Keith Olwell and Elizabeth Kiehner had an epiphany last year. At a TED talk, the two New York advertising executives learned that captive monkeys understand money, and that when faced with economic games they will behave in similar ways to humans. So if they can cope with money, how would they respond to advertising?
Showing posts tagged brains
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If you are a carrier of a particular set of genes, the probability that you will commit a violent crime is four times as high as it would be if you lacked those genes. You’re three times as likely to commit robbery, five times as likely to commit aggravated assault, eight times as likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times as likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. The overwhelming majority of prisoners carry these genes; 98.1 percent of death-row inmates do… As regards that dangerous set of genes, you’ve probably heard of them. They are summarized as the Y chromosome. If you’re a carrier, we call you a male.
The first advertising campaign for non-human primates
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Listen to the questions asked by philosophers but don’t be distracted by their answers.
Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness
Political Language: Limits of My Moral Imagination
Kwame Appiah: “What were they thinking?” we ask about our ancestors, but we know that, a century hence, our descendants will ask the same thing about us. Who knows what will strike them as strangest?
Lovely post and on my kinds of subjects! Give it a read.
I’ll share some thoughts on robots and free will but first give my predictions for future ethical embarassments. Giving in to the siren song of self-congratulation and hypocrisy, I’d go for some environmental issues such as overpopulation (having grandchildren who can be embarassed with you may be bad in itself), eating meat (particularly beef), raping the oceans and internal combustion engines (“Petrol, what was that all about?”); non-human animal rights and the arrogance of thinking that, say, other great apes or cetaceans lack some important human faculty like consciousness; drugs prohibition, which will be looked back on in the same way as 1920s alcohol prohibition; a variety of sexual uptightness; religion and superstition…
I’ll be sure, Ilya, to argue with you about human ‘enhancement’ at a later date as I’ve also read some Sandel. Modifying unborn childen is controversial (as is education) but I hope you’ll support one’s right to modify *oneself*, be that with nootropic drugs, decorations, surgery, electronics, or some futuristic gene therapy.
As for things I may have badly misjudged:
- I’d be displeased to find that those liberal attitudes towards the place of sex, drugs or enhancement in society turned out to be bad for us all.
- I imagine I could be made to very guilty for not giving up flying. For example, I’m set to go to Australia this year but in going to see the Great Barrier Reef, I’m actualy helping to drive corals to extinction through global warming and ocean acidification. Madness?
- I think it’s conceivable that having too much faith in democracy could in future go out of fashion. China seem to be progressing very well without it.
- The grandchildren may also not be pleased with the way we treat neurological ‘disorders’. Often these people are not ‘diseased’ but simply extremes of neurodiversity.
- To go beyond ethics, I’m sure Physics has some surprises in store that I might by then be too old to truly accept. I’d be unhappy to relinquish my belief that the big bang wasn’t an absolute beginning, or that there isn’t a multiverse in the way that it’s popularly envisioned.
Most of all, if I have any grandchildren they’ll probably be mostly embarassed by all my blog posts, and will flippantly read bits out at future family meals (if Tumblr has solved its issues by then!)! They might seriously be embarassed by the reckless abandon of how much we share online, or how attached to technology we are; but I very much doubt it.
To get back to Battlestar Galactica and robots… with the development of AI personal assistants, or avatars that welcome you when you get home, or human looking robots and sex dolls, Love and Sex with Robots seems likely to become a hugely divisive issue and I don’t know where I’ll stand. Human minds aren’t perfect: they could fall in love with chatbots, let alone an artificial pretty face and soothing voice. Sex sells but will love? But as for robot marriage, which some see on the horizon, I can’t yet see the point.
Will these or other robots get beyond a ‘mere’ appearance of interests and agency? Ilya says that “Robots and free will don’t mix.” I’m convinced that the whole idea of free will is, frankly, bollocks and that our actions are determined by everything that has happened in the past. But that’s another argument. For now, what’s so difficult about creating a being with ‘free will’? People do it quite regularly. What if we grew a human brain in an otherwise mechanical body? Or what if we made artificial neurons that replicated the function of human ones, and assembled a humanoid brain from these? If that’s still - even after some education - just an automaton then aren’t we all? And that’s generously assuming that a working mind needs to be built from neurons; isn’t it conceivable that at least some groups of those cells could be replaced by a different kind of machine, or by a few lines of code?
Frakkin’ cylons.
Music and cool graphs are my cocaine
Listening to a favorite pop song or classic rock hit can trigger the same chemical reactions in the body as having sex, eating good food or taking drugs…
A team of scientists from Montreal’s McGill University found that the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine was released when people listened to their favorite tunes, the newspaper reported.
Neuroscientist Robert Zatorre, who led the research, said the findings helped explain why music was important throughout history. He said it was well-known that dopamine is produced when people eat and have sex, reinforcing acts essential to survival.
“For reasons that we don’t entirely understand, somehow music was able to kick in with the same system, and that gives it power that it might not otherwise have,” Zatorre said. [Fox News]
Check out the graph below (c) which shows activity in two brain areas against time while subjects listen to music [from Nature Neuroscience]. ‘Experience’ is the section of a track that gives them ‘chills’ and ‘anticipation’ is the music just before it. Given that the subjects’ choices of music included Yann Tiersen, Tiesto, various classical pieces and even Explosions in the Sky’s ‘First Breath After Coma’, I’m not surprised they got such a kick! Now I’ll have to go listen to them: just one more hit, I promise.
Here’s the abstract of the paper if you’re neuroscientifically inclined:
Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. Using the neurochemical specificity of [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography scanning, combined with psychophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system activity, we found endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening. To examine the time course of dopamine release, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging with the same stimuli and listeners, and found a functional dissociation: the caudate was more involved during the anticipation and the nucleus accumbens was more involved during the experience of peak emotional responses to music. These results indicate that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system. Notably, the anticipation of an abstract reward can result in dopamine release in an anatomical pathway distinct from that associated with the peak pleasure itself. Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.
BMJ Blogs - Richard Smith: Now happiness is declared a disease
“It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains—that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.”
Atheists know more about religion than religious people
(In America, at least)
Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.
…The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.
…“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge.”
There’s a lot I don’t know about religions, as I can’t spare the time to learn the details of all 4000+ of them, but I did at least know the following!:
¶ Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation.
¶ Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.
That suggests to me that there an awful lot of people who blindly accept the religion they inherit while not even learning the basics of what it’s about, let alone what views others have. I hope this is just an American thing as it would be painful to consider a world full of such narrow-minded people, apparently never instilled with any curiosity or questioning spirit.
45% of people surveyed know the names of the four gospels, 27% know that Indonesia is mostly Muslim (the biggest Muslim population in the world, in fact), 54% know the Koran is the Islamic holy book… (Pew)
It’s worth mentioning here the interesting results of (peer-reviewed) IQ & Belief studies. Anything to do with IQ as a measure is hugely controversial (and even more so on the scale of whole countries) and the authors may be biased, but here are the numbers: atheists are on average 6 IQ points above those of ‘dogmatic persuasions’; highly statistically significant correlation between atheism rates and level of intelligence in countries;
“I’m not saying that believing in God makes you dumber. My hypothesis is that people with a low intelligence are more easily drawn toward religions, which give answers that are certain, while people with a high intelligence are more skeptical”
I think this study is really interesting:
…suggests that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences (such as liberalism and atheism and, for men, sexual exclusivity) than less intelligent individuals
[two studies show that] adolescent and adult intelligence significantly increases adult liberalism, atheism, and men’s (but not women’s) value on sexual exclusivity.
“Evolutionarily novel” preferences and values are those that humans are not biologically designed to have and our ancestors probably did not possess. In contrast, those that our ancestors had for millions of years are “evolutionarily familiar.” The thinking is that we “are evolutionarily designed to be conservative, caring mostly about their family and friends” but that with enough general intelligence, some can come up with the novel solutions of “being liberal [and/or] caring about an indefinite number of genetically unrelated strangers they never meet or interact with”.
Back to the subject of breadth of religious knowledge, I was entertained the other night to learn that Mohammed was taken to Jerusalem and the heavens on a winged horse, or Buraq (to be fair, this is in the Hadith rather than the Qur’an, and “‘some scholars say it happened spiritually through a dream or metaphorical vision”). Bellerophon and Pegasus anyone? I’m tempted to take up ancient Greek religion but for some reason (reason, in fact) people wouldn’t accept that I could believe in something so ridiculous. Funny that.
(Source: The New York Times)
