Mizblog

This idea keeps coming back into my head. It happened again when I read this article on atheist/theist thought processes, especially the bit about how it relates to Cypher from The Matrix.

In the movie, of course Cypher never gets plugged back into the matrix the way he wants. But either way, he no longer has memories of living his renegade life on an outlaw vessel, eating disgusting mush and being miserable all the time. There are actually drugs being used as anesthetics which cause amnesia for the procedure! So if you don’t remember it, did you experience it? You can only infer that it happened. I bet psychologists could implant false memories in you about what had happened. You wouldn’t remember, but you’d come to think of it like something you used to remember. You would believe that things happened, even though they didn’t really happen.

Or did they? Maybe if you believe something with all your heart and with all your soul, then it has to be true! This seems to be the feeling of the deeply religious people I’ve talked to, when they talk about their belief in God. They just know their beliefs are true, because they can feel it as a warm feeling in their hearts.

Then again, some of us believe in something called objective truth. We’re called “scientists” and we explore the world in order to find out what these truths are. Some of us try to find out objective truths about the way our minds work. We’re called “cognitive scientists” and we study cognition, perception, learning, memory, language; basically: intelligence.

Not only do we study it, but we also make computer models to try to make our theories of mental functioning concrete. Then we test those theories, and if we believe that they’re true then we make up elaborate scenarios in order to show them to be true, rather than shining the light of truth on them and jettisoning them if they don’t cast a shadow. But that’s where other cognitive scientists come in: they see our theories as competition to the theories which they fervently believe are true, and will point out the many shortcomings of those competing theories. The way we get around this negative attention is to make our computer programs as unavailable or incomprehensible or unusable as possible, so that other researchers aren’t able to level such criticisms against us without our being able to reply “well, you must not have done it right!”

So much for Objective Truth, huh? When I think about it this way, I can no longer proudly claim that I am a Brain Scientist. I now have to admit that I am a Brain Hacker. I have a hack that seems to work very well in inducing learning, and I’m trying to promote and augment that hack. I’d like to be a scientist one day, though…

Anyone reading this blog will notice that I haven’t been sick much lately, so I haven’t been posting anything. Today I’m taking the time to remind my future self what I was thinking about and doing way back in June.

Sangeeta is getting ready to take Saranya to Nepal for a month. She’s got a week left to get everything ready, her car is in the shop with a major intermittent coolant leak that they can’t seem to find, and she just got addicted to Korean soap operas so she spends all day sitting in front of the computer watching them and reading the subtitles.

World of Warcraft is holding less and less of my attention. I still log on every day to do my jewelcrafting daily quest, and sometimes I take a break and do some Argent Tournament stuff. Oh, and I have calendar reminders to check and renew my Mysterious Eggs on 5 different characters. I can do all this while only actually paying attention to the game for as little as 30 minutes per day. The rest of my time I’m either programming, reading about programming, reading literature on human memory models, or studying math/statistics.

I’m the only employee of Insight Learning Technology, Inc. who’s not on vacation. I’m using the time to take cars back and forth for repairs, and to rework, refactor, and modernize all my PLM server code. I had to fake object orientation before, but PHP5 lets me write code the way I’m used to thinking about it. We’ve got at least two big projects coming up this summer, so I’m scrambling to get some of this background work done and tested before I have to focus on deliverables. The hope is that all this will make later projects easier.

I’ve been studying Psychological journals to see what other people have been doing in the field. Phil Pavlik and John Anderson have a nice model that predicts forgetting and recall time, and I think I’d like to adopt a similar model. Our system has a couple of arbitrary parameters, and I need to figure out a system for making them less arbitrary.

Whenever we create a new module for adaptive training, we have to decide what sort of performance reflects sufficient learning that the learner will be able to correctly answer the item (or an item from the same category) after a delay. We also have to determine the parameters that tell us approximately how long to wait after an item is presented before we show it again. Right now, these parameters are arbitrary and independent, but I think we need to come up with a system for not only generating these parameters automatically, but for relating them theoretically. That’s a path we’ve been loathe to tread, but access to funding for research in the field lies down that road, and we need to show our feet thereupon before the monetary gates will be opened to us.

Then there’s math and statistics. I’ve been looking at performance data from an earlier experiment, and trying to find a pattern of accuracy following particular patterns of problem presentation. I guess I need to learn some data mining and regression techniques to figure out the relationships. My lack of statistics background is holding me back, so I think I’m going to try to sit in on some classes next year.

If I still have a job…

PHD Comics: Science News Cycle

What is your favorite bible fairy tale? – Yahoo! Answers

Quotes used in The Millenium Project – 1 to 100

I was reading this article (Psychology Today: The Secrets of Happiness) and it occurred to me: they could have edited it down to one thing.

The Secret of Happiness is… be happy! That’s it! Just do it! All the rest of the advice are just techniques to trick yourself into having that feeling.

Dr. Kellman was telling the lab about some people he knew who died, and was fretting about death. I got the impression that he never really thought about it before, and that surprised me. I used to think about it all the time, until I got used to it. Sure I’m scared of death, both in an abstract way and in a very visceral way at the same time. But I don’t let it get in the way of my enjoyment of my life. Most people go to great lengths to distract themselves from the reality of mortality, even going so far as to invent “the afterlife” to make it more bearable. Come on, people. It’s just death.

There are more dead people than living, and their numbers are increasing.

God never gives you anything you can’t handle, unless of course you die of something…

I’ve probably written this before, but I feel the need to write it again.

Science is founded on the assumption that the world is both systematic and predictable. An experiment that isn’t reproducible is a failure. The only phenomena that the scientific method can address are those which fit in with the systematic and predictability presupposition. Many regular systems exist and can be described elegantly with mathematics, which is what has made science so popular and successful.

But just because the scientific method can’t tell us about unpredictability doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Chaos theory shows us that even in simple deterministic systems with a positive feedback loop, even the tiniest variation in initial conditions will be magnified until it dominates the system, making it unpredictable in a practical sense. Weather is like this, and that’s why long-term weather forecasting is a fool’s game. We can only make short-term predictions because it takes time for the variations to be magnified.

Many people seem to adopt the view that all of the world is regular and predictable because that’s all science can really tell us about. This is a comforting notion but unfortunately it requires ignoring a lot of data. Scientists call this data “noise”.

Atheist Prayer

Our brains, which art in our heads, treasured be thy name. Thy reasoning come. Thy best you can do be done on earth as it is. Give us this day new insight to help us resolve conflicts and ease pain. And lead us not into supernatural explanations, but deliver us from denial of logic. For thine is the kingdom of reason, and even though thy powers are limited, and you’re not always glorious, you are the best evolutionary adaptations we have for helping this earth now and forever and ever. So be it.

This subject was all the rage back in the early days of the GW Bush Presidency. One of his aides differentiated his position from the “Reality-based” position, implying that they work according to their own beliefs and that shapes the world to the way they believe it is. I always had a big problem with that, and apparently Penn Gillette has a problem with it too.

BTW. Penn is one of my heroes. Atheist Libertarian Musician Magician.

I’ve realized that becoming a father has caused real changes in me.

• I’m much more security-conscious
• I’m willing to sacrifice sleep in order to have time to myself
• I’m more worried about death

I’ve been sick for a few days now. Nothing serious, just some congestion. Well, a lot of congestion. In fact, I’m a snot factory. A booger explosion. Keep clear.

I had a nap yesterday afternoon, and while waking up from that sleep I had not so much a dream but a fear. I was afraid of being dead. Writing it down now makes it seem so trivial, but I felt a deep fear of never having access to memories or sensations again. What else is life but memory and sensation?

Oh yes: anticipation, plans, and goals. These seem to be important components of life, or at least of staying alive and being successful as a reproducing organism and/or a member of a society. We have goals relating to whatever our function is, we make plans to achieve those goals, and we try to anticipate the consequences of our actions in order to formulate the steps of our plans. Unless of course we’re stupid, in which case we take steps that aren’t likely to take us to our goals.

There’s a popular saying that insanity is defined as expecting different results from the same repeated action. I have a problem with this, and not just at the superficial level where there are hidden variables or probability waves or whatever that can really cause different results from repeated actions. My problem is that this isn’t what I think of as insanity – it’s more like stupidity. More generally, stupidity is choosing actions that are not likely to bring about the achievement of your goals, whatever those might really be.

Addiction is a sort of hard-wired stupidity. We get locked into a feedback loop with our rewards system. Normally, we assess our progress with our emotions. When we’re doing well, we feel good. When things are going poorly, we become angry, depressed, sad, frustrated, etc. Ideally, these negative feelings should motivate us to make changes and adapt to our new environment. Unfortunately, there are ways to suppress them and bring about positive emotions without making progressive changes. Drugs are a prime example. Use a drug and you feel good. Now the system that normally works to guide you to your goals has been sabotaged, and now your goal is to keep tricking it for as long as possible. Other things can do this as well, and they’re all things associated with addiction. Eating, drinking, sex, gambling, masturbation, etc. All of them are ways of managing feelings, but they all have potential negative consequences. When you get into the negative consequences but you maintain the behaviors anyway, that’s when the addiction becomes apparent.