Human awareness vs. animal awareness

A linguist friend writes to say,

In the syntax classes I have taught I always began by distinguishing between the expression of feelings, at which a dog is nearly as proficient as a person, and the communication of complex information. People can grunt and gesture and smile and frown, and such "body language" garners more interest than the real thing, which is the communication of complex information: "My grandmother came from Poland at the beginning of the 20th century and..." No animal can do that.

[ ... ]

The defining feature of man is language. There would be no science or technology or religion without it. But we take it for granted.

This was in response to a comment I had made in a letter, about an aged senior who had had a stroke. For some months afterward, he was very confused about words, but his sense of concepts remained. For example, he couldn’t remember the name of the place he was living, but he knew it was an old folks home.

I had written,

A bull can paw the ground and bellow and lower his horns, and you don't need any more information about what he is thinking than what you are seeing. So what advantage would language be to him?

Can't think of any, off hand. He might as well just charge.

But if a man, afflicted with old age memory deficits, nonetheless manages to say, "I am worried about what will happen to my wife when I am gone, and about how my unmarried daughter will manage, now that she is retirement age, and how my son will be able to educate his four children" - those are more complex thoughts, and they require language.

I have not seen any worthwhile materialist explanation of how either language or the quest for it came about.

Fun from crank psychology: Except, it is not fun when you must live it.

I have not had much time to contribute to the Mindful Hack blog, because I must shortly help write a book about something else. But bear with me now. First, ...

One columnist writes,

I have a former student who has found the perfect job. She’s working with troubled youths in a faith-based program that allows her to finally put her psychology degree to use – a full eight years after she graduated from college. She likes the job, but she called my office recently to vent about a boy who suffers from Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD).

I have a B.A. and an M.S. in psychology. But I must confess that I needed some explanation of ODD because it wasn’t yet a disorder when I studied psychology back in the 1980s. So I asked my former student simply to describe the behavior of the boy with ODD. The conversation went something like this:

Erica (not real name): He is constantly pitching a fit over nothing – or nearly nothing. He argues with everything I say and there is no such thing as a rule he does not question.

Me: So, in other words, the boy is a jerk.

You get the general idea. Modern (as opposed to traditional) psychology sometimes gives a young fellow a pass just for being a jerk.

Fast backward to traditional psychology: Unenlightened young fellows, in my experience, might not offer such a pass, especially if their sweethearts, mothers, sisters, aunts, old lady teachers, etc., are in any way concerned. Stuff happened to guys who did bad things to them, and those guys had bruises they could not plausibly explain to the emergency room physician, let alone a local cop. But no one really cared.

Was that a good teaching method? Do I know? All I would ever ask is, does your community feel safer than it did two decades ago?

So, if you are French, your neurons run your life? Or?

France, we are told, has created a brain and behavioural research unit specifically to form public policy around stuff like anti-smoking messages. One somewhat skeptical analyst reports,

As we've discussed several times, the 'neuro' of 'neuromarketing' is an interesting research focus but as an applied science it is completely premature and can currently tell us nothing about how best to appeal to the public that standard psychology can't do already.

Rather worringly, unit director Olivier Oullier seems to think that 'neuroscience' and 'neuroimaging' allows access to unconscious and emotional responses that aren't available to established behavioural research.

This is clearly crap and anyone who is aware of how neuroimaging studies are created knows that they rest on the quality of the psychological science.

Basically, people start smoking because they like it, and they stop smoking if and when they think the costs are too high. My dear old dad likes to say that he could buy a couple of cars from all he had saved by stopping smoking in the 1950s. Given that he will shortly celebrate a ninety-plus birthday, I can think of other things he may have saved as well - but I digress.

I doubt that - strictly speaking - Dad’s neurons played a key role. He is a life member of the Chartered Accountants’ Society of Canada (fifty years of service), and his keen accountant’s sense of alternative uses of money (= smoke or buy a car for my family) was likely the deciding factor. Yes, he needed neurons to calculate that, but it wasn’t really the neurons that were making the decision. It was attitudes, values, beliefs, concerns, commitments, etc., that guided him.

As long as the French keep that element in mind, I wish them all the best in their project.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Pseudo-neuroscience: If you believe in God, it is just because you think you ARE God?

See the abstract for "Believers' estimates of God's beliefs are more egocentric than estimates of other people's beliefs" by Nicholas Epleya,1, Benjamin A. Conversea, Alexa Delboscb, George A. Monteleonec and John T. Cacioppoc:

Abstract

People often reason egocentrically about others' beliefs, using their own beliefs as an inductive guide. Correlational, experimental, and neuroimaging evidence suggests that people may be even more egocentric when reasoning about a religious agent's beliefs (e.g., God). In both nationally representative and more local samples, people's own beliefs on important social and ethical issues were consistently correlated more strongly with estimates of God's beliefs than with estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 1–4). Manipulating people's beliefs similarly influenced estimates of God's beliefs but did not as consistently influence estimates of other people's beliefs (Studies 5 and 6). A final neuroimaging study demonstrated a clear convergence in neural activity when reasoning about one's own beliefs and God's beliefs, but clear divergences when reasoning about another person's beliefs (Study 7). In particular, reasoning about God's beliefs activated areas associated with self-referential thinking more so than did reasoning about another person's beliefs. Believers commonly use inferences about God's beliefs as a moral compass, but that compass appears especially dependent on one's own existing beliefs.

Well, obviously, people who believe in God would want to take God's side in ethical issues, right? Who wants to be merely on the neighbours' side (obsessed with property values) or on Satan's side ... (evil for the fun of it?).

The authors of this study, having begun by assuming that God does not exist, attempt to reason about why people conform their beliefs to what they think God wants, based purely on private preferences. That goes against everything I know about religious people.

Neuroscience and design: FMRI flops in first criminal trial

A friend notifies me to look here re neurolaw and the death penalty. He writes,

The threads of the Jeanine Nicarico murder case are too tangled to attempt even a summary. Suffice it to say that an innocent man was sent to death row, and before it was all sorted out police and prosecutors were charged with fabricating evidence and there hasn't been an execution in Illinois in over a decade. The final act played out last November in a suburban Chicago courtroom where the real killer, Brian Dugan, asked a jury to spare his life. To assist, his lawyers ... presented fMRI images -- a first in a U.S. criminal trial. The pictures revealed that parts of the brain that light up in normal people remained cold and dark in Dugan's brain. The defense expert described these areas as regulating impulse control and emotional reactions. In short, Dugan was a classic psychopath, and the fMRI helped to prove it.

Although prosecutors had tried to keep the evidence out by challenging the science behind it, the judge ruled that under the relaxed standards of mitigating evidence in a death penalty case, it should come in. Fearful of "The Christmas Tree Effect" dazzling jurors with colorful snapshots of Brian Dugan's grim interior life, the judge originally ruled no images could be admitted. Later he reversed himself, and Dr. Kiehl, a New Mexico researcher who hauls an fMRI trailer from prison to prison for grant-fueled research on criminals, was able to show the jury the cold, dark spaces that he claimed correlated to the brutal sexual assault and murder of a young girl. Brian Dugan's brain was to blame and they had the pictures to prove it.

Apparently the jury did not appreciate how being a psychopath worked in the defendant's favor. They sentenced Brian Dugan, broken brain and all, to death. .

The jury may or may not have discounted the science, but they probably bought it to the extent they understood it. The point is, they refused to split Brian Dugan into a legally responsible entity on one hand, and a broken brain on the other. They may have judged him to be a bad person, but they saw him as a package of damaged goods that was nonetheless a person, and one deserving of the ultimate penalty. Arguably, adding advanced neuroimaging to the proof that Dugan was a psychopath may have actually hurt Dugan more than helped him. There was no suggestion that he could not appreciate the wrongfulness of his acts or keep himself from doing them. Scientific proof that Dugan was a cold, remorseless killer is not considered to be the best mitigation, but the defense lawyers had been dealt a bad hand in a high stakes game and thought the broken brain card was worth playing. One of his lawyers said this case was "unique" and did not foresee frequent use of the technology.

Note that this worked out exactly as I predicted the last time I wrote you about the neurolaw fad in academia. In its first real test, jurors shrugged and voted for death. It will never play in Peoria.

My sense of the situation is as follows:

1. Advanced Western democracies do not need the death penalty because we can just keep people locked up until they are no longer dangerous. Dramatic strategies, such as the death penalty, tend to glamorize crime. By contrast, a guy who pounds out auto licence plates for 25 years to earn himself packs of smokes, to get him through the night in prison, is not glamorous.

2. I am not surprised that the jury didn't believe it. The key question is not "what is going on in that guy's brain" but "what steps could he have taken such that he would not have committed a fatal assault? If he did not take them, why not?"

3. I don't think "neurolaw" has anything to contribute. If adults are truly not responsible for their actions, they should be living in a supervised group home. At least, that is how we have usually done it here, and it works pretty well. I mean, if you go by the fact that my own country, Canada, is a low crime/low threat jurisdiction.

Proof that there is - or is not - free will is worth what, in money? $4.4 million from Templeton?

Announcing the $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to Alfred Mele,

Do we have free will? FSU philosopher awarded $4.4 million grant to find out
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Since the beginning of time, philosophers, scientists and theologians have sought to find out whether human beings have free will or whether other forces are at work to control our actions, decisions and choices.

Now, Florida State University philosopher Alfred Mele has been awarded a $4.4 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to get to the bottom of this question for the ages. Mele, the William H. and Lucyle Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy, will oversee a four-year project to improve understanding of free will in philosophy, religion and science.

"This is an extraordinarily large award in the humanities, which speaks volumes about Al Mele's worldwide reputation as a scholar, the excitement provoked by his newest ideas, and the Templeton Foundation's commitment to the highest standards of creativity in ideas and rigor in scholarship," said Joseph Travis, dean of Florida State University's College of Arts and Sciences. "An award of this magnitude and visibility puts our Department of Philosophy, and Florida State, in a very bright international spotlight."

The first big question I would ask is, what is the practical importance of the question? The people who administer the Highway Traffic Act in my province assume that one has free will. Driving while over the alcohol limit is assumed to be an offence under the Act, whereas going off the road due to a pothole is not. But some want to change this:


The project, "Free Will: Human and Divine — Empirical and Philosophical Explorations," is not quite as esoteric as the topic might suggest. For thousands of years the question of free will was strictly in the domain of philosophers and theologians. But in recent years, some neuroscientists have been producing data they claim shows that the genesis of action in the brain begins well before conscious awareness of any decision to perform that action arises. If true, conscious control over action — a necessary condition of free will — is simply impossible. Likewise, some social psychologists believe that unconscious processes, in tandem with environmental conditions, control behavior and that our conscious choices do not.

Mele argues

"It's not as if in four years, we are going to know. But I want to push us along the way so that we can speed up our understanding of all of this."

[ ... ]

"If we eventually discover that we don't have free will, the news will come out and we can predict that people's behavior will get worse as a consequence," Mele said. "We should have plans in place for how to deal with that news."

Actually, there is no news. Every drunk driver claims "drink done him", yet he could not have got drunk except by exercising his free will to drink before driving, instead of going for a walk in the park. Unfortunately, this sort of verbiage tends to promote more and more rules, which the human mind is always capable of getting around.

Other free will stories here.

Thicker foreheads: Meet thickets of Darwinism

In "Men developed thicker foreheads and jaws due to fighting, over women" Richard Alleyne, science correspondent for Britain's Telegraph, who presumably knows better, advises us (14 May 2010):

Winning a mate used to depend only on physical prowess and men with the strongest jawline and thickest skulls were better able to survive onslaughts from love rivals.

That meant that over time all men developed thicker bones in the jaws, around the eyes and on the forehead than women.

You can read the further Darwiniana for yourself.

—

Men evolved manly jawlines and thick brows because they used to fight for women in the past, claim anthropologists

—

To dispose of the evidence-based issues first, it is more likely that characteristic male appearance is part of a kit of traits governed by the need for rapid building of muscle mass. Maybe a fuzzy navel was part of that too? Whether governed by design or chance, the kit is the kit, and if you have outdoor plumbing to begin with, you probably got whatever else came with the kit. (If you didn't, you can always complain to the Manufacturer, though how much good that does is under debate. You might get the usual "I am the Potter, you are the clay" boilerplate.)

The part I want to focus on is the observation of biological anthropologist David Puts of Pennsylvania State University and author of these theories, that "On average men are not all that much bigger than women, only about 15 percent larger. But the average guy is stronger than 99.9 percent of women." From this he derives his theories.

As I wrote to a friend recently,

But what if Jawline is stupider than 99.9 per cent of women? Isn't he winning the club bash, just to go to his doom?

This classic Darwinian thesis entirely discounts the effect of intelligence in confrontations.

And that somehow images Darwinism perfectly, doesn't it?.

Suppose Jawline is bashing it out with Muscle and Gravel?

Go-getter, watching nearby, has always avoided the race to the bottom, possibly because - although he has normal male characteristics - he is not physically intimidating.

He has had his eye on the nice girl standing there, haplessly awaiting her fate, for some time. So, seizing an opportunity, he whispers,

"Hey, babes, with any luck, all these losers will just kill each other. I've got a nice little secluded cave up in the hills. Always plenty to eat. Lots of skins. Lots of firewood. Wanna come and see it? Fine. Just don't make any noise while we go..."

This is the "true evolutionary reason" why women put on more fat, a fact that Dr. Puts correctly notes ... (See? I can make up stories too.)

Incidentally, I am told that something like this can happen with a number of animal species where males compete for mates. The female may mate with the male who is just standing around, because he is Mr. Available. Of course, he isn't smart, just less aggressive, and the species doesn't get any smarter as a result of his success. But this situation helps the ecology by controlling the value of sheer aggression. That's behavioural ecology, which I consider a much better explanation of many facets of animal life than Darwinism.

Catching up with mailbox: Antony Flew

A correspondent has directed my attention to this vid, which he says should answer all doubts about whether Antony Flew was in his right mind toward the end of his life, when he decided the universe showed evidence of design. I never doubted that the late Antony Flew was in his right mind, but always think scrubbing out that kind of nonsense is worthwhile. I never doubted it, but - having dealtt with many seniors - I am well aware of the need to distinguish between words and concepts.

My father, 91 and suffering a stroke, cannot remember my name. He calls me “sheila” = “my girl”.

Yes, Dad, I am your girl, and will always be your girl, and even the invasions of time and late-life disease have not erased that.

I wonder what the usual Internet Darwinists would have to say. Maybe they want to take the opportunity to confess their atheism.

Can your lifestyle affect your grandchildren's health? Maybe ...

Here we are not discussing the question of whether, if grandpa is a falldown drunk, the grandkids might lack opportunities in life. Of course they will. They might not have the money for college or a good trade school, and they might be tempted to take the same refuge he did.

But could it affect their genes as well?

Was Lamarck right (he said yes) or Darwin right (he said no)?

In ""Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong" (Oliver Burkeman, Guardian, March 19, 2010), we learn

As years of bestselling books by Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and others have seeped into the culture, we've come to understand that the awesome power of natural selection ... .

Yet epigenetics suggests this isn't the whole story. If what happens to you during your lifetime – living in a stress-inducing henhouse, say, or overeating in northern Sweden – can affect how your genes express themselves in future generations, the absolutely simple version of natural selection begins to look questionable. Rather than genes simply "offering up" a random smorgasbord of traits in each new generation, which then either prove suited or unsuited to the environment, it seems that the environment plays a role in creating those traits in future generations, if only in a short-term and reversible way. You begin to feel slightly sorry for the much-mocked pre-Darwinian zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose own version of evolution held, most famously, that giraffes have long necks because their ancestors were "obliged to browse on the leaves of trees and to make constant efforts to reach them". As a matter of natural history, he probably wasn't right about how giraffes' necks came to be so long. But Lamarck was scorned for a much more general apparent mistake: the idea that lifestyle might be able to influence heredity. "Today," notes David Shenk, "any high school student knows that genes are passed on unchanged from parent to child, and to the next generation and the next. Lifestyle cannot alter heredity. Except now it turns out that it can . . ."

Epigenetics is the most vivid reason why the popular understanding of evolution might need revising, but it's not the only one.

Actually, I knew something was wrong when I saw how Darwinists kept going to court to force taxpayers to fund Darwin in the school system. Something was happening that wasn't science. Then I discovered that 78% of evolutionary biologists are "pure naturalists" (= no God and no free will - maybe no actual mind either?). They did not learn this from science. They front it as a religion at tax expense, and get away with it, due to citizen apathy.

Incidentally, it does not make any sense to me that Darwin could have been right about this, because genes/chromosomes/DNA might easily be affected by unhealthy lifestyles. Everything else is.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Also:

Catching up with the Inbox, while dealing with many practical issues around here, note these new storie:.

New York Times pundit: Book rather existence of Antony Flew

Should "intelligent design" be captialized as Intelligent Design?

Evolutionary psychology promises to "rescue" literature