New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

In memoriam: Patrick Suppes

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

As readers will have noticed, since yesterday there has been an outpour of expressions of sorrow for the passing of Patrick Suppes everywhere on the internet. He was without a doubt one of the most influential philosophers of science in the 20th century, and so all the love and appreciation is richly deserved. I do not have anything much to add to what others who knew him better have been saying, but I thought of posting a link to the video podcast of a lecture he delivered at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy some two years ago, titled ‘A neuroscience perspective on the foundations of mathematics’. (Back then I even wrote a blog post about the lecture, just before it took place.)

As much as it is sad to see dear, talented people passing away, I think it is comforting to note that Suppes lived his life to the fullest until the very end, for example by flying across the ocean to give a lecture on a new, exciting topic at age 90. The vitality he displays in the lecture is truly impressive, and a lovely reminder of his decisive contributions to philosophy and the sciences.

Rodney Brooks and the Enactivists

I have been reading Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin’s book Radicalizing Enactivism for a critical notice in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Enactivism is the view that cognition consists of a dynamic interaction between the subject and her environment, and not in any kind of contentful representation of that environment. I am struck by H&M’s reliance on a famous 1991 paper by the MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks, “Intelligence Without Representation.” Brooks’s paper is quite a romp—it has attracted the attention of a number of philosophers, including Andy Clark in his terrific book, Being There (1996). It’s worth a quick revisit today.

To soften his readers up for his main thesis, Brooks starts out his paper with an argument so daft that it cannot have been intended seriously, but which encapsulates an important strand of enactivist thinking. Here it is: Biological evolution has been going for a very long time, but “Man arrived in his present form [only] 2.5 million years ago.” (Actually, that’s a considerable over-estimate: homo sapiens is not more than half a million years old, if that.)

He invented agriculture a mere 19,000 years ago, writing less than 5000 years ago and “expert” knowledge only over the last few hundred years.

This suggests that problem solving behaviour, language, expert knowledge and application, and reason are all pretty simple once the essence of being and reacting are available. That essence is the ability to move around in a dynamic environment, sensing the surroundings to a degree sufficient to achieve the necessary maintenance of life and reproduction. This part of intelligence is where evolution has concentrated its time—it is much harder. (141) 

Do Memory Sports Champions Have Savant Syndrome?

[Cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

By Berit Brogaard and Kristian Marlow

Mark Aarøe Nissen is a 22-year-old math student at Aarhus University, Denmark, with extraordinary memory abilities. He has competed in memory sports for several years. He can recite the number Pi to more than 20,000 decimal points, recall thousands of names, faces and historical dates and remember the order of a pack of cards.

When The Brain's Biological Clock Goes Haywire

[cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

Our perception of time varies greatly depending on our age, mood, stress level and psychological health and stability. Psychological disorders, such as Parkinson's disease, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and schizophrenia, can mess with the brain's time keeping mechanism and warp our estimation of time. Patients suffering from these disorders are unable to properly coordinate events in time. Patients over- or underestimate time intervals ranging from several seconds to minutes.

How does this happen? How does the brain manage to keep track of time and what goes wrong in psychological disorders? Our senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch) use specialized sensory systems with task-specific neurons to process sensory input. Yet there is no specific sensory system for time. So how does our sense of time come about?

Social integration and brain chemistry approaches to treating PTSD

This NYT article (h/t Greg Downey on FB; check out his Neuroanthropology blog) lays out research on the effects of social conditions (isolation vs integration) on PTSD. Greg excerpted this quote: 

It turns out that most trauma victims — even survivors of combat, torture or concentration camps — rebound to live full, normal lives. That has given rise to a more nuanced view of trauma — less a poison than an infectious agent, a challenge that most people overcome but that may defeat those weakened by past traumas, genetics or other factors. Now, a significant body of work suggests that even this view is too narrow — that the environment just after the event, particularly other people’s responses, may be just as crucial as the event itself.

I thought this one about Nepalese ex-child soldiers provided a good concrete example: 

But in villages that readily and happily reintegrated them (usually via rituals or conventions specifically designed to do so), they experienced no more mental distress than did peers who had never gone to war. The lasting harm of being a child soldier, it seemed, arose not from the war but from social isolation and conflict afterward.

Contrast* the social integration approach to an individual pathology approach, using cognitive behavioral therapy and / or SSRIs to handle symptoms or beta-blockers to intervene in memory formation (another h/t to Greg Downey for this link). 

You can move external objects with your mind! It's called synthetic telepathy

[Cross-posted from our Psychology Today blog]

Lou, who once set several major league baseball records, suddenly could barely keep his body upright during practice. He would fall while running bases, stumble over curbs and mishandle fielding plays. His wife, Eleanor, was concerned. Her husband held records for most consecutive games played, 2131 to be exact, and most career grand slams. Though Lou said it was just a phase, Eleanor got on the phone with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Charles William Mayo wanted them to come right away. They arrived on June 13, 1939 and six days later on Lou’s thirty-sixth birthday the doctors told Eleanor that her husband suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Lou Gehrig died less than two years later.