inferiority complex and the overview effect

I woke up this morning with a thought. A thought that I’d never had before; this is despite the fact that I’ve often read about, talked about and written about. The thought?

Well, the realization that the universe is as small in scale as it is large. That is, there are objects in the universe that are unimaginably small as there are objects that are unimaginably large.

Space programs since the 1960’s reaffirmed the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void", shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. And we’ve read about the overview effect, which is a cognitive shift in awareness reported by some astronauts and cosmonauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit or from the lunar surface.

At the same time, some of us have an inferiority complex about being smaller than average. Most people don’t like being just average, but being less than average is even worse. Astronomers like to take advantage, by pointing out that the universe is really, really big — much bigger than these below-average-sized persons.

But we’re not so small if we compare ourselves to small things. For instance, we are much, much bigger than a bacterium, which is so small you need to look through a microscope to find it; and by the time you do find it, it has probably split in half and turned into two even smaller bacteria.

Now we often say the universe is a large, large place. But we don’t seem to ever say the universe is a really small place. If we take the height of an average person to be 1.7 x 10⁰ meters, or roughly 1.7 meters, Gomez’s Hamburger is 10¹⁶ meters away; the Milky Way galaxy 10²¹ meters and the observable universe 10²⁶ meters.

Equally, a white blood cell is 10^-5 big (.0001) big, the Hepatitis B Virus is 10^-8 meters and the smallest object we know of include the Neutrino at 10^-24 meters and more esoteric objects such as strings, and the quantum foam coming in at 10^-36 meters.

On my birthday

Birthdays – even better than Christmas when we’re young, wet behind the ears and knee high to creepy crawlers. We get to celebrate our existence, noting annually the exact day we were born into this world and the glorious journey called Life.

But birthdays mark the passage of time and as we grow older they seem to keep coming at an alarmingly rapid rate. Growing older certainly beats the alternative. I’m very happy that I’m alive when so many of my dear ones no longer are. None of us expected they would die so young and I never imagined being this old back in more naïve, crisp days of yesteryear. How can we possibly know? But I think each of us has an imagined age we would reach when we would be “old” and a vision of some time, many many years away, when we would die…if we can imagine such an event.

For years, a close friend insists that we don’t age. That is, our personality doesn’t age. I think I know what she is saying. She recalls traits and patterns of thought that have formed her very being.

Contemporary psychology argues that personality is defined as a set of traits that follow the individual throughout the life course. Personality is made of five traits that dispose an individual to particular thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. These traits are: (a) neuroticism, (b) extroversion, (c) openness to experience, (d) agreeableness, and (e) conscientiousness.

The Baltimore Longitudinal Study on Aging is regarded as the most definitive study of personality traits. Paul Costa and Robert McCrae tested the personalities of individuals between 19 to 80 years old for over twelve years and specifically measured their levels of neuroticism, extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. Costa and McCrae concluded that these five personality traits remained relatively stable with age.  Furthermore, trait stability especially characterized individuals after the age of 30.

Given the general conclusion that personality traits remain stable after age 30, Costa and McCrae would argue that if a 30 year old woman worried excessively about whether or not her husband's salary was enough to make mortgage payments, then she also is likely to be worried about having saved enough for her children's college tuition when she is 45 and is likely to be worried about the adequacy of her husband's pension income at age 70. Since Costa and McCrae suggest that personality traits remain stable through adulthood a high degree of neuroticism, as reflected by a consistent and excessive level of anxiety and worry, is likely to persist and find new focal points over time.

The Chinese room

Computational psychology, computational cognitive modeling, and or if philosophy is your thing computational theory of mind all explore the essence of cognition via and by specifying computational mechanisms, structures, and processes. Given the complexity of the human mind and its manifestation in behavioral flexibility, process-based computational models may be necessary to explicate and elucidate the intricate details of the mind. Put simply, these espouse the notion that the human mind or the human brain is an information processing system and that thinking is a form of computing; a discipline lying on the border between artificial intelligence and psychology and a mainstay of cognitive science.

Models in cognitive science may be roughly categorized into computational, mathematical, or verbal-conceptual systems although a variety of symbolic “cognitive” models are proposed in Artificial Intelligence. Symbolic systems are usually broad and capable of a significant amount of information processing; however, not rigorously matched with human data.

Instead of symbolic models that rely on a variety of complex data structures that store highly structured pieces of knowledge a resurgence of neural network models has relied upon simple, uniform, and often massively parallel numerical computations.

Many have also argued against computational theories of mind. Some have used thought experiments to demonstrate obvious deficiencies. The Chinese room is once such experiment. Imagine that there is a man in a room with no way of communicating to anyone or anything outside of the room except for a piece of paper that is passed under the door. With the paper, he is to use a series of provided books to “answer” what is on the paper. The symbols are all in Chinese, and all the man knows is where to look in the books, which then tell him what to write in response. It just so happens that this generates a conversation that the Chinese man outside of the room can actually understand, but can our man in the room really be said to understand it?

This is essentially what the computational theory of mind presents us with; a model in which the mind simply decodes symbols and outputs more symbols. It is argued that perhaps this is not real learning or thinking at all. However, it can be argued in response to this that it is the man and the books together that understand Chinese.

Doing away with the is word

Now I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, reading and writing about the quantum. More and more I’ve been searching for  connections that seem to bind elements of the quantum with  consciousness and our perceptions of reality. At the same time, I am a huge fan of Albert Ellis and his work in rational emotive behavior therapy. Of course we shouldn’t expect to be loved just because we love.

Albert Ellis also advocated the use of E-Prime, especially in writing, as a way to avoid muddled and blame-based thinking that distresses psychotherapy patients. According to Ellis, rational emotive behavior therapy "has favored E-Prime more than any other form of psychotherapy and I think it is still the only form of therapy that has some of its main books written in E-Prime."

E-prime you ask?

Alfred Korzybski, in 1933 proposed that we should abolish the "is of identity" from the English language. And, in 1949, D. David Bourland Jr. went further and proposed the abolition of all forms of the words "is" or "to be.” An English without "isness" now known as E-Prime, or English-Prime.

By and large, however, E-Prime has not yet caught on either in learned circles or in popular speech.

Oddly, most physicists write in E-Prime a large part of the time, due to the influence of Operationalism -- the philosophy that tells us to define things by operations performed -- but few have any awareness of E-prime as a discipline and most of them lapse into "isness" statements all too frequently

1. The photon is a wave can be re-written to read - The photon behaves as a   wave when constrained by certain instruments

2. The photon is a particle can be written such as:  The photon appears as a particle when constrained by other instruments.

3. John is unhappy and grouchy can be re-written to read John appears unhappy and grouchy in the office.

Sure, the first example becomes an operational formulation when rewritten in English Prime and may appear of interest to philosophers and scientists of an operationalist bias, but consider what happens when we move to the second example.

Clearly, written in Standard English, "The photon is a wave," and "The photon is a particle" contradict each other, just like the sentences "Robin is a boy" and "Robin is a girl." Nonetheless, all through the nineteenth century physicists found themselves debating about this and, by the early 1920s, it became obvious that the experimental evidence depended on the instruments or the instrumental set-up (design) of the total experiment. One type of experiment always showed light traveling in waves, and another type always showed light traveling as discrete particles.

3.         To be or not to be,

            That is the question. Hamlet

Become

To live or to die,

I ask myself this.

While teaching at the University of Florida, Korzybski counseled his students to eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of "to be" from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use "I am," "You are," "They are" statements as usual. For example, instead of saying, "I am depressed," a student was asked to eliminate that emotionally primed verb and to say something else, such as, "I feel depressed when ..." or "I tend to make myself depressed about … demonstrating the application of general semantics to psychotherapy.

Is precognition a reality

I was having a chat today with an old friend and colleague Jen (not her real name). Once again and as we do every year reflect on the year we had, obligatory observations about the pace by which the years are passing us by and something Jen had first told me about more than 10 years ago. Jen contracted type I diabetes after a protracted illness when she was 16 years old. She is now in her 40’s and practicing medicine in a large hospital. What makes this tale interesting is the fact that Jen had read about diabetes when she was just seven years old. She says she remembers clearly that day and how she had formed a belief that she would one day contract the diseases. Jen’s story is not an isolated case. Over the years I’ve had countless such conversations – admitingly some much more convincing than others.

                                       

At the same time, I’ve been stuck with a quandary – is it possible, somehow, for our brain to have the potential to predict what will happen in the future? Is our brain, a system ultimately based on properties of quantum mechanics, be capitalising on phenomena that could aid our survival.

It turns out that in 2011, one of the most notorious scientific supporters of precognitive phenomena, Cornell University’s Professor Daryl J. Bem, urged researchers to attempt to replicate his time-reversed experimental findings, in order to create a database that as it grows, will increasingly allow for a more scrupulous analysis of precognition research.

Bem and colleagues have since published a meta-analysis based on this database that included 90 experiments from 33 laboratories across 14 different countries involving 12,406 participants. The analysis yielded an overall positive Hedges’ effect size (~ difference between 2 means), albeit relatively small, in favor of the theory that a persons’ cognitive and affective response in the present can be influenced by events in the future that are yet to occur. This was coupled with pretty strong statistical significance (p=1.3×10-11) indicating that the experimental results are not due to chance.

Are these results due to precognitive thought? A good question indeed…

The Mask Of Sanity: An Attempt to Reinterpret the So-Called Psychopathic Personality

The Mask Of Sanity: An Attempt to Reinterpret the So-Called Psychopathic Personality

During a case discussion involving patients in custody recently a colleague made reference to Milton Cleckley’s  “The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Reinterpret the So-called Psychopathic Personality.” I’d heard of the book given that it’s considered to be a seminal work and the most influential clinical description of psychopathy in the twentieth century. I had to read it…

Right off, the book starts with a poem – not a poem by an antisocial but perhaps one for an antisocial. The poem is reproduced in many forums including an internet-based Psychology and Mental Health forum. Here it is:

“From chaos shaped, the Bios grows. In bone and viscus broods the Id. And who can say Whence Eros comes? Or chart his troubled way? Nor bearded sage, nor science, yet has shown. How truth or love, when met, is straightly known; Some phrases singing in our dust today. Have taunted logic through man's Odyssey: Yet, strangely, man sometimes will find his own. And even man has felt the arcane flow. Whence brims unchanged the very Attic wine, Where lives that mute and death-eclipsing glow. That held the Lacedaemonian battle line: And this, I think, may make what man is choose. The doom of joy he knows he can but lose.” Cleckley

This book is now in its fifth edition – first published in 1941. Cleckley recalls how the first edition was based primarily on experience with adult male psychopaths hospitalized in a closed institution. During the ensuring decades a much more diverse group of people became available. Female patients, adolescents, people who had never been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, all in large numbers, became available for study and afforded an opportunity to observe the disorder in a very wide range of variety and of degree.

Since the first edition of this book, revisions of the nomenclature have been made by the American Psychiatric Association. The classification of psychopathic personality was changed to that of sociopathic personality in 1958. In 1968 it was changed again to antisocial personality. Like most psychiatrists I continue to think of the people who are the subject of this book as psychopaths and will most often refer to them by this familiar term.

One of the most striking things about this book is born in its seemingly incorruptible America – an era where deals are considered legal contracts by handshakes and man’s word is gold. The government seems to care about its citizens. Here,  lawyers and judges and police officers have a certain amount of sympathy for the patients he’s worked with; they know these people aren’t quite right because they keep committing idiotic crimes that really have no pay-off, but they aren’t legally insane.

What I found most interesting about this book, perhaps it’s just me, the overwhelming sense of paternalism and male chauvinism. While women are mentioned as having jobs, it’s understood that of course they do that until they follow the natural course of life and get married and have children. A case study of one woman was particularly curious. The woman was considered to be a “deviant” and show signs of psychopathology merely because she was a lesbian and had the audacity to say that she did not want to be married. No worries—she was soon “cured” of those two unnatural conditions. Deviant behaviour abounds in this book. There is even a  chapter titled: “Homosexuality and other consistent sexual deviations.” Sure this is written in the early twentieth century but the incredible stereotypes are noteworthy to say the least. Sections deal with The psychopath as businessman, The psychopath as man of the world, The psychopath as gentleman, etc where are fascinating.