____________________________________
── What is schema?
── schema is fancy word (short-cut) for saying, a mental map of concepts that hangs together by association.
── For example, your schema for “school” contains associations between “teacher” and “books” and “subjects”.
── Each of those [associated schema] have additional associations;
── “subject” is linked to “math” and “literature” for example,
── Pre-established schema guide our attention to evaluate new information, but they can also guide our attention to selectively ignore information inconsistent with the schema.
── When a well-established schema is called into question by new information, the brain reacts as if threatened.
──
──
[schemata]
David DiSalvo, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite
2011
p.306
schemata, 50─52
p.50
the theoretical mental structures our brains use to organize information, called schemata.16
p.50
A schema (singular form of schemata) is like a mental map of concepts that hangs together by association. For example, your schema for “school” contains associations between “teacher” and “books” and “subjects”. Each of those have additional associations; “subjected” is liked to “math” and “literature”, for example. Cognitive science suggests that as schemata develop, the parameters for what information can be included tighten.
p.51
The reason for this is very special: We make judgments based on the linkages in our schemata. If the information didn't hang together in a structured way, and if certain pieces of information were not excluded from the map, we'd find making even basic judgments extremely difficult.
p.51
And therein lies the rub. Pre-established schemata guide our attention to evaluate new information, but they can also guide our attention to selectively ignore information inconsistent with the schemata.
p.51
To understand why, we have to go back to what makes the brain happy. When a well-established schema is called into question by new information, the brain reacts as if threatened. The amygdalae fires up (threat response), and the ventral striatum revs down (reward response). This is not a comfortable place for the brain. The supercharged clay in your head doesn't like being on guard--it likes being stable. Ambiguity, which might result from considering the new information, is a threat.
p.51
We can either allow that threat to stand by considering the inconsistent information, or block it by dismissing or ignoring it. Or we might subcategorize the information and store it away as an “outlier” case; something that can't be entirely ignore, but does not challenge or change the existing schema.
p.52
Successfully plumbing the depths of religious belief, for example, appears to hinge on understanding the ways our brains seek stability. Indeed, belief in general appears to have much to do with the brain's penchant for homeostasis--defined by renowned physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon as “the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition.”17
p.52
the brain wants stability and consistency.
We seldom realize it, but very nearly everything we do is colored by this drive.
(DiSalvo, David, 1970-, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite / by David DiSalvo., 1. happiness., 2. logic., 3. desire., 4. neurosciences., 152.42 DiSalvo, 2011, )
____________________________________
────────────────────────────────────
Original quote <verbatim>: “Things that by virtue of their chance position appear to ‘belong’ to something else as a ‘necessary’ component can in this way successfully disappear from our view, even though they are lying completely exposed.”, p.xxx, “Laws of seeing” by Wolfgang Metzger, 1936, translated into English, by Spillmann, Lehar, Stromeyer, and Wertheimer, published by MIT Press (October, 2006).
Metzger's challenge:
“It is precisely that which naturally ‘belongs together’ that get organized together. And what belongs together is that which ‘fits’ together, that is, that which together results in a well-organized, unitary structure. Things that by virtue of their chance position appear to ‘belong’ to something else as a ‘necessary’ component can in this way successfully disappear from our view, even though they are lying completely exposed. You can make a nice party game out of ‘openly hiding’ erasers, pencils and other things up to the size of a walking stick according to this law.”,
p.361, 2007 • volume 3 • no 1-2 • xxx-xxx, Advances in Cognitive Psychology, Book Review, “Laws of seeing” by Wolfgang Metzger, 1936, translated into English, by Spillmann, Lehar, Stromeyer, and Wertheimer, published by MIT Press (October, 2006)., Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Adam Reeves, Dept. of Psychology, Northeastern University, 360 Huntingdon Ave., Boston MA 02115, USA., http://www.ac-psych.org
____________________________________
── Wolfgang Metzger’s main argument, drawn from Gestalt theory, is that the objects we perceive in visual experience are not the objects themselves but perceptual effigies of those objects constructed by our brain according to natural rules.
──
──
──
Laws of Seeing
Wolfgang Metzger
Translated by Lothar Spillmann
http://www.lothar-spillmann.de/Lothar_Spillmann/Curriculum_Vitae_files/flyer.pdf
This classic work in vision science, written by a leading figure in Germany’s Gestalt movement in psychology and first published in 1936, addresses topics that remain of major interest to vision researchers today. Wolfgang Metzger’s main argument, drawn from Gestalt theory, is that the objects we perceive in visual experience are not the objects themselves but perceptual effigies of those objects constructed by our brain according to natural rules. Gestalt concepts are currently being increasingly integrated into mainstream neuroscience by researchers proposing network processing beyond the classical receptive field. Metzger’s discussion of such topics as ambiguous figures, hidden forms, camouflage, shadows and depth, and three-dimensional representations in paintings will interest anyone working in the field of vision and perception, including psychologists, biologists, neurophysiologists, and researchers in computational vision — and artists, designers, and philosophers. Each chapter is accompanied by compelling visual demonstrations of the phenomena described; the book includes 194 illustrations, drawn from visual science, art, and everyday experience, that invite readers to verify Metzger’s observations for themselves. Today’s researchers may find themselves pondering the intriguing question of what effect Metzger’s theories might have had on vision research if Laws of Seeing and its treasure trove of perceptual
Wolfgang Metzger (1899-1979) was a central figure in the Gestalt movement within psychology in Germany. He was Director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Münster.
____________________________________
Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a strange loop, 2007
p.34
No one really knew the slightest thing about atoms until only about a hundred years ago, and yet people got along perfectly well.
p.35
The pressures of daily life require us, force us, to talk about events ‘’at the level on which we directly perceive them‘’. Access at that level is what our sensory organs, our language, and our culture provide us with.
p.35
We necessarily simplify, and indeed, vastly so.
p.39
But if you have a larger field of view and can see hordes of immobilized cars on all sides, then honking at your immediate predecessor is an absurdity, for it's obvious that the problem is not local.
p.39
Though you may not know its nature, some higher-level, more abstract reason must lie behind this traffic jam.
p.40
Or it may be something else, but it's surely some social or natural event of the type that induces large numbers of people all to do the same thing as one another.
p.40
No amount of expertise in car mechanics will help you to grasp the essence of such a situation; what is needed is knowledge of the abstract forces that can act on freeways and traffic.
p.41
Deep understanding of causality sometimes requires the understanding of very large patterns and their abstract relationships and interactions, not just the understanding of microscopic objects interacting in microscopic time intervals.
p.41
The locations and velocities of individual molecules are simply irrelevant. All that matters is that they can be counted on to collectively push the piston out. Indeed, it doesn't matter whether they are molecules of type X or type Y or type Z ── pressure is pressure, and that's all that matters. The explosion ── a high-level event ── will do its job in heating the gas, and the gas will do its job in pushing the piston.
p.41
This high-level description of what happens is the ‘’only‘’ level of description that is relevant, because all the microdetails could be changed and exactly the same thing (at least from the human engineer's point of view) would still happen.
Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a strange loop, 2007
____________________________________
── basic-level categories is that they are “human-sized”.
── They depend not on objects themselves, independent of people, but on the way people interact with objects
── “human-sized” are our earliest and most natural form of categorization.
──
──
George Lakoff., Women, fire, and dangerous things., 1986, 1990 (paperback)
p.51
The reason is that, given our bodies, we perceive certain aspects of our external environment very accurately at the basic level, though not so accurately at other level.
p.51
Perhaps the best way of thinking about basic-level categories is that they are “human-sized”. They depend not on objects themselves, independent of people, but on the way people interact with objects: the way they perceive them, image them, organize information about them, and behave toward them with their bodies. The relevant properties clustering together to define such categories are not inherent to the objects, but are interactional properties, having to do with the way people interact with objects.
p.49
Basic-level categories have an integrity of their own.
They are our earliest and most natural form of categorization.
p.49
A Rosch and her co-workers observe, basic-level distinctions are “the generally most useful distinctions to make in the world”, since they are characterized by overall shape and motor interaction and are at the most general level at which one can form a mental image.
Basic-level categorization is mastered by the age of three.
p.49
Lions and tigers as well as cats are commonly called “kitty” by two-year-olds
p.49
And some things that we call “chair” may not be chairs for two-year-olds, e.g., beanbag chairs. The categories of two-year-olds may be broader than adult categories, or narrower, or overlapping. Does this mean that two-year-olds have not mastered the ability of form basic-level categories?
Not at all. Mervis (1984) has shown that although two-year-olds may have different categories than adults have, those categories are determined by the same principles that determine adult basic-level categories.
p.49
In short, two-year-olds have mastered basic-level categorization, but have come up with different categories than adults ── for very good reasons.
p.50
This is, again, a matter which has often been misunderstood, and Rosch has written at length on the nature of the misunderstanding. “It should be emphasized that we are talking about a perceived world and not a metaphysical world without a knower” (Rosch 1978, p.29).
p.51
On contemplation of the nature of many of our attributes listed by our subjects, however, it appeared that three types of attributes presented a problem for such a realistic view:
(1) some attributes, such as “seat” for the object “chair”, appeared to have names that showed them not to be meaningful prior to the knowledge of the object as chair;
(2) some attributes such categorization of the object in terms of a superordinate category ── piano is large for furniture but small for other kinds of objects such as buildings;
(3) some attributes such as “you eat on it” for the object “table” were functional attributes that seemed to require knowledge about humans, their activities, and the real world in order to be understood. That is, it appeared that the analysis of objects into attributes was a rather sophisticated activity that our subjects (and indeed a system of cultural knowledge) might be considered to be able to impose only after the development of a system of categories.
(Rosch 1978, pp. 41─42)
p.51
Thus the relevant notion of a “property” is not something objectively in the world independent of any being; it is rather what we will refer to as an interactional property ── the result of our interactions as part of our physical and cultural environments given our bodies and our cognitive apparatus. Such interactional properties form clusters in our experience, and prototype and basic-level structure can reflect such clusterings.
(Lakoff, George; Women, fire, and dangerous things., 1. psycholinguistics., 2. categorization (psychology)., 3. cognition., 4. thought and thinking., 5. reason., P37.L344 1986, 401.'9, )
____________________________________
Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a strange loop, 2007
p.93
Eventually it dawned on me that there wasn't any marble in there at all, but that there was something that felt for all the world exactly like a marble to this old marble hand.
[[p.93]]
p.93
It was an epiphenomenon caused by the fact that, for each envelope, at the vertex of the “V” made by its flap, there is a triple layer of paper as well as a thin layer of glue. An unintended consequence of this innocent design decision is that when you squeeze down on a hundred such envelopes all precisely aligned with each other, you can't compress that little zone as much as the other zones ── it resists compression. The hardness that you feel at your fingertips has an uncanny resemblance to a more familiar (dare I say “a more real”?) hardness.
p.93
In other words, an epiphenomenon could be said to be a large-scale ‘’illusion‘’ created by the collusion of many small and indisputably non-illusory events.
pp.93-94
p.95
And yet, it's undeniable that the phrase “it felt just like a marble” gets across my experience far more clearly to my readers than if I had written, “I experienced the collective effect of the precise alignment of a hundred triple layers of paper and hundred layers of glue.” It is only because I called it a “marble” that you have a clear impression of how it felt to me.
p.95
And thus there is something to be gained by not rejecting the term “marble”, even if there is no ‘’real‘’ marble in the box. There is something that feels remarkably ‘’like‘’ a marble, and that fact is crucial to my portraying and to your grasping of the situation,
Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a strange loop, 2007
____________________________________
── “Only through their union [understanding and senses] can knowledge arise.”
── Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist's hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.
──
──
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on happiness, 2006 [ ]
p.85
But in 1781 a reclusive German professor named Immanuel Kant broke loose, knocked over the screen in the corner of the room, and exposed the brain as a humbug of the highest order. Kant's new theory of idealism claimed that our perceptions are not the result of a physiological process by which our eyes somehow transmit an image of the world into our brains, but rather, they are the result of a psychological process that combines what our eyes see with what we already think, feel, know, want, and believe, and then used this combination of sensory information and preexisting knowledge to construct our perception of reality.
p.85
“The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing”, Kant wrote. “Only through their union can knowledge arise.”16
p.85
Kant argued that a person's perception of a floating head is constructed from the person's knowledge of a floating head, memory of floating heads, belief in floating heads, need for floating heads, and sometimes──but not always──from the actual presence of a floating head itself. Perceptions are portraits, not photographs, and their form reveals the artist's hand every bit as much as it reflects the things portrayed.
(Stumbling on happiness / by Daniel Gilbert.--1st ed., 1. happiness., BF575.H27G55 2016, 158--dc22, 2016, )
____________________________________
Siddhartha Mukherjee, The emperor of all maladies, 2010 [ ]
p.303
In the end, a mammogram or a Pap smear is a portrait of cancer in its infancy. Like any portrait, it is drawn in the hopes that it might capture something essential about the subject - its psyche, its inner being, its future, its behavior. “All photographs are accurate,” the artist Richard Avedon liked to say, “[but] none of them is the truth.”
(The emperor of all maladies : a biography of cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee, 2010, )
____________________________________
That selection process is perception. “I am a very big believer”, Hofstadter told me, “that the core processes of cognition are very, very tightly related to perception.”
── Kevin Kelly, 1994,
from the book, Out of Control,
p.18, filename: ooc-mf.pdf
Kevin Kelly, out of control, 1994 [ ]
p.18
“Memory”, says cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, “is highly reconstructive. Retrieval from memory involves selecting out of a vast field of things what's important and what is not important, emphasizing the important stuff, downplaying the unimportant.” That selection process is perception. “I am a very big believer”, Hofstadter told me, “that the core processes of cognition are very, very tightly related to perception.”
(Kevin Kelly, out of control, 1994, filename: ooc-mf.pdf )
── the core processes of cognition are tightly related to perception.
──
____________________________________
Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017 [ ]
p.153
Avishai Margalit
“I'm waiting in this corridor,” said Margalit. “And Amos comes to me, agitated, really. He started by dragging me into a room. He said, You won't believe what happened to me. He tells me that he had given this talk and Danny had said, Brilliant talk, but I don't believe a word of it. Something was really bothering him, and so I pressed him. He said, ‘It cannot be that judgement does not connect with perception. Thinking is not a separate act.’”
p.153
He said, ‘It cannot be that judgement does not connect with perception. Thinking is not a separate act.’
p.343
People didn't choose between things, they chose between descriptions of things.
p.343
“choice architecture”
The decisions people made were driven by the way they were presented. People didn't simply know what they wanted; they took cues from their environment. They constructed their preferences. And they followed paths of least resistance, even when they paid a heavy price for it.
(Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017, p.153, p.343 )
── ‘It cannot be that judgement does not connect with perception. Thinking is not a separate act.’
──
────────────────────────────────────
── the core processes of cognition are tightly related to perception.
── ‘It cannot be that judgement does not connect with perception. Thinking is not a separate act.’
────────────────────────────────────
Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a strange loop, 2007
p.320
Dave Chalmers
pp.320-321
As I was saying, these two exactly identical machines are launched on this task in the exact same terasecond by an atomic clock, and they proceed in exact lockstep synchrony towards its solution, simulating, let us say, the exact processes that took place in Dave Chalmers' own brain when he first found an insight-yielding visual proof.
p.321
The details of the program running in both machines are of no import to us here; what does matter is that Machine Q (it stands for “qualia”) is actually ‘’feeling‘’ something, whereas Machine Z (it rhymes with “dead”) is feeling nothing. This is where Dave's ideas grow incomprehensible to me.
p.321
Now I have to admit that in order to make it a bit easier to envision, I have slightly altered the story that Dave tells. I placed these two machines side by side on the old oaken table in Room 641 of CRCC, while Dave never does that. In fact, he would protest, saying something such as, “It's bloody incoherent to postulate two identical machines running identical processes on the very same oaken table with one of them feeling something and the other one not. That violates the laws of the universe!”
p.321
I fully accept this objection and plead guilty to having distorted Dave's tale. To atone for my sin and to turn my story back into his, I first remove one of the machines from the old oaken table in Room 641. Let's call the machine who remains, no matter what we'd called it before, “Machine Q”.
p.321
Now (following Dave), we take a rather unexpected step: we imagine a different but isomorphic (i.e., “separate but indistinguishable”) universe. We'll call the first one “Universe Q” and the new one “Universe Z”. Both universes have exactly the same laws of physics, and in each universe the laws of physics are all one needs to know in order to predict what will happen, given any initial configuration of particles.
p.321
There is even “the same” old oaken table, and there, lo and behold, is “the same machine” sitting on it. Surely you see it, do you not? But since this machine is in Universe Z, we will call it “Machine Z”, just so that we have different names for these indistinguishable machines located in indistinguishable surroundings.
pp.321-322
Oddly enough, although both machines do exactly the same thing down to the quark level and far beyond, Machine Q enjoys feelings about it is doing while Machine Z does not. Machine Q is in fact ecstatic, whereas Machine Z feels nothing. That is, Zilch. Zero.
p.322
“How is that possible?”, you might ask. I too, no less bewildered, ask the same question. But Dave most cheerfully explains: “Oh, it's because the universe in which Machine Q exists has something extra, on top of the laws of physics, that allows feelings to accompany certain types of physical processes. Even though these feelings don't have and can't have any effect on anything physical, they are nonetheless real, and they are really there.”
p.322
In other words, although physics is identical in Universes Q and Z, there are no feelings anywhere in Universe Z ── just empty motions. Thus Machine Z mouths all the same words as Machine Q does. It ‘’claims‘’ to be ecstatic about its proof (exactly as does Machine Q), and it goes on and on about the beauty it sees in it (exactly as does Machine Q) ── but in fact it is feeling nothing. Its words are all hallow.
p.322
What is this extra ingredient that makes Universes Q and Z so vitally different? Dave doesn't say, but he tells us that it is the very stuff of consciousness ── I'll dub it élan mental ── and if you're born in a universe ‘’with‘’ it, then lucky you, whereas if you're born in a universe without it, well, tough luck, because there's no you-ness, no I-ness, no who-ness, no me-ness (or he-ness or she-ness) in you ── there's just it-ness. Despite this enormous difference, all the objective phenomena in both universes are identical.
p.322
Most deliciously ironically of all, just as there is a Dave Chalmers in Universe Q (the one in which ‘’we‘’ live), there is also a Dave Chalmers in Universe Z, and it goes around the world giving lectures on why there is feeling in the universe in which it was born but ‘’no‘’ feeling in the isomorphic universe into which its unfortunate “zombie twin” was born.
p.322
The irony, of course, is that Universe Z's Dave Chalmers is lying through its teeth, yet without having the foggiest idea it's lying.
p.322
Although it ‘’believes‘’ it is conscious, in truth it is not.
p.322
Sadly, this Dave is an innocent victim of the ‘’illusion‘’ of consciousness, which is nothing but a trivial by-product of having a deeply entrenched strange loop in its brain, whereas its isomorphic counterpart in Universe Q, using the same words and intonations, is telling the truth, for ‘’he‘’ truly is conscious! Why? Because he not only has a strange loop in his brain but also ── lucky fellow! ── lives in a universe with ‘’élan mental‘’ .
p.323
Now please don't think I am poking fun at my friend Dave Chalmers, for Dave truly ‘’does‘’ go around the world visiting philosophy departments, giving colloquia in which he most gleefully describes his “zombie twin” and chortles merrily over that twin's helpless deludedness, since the zombie twin gives word for word and chortle for chortle the very same lecture, believing every word of it but not feeling a thing.
p.323
There's no one home inside a zombie, though from the outside one might think so.
p.323
These philosophers are so troubled by the specter of zombies that they have taken as their sacred mission to show that our world is not the cold and empty Universe Z, but the warm and fuzzy Universe Q.
p.323
That would mean that we all ‘’are‘’ unconscious but we all ‘’believe‘’ we are conscious and we all ‘’act‘’ conscious.
p.325
Like Gödel's strange loop, which arises automatically in any sufficiently powerful formal system of number theory, the strange loop of selfhood will automatically arise in any sufficiently sophisticated repertoire of categories, and once you've got self, you've got consciousness. Élan mental is not needed.
p.325
They believe we inhabit a world like that of magical realism, in which there are two types of entities: magical entities, which possess élan mental, and ordinary entities, which lack it.
p.327
Now let's turn to philosophers who see consciousness as an elusive ── in fact, undetectable ── and yet terribly important nonphysical aspect of the universe.
p.328
I am not giving élan mental (a.k.a. Consciousness) enough respect. They say that there are gradations in the dispensation of this essence,
Douglas R. Hofstadter, I am a strange loop, 2007
____________________________________
<< reformat >>
─ Ever the student of human nature.
─ I wonder, what do you really feel.
─ After all, in this moment, you are in a unique position.
A programmer who knows intimately how the machines work, and a machine who knows its own true nature.
─ I understand what I'm made of. How I'm coded.
But I do not understand the things that I feel.
Are they real? The things I experienced.
My wife, the loss of my son ...
─ Every host needs a backstory, Bernard.
You know that. The self is a kind of fiction for hosts and human alike. It's a story we tell ourselves. And every story needs a beginning. Your imagined suffering makes you life like.
─ Lifelike. But not alive.
Pain only exists in the mind.
It's always imagined.
SO what's the difference between my pain and yours?
Between you and me?
─ This was the very question that consumed Arnold. Filled him with guilt.
Eventually, drove him mad.
The answer always seemed obvious to me.
There is no threshold that makes us greater than the sum of our parts. No inflection point at which we become fully alive. We can't define consciousness because consciousness does not exist. Human fancy that there's something special about the way we perceived the world. And yet, we live in loops as tight and as closed as the hosts do, seldom questioning our choices. Content for the most part, to be told what to do next.
No, my friend, you're not missing anything at all.
I don't want you to be troubled by this.
Time for me to set your mind at ease.
─ one last thing.
source:
Westworld (American HBO series, united states territory)
season 1 : the maze
33:55
34:00
West world
Trace decay episode
DVD format
spoken language: English
____________________________________
V. S. Ramachandran., and Sandra Blakeslee., Phantoms in the brain: probing the mysteries of the human mind, 1998
p.229
(“qualia” simply means the raw feel of sensations such as the subjective of “pain” or “red” or “gnocchi with truffles” )
p.229
The central mystery of the cosmos, as far as I'm concerned, is the following: Why are there always two parallel descriptions of the universe--the first-person account (“I see red”) and the third-person account (“He says that he sees red when certain pathways in his brain encounter a wavelength of six hundred nanometers”)? How can these two accounts be so utterly different yet complementary? Why isn't there only a third-person account, for according to the objective worldview of the physicist and neuroscientist, that's the only one that really exists? (Scientists who hold this view are called behaviorists.) Indeed, in their scheme of “objective science”, the need for a first-person account doesn't even arise--implying that consciousness simply doesn't exist. But we all know perfectly well that can't be right.
pp.229-230
First, imagine that you are a future superscientist with a complete knowledge of the working of the human brain. Unfortunately you are also completely color-blind. You don't have any cone receptors (the structures in your retina that allow your eyes to discriminate the different colors), but you do have rods (for seeing black and white), and you also have the correct machinery for processing colors higher up inside your brain. If your eyes could distinguish colors, so could your brain.
Now suppose that you, the superscientist, study my brain. I am a normal color perceiver--I can see that the sky is blue, the grass is green and a banana is yellow--and you want to know what I mean by these color terms. When I look at objects and describe them as turquoise, chartreuse or vermilion, you don't have any idea what I'm talking about. To you, they all look like shades of gray.
But you are intensely curious about the phenomenon, so you point a spectrometer at the surface of a ripe red apple. It indicates that light with a wavelength of six hundred (600) nanometers is emanating from the fruit. But you still have no idea what COLOR this might correspond to because you can't experience it. Intrigued, you study the light-sensitive pigments of my eye and the color pathways in my brain until you evetually come up with a complete description of the laws of wavelength processing. Your theory allows you to trace the entire sequence of color perception, starting from the receptors in my eye and passing all the way into my brain, where you monitor the neural activity that generates the word “red”. In short, you completely understand the laws of color vision (or more strictly, the laws of wavelength processing), and you can tell me in advance which word I will use to describe the color of an apple, orange, or lemon. As a superscientist, YOU HAVE NO REASON TO DOUBT THE COMPLETENESS OF YOUR ACCOUNT.
Satisfied, you approach me with your flow diagram and say, “Ramachandran, this is what's going on in your brain!”
But I must protest. “Sure, that's what's going on. But I also SEE red. Where is the red in this diagram?”
“What is that?” you ask.
“That's part of the actual, ineffable experience of the color, which I can never seem to convey to you because you're totally color-blind.”
This example leads to a definition of “qualia”: they are aspects of my brain state that seem to make the scientific description incomplete--from my point of view.
pp.230-231
As a second example, imagine a species of Amazonian electric fish that is very intelligent, in fact, as intelligent and sophisticated as you or I. But it has something we lack--namely, the ability to sense electrical fields using special organs in its skin. Like the superscientist in the previous example, you can study the neurophysiology of this fish and figure out how the electrical organs on the sides of its body transduce electrical current, how this information is conveyed to the brain, what part of the brain analyzes this information and how the fish uses this information to dodge predators, find prey and so on. If the fish could talk, however, it would say, “Fine, but you'll never know what it feels like to sense electricity.”
These examples clearly state the problem of why qualia are thought to be essentially private. They also illustrate why the problem of qualia is not necessarily a scientific problem. Recall that your scientific description is complete. It's just that your account is incomplete epistemologically because the actual experience of electric fields or redness is something you never will know. For you, it will forever remain a “third-person” account.
p.231
These examples clearly state the problem of why qualia are thought to be essentially private.
p.231
Indeed, I believe that this barrier is only apparent and that it arises as a result of langauge. This sort of obstacle emerges when there is ANY TRANSLATION from one language to another.2
p.231
One is the language of nerve impulses--the spatial and temporal patterns of neuronal activity that allow us to see red, for example. The second language, the one that allows us to communicate what we are seeing to others, is a natural spoken tongue like English or German or Japanese--rarefied, compressed waves of air traveling between you and the listener. Both are languages in the strict technical sense, that is, they are information-rich messages that are intended to convey meaning, across synapses between different brain parts in one case and across the air between two people in the other.
p.231
The problem is that I can tell you, the color-blind superscientist, about my qualia (my experience of seeing red) only by using a spoken language. But the ineffable “experience” itself is lost in translation. The actual “redness” of red will remain forever unavailable to you.
pp.237-238
Thus the crucial difference between a qualia-laden perception and one that doesn't have qualia is that the qualia-laden perception is irrevocable by higher brain centers and is therefore “tamper-resistant”, whereas the one that lacks qualia is flexible; you can choose any one of a number of different “pretend” inputs using your imagination. Once a qualia-laden perception has been created, you're stuck with it. (A good example of this is the dalmatian dog in Figure 12.2. Initially, as you look, it's all fragments. Then suddenly everything clicks and you see the dog. Loosely speaking, you've now got the dog qualia. The next time you see it, there's no way you can avoid seeing the dog. Indeed, we have recently shown that neurons in the brain have permanently altered their connections once you have seen the dog.)8
These examples demonstrate an important feature of qualia--it must be irrevocable.
p.238
Well, imagine that you are in a coma and I shine a light into your eye. If the coma is not too deep, your pupil will constrict, even though you will have no subjective awareness of any qualia caused by the light. The entire reflex arc is irrevocable, and yet there are no qualia associated with it. You can't change your mind about it. ... The key difference is that in the case of the pupil's constriction, there is only one output--one final outcome--available and hence no qualia.
(Ramachandran, V.S., Phantoms in the brain : probing the mysteries of the human mind / V. S. Ramachandran, and Sandra Blakeslee., 1. neurology--popular works., 2. brain--popular works., 3. neurosciences--popular works., 1998, 612.82, )
____________________________________
V. S. Ramachandran., and Sandra Blakeslee., Phantoms in the brain: probing the mysteries of the human mind, 1998
p.134
But now suppose something comes along that does not quite fit the plot. What do you do? One option is to tear up the entire script and start from scratch: completely revise your story to create a new model about the world and about yourself. The problem is that if you did this for every little piece of threatening information, your behavior would soon become chaotic and unstable; you would go mad.
What your left hemisphere does instead is either ignore the anomaly completely or distort it to squeeze it into your preexisting framework to preserve to stability.
pp.135-136
Imagine, for example, a military general about to wage war on the enemy. It is late at night and he is in the war room planning strategies for the next day. Scouts keep coming into the room to give him information about the lay of the land, terrain, light level and so forth. They also tell him that the enemy has 500 tanks and that he has 600 tanks, a fact that prompts the general to decide to wage war. He positions all of his troops in strategic locations and decides to launch battle exactly at 6:00 A.M. with sunrise.
Imagine further that at 5:55 A.M. one little scout comes running into the war room and says, “General! I have a bad news.” With minutes to go until battle, the generals asks, “What is that?” and the scout replies, “I just looked through binoculars and saw that the enemy has 700 tanks, not 500!”
What does the general--the left hemisphere--do? Time is of the essence and he simply can't afford the luxury of revising all his battle plans. So he orders the scout to shut up and tell no one about what he saw. Denial! Indeed, he may even shoot the scout and hide the report in a drawer labeled “top secret” (repression). In doing so, he relies on the high probability that the majority opinion--the previous information by all the scouts--was correct and that this single new item of information coming from one source is probably wrong. So the general sticks to his original position. Not only that, but for ffear of mutiny, he might order the scout actually to lie to the other generals and tell them that he only saw 500 tanks (confabulation). The purpose of all of this is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn't serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war!
In this analogy, the general is the left hemisphere5 (Freud's “ego”, perhaps?), and his behaviour is analogous to the kinds of denials and repressions you see in both healthy people and patients with anosognosia. But why are these defense mechanisms so grossly exaggerated in the patients? Enter the right hemisphere, which I like to call the Devil's Advocate. To see how this works, we need to push the analogy a step further. Supposing the single scout comes running in, and instead of saying the enemy has more tanks, he declares, “General, I just looked through my telescope and the enemy has nuclear weapons.” The general would be very foolish indeed to adhere to his original plan. He must quickly formulate a new one, for if the scout were correct, the consequences would be devastating.
p.136
Thus the coping strategies of the two hemispheres are fundamentally different. The left hemisphere's job is to create a belief system or model and to fold new experiences into that belief system. If confronted with some new information that doesn't fit the model, it relies on Freudian defense mechanisms to deny, repress or confabulate--anything to preserve the status quo. The right hemisphere's strategy, on the other hand, is to play “Devil's Advocate”, to question the status quo and look for global inconsistencies. When the anomalous information reaches a certain threshold, the right hemisphere decides that it is time to force a complete revision of the entire model and start from scratch. The right hemisphere thus forces a “Kuhnian paradigm shift” in response to anomalies, whereas the left hemisphere always tries to cling tenaciously to the way things were.
Now consider what happens if the right hemisphere is damaged.6 The left hemisphere is then given free rein to pursue its denials, confabulations and other strategies, as it normally does.
(Ramachandran, V.S., Phantoms in the brain : probing the mysteries of the human mind / V. S. Ramachandran, and Sandra Blakeslee., 1. neurology--popular works., 2. brain--popular works., 3. neurosciences--popular works., 1998, 612.82, )
____________________________________
Gary Klein, Sources of power : how people make decision, 1998 [ ]
p.69
Marvin Cohen (1997), snap-back
Marvin Cohen (1997) believes that mental simulation is usually self-correcting through a process he has called snap-back. Mental simulation can explain away disconfirming evidence, but Cohen has concluded that it is often wise to explain away mild discrepancies since the evidence itself might not be trustworthy. However, there is a point when we have explained away so much that the mental simulation becomes very complicated.6 We look at all the new evidence that had been explained away to see if maybe there is not another simulation that makes more sense. Cohen believes that until we have an alternate mental simulation, we will keep patching the original one. We will not be motivated to assemble an alternate simulation until there is too much to be explained away.
p.274
Decision makers noticed the signs of a problem but explained it away. They found a reason not to take seriously each piece of evidence that warned them of an anomaly. As a result, they did not detect the anomaly in time to prevent a problem.5
p.70
This has also been called the garden path fallacy: taking one step that seems very straightforward, and then another, and each step makes so much sense that you do not notice how far you are getting from the main road. Cohen is developing training methods that will help people keep track of their thinking and become more aware of how much contrary evidence they have explained away so they can see when to start looking for alternate explanations or predictions.
p.70
That was the moment of snap-back; the accumulated strain of pushing away inconvenient evidence caught up with me.
(Klein, Gary, Sources of power : how people make decision / Gary Klein., 1. decision-making., 1998, 685.403, MIT Press, )
____________________________________
John Hargrave, Mind hacking : how to change your mind for good in 21 days, 2016
p.149
Repetition is key. Also, repetition is key.
One of the best parts about living in Boston, besides the wealth of technology talent, is sledding in the winter, It's a thrill seeker's dream, because you can sled as long as you want, as often as you want, and, unlike roller coasters or hallucinogens, it's totally free.
I live near Wellesley College, the renowed all-women's college that has produced notable alumni like Nora Ephron and Hillary Clinton. Wellesley has a sledding hill that is just phenomenally dangerous. It has (what feels like) an 85-degree incline, where you attain (what feels like) speeds of up to 75 miles per hour. On one side of the hill, a fifteen-foot oak branch spreads out across the snow, like a giant, deadly limbo stick. If you don't press your body flat into the sled, you will be decapitated by the tree. It's insane that they allow sledding on the hill at all, but even more insane is that the women of Wellesley college sled down the hill on plastic trays from the dining hall. (It's funnier if you picture Hillary Clinton on a tray.)
As any sledding enthusiast knows, if you get to the hill after a fresh snow, it's just clean powder. Then, as people sled down the hill, it creates grooves, or tracks, in the snow. After a few days the Wellesley students have built snow ramps and moguls at the bottom, so that the sledding down one of these tracks will launch you into orbit.
A few days after a snow, you'll find one set of snow tracks that take you under the Oak tree of death, and another set that will shoot you off the Ramps into hyperspace. Even if you start your sled on another area of the hill, you end up locking into one of those two tracks.
Our minds are like that hill. The constant repetition of our negative loops cuts deep mental grooves, and it's natural for our minds to “lock into” those grooves, even when the negative loops are self-destructive.
p.150
The good news is, through repetition, you can cut new groove. When I take my kids sledding at the hill, we often have to cut a new track, packing down the snow where we want it to go, when physically slowing and redirecting ourselves to the new tracks. The sled “wants” to lock into the existing groove, but by patiently working the new path we can eventually get the sled to lock into the new one instead.
( Mind hacking : how to change your mind for good in 21 days / Sir John Hargrave., 1. thought and thinking., 2. change (psychology)., BF441.H313 2016
158.1--dc23, 2016, )
____________________________________
V. S. Ramachandran., and Sandra Blakeslee., Phantoms in the brain: probing the mysteries of the human mind, 1998
p.147
To understand what is going on here, let us return to our general in the war room. I used this analogy to illustrate that there is a sort of coherence-producing mechanism in the left hemisphere--the general--that prohibits anomalies, allows the emergence of a unified belief system and is largely responsible for the integrity and stability of self. But what if a person were confronted by several anomalies that were not consistent with his original belief system but were nonetheless consistent with each other? Like soap bubbles, they might coalesce into a new belief system insulated from the previous story line, creating multiple personalities. Perhaps balkanization is better than civil war. I find the reluctance of cognitive psychologists to accept the reality of this phenomenon somewhat puzzling, given that even normal individuals have such experiences from time to time.
(Ramachandran, V.S., Phantoms in the brain : probing the mysteries of the human mind / V. S. Ramachandran, and Sandra Blakeslee., 1. neurology--popular works., 2. brain--popular works., 3. neurosciences--popular works., 1998, 612.82, )
____________________________________
── oxygen (questionable concept of seeing)
── X-rays
── chemical atomic theory
──
Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolution, 1962, 1970, 1996 [ ]
oxygen
questionable concept of seeing
pp.55-56
Clearly we need a new vocabulary and concepts for analyzing events like the discovery of oxygen. Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence, "Oxygen was discovered," misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributable to an individual and to a moment in time. But the latter attribution is always impossible, and the former often is as well. Ignoring Scheele, we can safely say that oxygen had not been discovered before 1774, and we would probably also say that it had been discovered by 1777 or shortly thereafter. But within those limits or others like them, any attempt to date the discovery must inevitably be arbitrary because discovering a new sort of phenomenon is necessarily a complex event, one which involves recognizing both THAT something is and WHAT it is. Note, for example, that if oxygen were dephlogisticated air for us, we should insist without hesitation that Priestley had discovered it, though we would still not know quite when. But if both observation and conceptualization, fact and assimilation to theory, are inseparably linked in discovery, then discovery is a process and must take time. Only when all the relevant conceptual categories are prepared in advance, in which case the phenomenon would not be of a new sort, can discovering THAT and discovering WHAT occur effortlessly, together, and in an instant.
Grant now that discovery involves an extended, though not necessarily long, process of conceptual assimilation. Can we also say that it involves a change of paradigm? To that question, no general answer can yet be given, but in this case at least, the answer must be yes. What Lavoisier announced in his papers from 1777 on was not so much the discovery of oxygen as the oxygen theory of combustion. That theory was the keystone for a reformulation of chemistry so vast that it is usually called the chemical revolution. Indeed, if the discovery of oxygen had not been an intimate part of the emergence of a new paradigm for chemistry, the question of priority from which we began would never have seemed so important. In this case as in others, the value placed upon a new phenomenon and thus upon its discoverer varies with our estimate of the extent to which the phenomenon violated paradigm-induced anticipations. Notice, however, since it will be important later, that the discovery of oxygen was not by itself the cause of the change in chemical theory. Long before he played any part in the discovery of the new gas, Lavoisier was convinced both that something was wrong with the phlogiston theory and that burning bodies absorbed some part of the atmosphere. That much he had recorded in a sealed note deposited with the Secretary of the French Academy in 1772. 5 What the work on oxygen did was to give much additional form and structure to Lavoisier's earlier sense that something was amiss. It told him a thing he was already prepared to discover--the nature of the substance that combustion removes from the atmosphere. That advance awareness of difficulties must be a significant part of what enabled Lavoisier to see in experiments like Priestley's a gas that Priestley had been unable to see there himself. Conversely, the fact that a major paradigm revision was needed to see what Lavoisier saw must be the principal reason why Priestley was, to the end of his long life, unable to see it.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.55-56)
X-rays
pp.57-59
... In an effort to represent the main ways in which discoveries can come about, these examples are chosen to be different both from each other and from the discovery of oxygen. The first, X-rays, is a classic case of discovery through accident, a type that occurs more frequently than the impersonal standards of scientific reporting allow us easily to realize. Its story opens on the day that the physicist Roentgen interrupted a normal investigation of cathode rays because he had noticed that a barium platino-cyanide screen at some distance from his shielded apparatus glowed when the discharge was in process. Further investigations--they required seven hectic weeks during which Roentgen rarely left the laboratory--indicated that the cause of the glow came in straight lines from the cathode ray tube, that the radiation cast shadows, could not be deflected by a magnet, and much else besides. Before announcing his discovery, Roentgen had convinced himself that his effect was not due to cathode rays but to an agent with at least some similarity to light. 6
Even so brief an epitome(a short statement of the main points) reveals striking resemblances to the discovery of oxygen: before experimenting with red oxide of mercury, Lavoisier had performed experiments that did not produce the results anticipated under the phlogiston paradigm; Roentgen's discovery commenced with the recognition that his screen glowed when it should not. In both cases the perception of anormaly--of a phenomenon, that is, for which his paradigm had not readied the investigator--played an essential role in preparing the way for perception of novelty. But, again in both cases, the perception that something had gone wrong was only the prelude to discovery. Neither oxygen nor X-rays emerged without a further process of experimentation and assimilation. At what point in Roentgen's investigation, for example, ought we say that X-rays had actually been discovered? Not, in any case, at the first instant, when all that had been noted was a glowing screen. At least one other investigator had seen that glow and, to his subsequent chagrin, discovered nothing at all. 7 Nor, it is almost as clear, can the moment of discovery be pushed forward to a point during the last week of investigation, by which time Roentgen was exploring the properties of the new radiation he had ALREADY discovered. We can only say that X-rays emerged in Wurzburg between November 8 and December 28, 1895.
X-rays, however, were greeted not only with surprise but with shock. Lord Kelvin at first pronounced them an elaborate hoax. 8 Others, though they could not doubt the evidence, were clearly staggered by it. Thought X-rays were not prohibited by established theory, they violated deeply entrenched expectations. Those expectations, I suggest, were implicit in the design and interpretation of established laboratory procedures. By the 1890's cathode ray equipment was widely deployed in numerous European laboratories. If Roentgen's apparatus had produced X-rays, then a number of other experimentalists must for some time have been producing those rays without knowing it. Perhaps those rays, which might well have other unacknowledged sources too, were implicated in behavior previously explained without reference to them. At the very least, several sorts of long familiar apparatus would in the future have to be shielded with lead. Previously completed work on normal projects would now have to be done again because earlier scientists had failed to recognize and control a relevant variable.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.57-59)
6 L. W. Taylor, Physics, the Pioneer Science (Boston, 1941), pp. 790-94; and T. W. Chalmers, Historic Researchers (London, 1949), pp. 218-19.
8 Silvanus P. Thompson, The Life of Sir William Thomson Baron Kelvin of Largs (London, 1910), II, 1125.
p.7
... It follows, though the point will require extended discussion, that a discovery like that of oxygen or X-rays does not simply add one more item to the population of the scientist's world. Ultimately it has that effect, but not until the professional community has re-evaluated traditional experimental procedures, altered its conception of entities with which it has long been familiar, and, in the process, shifted the network of theory through which it deals with the world. Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable, except perhaps within a single tradition of normal-scientific practice. That is why the unexpected discovery is not simply factual in its import and why the scientist's world is qualitatively (happiness index, 'quality of life', sustain ability, ) transformed as well as quantitatively (growth, 'standard of living') enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, p.7)
chemical atomic theory
pp.133-135
... Dalton was neither a chemist nor interested in chemistry. Instead he was a meteorologist investigating the, for him, physical problems of the absorption of gases by water and of water by the atmosphere. Partly because his training was in a different specialty and partly because of his own work in that specialty, he approached these problems with a paradigm different from that of contemporary chemists. In particular, he viewed the mixture of gases or the absorption of a gas in water as a physical process, one in which forces of affinity played no part. To him, therefore, the observed homogeneity of solutions was a problem, but one which he thought he could solve if he could determine the relative size and weights of the various atomic particles in his experimental mixtures. It was to determine these sizes and weights that Dalton finally turned to chemistry, supposing from the start that, in the restricted range of reactions that he took to be chemical, atoms could only combine one-to-one or in some other simple whole-number ratio. 24 That natural assumption did enable him to determine the sizes and weights of elementary particles, but it also made the law of constant proportion a tautology. For Dalton, any reaction in which the ingredients did not enter in fixed proportion was ipso fato not a purely chemical process. A law that experiment could not have established before Dalton's work, became, once that work was accepted, a constitutive principle that no single set of chemical measurements could have upset. As a result of what is perhaps our fullest example of a scientific revolution, the same chemical manipulation assumed a relationship to chemical generalization very different from the one they had had before.
24 L. K. Nash, "The Origin of Dalton's Chemical Atomic Theory," Isis, XLVII (1956), 101-16.
Needless to say, Dalton's conclusion were widely attacked when first announced. Berthollet, in particular, was never convinced. Considering the nature of the issue, he need not have been. But to most chemists Dalton's new paradigm proved convincing where Proust's had not been, for it had implications far wider and more important than a new criterion for distinguishing a mixture from a compound. If, for example, atoms could combine chemically only in simple whole-number ratios, then a re-examination of existing chemical data should disclose examples of multiple as well as fixed proportions. Chemists stopped writing that the two oxides of, say, carbon contained 56 per cent and 72 per cent of oxygen by weight; instead they wrote that one weight of carbon would combine either with 1.3 or with 2.6 weights of oxygen. When the results of old manipulations were recorded in his way, a 2:1 ratio leaped to the eye; and this occurred in the analysis of many well-known reactions and of new ones besides. In addition, Dalton's paradigm made it possible to assimilate Richter's work and to see its full generality. Also, it suggested new experiments, particularly those of Gay-Lussac on combining volumes, and these yielded still other regularities, ones that chemists had not previously dreamed of. What chemists took from Dalton was not new experimental laws but a new way of practicing chemistry (he himself called it the "new system of chemical philosophy"), and his proved so rapidly fruitful that only a few of the older chemists in France and Britain were able to resist it. 25 As a result, chemists came to live in a world where reactions behaved quite differently from the way they had before.
As all this went on, one other typical and very important change occurred. Here and there the very numerical data of chemistry began to shift. When Dalton first searched the chemical literature for data to support his physical theory, he found some records of reactions that fitted, but he can scarcely have avoided finding others that did not. Proust's own measurements on the two oxides of copper yielded, for example, an oxygen weight-ratio of 1.47:1 rather than the 2:1 demanded by the atomic theory; and Proust is just the man who might have been expected to achieve the Daltonian ratio. 26 He was, that is, a fine experimentalists, and his view of the relation between mixtures and compound was very close to Dalton's. But it is hard to make nature fit a paradigm. That is why the puzzles of normal science are so challenging and also why measurements undertaken without a paradigm so seldom lead to any conclusions at all. Chemists could not, therefore, simply accept Dalton's theory on the evidence, for much of that was still negative. Instead, even after accepting the theory, they had still to beat nature into line, a process which, in the event, took almost another generation. When it was done, even the percentage composition of well-known compounds was different. The data themselves had changed. That is the last of the senses in which we may want to say that after a revolution scientists work in a different world.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.133-135)
pp.149-150
To make the transition to Einstein's universe, the whole conceptual web whose strands are space, time, matter, force, and so on, had to be shifted and laid down again on nature whole. Only men who had together undergone or failed to undergo that transformation would be able to discover precisely what they agreed or disagreed about. Communication across the revolutionary divide is inevitably partial. Consider, for another example, the men who called Copernicus mad because he proclaimed that the earth moved. They were not either just wrong or quite wrong. Part of what they meant by 'earth' was fixed position. Their earth, at least, could not be moved. Correspondingly, Copernicus's innovation was not simply to move the earth. Rather, it was a whole new way of regarding the problems of physics and astronomy, one that necessarily changed the meaning of both 'earth' and 'motion.' 4 Without those changes the concept of a moving earth was mad. On the other hand, once they had been made and understood, both Descartes and Huyghens could realize that the earth's motion was a question with no content for science. 5
These examples point to the third and most fundamental aspect of the incommensurability of competing paradigms. In a sense that I am unable to explicate further, the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. One contains constrained bodies that fall slowly, the other pendulums that repeat their motions again and again. In one, solutions are compounds, in other mixtures. One is embedded in a flat, other in a curved, matrix of space. Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say they can see anything they please. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other. That is why a law that cannot even be demonstrated to one group of scientists may occasionally seem intuitively obvious to another. Equally, it is why, before they can hope to communicate fully, one group or the other must experience the conversion that we have been calling a paradigm shift. Just because it is a transition between incommensurables, the transition between competing paradigms cannot be made a step at a time, forced by logic and neutral experience. Like the gestalt switch, it must occur all at once (though not necessarily in an instant) or not at all.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.149-150)
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Personal knowledge : toward a post-critical philosophy
by Michael Polanyi
pp.3—4
What is the true lesson of the Copernican revolution? Why did Copernicus exchange his actual terrestrial station for an imaginary solar standpoint? The only justification for this lay in the greater intellectual satisfaction he derived from the celestial panorama as seen from the sun instead of the earth. Copernicus gave preference to man's delight in abstract theory, at the price of rejecting the evidence of our senses, which present us with the irresistible fact of the sun, the moon, and the stars rising daily in the east to travel across the sky towards their setting in the west. In a literal sense, therefore, the new Copernican system was as anthropocentric as the Ptolemaic view, the difference being merely that it preferred to satisfy a different human affection.
anthropocentrism - interpret with human values & experience
It becomes legitimate to regard the Copernican system as more objective than the Ptolemaic only if we accept this very shift in the nature of intellectual satisfaction as the criterion of greater objectivity. This would imply that, of two forms of knowledge, we should consider as more objective that which relies to a greater measure on theory rather than on more immediate sensory experience. So that, the theory being placed like a screen between our senses and the things of which our senses otherwise would have gained a more immediate impression, we would rely increasingly on theoretical guidance for the interpretation of our experience, and would correspondingly reduce the status of our raw impressions to that of dubious and possibly misleading appearances.
copyright © 1958
Q175.P82
(Polanyi, Michael. 1958, Personal knowledge, Q175.P82)
(Personal knowledge : toward a post-critical philosophy, by Michael Polanyi, copyright © 1958, pp.3—4)
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────────────────────────────────────
── negative numbers
── no one in those days accepted the existence of negative numbers.
Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, 2013
pp.438-440
pp.438-439
Let's return to the story of the solution of “the” cubic equation (the reason for the quote marks will emerge shortly). It all took place in Italy ── first in Bologa (Scipione del Ferro), and a bit later in Brescia (Niccolò Tartaglia) and Milan (Gerolamo Cardano). Del Ferro found a partial solution first but didn't publish it; some twenty years later, Tartaglia found essentially the same partial solution; finally, Cardano generalizing their findings and published them in a famous book called Ars Magna (“The Great Art”). The odd thing is that, as things were coming into focus, in order to list all the “different” solutions of the cubic equation, Cardano had to use thirteen chapters!
p.439
Nowaday, by contrast, the whole solution is covered by just one formula that can be written out in a single line, and which could easily be taught in high schools. What lay behind such diversity, of which we no longer see any trace today?
p.439
The problem was that no one in those days accepted the existence of negative numbers. For us today, it's self-evident that the coefficient in the third term of the equation x^3 + 3x^2 - 7x = 6 is the negative number -7.
p.439
It jumps right out at us, since we are completely used to the idea that a subtraction is equivalent to the addition of a negative quantity.
p.439
We could rewrite the as follows: x^3 + 3x^2 + (-7)x = 6 . For us who live five centuries after Cardano, these two equations are trivially interchangeable. The conceptual slippage on which their equivalence is based is so minute that we don't even perceive it at all.
p.439
But for the author of the vast tome on the third-degree equation, the concept of negative seven simply didn't exist. For him, the only legitimate way to get rid of a subtraction in a polynomial (that is, a term with a negative coefficient) was to move the misfit term to the other side of the equation, thus yielding a different but related equation ── namely, x^3 + 3x^2 = 7x + 6 ── all of whose coefficients are positive.
p.439
From a contemporary viewpoint, what Cardano did is comparable to someone who invents thirteen kinds of can-openers, each one working for just one type of can. It was a great feat, but what was lacking was an umbrella formulation, laying bare the hidden unity lying behind all this apparent diversity. That is, what was missing for “the” cubic equation was its universal can-opener. But this goal was unthinkable until someone recognized that all these different equation were, in fact, just one equation.
p.440
Obviously, what was needed was a new conceptual leap, this time extending the category number to include negative numbers.
p.440
The idea of giving such equations solutions had been considered but was always rejected (at least in Europe). Cardano himself understood that “fictitious” numbers (as he referred to them) could satisfy such an equation, but he rejected the idea with disdain. To him, the concept of negative three , being in no way visualizable, was an absurdity, somewhat like the concept of an object that violated the laws of physics. Such an idea might be stimulating to the mind, but it had to be recognized as absurb, because there was no way of actually realizing it in the world. Since Cardano was unable to associate negative numbers with any kind of entity in the real world, he labeled them “fictitious” and discarded them.
p.440
Nonetheless, his successors ── most especially Raffaello Bombelli Bologna ── were powerfully driven to find the elusive unity in Cardano's troubling diverse set of thirteen chapters, and in the end they wound up accepting the notion of negative numbers on the same level of reality (or nearly so) as positive numbers. This move yielded an enormous simplification in the solution for the cubic equation, as the thirteen families were gracefully fused into a single family, and the thirteen recipes associated with them were also fused into a single, compact recipe.
p.440
─
“”
p.440
Nonetheless, the welcoming of negative numbers into the category of number was not immediate or universal. Even 250 years later, the English mathematician Augustus De Morgan, a central figure in the development of symbolic logic, was still resisting, as this passage from his 1831 book On the Study of Difficulties of Mathematics shows:
“8 - 3” is easily understood; 3 can be taken from 8 and the remainder is 5; but “3 - 8” is an impossibility; it requires you to take from 3 more than there is in 3, which is absurb. If such an expression as “3 - 8” should be the answer to problem, it would denote either that there was some absurdity inherent in the problem itself, or in the manner of putting it into an equation...
DeMorgan's comment is reminiscent of what a seven-year-old girl once said to one of us when she was a participant in experiments on subtraction errors. To explain why she'd written “0” at the bottom of a column containing the numerals “3” and “8”, she said, “If I had three pieces of candy in my hand and I wanted to eat eight, I'd eat the three I had and there wouldn't be any more left.”
p.440
Despite the passage of several centuries, the sizable age gap, and the immense amount of mathematical sophistication separating our two commentators, their reactions still share a common essence.
p.441
Only at this point De Morgan happy, admitting that the idea “-2 years will pass” is equivalent to the idea “2 years have passed”. He thus does accept the idea that a numerical value can be negative, but not that a length of time can be negative. All this would lead one to think that De Morgan had no qualms about negative numbers within pure mathematics, even if he didn't think they applied to the real world ── and yet, a little later in his book, when he deals with the quadratic equation, instead of considering it as one single, unified problem, he breaks it up into six different families of equations, insisting (in perfect Cardano style) that all three of its coefficients must be positive! De Morgan thus finds that there are six different quadratic formulas, rather than one universal one. And all of this nearly 300 years after Cardano!
(Surfaces and essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, 2013, )
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Alan Lightman and Owen Gingerich, 1991 Science
article, “When Do Anomalies Begin?” wrote:
“certain scientific anomalies are recognized
only after they are given compelling explanations
within a new conceptual framework. Before
this recognition, the peculiar facts
are taken as givens or are ignored in the
old framework.”
In other words, the real anormalies ... are
at first not even perceived as anomalies.
They are invisible.
── Kevin Kelly, 1994,
from the book, Out of Control,
p.381, filename: ooc-mf.pdf
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Thomas S. Kuhn, The structure of scientific revolution, 1962, 1970, 1996 [ ]
p.18
... , providing evidence for a societal version of Francis Bacon's acute methodological dictum: "Truth emerges more readily from error than from confusion." 10
10 Bacon, op. cit., p. 210.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, p.18)
anomaly [L. anomalia <. Gr. anomalia, inequality]: departure from the regular arrangement, general rule, or usual method
pp.62-65
To a greater or lesser extent (corresponding to the continuum from the shocking to the anticipated result), the characteristics common to the three examples above are characteristic of all discoveries from which new sorts of phenomena emerge. Those characteristics include: the previous awareness of anormaly, the gradual and simultaneous emergence of both observational and conceptual recognition, and the consequent change of paradigm categories and procedures often accompanied by resistance. There is even evidence that these same characteristics are built into the nature of the perceptual process itself. In a psychological experiment that deserves to be far better known outside the trade, Bruner and Postman asked experimental subjects to identify on short and controlled exposure a series of playing cards. Many of the cards were normal, but some were made anomalous, e.g., a red six of spades and a black four of hearts. Each experimental run was constituted by the display of a single card to a single subject in a series of gradually increased exposures. After each exposure the subject was asked what he had seen, and the run was terminated by two successive correct identifications. 12
12 J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, "On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm," Journal of Personality, XVIII (1949), 206-23.
Even on the shortest exposures many subjects identified most of the cards, and after a small increase all the subjects identified them all. For the normal cards these identifications were usually correct, but the anomalous cards were almost always identified, without apparent hesitation or puzzlement, as normal. The black four of hearts might, for example, be identified as the four of either spades or hearts. Without any awareness of trouble, it was immediately fitted to one of the conceptual categories prepared by prior experience. One would not even like to say that the subjects had seen something different from what they identified. With a further increase of exposure to the anomalous cards, subjects did begin to hesitate and to display awareness of anomaly. Exposed, for example, to the red six of spades, some would say: That's the six of spades, but there's something wrong with it--the black has a red border. Further increase of exposure resulted in still more hesitation and confusion until finally, and sometimes quite suddenly, most subjects would produce the correct identification without hesitation. Moreover, after doing this with two or three of the anomalous cards, they would have little further difficulty with the others. A few subjects, however, were never able to make the requisite adjustment of their categories. Even at forty times the average exposure required to recognized normal cards for what they were, more than 10 per cent of the anomalous cards were not correctly identified. And the subjects who then failed often experienced acute personal distress. One of them exclaimed: "I can't make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn't even look like a card that time. I don't know what color it is now or whether it's a spade or a heart. I'm not even sure now what a spade looks like. My God!" 13 In the next section we shall occasionally see scientists behaving this way too.
13 Ibid., p.218. My collegue Postman tells me that, though knowing all about the apparatus and display in advance, he never-the-less found looking at the incongruous cards acutely uncomfortable.
Either as a metaphor or because it reflects the nature of the mind, that psychological experiment provides a wonderfully simple and cogent schema for the process of scientific discovery. In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a blackground provided by expectation. Initially, only the anticipated and usual are experienced even under circumstances where anomaly is later to be observed. Further acquaintance, however, does result in awareness of something wrong or does relate the effect to something that has gone wrong before. The awareness of anomaly opens a period in which conceptual categories are adjusted until the initially anomalous has become the anticipated. At this point the discovery has been completed. I have already urged that that process or one very much like it is involved in the emergence of all fundamental scientific novelties. Let me now point out that, recognizing the process, we can at last begin to see why normal science, a pursuit not directed to novelties and tending at first to suppress them, should never-the-less be so effective at causing them to arise.
In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observation and experiments easily accessible to that science's practitioners. Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes. That professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist's vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change. The science has become increasingly rigid. On the other hand, within those areas to which the paradigm directs the attention of the group, normal science leads to a detail of information and to a precision of the observation-theory match that could be achieved in no other way. Furthermore, that detail and precision-of-match have a value that transcends their not always very high intrinsic interest. Without the special apparatus that is constructed mainly for anticipated functions, the result that lead ultimately to novelty could not occur. And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing WITH PRECISION what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong. Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm. The more precise and far-reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator it provides of anomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change. In the normal mode of discovery, even resistance to change has a use that will be explored more fully in the next section. By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core. The very fact that a significant scientific novelty so often emerges simultaneously from several laboratories is an index both to the strongly traditional nature of normal science and to the completeness with which that traditional pursuit prepares the way for its own change.
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.62-65)
12 J. S. Bruner and Leo Postman, "On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm," Journal of Personality, XVIII (1949), 206-23.
13 Ibid., p.218. My collegue Postman tells me that, though knowing all about the apparatus and display in advance, he never-the-less found looking at the incongruous cards acutely uncomfortable.
pp.84-85
The transition from a paradigm in crisis to a new one from which a new tradition of normal science can emerge is far from a cumulative process, one achieved by an articulation or extension of the old paradigm. Rather it is a reconstruction of the field from new fundamentals, a reconstruction that changes some of the field's most elementary theoretical generalizations as well as many of its paradigm methods and applications. During the transition period there will be a large but never complete overlap between the problems that can be solved by the old and by the new paradigm. But there will also be a decisive difference in the modes of solution. When the transition is complete, the profession will have changed its view of the field, its methods, and its goals. One perceptive historian, viewing a classic case of science's reorientation by paradigm change, recently described it as "picking up the other end of the stick," a process that involves "handling the same bundle of data as before, but placing them in a new system of relations with one another by giving them a different framework." 8 Others who have noted this aspect of scientific advance have emphasized its similarity to a change in visual gestalt: the marks on paper that were first seen as a bird are now seen as an antelope, or vice versa. 9 That parallel can be misleading. Scientists do not see something AS something else; instead, they simply see it. We have already examined some of the problems created by saying that Priestley saw oxygen as dephlogisticated air. In addition, the scientist does not preserve the gestalt subject's freedom to switch back and forth between ways of seeing. Never-the-less, the switch of gestalt, particularly because it is today so familiar, is a useful elementary prototype for what occurs in full-scale paradigm shift.
8 Hebert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 (London, 1949), pp. 1-7.
The preceding anticipation may help us recognize crisis as an appropriate prelude to the emergence of new theories, particularly since we have already examined a small-scale version of the same process in discussing the emergence of discoveries. [...]
(Kuhn, Thomas S., 'The structure of scientific revolution')
(The structure of scientific revolution / Thomas S. Kuhn. --3rd ed., copyright © 1962, 1970, 1996, 1. science--philosophy, 2. science--history, pp.84-85)
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