Reading, Evocation and Simulaton

Readers build vivid mental simulations of narrative situations, brain scans suggest

A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

Does that mean that stories use the same brain areas as real-life?

Or that what we conceive to be real-life is really happening in the same brain areas as fiction but with the added benefit or sensorial input? Both seem to operate in the same fashion. A friend who studies lucid dreaming also expects the similar brain areas to fire up when a dreamer acquires lucidity.

Real-life worldviews are of the same substance as more or less educated stories?

That would render myths, legends, fallacies, and other imaginary constructions indistinguishable from evidence-supported hypothesis.

Faith & Consequences

Miss Beatrice, the church organist, was in her eighties and had never been married. She was admired for her sweetness and kindness to all.

One afternoon the pastor came to call on her and she showed him into her quaint sitting room.

She invited him to have a seat while she prepared tea. As he sat facing her old Hammond organ, the young minister noticed a cut-glass bowl sitting on top of it. The bowl was filled with water, and in the water floated, of all things, a condom! When she returned with tea and scones, they began to chat.

The pastor tried to stifle his curiosity about the bowl of water and its strange floater, but soon it got the better of him and he could no longer resist. 'Miss Beatrice', he said, 'I wonder if you would tell me about this?' pointing to the bowl.

'Oh, yes,' she replied, 'Isn't it wonderful? I was walking through the Park a few months ago and I found this little package on the ground. The directions said to place it on the organ, keep it wet and that it would prevent the spread of disease.

Do you know I haven't had the flu all winter.'

Improbabilities

What happens happened because it was the most probable thing to happen then. Most of the time.

The next now for most average folks is a highly probable, predictable, expected moment, life that continues. Until for some, the unexpectedly improbable outside force strikes directly and life takes a turn. But the surprise doen't always come from beyond.

Errors, mistakes, bad choices and other wrong moves are examples of points where we ourselves are the cause of an unexpected turn of event. Which of course doesn't exclude the improbable - an erroneous assumption leading to real discovery for instance, or a bad turn in an alley... Even the highly improbable can happen - News Of The Weird is full of such demonstrations.

Causality?

My point: In view of the chaotic circumstances of the universe at the time, I'd dare to say that the emergence of life and subsequent self-aware beings resulted from a chain of these highly improbable events. If you consider that reality, at our level, is the gazillion nano-to-mega events required to maintain the consistency of matter, with such numbers improbable things are bound to happen.

But they just rarely do, sitting at the edges of the Bell curve as they are.

FUTURE

"There's no data on the future.
That's what makes it interesting."

Don Derosby of GBN

Discontinuity

Awareness and the sense of self that ensues appear, contrary to expectations, to be very discontinuous. Our consciousness is attention-driven and we know how flickering is attentiveness. Even time flow is actually grasped by tiny blocks of varying size or weight - most certainly related to our short term memory capacity. Emotions ebb and flow, ideas change (hopefully!), wakefulness varies, and dreams, when we can remember them, are the best if exagerated example of that discontinuity of the self. This discontinuity is actually what allows paradoxical behavior/belief systems, lies and hypocrisy, religious scientists, makeover sex and things like that. It also accounts for broken resolutions and promises, forgotten intent and decisions and elastic sincerity. Of course I've been Michel all day today, but I certainly don't feel now like I felt this morning, and that change throughout the day has not been a continuum. Maybe someone with so-called perfect recall can pinpoint the switching that occured in his awareness, I'm not very good with memory but I can remember many points today where I became something else than I was just moments before. Knowledge about this aspect of awareness is useful when making plans.

A Human Being

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects." -
Robert A. Heinlein

Embryo

http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=XcMBjiILTRk
More clips of the event at YouTube.



The Embryo Of War.


This very funny clip of priests of different christian denominations fighting it out in the streets of Jerusalem is probably humorous because of the huge contrast between the (supposedly holy) costumes and the (violent) posturing and attitudes.


But it also underlines how faction wars begin. It could be just an accidental aggravation during one of these street fights that will start ill feelings, needs for retaliation and things like that. And Bam! you have a religious war.


Now that's all we need, Catholic and Orthodox nations at war, Greece and Turkey now united, supported by Russia, at war with Italy, supported by Europe and the USA. There must be something in these people's "books" that tells them how wrong their differences are, at least something to the effect that they are somewhat brothers. Mmmm... don't these two read the same book?


Actually I think they choose to overlook the good advice and let instead their hurt feelings guide their actions, oblivious to the real consequences. Revenge, retaliation, restitution of justice, all suddenly seem more real, important, urgent, than their religious and moral pretense , than those virtues they claim ownership upon.


And war becomes part of the sacred fantasy.

Music

Using the above ZuneCard you can listen to some of the music I like.

Music is Art.

It is one of the things we do to ourselves, as humans, to exercise our imagination and to provoke emotions. For the performers it promotes creativity - an abilty that can be used in other fields as well - and for the enjoyers, it is interpreted immediately and it can mark memories.

I greatly enjoy listening to music, it's a way to control or influence my moods, and to stimulate memories when I listen to older songs. I'm mostly interested in new music however, stuff that reflects our current condition, stuff from all over the world and from all genres.

I'm even interested in religious music, as, beyond its insidious propaganda, it also reflects the big existential puzzle humans have had to deal with as their self-awareness emerged.

Music is important, like litterature and visual arts. It is something that we do to ourselves - so better be aware of what it actually does to you, that we leave for posterity - and mark our collective memories with, that we use to try to understand the world and ourselves.

The Devil

The French poet Beaudelaire said: "The devil’s best trick is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!".

A) The devil exists and indeed all atheists are his intruments. And there is Good and Evil, while health and madness are just consequences of the actions of these forces. Human society needs to be saved from Evil, protected from the devil's hidden influence. Fighting him in one's individual life - one of the believer's duty - will prove difficult however, because if the poet is right, we might not see him coming.

B) The devil does not exist, all moral issues rest on the shoulder of the beholder, human society adheres to the principles of individual responsibility, and it is mental health that is the real issue behind criminal behavior. Maintaining and enforcing sanity are matters of scientific research and poetry remains in the realm of imagination.

The blame for our collective soggy condition is not to be wasted on imaginary foes but should be focused on our own misundertsanding of the real situation.

As Woody Allen once wrote:

"We stand today at a crossroads:

One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness.

The other leads to total extinction.

Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice."

Undirected

In an attempt to reconcile Darwin and faith , a christian theologist presents a god that is continuously engaged in the creative process through undirected natural selection (Scientific American, Nov 2008).


Why do we absolutely require an intent behind everything? Does something like a universe necessarily abslolutely require an intent to be and become?

I think it comes from our survival instincts (the animal again) when we need to predict what our predator will do next. For this we have learned to imagine intent, and now there's even a part of our brain that's been identified, closely related to the empathy centers, as active when we try to find a meaning to something, and I'm pretty sure this brain area lights up when religious people think of and/or relate to god, and the creation of the universe.

In Other News

There is apparently an increase in the numbers of biology teachers that promote creationism as a valid hypothesis... I'd love to hear their own personal compromise between this idea of intent and what the whole of science seems to be revealing, that the universe just grew.


As I said in the first post of this blog, " I have now come to the conclusion that pretending, teaching or preaching anything else (than up-to-date scientific knowledge) is dangerous." and I might add, should be fought.

Disintegrating Moon

It must have been quite an impact! It happened during the new moon so it was not seen by anyone. But now the moon is disintegrating. Fragments should begin to fall on us in a day or two. Impact on the tides will be catastrophic. Earth's orbit will change. Nowhere to flee.

Ignorance Is Fear

"When disease in a small village on the edge of the rain forest can travel to an international travel hub within the incubation period of virtually any known disease of concern, this kind of policy endangers everyone, including all US citizens."

From Effects Measure, the science blog.

The kind of policy mentionned in the above quote is the ban on U.S.-made vaccine exports towards certain "threatening" countries for fear that the vaccines be turned into chemical weapons. A spectacularly innate bureaucratic decision basted in ignorance; scientific ignorance, lack of or wrong knowledge, and ignorance of potential consequences.

Just one example that shows how ignorance can hurt. How ignorance allows fear to foster pure danger, danger for all.

Death: Loosing The Self

We are going to die, one day.

Hard fact to accept, ingest and digest. First because we never like to think about our own termination, the consequences appear too unpleasant. And it is something we cannot really conceive of. Those who have been through the experience do not talk about it, in fact we can never tell what happens when we die. The living understand the death of someone else, their grief, loss, the sudden absence of personality and the decaying of the body, the biology of death we can map and understand.

But the subjective experience of the loss of self, is most probably impossible to grasp, not enough time to build an idea. And no means of communicating it to someone else, after the fact.

There's also the difficulty of giving meaning to the apparent futility of death when considered coldly, outside the reassuring fantasies of cults and religions. I think it is the hardest path to thread. From the angle of our genes however, it's another matter. Death becomes actually the price we pay for having sex, we must die but our genes will survive.

Death is necessary for the continuation of other lives, of Life itself. Small consolation, but the only one available right now from observation.


I strongly recommend viewing the five parts of this documentary : not always easy to watch as someone has accepted that his own death be filmed and some cold hard facts about physical and mental death are difficult to integrate. But I think we should get to know as much as possible about the only absolute certainty we can entertain: we will die, one day, and our self will dissolve into nothing.


There are no proofs of an afterlife.

Is ignorance really bliss?

Sense of Humor

No sense of humor.

Because of the sacred nature of religious beliefs (mild or accute) the
beholders will rarely allow any kind of jokes about faith. About their own faith. Some of the more sincere won't even laugh at jokes about other faiths. Some seriously addicted people are sometimes able to see their own condition in a humorous way, they can laugh at their sorry selves. Not those addicted to religious faith.

So, even if I enjoy it immensely myself, I don't think faith-humor is a successful strategy to convince the religious of the folly of their fantasies. Those who believe will still think it is "sacrilegeous". And they will refuse to see the funny side revealed in the joke.

Catholics are against abortions.
Catholics are against homosexuals.
But, I can't think of anyone who has less abortions than homosexuals! --
- George Carlin

Most passionately religious people would benefit from seeing their own system of beliefs as they see the other ones around them in the world. How are Allah, Yahveh, Thor and Jupiter erroneous and God rigtheous?

And for those who forgot, let's remember that atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Evolution

Studying real evolution through artificial means.

Darwin-at-Home, a project harnessing individual computers has been used to study how artificial (virtual/digital) creatures can evolve. Evolution: that's how the actual living things have become more complex, sophisticated, adapted - through minute changes from generation to generation, over time.




http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7989532956224708331&hl=en

In this video, we see artificial creatures who have evolved (from various initial object shapes) the ability to walk. In this case of course, there were gods involved: the researchers who initiated the project. As some mildly religious persons will say, God laid out the rules and told us to procreate and populate this universe under our our free will and our own responsibility.

My own opinion is that the evolution process is an entirely probabilistic affair, with the help of the brute force of an extremely high number of random interactions between components.