Re: The Unfinished Zebra Minima (SYNTH PRESET)
Agathe Thies
What's my favorite elegant idea? The elucidation of DNA's structure is surely the most obvious, but it bears repeating. I'll argue that the same strategy used to crack the genetic code might prove successful in cracking the "neural code" of consciousness and self. It's a long shot, but worth considering.
It is well known that Crick and Watson unraveled the double helical structure of the DNA molecule: two twisting complementary strands of nucleotides. Less well known is the chain of events culminating in this discovery.
I believe there are similar correlations between brain structure and mind function, between neurons and consciousness. I am stating the obvious here only because there are some philosophers, called "new mysterians," who believe the opposite. The erudite Colin McGinn has written, for instance, "The brain is only tangentially relevant to consciousness." (There are many philosophers who would disagree, e.g., Churchland, Dennett, and Searle.)
Crick did not, in my opinion, succeed in solving consciousness (whatever that might mean). Nonetheless, I believe he was headed in the right direction. He had been richly rewarded earlier in his career for grasping the analogy between biological complementarities, the notion that the structural logic of the molecule dictates the functional logic of heredity. Given his phenomenal success using the strategy of structure-function analogy, it is hardly surprising that he imported the same style of thinking to study consciousness. He and his colleague Christoff Koch did so by focusing on a relatively obscure structure called the claustrum.
The claustrum is a thin sheet of cells underlying the insular cortex of the brain, one on each hemisphere. It is histologically more homogeneous than most brain structures, and intriguingly, unlike most brain structures (which send and receive signals to and from a small subset of other structures), the claustrum is reciprocally connected with almost every cortical region. The structural and functional streamlining might ensure that, when waves of information come through the claustrum, its neurons will be exquisitely sensitive to the timing of the inputs.
I visited him at his home in La Jolla in July of 2004. He saw me to the door as I was leaving and as we parted, gave me a sly, conspiratorial wink: "I think it's the claustrum, Rama; it's where the secret is." A week later he passed away.
Humans are a story telling species. Throughout history we have told stories to each other and ourselves as one of the ways to understand the world around us. Every culture has its creation myth for how the universe came to be, but the stories do not stop at the big picture view; other stories discuss every aspect of the world around us. We humans are chatterboxes and we just can't resist telling a story about just about everything.
Well, it has taken us a while but by now enormous amounts are known about the composition of stars and galaxies and how the universe came to be. There are still gaps in our knowledge (and our skepticism will never stop), but we've made a lot of progress on cosmology and many other problems. Indeed we know more about the composition of distant stars than many questions about things here on earth. The scientific method has not conquered all great questions - other issues remain illusive, but the spirit of the scientific method is that one does shrink from the unknown. It is OK to say that we have no useful story for everything we are curious about, and we comfort ourselves that at some point in the future new explanations will fill the gaps in our current knowledge, as often raise new questions that highlight new gaps.
A great example how a great deal of amazing insight can be gained from some very simple considerations is the explanation of atomic forces by the 18th century Jesuit polymath Roger Boscovich, who was born in Dubrovnik.
His arguments are very easy to understand and extremely convincing. Let's imagine two bodies, one of which is traveling at a speed of, say, 6 units, the other at a speed of 12 with the faster body catching up with the slower one along the same straight path. We imagine what transpires when the two bodies collide. By conservation of the "quantity of motion," both bodies should continue after collision along the same path, each with a speed of 9 units (in the case of inelastic collision, or in case of elastic collision for a brief period right after the collision)
But how did the velocity of the faster body come to be reduced from 12 to 9, and that of the slower body increased from 6 to 9? Clearly, the time interval for the change in velocities cannot be zero, for then, argued Boscovich, the instantaneous change in speed would violate the law of continuity. Furthermore, we would have to say that at the moment of impact, the speed of one body is simultaneously 12 and 9, which is patently absurd.
It is therefore necessary for the change in speed to take place in a small, yet finite, amount of time. But with this assumption, we arrive at yet another contradiction. Suppose, for example, that after a small interval of time, the speed of the faster body is 11, and that of the slower body is 7. But this would mean that they are not moving at the same velocity, and the front surface of the faster body would advance through the rear surface of the slower body, which is impossible because we have assumed that the bodies are impenetrable. It therefore becomes apparent that the interaction must take place immediately before the impact of the two bodies and that this interaction can only be a repulsive one because it is expressed in the slowing down of one body and the speeding up of the other.
Moreover, this argument is valid for arbitrary speeds, so one can no longer speak of definite dimensions for the particles that were until now thought of as impenetrable, namely, for the atoms. An atom should rather be viewed as a point source of force, with the force emanating from it acting in some complicated fashion that depends on distance.
With this idea Boscovich not only offered a new picture for interactions in place of the Aristotelian-Cartesian theory based on immediate contact, but also presaged our understanding of the structure of matter, especially that of solid bodies.
It is a fundamental principle of economics that a person is always better off if they have more alternatives to choose from. But this principle is wrong. There are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action.
The idea of commitment as a strategy is an ancient one. Odysseus famously had his crew tie him to the mast so he could listen to the Sirens' songs without falling into the temptation to steer the ship into the rocks. And he committed his crew to not listening by filling their ears with wax. Another classic is Corts's decision to burn his ships upon arriving in Mexico, thus removing retreat as one of the options his crew could consider. But although the idea is an old one, we did not begin to understand its nuances until Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling's wrote his 1956 masterpiece: "An Essay on Bargaining".
It is well known that thorny games such as the prisoner's dilemma can be solved if both players can credibly commit themselves to cooperating, but how can I convince you that I will cooperate when it is a dominant strategy for me to defect? (And, if you and I are game theorists, you know that I know that you know that I know that defecting is a dominant strategy.)
Schelling gives many examples of how this can be done, but here is my favorite. A Denver rehabilitation clinic whose clientele consisted of wealthy cocaine addicts, offered a "self-blackmail" strategy. Patient were offered an opportunity to write a self- incriminating letter that would be delivered if and only if the patient, who is tested on a random schedule, is found to have used cocaine. Most cocaine addicts will probably have no trouble thinking of something to write about, and will now have a very strong incentive to stay off drugs. They are committed.
Many of society's thorniest problems, from climate change to Middle East peace could be solved if the relevant parties could only find a way to commit themselves to some future course of action. They would be well advised to study Tom Schelling in order to figure out how to make that commitment.
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." This is one of the most famous quotes from Albert Einstein. "The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle." Similarly, Eugene Wigner said that the unreasonable efficiency of mathematics is "a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve." Thus we have a problem that may seem too metaphysical to be addressed in a meaningful way: Why do we live in a comprehensible universe with certain rules, which can be efficiently used for predicting our future?
One could always respond that God created the universe and made it simple enough so that we can comprehend it. This would match the words about a miracle and an undeserved gift. But shall we give up so easily? Let us consider several other questions of a similar type. Why is our universe so large? Why parallel lines do not intersect? Why different parts of the universe look so similar? For a long time such questions looked too metaphysical to be considered seriously. Now we know that inflationary cosmology provides a possible answer to all of these questions. Let us see whether it might help us again.
If the huge density example looks a bit extreme, rest assured that it is not. There are three basic types of universes: closed, open and flat. A typical closed universe created in the hot Big Bang would collapse in about 10-43 seconds, in a state with the Planck density. A typical open universe would grow so fast that formation of galaxies would be impossible, and our body would be instantly torn apart. Nobody would be able to live and comprehend the universe in either of these two cases. We can enjoy life in a flat or nearly flat universe, but this requires fine-tuning of initial conditions at the moment of the Big Bang with an incredible accuracy of about 10-60.
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