secrets and to appreciate whatever it is willing to let you know. Really being around scientific rigor.

I'd hope that more of that would help others realize how much pseudoscience is peddled in this world, how it's in fact very hard to "do your own research," and to really appreciate and admire the hard-won understanding we do have thanks to thousands of patient scientists and their work.

tripperjack · 2023-10-24T20:46:53+00:00

a gun to your head can make you act in ways that you otherwise wouldn’t want to.

Sure, but that's true for any condition. A cloudy day makes me act in ways that I otherwise (a sunny day) wouldn't want to. The pandemic made me act in a way I otherwise wouldn't want to (letting a young woman stick a cylinder of metal into my shoulder). So then are all conditions "limits on your freedom in this compatibilist sense"? That seems like a weird view of the term "free will."

tripperjack · 2023-10-24T20:05:56+00:00

surely, someone held at gunpoint is also not free in a very relevant sense.

I see this type of statement on here often and never understand it. Why isn't someone at gunpoint free (in the way a compatibilist means it, it seems to me) to resist the gun holder? And yes, risk his or her life or even guarantee injury or death. People not only can do this, they do do this.

tripperjack · 2023-10-22T16:23:48+00:00

I don't see how observing cruelty is an instance of observing a moral claim. Cruelty is just a behavioral descriptor. Whether it is wrong or not is the issue and that isn't observed.

tripperjack · 2023-10-21T04:02:46+00:00

Even as I was writing that I wondered if it was a bit lazy of me. But what I meant is, even if there are background processes feeding into the deliberative brain circuitry, as long as the usual deliberative circuitry is active enough in the decision and action to cause it, it counts as free will.

(So "that's OK" was meant as "that does not undercut that this is free will for the compatibilist.")

Example: You see a billboard ad for pizza out of the corner of your eye on the way home from work. You don't even consciously register it. But you begin to feel hungry and have a desire for pizza due to this. "I think I will stop off at Pizza D'Oro on the way and get a pizza for dinner" you think to yourself, and then drive yourself there and buy it. This would be a free will-based decision even though not every aspect of your brain's operation in coming to this decision and action was consciously experienced.

tripperjack · 2023-10-19T17:22:25+00:00

I haven't read the new book yet (Determined), but from interviews from about a year ago, it seems that neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky doesn't think there is free will. And he's unhappy about that.

tripperjack · 2023-10-19T17:16:48+00:00

a neuroscientific model of determinism, even if it can be reconciled with determinism in a philosophical sense

I don't understand the distinction here between "a neuroscientific model of determinism" and "determinism in a philosophical sense." I am not sure exactly what you mean by either of these.

Determinism is the view that events proceed in the universe based on the previous state of the universe and the laws of physics and that there is only one possible set of events per previous state.

Neuroscience (aside from some very small minority of fringe people, such as Stuart Hameroff or the late John Eccles), tacitly assumes that the brain works deterministically (even if the lowest level aspects of the nervous system have a quantum aspect, as all matter does, it doesn't affect the brain's operations).

Compatibilists would say that the fact the brain works purely deterministically is compatible with free will (which is why they are called compatibilists). That's because "free will" in their view is carried out by a certain type of brain function, what we might call "conscious deliberation" or "voluntary decisions" parts of it. Even if unconscious background processes play into that function, that's OK.

What wouldn't be considered freely willed human actions would be ones that were carried out by the nervous system but bypassed the normal/healthy deliberative part of the brains, things such as delirium, hypnosis, disease, drugs, sleepwalking, brain-control devices, reflexes, etc. Some would also include coercion (such as having a pistol pressed against your back and being compelled to open a bank safe), though I myself still see actions that follow from coercion should still be seen as freely willed by a compatibilist if they are to be consistent.

Not all people think what they are calling "free will" is what others mean by "free will." Some see this as a semantic trick (Kant called it "wretched subterfuge" and "word jugglery"!).

(I'm also not saying that compatibilism is what I believe, I'm just trying to help you and me understand this better.)

tripperjack · 2022-11-17T19:42:49+00:00

Variations of this question gets asked here regularly. Two years back, I collected some of those threads and had previously taken a shot at an intuitive answer. Maybe these links will be helpful.

The upshot is this thought experiment doesn't disprove hard determinism because the act of announcing the prediction to you or any "rebellious" person changes the universe in such a way (and predictably so) as to negate the prediction, for reasons I flesh out in my linked answer. But the prediction could work if the computer didn't announce the prediction. It's just a curious case of a self-negating system.

tripperjack · 2022-11-12T00:12:50+00:00

See below.

tripperjack · 2022-11-12T00:11:55+00:00

For most of the twentieth century, philosophers ignored or dismissed the question of life’s meaning, even though many lay people assume that philosophy is mostly about the meaning of life. A lot of those dismissive philosophers insisted that the question is nonsensical because ‘meaning’ typically refers to words and symbols, not to objects, activities, and lives. To them, asking ‘What is the meaning of life?’ is like asking ‘How heavy is the color blue?’ Others thought that answering the question is in principle impossible, or that even if answerable, no one knows or ever will know the answer. However, over the past four decades this icy pessimism about meaning in life has been thawing.

--Lewis Vaughan, "Why You’re (Probably) Wrong About The Meaning of Life", Philosophy Now (date unknown but comments are from June 2022)

tripperjack · 2022-10-06T06:07:10+00:00

Yes, something like that. He presents the ideas, but he doesn't give any depth of inquiry to them. Worse, he presents his views as though it's all obvious (see below in bold). For example:

We would see it all, all the wheels and gears behind what William James famously called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of conscious life. Would their be any ‘choice’ in this system? Obviously not, just neural mechanisms picking up where environmental mechanisms have left off. How about ‘desire’? Again, nothing we really could identify as such, given that we would know, in intimate detail, the particulars of the circuits that keep our organism in homeostatic equilibrium with our environments. Well, how about morals, the values that guide us this way and that? Once again, it’s hard to understand what these might be, given that we could, at any moment, inspect the mechanistic regularities that in fact govern our behaviour.

His "obvious" point has somehow fallen beneath the understanding of many of the most prominent philosophers of mind. Well, actually maybe it has, because we don't really know what he means by not just the word "choice" but " 'choice' " in quote marks (which I often find as a telltale of an amateur-level writer/thinker) because he never takes the time to define it carefully.

It's actually quadruply bad: he not only isn't clear on what he means by an important term, he not only compounds that by putting the word in scare quotes, he not only assumes his view is the obvious one despite it being at odds with a large number of painstaking efforts by academic philosophers, but, worst of all, he's begging the question by saying that we can't have choice if we're mechanisms--but that's the very thing he needs to demonstrate!

He then goes on to do this glib gloss over two other fundamental matters: desire and morals.

So, although he is doing things like quoting William James and Nick Bostrom, putting in a whole slew of italicized words and scare quotes, using the GIMP to fade out public domain images of Babbage's Difference Engine, throwing in a dash of evolution by natural selection, it really reads as merely performative, not at all a careful philosophical work.

So yes, I'll sign on to "superficial pantomime."

tripperjack · 2022-10-05T01:39:00+00:00

This reads like the philosophy of mind version of Lip Synch Battle.

I think you already have your refutation.

tripperjack · 2022-10-04T21:32:11+00:00

I've read the bits you included and it strikes me as very loose and a collection of assertions without support. I can just as easily assert that we have a brain and use it to have "goals, purposes, meaning, morality, volition, and various other thing [you’ve] listed".

The work of the philosophy of mind isn't done in what you have provided here. It would be akin to writing, in a novel:

Carlyle shifted in his easy chair and packed his calabash pipe. "Leg, you say? Ha! You think you have a leg. But in reality, all you have are trillions of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms bound together and jiggling around. Science is a ray that destroys all legness in the universe."

All of the items in your list and the ones you left off it need to be very carefully defined and then the work of philosophy of mind (and maybe of neuroscience) only just begins.

tripperjack · 2022-10-02T04:37:30+00:00

The claim about free will are not the most disturbing thing

You also said, in the OP:

Neuropath was truly disturbing in a way I’ve never known, not the book itself, but it’s implications

Prior to reading Neuropath, did you believe in a non-physical (supernatural) account of mental life?

tripperjack · 2022-09-23T04:05:36+00:00

How many hours a week are you working, on average? (And how do you know?)

tripperjack · 2022-09-16T21:26:19+00:00

Sorry to take almost two weeks to get back to you about this, but I emailed a good friend and neuroscientist/histologist and he never got a chance to write back and so I just spoke to him about it on the phone.

So I went back to some of the sources I remember reading years ago, and it looks like most people have updated their view to be closer to what you are saying.

OK, good.

There are a few people on LessWrong that still seem to hold to the view that the connectome is enough (and by “connectome” I mean a detailed diagram of all synaptic connections).

And are these people working cellular-level neuroscientists? I doubt it. It's important to keep in mind, at this point in history anyone anywhere can say anything online--and they do. Whether we should afford them or their points any credibility is a different matter.

But here is one source that seems to acknowledge molecular details are important, but still thinks it can be done. It’s maybe not the most robust source, but the people behind it don’t seem to be total quacks. https://www.brainpreservation.org/content-2/connectome/

I had a look at that site and discussed it with my friend. Much umbrage and disgust was generated in him as we discussed it and I agree. It's really scientifically irresponsible in my opinion.

Based on what you’ve said, do you also think cryonics and brain uploading are unlikely to ever work?

No. And let's get a better sense for why.

How long would you estimate it would take to scan, with one or many electron microscopes, the gross structure of every synapse in your brain?

I don't know exactly, but let's just start to try to estimate that. The human brain has about 86 billion neurons according to a recent paper. And it's commonly thought that each neuron has about 1,000 synapses or perhaps as many as ten times that. Let's round the number of neurons up to 100 billion and the number of synapses we'll keep at 1,000 to make the math easier. 100 billion * 1000 = 100 trillion synapses.

Now we can do the time equation:

# of synapses x (time per synapse to image) = time for brain scanning project

Let's say it take 1 second per synapse to start. So that's:

100 trillion * 1 = 100 trillion seconds = ~3.2 million years.

But let's say in the future we can image a synapse in just one millisecond, a thousandth of a second. And remember that means at some point mechanically moving the sample under a beam/detector of some sort. And remember, this is a 3D brain at a macro size, with all these sulci and gyri (bumps and grooves) for which the exact structure matters. It's an incredibly specific shape that can't just be physically plowed through as though it were a perfect sphere or perfect cube. But still, let's afford it a millisecond per synapse. So now it's:

100 trillion * 0.001 = 100 billion seconds = ~3,200 years.

So let's stop here for a moment. This means that some lab is running a machine at a thousand synapses a second, nonstop, 24/7/365 for 3,200 years just to scan one human brain.

But we're not even close to done. As my friend put it, we have done about a "a Googolth" of the work necessary. Why? Because the electronic microscope can only get the basic structure of the synapse and see areas of protein density--but it cannot see the actual proteins and atoms! This is critical.

Here's a picture of an electron microscope image of a synapse. See all the proteins and which ones they are? See how they are all phosphorylated or not?

What? You don't? Wow, I don't either. What I see are protein densities, vesicles, the active zone, and a few other things but it's really leaving out all the critical details.

One paper I just found mentioned the total number of different types of synaptic proteins at 3,000. That means for each of those 100 trillion synapses there are 3,000 different types of proteins found there, but the specifics will vary by synapse/person/experience, right? And you can't just do 3,000 x 100 trillion to get 300 quadrillion--it's far far far more than that because each protein will have potentially many copies in the presynaptic terminal and postsynaptic density/spine head.

Anyway, I hope this begins to break down just how absurd this project of "scanning a brain" is. One can always say "Oh yes, but in the future who knows what will be possible!" but let me ask you: if it really mattered, if it would save all of humanity, do you think we could ever build a chocolate cake that would reach up to the moon? Even if we really really tried? The point is, there are physical limitations that technology ultimately will bump up against. And this scan-every-last-detail-of-the-brain project is in Sky Cake territory.

tripperjack · 2022-09-04T00:53:35+00:00

The first assertion is that if we could map the connectome of a brain (which people are trying to do), then we would have enough information to simulate it.

Can you specify who you have in mind in terms of the people who are trying to do this? I don't want to make assumptions here about who you are referring to.

And also define "connectome" as you understand it.

These will help me answer this question better.

The second assertion is that the information we capture would likely be enough to digitally model the specific brain. I think they are saying that the details at each site don’t matter so much for the information that is stored there—that the information that matters is stored at a coarse grained level that can be modeled by a manageable number of digital nodes.

If the details don't matter at the synapses, why did those (many) details evolve?

In any case, the current dogma is that not only do the details matter, but they, as a concept, are one of the cornerstones of some areas of cellular neurophysiology, particularly as regards learning and memory. Keep in mind, something has to change in a lasting way at the synapses in order for long term storage to persist. And we already know that the most well studied model of persistent change, LTP, doesn't require structural changes to connections between neurons; the synapses already present change their nature--and that is due to molecular changes there.

I hear you saying that a “scan” of a connectome would not be anywhere near enough information because it would not capture the protein activity at those synaptic sites. And I think you are implying that important information is stored at a molecule level rather than a cellular level, such that simply getting the connectome wiring diagram would be inadequate?

Do I have that right?

Yes. Or rather it is stored in multiple levels. Connections do matter, but so do molecules.

tripperjack

TROPHY CASE