Who are we? Don't ask our neurons, they're a bunch of idiots. And don't answer with your gut, because your gut isn't even human.

As the philosopher Daniel Dennett likes to remind us, each one of us is made up of trillions and trillions of living organisms (we call them 'cells'), and not a single one of these living things that make us up has any idea who we are, or even cares.

Take a moment to let that sink in.

Now, don't blame the cells for not caring; they are all living organisms and thus have their own metabolism, their own respiration, and their own reproduction to manage.  They don't have the time to worry about the bigger picture.  Nor do they have the mental capacity.  Even neurons--the living organisms that do our thinking for us--are quite dumb, when considered on an individual level.  Even though it is our neurons that allow us to think and learn, no individual neuron can think or learn.  Each one follows very simple rules of behavior: basically if a certain number of its neighbors are firing, they fire too.  That's it.  And yet somehow, out of all those mindless firings of neurons, a mind emerges--a mind that can even write a blog post about the neurons mindlessly making a mind.

Three stupid neurons.

More than human.
It gets even weirder.  A good proportion of the cells that make us up aren't even human!  Before I tell you what percentage, I invite you to take a guess: What percentage of the cells in our body are human cells?  90%? 70%? 50%?  So far, you're way off.  (Are your neurons even firing correctly?  Sheesh.)  Truth is, human cells are the in the minority amongst humans, by a long shot.

Human cells comprise only about 10% of the 100 trillion cells in a human.  10%.  The rest of the cells in our body are mostly bacteria, which generally take up residence in our gut.  Far from being invasive, our bacterial friends are an integral part of our digestive system, breaking down food and passing along the energy and vitamins to us after they're done with them.

Are you the same "you" that you were 10 years ago?
Biologically speaking, not exactly.  The living organisms that make us up generally do not live long enough to see us grow old.  Our body may grown and develop at a steady, slow pace, but that is due to a complex flux of cells dying and new cells being born to take their place (here's a nice NYT article on this).  The skin that covers your entire body--the thing that makes you look like "you" with your dimples and wrinkles and all--is not even the same skin you had two weeks ago.  The stable patterns in our skin, including our fingerprints and dimples and wrinkles and all, are sort of like traffic jams that persist even after all individual the cars that started the jam travel on down the road.

Down another level, they say that most of the atoms and molecules that make up the cells are replaced by other atoms (of the same variety) every year or so.  Since the new atoms are functionally equivalent to the old atoms, we would never know the difference.

So what are we to make of this?
So, if the neurons that make us think are all stupid, and the cells that make us up are dying all the time, how do we think?  How do we persist?

Part of what makes this all so mysterious is that we are so far removed from the microscopic level of the goings-on of our body that we have no sense of how the micro-level goings-on give rise to the macro-patterns of our daily life.  But there are some systems in nature where the levels are not so far removed, and so we can learn something about this mystery by studying them.  I will briefly introduce you to two of them: slime molds, and ant colonies.

Slime molds
The slime mold may be one of the grossest organisms on earth, but it is also one of the most fascinating.  We humans like to think of our life cycle in terms of our whole body, not our cells, but the life cycle of the slime mold doesn't work like that.

The slime mold spends much of its life as a single-celled organism, not unlike an amoeba, generally sliming around.  But there comes a point in the life cycle where tens of thousands of individual cells come together and act like one big organism.  First this aggregate organism looks like a slug, slithering around, eating, sliming, and doing whatever it is slugs like to do.  Then during it's reproductive stage the slime mold self-organizes into a mushroom-like stalk, releasing new spores into the surrounding environment and starting the whole process over again.

Although individual slime mold cells are just about as dumb as our individual neurons, the aggregate of slime mold cells can be pretty darned smart.  For example, they can find their way through a complicated maze to get to food:

Ant colonies
Although ants may be smarter than slime mold cells, they are still pretty dumb.  What I mean by that is that ants follow a very simple algorithm for guiding their behavior, a very simple decision-making procedure based entirely on pheromones.

If, in their walking around, an ant happens to cross paths with another ant, they give each other an antennae high-five and sniff out the pheromones.  There is a pheromone that signal one of a few basic meanings: "I found food" and one for "I'm working on the hive" and another for "there's a threat to the colony".  If they sniff the pheromone for "I found food", then they head in the direction that ant was coming from, repeating the process with other ants, until it ultimately finds the food.  This is not much different than our dumb neurons' algorithm of "if my neighbors are firing, I will too".

Now, despite being made up of dumb ants, an ant colony is pretty darned smart.  For instance, they can solve the complicated problem of allocating the optimal number of ants to various food sources at various distances with varying amounts of food.  (here's a nice TED talk on the emergent intelligence of ant colonies)


Also, ant colonies persist for decades, even though the individual ants generally die after several months or at most a few years.  (The queen is the exception to this rule, she's around for up to 21 years).

So, ant colonies and slime molds each give us insight on how a form of intelligence can emerge from the collective behavior of dumb individuals, much like mindless neurons can collectively make a mind. They also lend insight onto the persistence problem, how we can be around for decades when most of our cells are long dead by then.

The bigger picture.
Now that we've seen there's no real magic to how we can be composed out of a bunch of dumb organisms but still be relatively smart, there are more questions to consider.  Should we feel bad if we scratch our cheek and kill thousands if not millions of living organisms?  Is it possible that individual humans could be part of some larger system that is even smarter than any individual humans?  If so, should that system feel bad if it happens to "scratch it's cheek" and wipe out thousands if not millions of humans?  And what should we call that system?  I propose that we call this hypothetical system "Frank."  Frank, if you're listening, please don't scratch your cheek!!!


Extra goodies:

• this article also reports on a finding that human cells even forage for food in a pattern similar to other scavengers, including sharks and um, penguins
• another video of slime mold finding the shortest path to food through a maze 
• here's a research article on the how ant colonies solve complicated problems with dumb ants

What are the lessons to learn from Columbus?

Was Columbus a hero or a villain?  

We all know that Columbus' legacy is a controversial one.  Many history books have painted him as an intrepid explorer and overlooked the facts that would paint him in a negative light.  Some Columbus scholars have admitted that he encited a devastating genocide, but dedicated no more than a sentence to that fact (see, for example, Samuel Eliot Morison).  


So which is it--was Columbus a hero or a villain?  And how do we decide?  One thing that would be important to determine is what Columbus himself thought he was doing.  Perhaps he was trying to do good.  Perhaps he did not mean to exploit and kill all those natives...maybe it was his lower officers that took things into their own hands and got out of control.  


Fortunately, we have Columbus' log, as well as the log of several of his viceroys, and so we can find some answers to this question.  This, for example, is what Columbus wrote about his first encounter with the natives:


They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells. They willingly traded everything they owned... . They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane... . They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.


Well, he pretty much just comes out and says that he is intentionally subjugating them and making them do whatever they wanted.  And, also according to Columbus' own words, they wanted them for two things: gold and slavery.  So he took many as slaves and set everyone else to the grueling work of looking for gold where there wasn't any to write home about.   The working conditions for finding the gold were miserable, and the penalty for not meeting one's gold quota was chopping off the hands and bleeding them to death.  

The situation was written about extensively by one of Columbus' appointed governors, Bartolome de las Casas, a young priest who initially took part in the conquest and held slaves and such, but became disgusted by the cruelty of the Spaniards.  Here he describes the working conditions for the Arawaks faced under Columbus' rule:


Thus husbands and wives were together only once every eight or ten months and when they met they were so exhausted and depressed on both sides ... they ceased to procreate. As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers, overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them, and for this reason, while I was in Cuba, 7000 children died in three months. Some mothers even drowned their babies from sheer desperation.... in this way, husbands died in the mines, wives died at work, and children died from lack of milk . .. and in a short time this land which was so great, so powerful and fertile ... was depopulated. ... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write. ...


When Las Casas arrived in the Bahamas in 1508 he documented the unbelievable scale of the devastation:


"there were 60,000 people living on this island, including the Indians; so that from 1494 to 1508, over three million people had perished from war, slavery, and the mines. Who in future generations will believe this? I myself writing it as a knowledgeable eyewitness can hardly believe it...."


And so the question of whether Columbus' behavior was villainous seems pretty settled, based on his own writings as well as accounts from his officers.  What is not yet settled, for me at least, is how Columbus justified his behavior to himself.  With his reports to the King and Queen of Spain he could talk of subjugation without needing to explain how that is a good thing.  But what was going through his head when he went to sleep each night?  Was there any recognition of the evil actions let alone remorse?  Did he think he was being a hero?  Did he, as a devout Christian, think he was saving the souls of these natives?  If so, did he somehow twist this reasoning to render his maniacal methods as somehow forgivable, even noble?  Is there a way we can ever find this out?


I don't know the answer to these questions, perhaps nobody does and nobody ever will; but I think it is an extremely important set of questions with which to struggle.  You see, Columbus is not the only instance of such a horrible turbulence between two cultures as they newly meet.  If anything, subjugation and genocide seem to be the norm of two intersecting cultures, especially in the Americas.  The same sort of despicable treatment of human beings, from slavery to torture and genocide, accompanied the missions of Cortes in Mexico, Pizarro in Peru, and English settlers in English Settlers in Virginia and Massachusetts with the Powhatans and Pequots.


The lessons we learn (or do not) from such conquests could make or break the survival of the Earth, if extraterrestrial beings ever pay us a visit.  Is there a way for two cultures to intersect and mutually reinforce each other, or is war and death the only inevitable outcome?  Or maybe we will one day venture out to the stars, and we could end up being Avatars, i.e., Columbus 2.0.  These are big IF's, of course, but I think it is worth thinking about how we might do things better next time, whichever end of the ordeal we end up on.


Columbus apparently went down a slippery slope, thinking it his spiritual duty to convert these natives and save their souls, which let him to thinking, how better to convert people than by the club, and what makes a better club than a sword?  By turning to the sword, Columbus ultimately succumbed to blind and arrogant self-righteousness which nothing--not the absence of gold nor the decemation of an entire people--could snap him out of.  Let's learn to avoid this in the future, what do you say, fellow humans?

Where Have all the Flowers Gone?

Watching the Olympics this past week has conjured up a lot of memories of various moments in sport that I have found particularly moving. One of my favorite moments was one you probably do not remember.  It was 1994, at the Nagano Winter Olympics.  This was the much-anticipated Olympics of the Nancy Kerrigan-Tanya Harding drama, when skating had reached new high in the amount of attention from the public by hitting a new low morally and emotionally. 

Under the radar was two-time Olympic champion Katarina Witt, who had just come back to figure skating that year.  Coming into the long program, she -stood in 6th place.  Witt dedicated her long program performance to the city of Sarajevo, where she had won her first gold medal 10 years before.  (Sarajevo in 1994 was under siege in the midst of the genocidic Bosnian war.)  In an elegant and simple dress (in contrast to a lot of the gaudy sparkle-fests worn by her competitors) Witt skated her program with soul, grace, and fluidity:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjB17Cn_Hd8

I especially love the ending, 4min into the video--I find it visually stunning and powerful.  I think it is noteworthy that the crowd was so taken by the performance, they were throwing flowers onto the ice.  Even more telling are the boos and hisses from the crowd when Katarina's abysmal scores were announced.  She came in eighth in the long program, because she just didn't do enough triples to impress the judges, like her upstart competitors did. 

Why has this moment stuck with me for so long?  I think it is because even then, when I was 16, I could sense the irony expressed by Katarina's performance.  There was the explicit message that in an age of war and aggression, we should seek peace and beauty.  There was also the implicit message sent to the sport of figure skating--in an age when skating had become little more than a triple-axle competition mixed with a reality TV show, Katarina was expressing that it had come at the expense of honesty and elegance. 

I think the sport of figure skating has tried harder and harder to become an "objective" sport, under the assumption that the more objective it is, the more you can prove through measurement that one performance was better than another, or that one skater is better than another.  I think Katarina Witt's performance at the Olympics in 1994 was one of the most telling reminders for me that the most important things cannot be measured.

What’s really happening

A story about stories

There is a fundamental paradox that we are all vaguely aware of, even if we haven’t quite articulated it to ourselves.  Unlike the paradoxes of physics and philosophy, which we may never personally encounter, this paradox resides right under our noses.  More specifically, it resides right at the tip of our tongue.  It also buzzes incessantly right between our ears, being the fabric out of which even our internal monologue is woven.    It is the paradox of storytelling—the holy trinity of the story, its teller, and its audience. 

When I say storytelling you probably think of the sorts of storytelling done by professionals such as Twain or Poe, or the kind that is performed to a group sitting around a campfire or a dinner table.  And I do mean those; but I don’t mean only those.  I mean storytelling as grand as telling the story of our cosmic origins, or as minute as silently but persistently telling ourselves what it is we are thinking about at the moment…and everything in between.

We are all storytellers.

Historians compose stories about civilization, the ideologies and innovations that compete and collaborate to form periods of stability, progress, and revolution.

The press and its journalists compose stories that amount to the history of “now”—events at the intersection of people, their roles, and the motivations that drive them to act according to their roles.

Biologists tell same sorts of stories as historians and journalists; the differences amount to ones of scope, with roles played by very different sorts of characters, the innovations of a much less teleological nature, and the motivations largely being those of survival.  But really these are not such dramatic differences after all.

Physicists tell causal stories about particles and their interactions.

Your mind tells stories about you, what you’re doing, what you have done, and what you plan to do.

How many stories are there?

We like to think of history as a continuous stream of goings-on.  So much so that we each tend to decide on one story and stick with it, quickly forgetting, ignoring or even deleting versions that don’t jive with it.  We all know it’s the winners that write the history books; this is true of the shared history written down in books as well as our personal histories written down in our stream of consciousness.  But if you’re really observant, you can sometimes spot multiple drafts of the same story before one get chosen and the other swept under the carpet. 

Case in point: the recent protests in Iran (video).  There are two major versions of the same events.  I’d like you to suspend judgment, if just for a moment, which version you believe.  (btw I’m going off this NY Times article)

Version #1: The Iranian government says that western countries helped orchestrated the protests, and that shots from the crowd struck and killed several people, including Ali Mousavi, the nephew of the opposition leader.

Version #2: The people in the street says that the protests were peaceful, but that revolutionary guard soldiers violated the rules of the holy day by shooting into the crowd, possibly even assassinating the nephew of the opposition leader.

These two versions of the story seem completely incompatible.  How can one person ever believe both at the same time?  How can it be decided which version is a “factual” account of the events?  Most likely what will happen is that one group of people will believe one version, and another will believe the other.  Whichever story gets believed by more people in the end will survive and become the “official” account, the other will pretty much die away.

What’s the real story, and who gets to tell it?

And now for the paradox. 

We all know that there are many sides to a story.  And so it makes sense to say that there is no one real story of what really happened.  There are only versions of stories, which are unavoidably colored by who is telling them and who they are being told to. 

But on the other hand, to say that there is no privileged version of what really happened—there is no plain and simple truth, no bare fact of the matter—seems totally crazy. 

I think this paradox, just like any paradox worth its mettle, is inherently unresolvable.  But that does not make it a dead end.  Keeping this paradox in mind helps us remember that we may always be wrong about even the things we’re most certain of.  I think this is a crucial step—perhaps THE crucial step—towards the peaceful resolution of conflict.

coincidence?

So You Think You Can Philosophize

This week's contestants, Joey Lawrence and Paris Hilton, discuss free will and causation.

	David Hume said we cannot directly perceive causation, but that's not true. We experience causation all the time.
	Prove it!
	Just wiggle your finger.. (she wiggles it) Now, focus in on that control you feel while you do it. Got it? Now, make your heart skip a beat.
	Hey, c'mon, that's different!
	Yes, and that's precisely my point! You can cause one but you can't cause the other. That's the difference!
	Hmm…that seems sketchy to me. (deep in thought) I got it! I can make it skip a beat. Move over.
	What? Okay, I've got to see this. Don't hurt yourself.
	Don't worry, I won't. (She lies down on her side, feeling her pulse) Yep. Feel it and weep.
	(He feels her pulse) Holy shit, you did it! What's your trick? How do you do it?
	I have conscious control over my heart.
	Shut the fuck up.
	No! It's true. I know that whenever I lay on my right side, my heart tends to skip. It's a correlation I can count on. That's all causation is—correlation you can count on.
	Bullshit! Consciously doing something else that you know will affect your heart is clearly different from consciously controlling your heart directly.
	How? How exactly is it different?
	Well, it's hard to put into words.
	I thought it was supposed to be clear…
	It is, perfectly clear in fact. Something can be perfectly clear without being easy to put into words.
	Like what?
	Well, um…like…like this! Like how it is totally clear how something can be totally clear but hard to put into words, but hard to put into words.
	What the…
	But listen, that's besides the point. The point is, you agree that when you lay down just then, you did it to speed up your heart.
	Correct.
	But you can't speed up your heart without doing that.
	Well, so far as I know right now…
	Yeah, yeah good enough for me. So that's completely different from there being no other actions that you need to perform to make your heart skip other than the very act of skipping your heart.
	Hmmm…good point. But now that I think of it, this is exactly the point I'm trying to make—there's always intervening actions…it's just that some we're so used to that we don't even notice them. Or there's no mechanism for noticing them, because they're so innate.
	But you're always acting in some way, that's my point…you're always causing action!
	No, you're not.
	How are you not?!
	Listen, have you heard of these studies, where they hook up a person's brain stem to an electrode, and using a little electric shock they make the person wiggle his finger. Funny thing is, the person thinks he chose to wiggle his finger! He even reports to the people, "Oh, yeah I just decided to wiggle my finger right then."
	No! Really?
	Yeah really.
	Whoa!! I'll have to check out that study, but if it's true then, damn!
	Yeah, that's what I'm saying! So, what if we're making up the story all the time, whenever something moves? In fact, that's precisely what we're doing! Everything happens according to the laws of physics. They have all the equations they need to predict how everything interacts--it's just the initial conditions that are hard to put into the equation because things are complicated. But they know the laws of the universe, and they know that everything obeys them. So do you. It's just that you have this propensity to make up a coherent story.
	But you're still saying that we choose to make up a story! That's still the causation that I'm talking about!
	No! I'm not saying you choose! The person isn't lying. It's unconscious. Split brain patients do it all the time. They say they intended to draw the drawing they did, and they believe it, too. It's their brain that puts the story together, checking for global coherence. They're listening to the explanation the first time just when you are! And they believe it, even though you, the researcher, knows better about their own actions! It's crazy, but true!
	Well, okay but still you're saying that the story's made up for us by our brain (whatever that could mean) and we are just attributing ourselves as the authors of the actions. Why would the laws of physics dictate that that should be so?
	Beats me, I didn't set it up. That's just how it is.
	But why would we make up a story about some things and not others?
	Why not? We can't make up a story about everything…
	But we only make up a story for actions that feel like we are controlling, like wiggling our finger as opposed to making our heart skip, yourself excluded.
	But the feeling is the story! That's the point! The feeling of control is the story that your brain makes up to keep global coherence.
	Ah, that's just a homunculus. And who tells the brain to tell the story? And who tells the brain-teller? And the brain-teller's teller? It's an infinite regress. As the chain grows, the first person has to know and say an exponentially growing list of people to tell. Even the fourth homunculus down the line has to tell the brain-teller's teller to tell the brain-teller to tell the brain to tell the person that he wiggled his finger, not the laws of physics.
	You lost me.
	Think about it some more. Alright, never mind, I'll just stick with the last step in the process: why would the brain deceive us at all?
	It's not trying to, it's trying to tell the truth!
	And we're back to the homunculus.
	What's the homunculus? Is that some weird philosophy thing?
	Uh, if you don't know, it won't help to have it explained to you I'm afraid. At least not now. Let me go a different route. If it's trying to tell a story, and it always works out to be the most globally coherent story, than doesn't that count as evidence that the story is right??
	You're assuming there's a "right" story.
	No, you're assuming that, and I'm just going with it!
	How's that?
	Because you're saying that there is a correct story—the laws of physics wiggled his finger—and that the person isn't privy to the real story. He's deceived, even if he knows the laws of physics, since he'll never be able to calculate them in time. Hey, that's interesting…if he could calculate fast enough, would he be able to predict his own motions?
	Yeah, I suppose…
	So will he be able to predict that he's going to predict what he's doing?
	You're losing me again, I don't see how this pertains to the argument at hand.
	It just shows that you're still supposing there's a real cause when we wiggle our finger and we are just not that cause…the laws of physics are.
	Okay, so what are you saying?
	I'm saying our body gives us good perceptions of cause. We cause our finger to move, and we feel ourselves deciding to and making that happen. We cannot do that with our heart, no matter how hard we concentrate. The difference is the difference between cause and not cause. Control and not control.
	What about your lungs? Sometimes we control our breathing, and sometimes we don't! Is it an override, or a linear combination of neuron firings resulting in one action, or is it a nonlinear pattern of neuron firings…
	Huh? Well, I don't know. I bet the breathing would be really interesting to study in terms of causes.
	Or swallowing…You only start the muscles during swallowing…the rest happens automatically.
	Yeah, you would know about swallowing, wouldn't you? Anyway, I'm saying that it's wrong to dismiss our biological basis for perceiving cause as 'animistic', whatever that would mean. It's important to take the things we're given and work with that. And we are given a front row seat to the decisions of our own actions. Even if we don't see every one, and sometimes we see things when they didn't happen, we are still remarkably reliable in being right about our own intentions. Not only can we perceive cause, we can perceive a single cause. That's something Hume could never do.
	Yeah, well there's no such thing as a single cause. There's always a whole bunch of causes leading up to the action. For instance, each neuron causes the next one to fire, presumably. But we can't control a one of those!
	That's true, that's a good point. But we can control the lot of them! It's a holistic thing. Besides, we don't have particular individual neurons as intentional objects. We do have the action as an intentional object—an object we can think about. That's the difference, I suppose, or part of it. The action has to be an intentional object, that is, a "think-about-able" thing.
	Well, that doesn't seem right either. If your wiggling finger inadvertently hit a hidden launch button for a nuclear missile while it was wiggling, we have no reason to say that you did not decide to launch the missile. You only decided to wiggle your finger, but your wiggling finger did cause the missile launch. You didn't even have the missile as an intentional object but you did cause it to launch. The finger caused it to launch, but it can't hold any intentional objects in its mind because it doesn't have a mind of its own (despite what your girlfriend says, hey-o!)
	Well, okay, I'll step that back a bit. I guess I'm just saying that actions that start as intentional objects and end as actions are an important case to study, since we see causation from the inside in those instances. Even if it's not perfect--we can be wrong about being the cause of our own actions if, for example, an electrode actually causes our finger to wiggle—there is still a fact of the matter to be determined. Then it becomes a problem of how to determine it, which leads us away from ontology and into epistemology.
	Fair enough. Speaking of which, I have to take an epistemology right now…peace out! (she goes to the bathroom).