Bogon Flux - A peek through the cracks in the dominant paradigm

Monday, September 11, 2006

Afternoons and coffee spoons, unabridged

As I sip my breve here in the '10 Speed Coffee Shop ' up here in the Hood River Heights, I ponder the nature of life, the universe, and everything. I'm Reading "A Beginners Guide to Constructing the Universe" A recommended read for anyone who cares (dares) to ponder such things.

On the smaller scale, this is Sep 11, the anniversary of the destruction of the WTC towers. On this note, I would like to mention another book I have recently finished, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins. Anyone who wishes a more comprehensive understanding of September 11 or of foreign policy in general would do well to read this book.

It is an insider 'tell all' book on international trade and extortion, and if you wish to understand the news behind the news, the information contained is critical and hard to find. For those among us who are a bit paranoid that the corporo-kleptocracy is watching, buy it cash at a bookstore. Wear a big hat.

John Perkins was instrumental in brokering the post oil embargo Saudi Development Deal with the House Of Saud, as well as many, many other economic development programs around the world. The importance of his insight and experience to understanding recent and current events is on a par with that of Robert S. McNamera. Read it.

If you haven't already, see The Fog of War: Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara .

Then take out your copy of "Fahrenheit 911" and burn it.

Michael Moore is exactly the type of self agrandizing greedy bastard that he likes to make his mocumentaries about. He distorts and makes a grotesque mockery of important questions for cold, hard cash. You don't see him donating the proceeds to his movies to the Flint town Hall, now do you? His assumption that the audience will see him as a benevolent hero is a vulgar insult to our intelligence, a profanity of arrogance.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Contemporary Philosophy : Creation vs Creation

I find it amusing if troubling that there are so many otherwise brilliant souls caught up in the "creation vs. evolution" conflict.

First, things like this are articles of faith. If you choose to adopt the 6000 year planetary age as an article of faith, so be it. That is your choice. End of story. Same deal if you choose to adopt a different theory of genesis, as an article of faith. Now, keep your faith, and keep it to yourself.

On the other hand, from a point of view of investigation, view the empirical (not faith-only) evidence, and draw your conclusion based on the evidence. If you think that this conclusion might conflict with your faith, either forgo the investigation, or revise your faith.

Simple. You have no more right to shove your article of faith down my throat than I have to shove mine down yours.

Now - about school.....

Public Schools, being publicly funded, should be inherently secular. They should not actively interfere in any way with the practice of any religion, so long as its practice does not interfere with the teaching of the students.

The school should teach the ideas and the theories that are best supported by the proponderance of the physical evidence, without regard to political or religious considerations, including any articles of faith. An article of faith is retained by the holder in the face of contradiction, or it was never an article of faith at all. If a religion teaches that the sky is orange, but the preponderance of the evidence supports that the sky is blue, the school shal not yield. Likewise with other scientific observations and theories. If this conflicts with articles of faith - as it surely will - then those who hold those articles should be prepared to face these challenges, quetly keeping their article of faith alive and to themselves.

If the prevailing science turns out to be wrong, as it often does, that truth will become known in due time. Such is the nature of science and the act of observation and learning. Simple. Students must not only learn their faith (at home) but also the primary scientific theories, and also, perhaps most importantly, to tolerate others points of view and their non disruptive worship or practice of faith. Thus, a prayer is tolerated by the atheist, a student bowing to mecca is tolerated by the christian, and so on. If it does not concern you, leave it be.

On the other hand, if you do not wish to send your child to a secular school, send him or her to a private one, or teach them yourself. Schools cannot be expected to teach multiple, often opposing viewpoints on articles of faith. Teach your children as you choose, and if you have done a decent job then they will not lose their faith just because they encounter an alternate point of view. Too poor to afford private school? Teach better at home. Too dumb to teach at home? Maybe your child is better off being taught elsewhere. If your faith is so strong, why are you being overcome by a tiny problem such as this? Faith indeed!

As for the Christians, and our articles of faith, I have the following to say:

As a Christian, I cannot fathom why no one seems to know that this debate (over the creation) was already put to rest around 400AD, long before it started, by a scholar of scripture and philosophy known as St. Augustine.

But first, lets take a look at what has happened to create the Church as we know it today.

The true irony in this story lies in the split of the Protestants from the Catholic church. Politics aside (and the politics were huge in this split) I agree in principle with the Protestants, that each man can read the scriptures and be enlightened, we do not need a Pope to act as go-between, and we are generally intelligent enough to not go running amok with The Book.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, idiocy crept in. Now we have entire branches of the church that have "forgotten" what the Bible is, and its context among the rest of holy scripture. The trend is towards extreme literalism that by ignoring the genesis of the Bible itself manages to take individual verses grossly out of context. They do this by ignoring the simple, irrefutable and provable fact that the Bible is a subset of scripture, that there are variances in translation form the original, and that parts of all modern bibles have been subject to manipulation and spin since they were first revised, approved, and made "official", most often by politicians! (king James ring a bell? Helloo-oo!!!!)

Compounding the irony, these rouge factions - and here I refer to mainstream U.S. Christianity as we know it today - only literalize the passages that they find convenient, passing other passages off as parable, not to be taken literally. So they then take the position of the Old Church, telling the common man how to believe, how to interpret, to the point that some 84.3% of church-goers never actually have studied the bible except in the context of being lectured in church. (+/- 3.3% potential sampling error) but unlike the Old Church, they do this outside the context of knowledge and study of the majority of our scriptural heritage.

I suppose it is the human condition to prefer that others do the work for you, and perhaps the Old Church and the New are not so far off considering that by definition half of the population has an intelligence below the average. (That thought scares the crap out of me on the highway).

Still I am thankful that I can read, study, and worship as I see fit without being hanged from the neck until dead, so for that I applaud the protestant movement, regardless of the eventualities involved.

Fellow Christians, Please try to remember that our holy scripture is a subset of a multitude of scripture thought to be most divine and most relevant. If you don't understand this or don't believe me, please educate yourself on this point before refuting it. Go see for yourself the scrolls, the tablets, the papyri written through divine inspiration. Only a tiny fraction ended up in the bible as we now know it. And that which made the cut has been massaged by kings, translated several times, and even the meanings of some of the -English- words have changed over the last century.

It is supreme testimony to His wisdom and divinity that despite the pruning, the forming, the translations and the omissions, the message remains wholly intact, undiminished in form or fact. Those who see only the words (which have -not- escaped the molestation of men) so often fail to see the message, so focused are they upon the fragile text itself. Classic Forest for the trees syndrome.

So they fight over which day is the Sabbath, what was meant in this passage or that, ad nauseam. So foolish, so childish - so very - human.

Anyway, Back to St. Augustine, tortured soul that he was.

Saint Augustine determined that based on his understanding of the writings, in Genesis, god makes all things in type in six days. That is, the archetypes, the divine ideas from which all things in fact spring were created in genesis. Remember, only a fraction of the divine writings made it into the bible - if it was all in there it would take twenty or so years to read it once through, and much of it has not been translated.

St Augustine came to this conclusion based only on what was put in front of him in scripture. There was no competing theory of evolution in 400 AD. Lacking the time or resources to duplicate his research, I see no reason to doubt it.

God authors not confusion. Things are as they appear, only more wondrous the closer you look. And we can look very, very close these days, with sophisticated instruments and powerful abilities to interpret information. Our knowledge dwarfs that of men only a few hundred years ago. God means for us to use our minds, to trust our intellects, to learn and grow in the glory of the Lord. He did not give us intelligence to deceive us, nor did he give us eyes but for to reveal the world to us.

Imagine a man, 4000 years ago, being told by God's messenger, about the creation - lets say, the big bang. First, there is no word for universe in his language. There is no concept of the solar system, the galaxy, or any of the many concepts we all understand. There is no idea for atom. nor particle, nor light (except for the perception of light) for that matter. Only through metaphor can it be described, so in metaphor it is written.

To take this verse or that, edited, translated, and written down by simple people -that lacked the cultural context to support that which was described to them- in total literal context is ridiculous folly at best, blackest of black heresy at worst.

Intelligent design...

To me, there is -no more intelligent form- of design than forming a universe from nothing, then adjusting the laws of physics so that the -inevitable- result is precisely what you desire - thus, you design without designing, for you have designed and created a universe that -designs itself according to your plan-.

And, just in case you aren’t totally prescient in the traditional sense, as a four dimensional being all you would have to do to make adjustments would be to nudge a few proto-atoms in the early phases of the "big kaboom" and the configuration of the fully formed universe would be drastically altered.

Got a problem species on your favorite planet? Go back to the beginning of the genetic line and nip it in the bud.

Got dinosaur infestation wiping out your favorites, the mammals? Easy fix. Nudge a few atoms twenty billion years ago to form a star that alters the eventual course of an asteroid that wipes them out, and the hardy mammals flourish according to plan.

To me, -that- is intelligent design.

It is the height of arrogance to assume that God must design as we design, build as we build, to think as we think.

It belittles the Creator to assume that (he) had to bother with all the details. If you are truly omnipotent, all you have to do is know the result you desire, and through your magnificently intelligent design of the universe, your will is expressed in fact and form, without having to bother with the details.

Like making seeds, instead of making trees.

Just my $.02 worth ;)

Sunday, May 14, 2006

Dark knowledge

I think it is safe to say that for all of our aquired knowledge, there is more that we do not know than that which we do know. If this is indeed true, It follows then that the bulk of all which can be known lies within the realm of that which we do not know that we do not know - that dark body of knowledge within which we are completely unaware even of of our ignorance.

Ouch. If that doesn't knock you down a couple of notches, nothing will. Perhaps our arrogance is eclipsed only by our ignorance.

Like the astronomer peering into the depths of the ancient universe, we can see that this knowledge must be there - we can see its effect within the cryptic machinations of the universe - yet we cannot see it. We cannot measure it. We cannot accurately describe, quantify or delineate it except by what it is not.

Unlike dark matter or its even stranger cousin, dark energy, dark knowledge is within our grasp if only we can break down our own memetic constructs to the point where the "holes" become apparent. The "holes" are the unthought thoughts, the missing concepts hidden in the gaps or falacies of our otherwise unexamined network of thoughts. Through this or other methods, exposed are the windows to all that lies truly "outside the box", to knowledge that cannot be arrived at only by building upon the knowledge within previous human experience. Dark Knowledge is connected to the trunk of all human experience only by some extensive branch that our ancient ancestors never explored, if it is connected at all.

To see through the window is not enough. To illuminate truly new knowledge, the window must be breached, the void traversed so that a bridge can be built to connect it back in to the trunk of cumulative human experience. This is precisely what Einstein did when he quantified his theory of relativity - he brought that knowledge out of the darkness by connecting his "vision through the window" to mathematical and physical concepts that were already understood. He had seen the answer long before he had the knowledge to substantiate his vision. He did not progress methodicaly from the known to the unknown. Instead, he grasped a truth well outside the box of previous human thought or experience and proceeded to build a bridge back to the known world.

It is thought provoking to note that civilizations may rise and fall, or simply vanish - and with them goes the threads connecting their knowledge to ours. In many cases, their "tools" (at least the ones we recognize as such) bear silent wisdom to this knowledge, effectively bridging the divide. But what of a society that develops an entirely different concept of tool, of technology? We could not hope to understand what we were looking at from an archeological perspective, and civilizations that may have been great, even transformational, could be easily dismissed as trivial if they did not leave behind comprehensible physical artifacts.

There is more to this than meets the eye.

A potential case - in - point of dark knowledge follows, but first I ask the reader to assess their definition of the concepts known as "tool" and "technology". We have a very limited view of these ideas, and this in particular may be blinding us to a more complete understanding of our consensual reality.

The expansion of the idea of "toolness" may be key.

To what I will not yet attempt to convey.

_________________________________________________________

Quantum Honeybees

How could bees of little brain come up with anything as complex as a dance language? The answer could lie not in biology but in six-dimensional math and the bizarre world of quantum mechanics.

By Adam Frank
DISCOVER Vol. 18 No. 11 | November 1997 | Astronomy & Physics

Honeybees don’t have much in the way of brains. Their inch-long bodies hold at most a few million neurons. Yet with such meager mental machinery honeybees sustain one of the most intricate and explicit languages in the animal kingdom. In the darkness of the hive, bees manage to communicate the precise direction and distance of a newfound food source, and they do it all in the choreography of a dance. Scientists have known of the bee’s dance language for more than 70 years, and they have assembled a remarkably complete dictionary of its terms, but one fundamental question has stubbornly remained unanswered: How do they do it? How do these simple animals encode so much detailed information in such a varied language? Honeybees may not have much brain, but they do have a secret.

This secret has vexed Barbara Shipman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester, ever since she was a child. I grew up thinking about bees, she says. My dad worked for the Department of Agriculture as a bee researcher. My brothers and I would stop at his office, and sometimes he would show us the bees. I remember my father telling me about the honeybee’s dance when I was about nine years old. And in high school I wrote a paper on the medicinal benefits of honey. Her father kept his books on honeybees on a shelf in her room. I’m not sure why, she says. It may have just been a convenient space. I remember looking at a lot of these books, especially the one by Karl von Frisch.

Von Frisch’s Dance Language and Orientation of Bees was some four decades in the making. By the time his papers on the bee dance were collected and published in 1965, there was scarcely an entomologist in the world who hadn’t been both intrigued and frustrated by his findings. Intrigued because the phenomenon Von Frisch described was so startlingly complex; frustrated because no one had a clue as to how bees managed the trick. Von Frisch had watched bees dancing on the vertical face of the honeycomb, analyzed the choreographic syntax, and articulated a vocabulary. When a bee finds a source of food, he realized, it returns to the hive and communicates the distance and direction of the food to the other worker bees, called recruits. On the honeycomb, which Von Frisch referred to as the dance floor, the bee performs a waggle dance, which in outline looks something like a coffee bean--two rounded arcs bisected by a central line. The bee starts by making a short straight run, waggling side to side and buzzing as it goes. Then it turns left (or right) and walks in a semicircle back to the starting point. The bee then repeats the short run down the middle, makes a semicircle to the opposite side, and returns once again to the starting point.

It is easy to see why this beautiful and mysterious phenomenon captured Shipman’s young and mathematically inclined imagination. The bee’s finely tuned choreography is a virtuoso performance of biologic information processing. The central waggling part of the dance is the most important. To convey the direction of a food source, the bee varies the angle the waggling run makes with an imaginary line running straight up and down. One of Von Frisch’s most amazing discoveries involves this angle. If you draw a line connecting the beehive and the food source, and another line connecting the hive and the spot on the horizon just beneath the sun, the angle formed by the two lines is the same as the angle of the waggling run to the imaginary vertical line. The bees, it appears, are able to triangulate as well as a civil engineer.

Direction alone is not enough, of course--the bees must also tell their hive mates how far to go to get to the food. The shape or geometry of the dance changes as the distance to the food source changes, Shipman explains. Move a pollen source closer to the hive and the coffee-bean shape of the waggle dance splits down the middle. The dancer will perform two alternating waggling runs symmetric about, but diverging from, the center line. The closer the food source is to the hive, the greater the divergence between the two waggling runs.

If that sounds almost straightforward, what happens next certainly doesn’t. Move the food source closer than some critical distance and the dance changes dramatically: the bee stops doing the waggle dance and switches into the round dance. It runs in a small circle, reversing and going in the opposite direction after one or two turns or sometimes after only half a turn. There are a number of variations between species.

Von Frisch’s work on the bee dance is impressive, but it is largely descriptive. He never explained why the bees use this peculiar vocabulary and not some other. Nor did he (or could he) explain how small- brained bees manage to encode so much information. The dance of the honeybee is special among animal communication systems, says Shipman. It conveys concise, quantitative information in an abstract, symbolic way. You have to wonder what makes the dance happen. Bees don’t have enough intelligence to know what they are doing. How do they know the dance in the first place? Calling it instinct or some other word just substitutes one mystery for another.

Shipman entered college as a biochemistry major and even spent some time working in a biology lab studying the hemolymph--the blood--of honeybee larvae, but she quickly moved her interest in bees to the side. During my freshman year, she says, I became more attracted to the beauty and rigor of mathematics. She switched her major and eventually went on to graduate school and to a professorship at the University of Rochester. For several years it seemed as though she had wandered a long way from her childhood fascination.

Then, taking an unlikely route, she found herself once again confronting the mysteries of bees head-on. While working on her doctoral thesis, on an obscure type of mathematics known only to a small coterie of researchers well-versed in the minutiae of geometry, she stumbled across what just might be the key to the secrets of the bee’s dance.

Shipman’s work concerned a set of geometric problems associated with an esoteric mathematical concept known as a flag manifold. In the jargon of mathematics, manifold means space. But don’t let that deceptively simple definition lull you into a false sense of security. Mathematicians have as many kinds of manifolds as a French baker has bread. Some manifolds are flat, some are curved, some are twisted, some wrap back on themselves, some go on forever. The surface of a sphere is a manifold, says Shipman. So is the surface of a bagel--it’s called a torus. The shape of a manifold determines what kinds of objects (curves, figures, surfaces) can live within its confines. Two different types of loops, for example, live in the surface of a torus--one wraps around the outside, the other goes through the middle, and there is no way to transform the first into the second without breaking the loop. In contrast, there is only one type of loop that lives on a sphere.

Mathematicians like to examine different manifolds the way antiques dealers browse through curio shops--always exploring, always looking for unusual characteristics that expand their understanding of numbers or geometry. The difficult part about exploring a manifold, however, is that mathematicians don’t always confine them to the three dimensions of ordinary experience. A manifold can have two dimensions like the surface of a screen, three dimensions like the inside of an empty box, four dimensions like the space-time of our Einsteinian universe, or even ten or a hundred dimensions. The flag manifold (which got its name because some imaginative mathematician thought it had a shape like a flag on a pole) happens to have six dimensions, which means mathematicians can’t visualize all the two-dimensional objects that can live there. That does not mean, though, that they cannot see the objects’ shadows.

One of the more effective tricks for visualizing objects with more than three dimensions is to project or map them onto a space that has fewer dimensions (usually two or three). A topographic map, in which three-dimensional mountains get squashed onto a two-dimensional page, is a type of projection. Likewise, the shadow of your hand on the wall is a two- dimensional projection of your three-dimensional hand.

One day Shipman was busy projecting the six-dimensional residents of the flag manifold onto two dimensions. The particular technique she was using involved first making a two-dimensional outline of the six dimensions of the flag manifold. This is not as strange as it may sound. When you draw a circle, you are in effect making a two-dimensional outline of a three- dimensional sphere. As it turns out, if you make a two-dimensional outline of the six-dimensional flag manifold, you wind up with a hexagon. The bee’s honeycomb, of course, is also made up of hexagons, but that is purely coincidental. However, Shipman soon discovered a more explicit connection. She found a group of objects in the flag manifold that, when projected onto a two-dimensional hexagon, formed curves that reminded her of the bee’s recruitment dance. The more she explored the flag manifold, the more curves she found that precisely matched the ones in the recruitment dance. I wasn’t looking for a connection between bees and the flag manifold, she says. I was just doing my research. The curves were nothing special in themselves, except that the dance patterns kept emerging.

Delving more deeply into the flag manifold, Shipman dredged up a variable, which she called alpha, that allowed her to reproduce the entire bee dance in all its parts and variations. Alpha determines the shape of the curves in the 6-D flag manifold, which means it also controls how those curves look when they are projected onto the 2-D hexagon. Infinitely large values of alpha produce a single line that cuts the hexagon in half. Large values of alpha produce two lines very close together. Decrease alpha and the lines splay out, joined at one end like a V. Continue to decrease alpha further and the lines form a wider and wider V until, at a certain value, they each hit a vertex of the hexagon. Then the curves change suddenly and dramatically. When alpha reaches a critical value, explains Shipman, the projected curves become straight line segments lying along opposing faces of the hexagon.

The smooth divergence of the splayed lines and their abrupt transition to discontinuous segments are critical--they link Shipman’s curves to those parts of the recruitment dance that bees emphasize with their waggling and buzzing. Biologists know that only certain parts of the dance convey information, she says. In the waggle dance, it’s the diverging waggling runs and not the return loops. In the circle dance it’s short straight segments on the sides of the loops. Shipman’s mathematics captures both of these characteristics, and the parameter alpha is the key. If different species have different sensitivities to alpha, then they will change from the waggle dances to round dances when the food source is at different distances.

If Shipman is correct, her mathematical description of the recruitment dance would push bee studies to a new level. The discovery of mathematical structure is often the first and critical step in turning what is merely a cacophony of observations into a coherent physical explanation. In the sixteenth century Johannes Kepler joined astronomy’s pantheon of greats by demonstrating that planetary orbits follow the simple geometric figure of the ellipse. By articulating the correct geometry traced by the heavenly bodies, Kepler ended two millennia of astronomical speculation as to the configuration of the heavens. Decades after Kepler died, Isaac Newton explained why planets follow elliptical orbits by filling in the all-important physics--gravity. With her flag manifold, Shipman is like a modern-day Kepler, offering, in her words, everything in a single framework. I have found a mathematics that takes all the different forms of the dance and embraces them in a single coherent geometric structure.

Shipman is not, however, content to play Kepler. You can look at this idea and say, ‘That’s a nice geometric description of the dance, very pretty,’ and leave it like that, she says. But there is more to it. When you have a physical phenomenon like the honeybee dance, and it follows a mathematical structure, you have to ask what are the physical laws that are causing it to happen.

At this point Shipman departs from safely grounded scholarship and enters instead the airy realm of speculation. The flag manifold, she notes, in addition to providing mathematicians with pure joy, also happens to be useful to physicists in solving some of the mathematical problems that arise in dealing with quarks, tiny particles that are the building blocks of protons and neutrons. And she does not believe the manifold’s presence both in the mathematics of quarks and in the dance of honeybees is a coincidence. Rather she suspects that the bees are somehow sensitive to what’s going on in the quantum world of quarks, that quantum mechanics is as important to their perception of the world as sight, sound, and smell.

Say a bee flies around, finds a source of food, and heads straight back to the hive to tell its colleagues. How does it perceive where that food is? What notation can it use to remember? What terms can it use to translate that memory into directions for its fellow bees? One way, the way we big-brained humans would be most comfortable with, would be to use landmarks--fly ten yards toward the big rock, turn left, duck under the boughs of the pine tree, and see the flowers growing near the trunk. Another way, one that seems to be more in line with what bees actually do, would be to use physical characteristics that adequately identify the site, such as variations in Earth’s magnetic field or in the polarization of the sun’s light.

Researchers have in fact already established that the dance is sensitive to such properties. Experiments have documented, for example, that local variations in Earth’s magnetic field alter the angle of the waggling runs. In the past, scientists have attributed this to the presence of magnetite, a magnetically active mineral, in the abdomen of bees. Shipman, however, along with many other researchers, believes there is more to it than little magnets in the bees’ cells. But she tends not to have much professional company when she reveals what she thinks is responsible for the bees’ response. Ultimately magnetism is described by quantum fields, she says. I think the physics of the bees’ bodies, their physiology, must be constructed such that they’re sensitive to quantum fields--that is, the bee perceives these fields through quantum mechanical interactions between the fields and the atoms in the membranes of certain cells.

What exactly does it mean to say that the bees interact with quantum fields? A quantum field is a sort of framework within which particles play out their existences. And, rather than assigning an electron to one position in space at one particular time, you instead talk about all the different places the electron could possibly be. You can loosely refer to this collection of all possible locations as a field smeared out across space and time. If you decide to check the electron’s position by observing it, the interaction between your measuring device and the field makes the electron appear to be a single coherent object. In this sense, the observer is said to disturb the quantum mechanical nature of the electron.

There is some research to support the view that bees are sensitive to effects that occur only on a quantum-mechanical scale. One study exposed bees to short bursts of a high-intensity magnetic field and concluded that the bees’ response could be better explained as a sensitivity to an effect known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or nmr, an acronym commonly associated with a medical imaging technique. nmr occurs when an electromagnetic wave impinges on the nuclei of atoms and flips their orientation. nmr is considered a quantum mechanical effect because it takes place only if each atom absorbs a particular size packet, or quantum, of electromagnetic energy.

This research, however, doesn’t address the issue of how bees turn these quantum-mechanical perceptions into an organized dance ritual. Shipman’s mathematics does. To process quantum mechanical information and communicate it to others, the bee would not only have to possess equipment sensitive to the quantum-mechanical world; to come up with the appropriate recruitment dance, it would have to perform some kind of calculation similar to what Shipman did with her flag manifold. Assuming that the typical honeybee is not quite intelligent enough to make the calculations, how does the bee come up with the flag manifold as an organizing principle for its dance? Shipman doesn’t claim to have the answer, but she is quick to point out that the flag manifold is common both to the bee dance and to the geometry of quarks. Perhaps, she speculates, bees possess some ability to perceive not only light and magnetism but quarks as well.

The notion that bees can perceive quarks is hard enough for many physicists to swallow, but that’s not even the half of it. Physicists have theorized that quarks are constantly popping up in the vacuum of empty space. This is possible because the vacuum is pervaded by something called the zero-point energy field--a quantum field in which on average no particles exist, but which can have local fluctuations that cause quarks to blink in and out of existence. Shipman believes that bees might sense these fleeting quarks, and use them--somehow--to create the complex and peculiar structure of their dance.

Now here’s the rub. The flag manifold geometry is an abstraction. It is useful in describing quarks not as the single coherent objects that physicists can measure in the real world but as unobserved quantum fields. Once a physicist tries to detect a quark--by bombarding it with another particle in a high-energy accelerator--the flag manifold geometry is lost. If bees are using quarks as a script for their dance, they must be able to observe the quarks not as single coherent objects but as quantum fields. If Shipman’s hunch is correct and bees are able to touch the quantum world of quarks without breaking it, not only would it shake up the field of biology, but physicists would be forced to reinterpret quantum mechanics as well.

Shipman is the first to admit that she is a long way from proving her hypothesis. The mathematics implies that bees are doing something with quarks, she says. I’m not saying they definitely are. I’m just throwing it out as a possibility. And when she publishes her research, probably sometime next year, no doubt many scientists will be turned off by her dragging quarks and quantum mechanics into the picture.

The joining of mathematics and biology is a fascinating endeavor and is just getting under way, says William Faris, a mathematician at the University of Arizona. Connecting quantum mechanics directly to biology is much more speculative. I frankly am skeptical that the bee dance is related to quantum mechanics. The mathematics she uses may be related to a completely different explanation of the bee dance. This is the universality of mathematics. To venture into quantum mechanics may be a distraction.

Shipman isn’t the first scientist to go out on a limb trying to link biology to quantum mechanics. Physicist Roger Penrose of Oxford University has postulated that nerve cells have incredibly tiny tubes that serve as quantum mechanical detectors, and other physicists have expressed similar ideas, but they are by no means widely accepted.

It is risky for a young scientist to take on a radical theory. Championing an unproved or unpopular idea is a good way to put your academic career on permanent hold. My thesis adviser was worried, too, says Shipman. He was happy to know that I am beginning collaborations with biologists.

However, Shipman is too excited about the ideas to care about the risk. To make discoveries that cross disciplines, someone has to start. I know there is always resistance to new ideas, especially if you are approaching the problem from a different perspective. Sometimes theory comes before discovery and points the way toward the right questions to ask. I hope this research stimulates other researchers’ imaginations.

I found the following article thought provoking also.

Consciousness in Animals and People with Autism

Temple Grandin, PH.D. - October 1998
Department of Animal Science
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523 USA

Some scientists and philosophers believe that animals are not conscious and do not lead internal mental lives. They think animals are like robots which just respond to changes in the environment in mechanical ways. Others believe that animals have a form of "animal consciousness" which is totally different from human consciousness. This debate between philosophers and scientists has raged for decades. As a person with autism, my "autistic like" consciousness is different from normal people. I think in pictures and language is not used to form thoughts or make decisions. In this paper, I discuss my views of animal consciousness using comparisons from my experience with autism, and examples from a large body of scientific evidence on other neurological disorders which affect consciousness.

Selective Attention

Although people who are familiar with cats, dogs, horses, even cattle have no problem with the question of consciousness, scientific evidence indicates that there may be many different levels of consciousness in animals. In 1890, William James, the founder of modern psychology wrote; "consciousness grows more complex and intense the higher we rise in the animal kingdom." According to James, a relevant property of consciousness is the capacity of an animal to compare and selectively attend to experiences. As a visual thinker my ability to consciously compare experiences and make choices is less complex compared to people who use both visual knowledge and internal verbal dialog to make choices. In the following description of how I avoided a car accident, I explain how I use thinking in pictures to make conscious decisions. This example illustrates a level of consciousness that may be in some ways similar to consciousness in higher mammals. The near-accident occurred in fairly light traffic on a sunny day while I was driving to the airport on Interstate highway 25. Cruising along at 70 miles per hour in the southbound lane, I suddenly saw a huge bull elk running full speed across the northbound lanes. I knew I had to react quickly to avoid hitting him. Instantly, three pictures appeared in my mind. Each picture represented the end result of an option available to me. The first picture was of a car rear ending my car. I knew from experience that slamming on the brakes could cause this. The next picture was the elk smashing through my windshield. From my understanding of animal behavior, I knew that swerving or any sudden movement of my car might cause the elk to stop or slow down. The third picture was of the elk passing harmlessly in front of my car. In this picture I saw what would happen if I gently applied the brakes to slow down. These pictures were like the picture menus one can click on an Internet web page. They appeared in my mind one at a time, but all within one second. This was enough time for me to selectively compare the options and chose the slow down gradually picture. I immediately calculated the elk's trajectory and speed coming across the highway, and my speed and position in the southbound lane, and began to slowly apply the brakes. This choice prevented me from being rear ended, or having the elk crash through my windshield. The conscious choice was a visual process without the use of internal verbal dialog.

At the moment I became aware of the elk crossing the northbound lane, I resisted the urge to make a panic response and slam on the brakes. In just seconds, I evaluated the three pictures in my mind. To use computer jargon, I conducted a basic cost-benefit analysis of the options. After running a quick video like simulation of the elk passing harmlessly in front of my car, I simply clicked a mental mouse on the "slowing down gradually" picture. I made a conscious choice from visual simulations played in my mind In another mishap on the highway, my ability to make a conscious choice was overridden by sudden panic. I was driving along a section of straight level highway on an icy night when a sudden gust of wind caused the car to skid. In this situation, I did not have time to make a conscious decision. It seems that conscious behavior can only occur when there is time to think, whereas instincts, reflexes, and simple conditioned responses take over when there is no time to think. For example, a grazing animal suddenly being attacked or chased by a lion relies on instincts and reflexes. These behaviors may not be completely consciousness. However, when an approaching predator is far away, an animal has time to decide on the best evasive action. When I hit the patch of ice, reflexes took over and I lost the ability to make an appropriate response. No option pictures appeared in my mind which could be used for making a decision. Reflexively, I began swearing uncontrollably and jerking the wheel in the wrong direction as I was skidding off the highway. I had no time to recall what I had learned about steering into a skid. My car ended up on the median strip, and fortunately, neither of us were hurt.

Some people question why I had three visual choices instead of just one. This is due to my visual associative way of thinking. In everything I do I see different choices as pictures on a computer monitor in my imagination. My thinking is not linear. I have learned by interviewing highly verbal thinkers that their thoughts are in language and they do not consciously see choices. Language may be another layer of thinking which covers up the visual pictures. I have no purely abstract thoughts. I only have pictures.

The "autistic type" of consciousness I used in both near accidents may be in some ways similar to conscious processes some animals use when they encounter danger. In both animals and people, conscious processes may have evolved as mechanisms for both avoiding danger and finding food. In other words, consciousness evolved as a means of allowing higher mammals to perform intelligent, adaptive responses to challenges in their environment. Rather than always relying on reflexes, simple conditioned responses, or hard wired instinctual behavior patterns, consciousness allows animals to make choices between several different options. Although consciousness is important, in most animals both instinctive and reflexive behaviors are also important. The instinctive killing bite to the throat that most predators do, the reflexive response of a horse kicking at a predator on its heels, or the conditioned response of learning to avoid places that are full of predators, all evolved as mechanisms used for survival and may not require consciousness to perform. The questions of whether non-human animals have consciousness depends on what we mean by consciousness.

Orienting Response

On Thursdays, the garbage truck picks up trash in the neighborhood next to where Mark stables his horses. The moment the back up alarm sounds, all the horses turn and orient towards the sound. Like soldiers at attention, all the horses aligned their eyes, ears, head and body in the same direction. The orienting response is accompanied by increased heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. The orienting response is also the point when animals switch from unconscious behavior to consciousness. Both animals and people orient towards novel sounds. In the wild, animals orient and freeze when they hear or see something that might be dangerous. A deer that hears the rustling sound in the bushes instantly freezes and turns both it's eyes and ears towards the sound. A deer will turn and face the noise before it flees. The orienting response provides time for the animal brain to make a conscious decision instead of just acting on reflexes and instinct. During the orienting response, the deer can decide to either flee or continue grazing. When I avoided the elk on the highway, I had time to make a conscious choice. But, when I skidded on the ice, there was not enough time to make a conscious choice.

Research has shown that the brain takes longer to process conscious awareness of a stimulus compared to an unconscious reaction to it. Up to half a second is required for full conscious awareness to occur after a stimulus is applied to the brain. For example, if you touch a hot stove, an unconscious reflex controlled by your spinal cord has already pulled your hand away before you feel the pain. Conscious processing of incoming information takes more time than a simple response governed by a reflex. A zebra kicking at a lion is probably relying on reflexes, but a zebra that hears a far away sound which may signal danger has time to weigh his escape options.

From my own experience, I have felt the difference between an orienting response and a fear flight response. For twenty years I have taken anti-depressants to calm constant anxiety attacks. Before taking the medicine I would wake up at 3:00 in the morning with my heart pounding. I was ready to flee from non-existent danger. This occurs because my nervous system has defects that put in a flight or fight stage for no reason. The medication blocks the massive fear response, but it has no effect on my tendency to orient towards intermittent high pitched noise. If I hear a garbage truck backing up in the middle of the night I still orient towards it.

Simple Consciousness

Worker bees communicate the location of food sources by performing dances when they return to the hive. When the colony gets ready to swarm, the workers go out and scout for suitable cavities in trees or buildings to build a new hive. Is this conscious behavior? Scientists have successfully built robot insects which mimic many of the behaviors of insects such as crickets and roaches. Although social insects such as bees and ants perform more complex behaviors than crickets and roaches, electronic circuits have been designed which can learn to walk by using a hierarchy of simple circuits. Scientists have also designed computer circuits that evolve and design themselves, or do amazing things such as compose Mozart like music. These circuits will often behave in ways that look intelligent, but they are definitely not conscious. None of the electronic components are conscious. They are based on physical principles. Although the animal brain is not the same as an electronic computer, I agree with writers such as Roger Penrose, and Daniel Dennett, that if improvements in computing continue at the present rate for a few for decades, it will possible to build a machine that simulates the way a human brain works.

For me, it is difficult to accept that individual bees are conscious. Could it possible that bees are more like elements in a biological computer? Perhaps the entire colony has a kind of collective consciousness where individual bees are like clusters of neurons in the brain, or electronic components in a computer. The creators of Star Trek came up with a scenario where humans loose their individual consciousness and become like bees in a hive. Called the Borg, their mission was to assimilate all life into the collective consciousness. By implanting electrodes in the brains of captured prisoners, everyone's thoughts are transmitted into everybody else's brain. Bach brain becomes like a component in a biological computer. A biological computer with a single collective consciousness is created and all individual self awareness is lost. An individual on patrol does not react as an individual, he only reacts after the Borg collective has processed the information.

Perhaps we will never know if bees are truly conscious, or if they're like a biological computer with a collective consciousness, or maybe something else. Barbara Shiffman, a mathematician at the University of Rochester has discovered that bee dances follow the same pattern as a theoretical mathematical shape called a flag manifold. Changes in the bee's dance can be predicted and explained by mathematical formulas. The flag manifold also explains the geometry of subatomic particles called quarks. Shiffman theorizes that bees may be sensitive to movements of subatomic particles which follow the principles of quantum mechanics which govern the movement of subatomic particles. I prefer to think of a bee colony as a biological computer because much of this is over my head.

Moving up the evolutionary ladder from insects, many biological scientists agree that mammals and birds have primary consciousness because they can process simultaneous stimuli and they have an internal representation of their experiences. Svene Sjolander states that a snake may not be conscious because it does not have a centralized representation of its prey. It seems to live in a world where a mouse is many different things. Sjolander explains that striking the mouse is controlled by vision; following the mouse after striking is controlled by smell; and swallowing the mouse is controlled strictly by touch. There is no integration of information from all the senses. Each sensory channel operates independently of the others. When a snake has a mouse held in its coils, it may still search for the mouse as if "the information from its body which is holding the prey did not exist." It appears that the snake has no ability to transfer information between sensory channels. Sjolander further explains that a snake has no ability to anticipate that a mouse running behind a rock will reappear. Cats and other predatory mammals are able to anticipate that the prey will reappear. According to Sjolander, snakes are not conscious. Using this definition of consciousness, than an autistic person experiencing severe sensory overload is not conscious. Sensory overload causes them to loose the ability to integrate input from all the senses.

Higher Consciousness

Since I do not think in language, there is a whole layer of abstract language consciousness that I do not have. Some of the papers I have read are so abstract and verbal that I simply do not understand them. So I have to study things that are understandable to me such as neuroscience experiments and research on animal behavior. I can visualize how the brain works and understand a brain scan study, but a linguistic concept such as "linguistic referants" in the mind is incomprehensible. Brain research has concrete data that I can understand. Many scientists believe that there are different levels, or degrees of consciousness. The different levels are determined by the complexity of the brain. Humans with the most complex brains have a higher level of consciousness than dogs which have smaller, less complex brains. As an autistic person, I believe I have a unique perspective. In some highly verbal people, they have forms of higher consciousness that I do not have. Some philosophers believe that language is required for the highest form of consciousness. In this view, I would not be fully conscious because I do not think in language.

After reading several books and scientific papers on consciousness, I concluded that the biological theories which correlated the level of consciousness directly to the level of brain complexity are the most appealing. Animals with more complex brains have a higher form of consciousness than animals with a simpler brain. It is particularly interesting that warm blooded animals such as dogs or birds have more complex brains than cold blooded animals such as reptiles. Maintaining a high internal body temperature requires huge quantities of food compared to a reptile. The ability to make flexible choices improves an animal's ability to both find food and avoid predators. Perhaps the degree of consciousness shown by most mammals avoiding predators is similar to the degree of consciousness I used to avoid hitting the elk. It was a deliberate, conscious decision. Why did consciousness evolve ? If my response was based on simple reflexes, I may have caused an accident. I avoided the elk because there was sufficient time to bring the pictures into consciousness and make a decision. However, the ability to make a conscious decision was lost when I found myself suddenly skidding out of control on an icy road. As the car skidded out of control, I began screamed like an animal being attacked by a predator. My screams came out as an uncontrollable, panic induced string of swear words. Screaming and fish-tailing on the highway, my conscious self was thinking I can't believe this was happening. Reflexes had taken over. My conscious self did not regain control until my car stopped on the median strip. Even when I was screeching swear words during the swerving, my conscious self was observing but could not override the reflexive movements my body was making. I remained calm in the elk incident because I had the time to make a conscious choice in how best to avoid danger.

The dawn of true consciousness would also be closely related to the ability of an animal to think in a flexible manner in a new situation. Marian Stamp Dawkins at the University of Oxford, defines thinking by discussing what it is not. True thinking is not instinctual behavior, and it is not a simple "rule of thumb", or a conditioned response. Instinctual behavior is governed by neurological circuits hard wired into an animals brain. Mating rituals in birds and egg retrieval behavior in geese are instincts. Modern scientists call them "fixed action patterns". These are patterns run like computer programs. Fixed action patterns are triggered by a "sign stimuli". Geese will retrieve any object that is the approximate size of an egg and roll it back into the nest. Even beer cans will be retrieved. The beer can is the sign stimuli. A basic principle is that higher mammals have less instinctual behaviors than reptiles.

Conscious behavior and true thinking does not necessarily occur after an animal learns a conditioned response. An example of a conditioned response is; when a red light comes on a rat must press a lever to get food. When a green light comes on, the rat must jump over a barrier to avoid a shock. Cows lining up at 4:00 for milking does not require thinking. The cows and mice learn a simple "rule of thumb". In a classic experiment, blind mice were trained to run a maze almost without error. This required that the mice make correct turns at about twenty junctions in the maze. The maze was cleaned after each trial to remove olfactory cues and the orientation of the maze was rotated to prevent sound orientation from the laboratory. Temporary regressions were produced after new orientations of the maze, however the mice soon overcame this and were performing hardly any mistakes at all. After three months, the mice were successfully trained to the maze and four different variations of the maze were introduced. In the first, the size of the maze was enlarged, in the second the angles of the turns were skewed from 90 degree turns to 45 and 135 degree turns, the third was a reverse of the second and the mouse had to turn through 134 and 45 degree turns and the fourth was a mirror image of the original maze. Before long, the mice had successfully mastered all the different mazes. The success of the experiment proved that the mice had transformed the information learned from the first maze which the mice then used to solve the problems of the novel mazes.

When ever animal thinking is being evaluated, the "Clever Hans Effect" must always be taken into account. Hans was a famous horse which had been trained to count by tapping his hoof Many people were very impressed and thought the horse really could count. Hans did not know how to count, but he was a very perceptive horse who picked up subtle cues from his trainer.

Experiments with pigeons have shown that birds are capable of real thinking because they can use previously learned knowledge to solve problems. Research done by Herb Terrace demonstrated thinking in pigeons. To determine whether or not animals are really thinking about what they are doing requires testing under novel conditions. Some very elegant research with birds has shown very clearly that even our feathered friends can think. Herb Terrace, the famous chimpanzee trainer, trained pigeons to peck at a series of lighted buttons to obtain food. The task was designed to make it impossible for the pigeon to use simple "rule of thumb" such as "red light equals food." All of the experiments were conducted in an enclosed box and controlled by a computer to insure that the pigeons did not receive cues from the trainer.

After all the precautions necessary to rule out the Clever Hans Effect were taken, the pigeons were trained to peck four colored lighted buttons in the correct order. Pigeons who learned the correct order of the buttons were rewarded with food. When the positions of the buttons on the wall of their box were switched, the pigeons were still able to peck the colored buttons in the correct order.

To rule out the possibility that the pigeons accomplished this task as a great feat of memory without real thinking, Terrace did a second experiment to determine if the pigeons really had a concept of order that would hold up under several conditions. The birds were presented with one familiar colored button and three new buttons with patterns of lines or diamonds. For one group of birds, the familiar colored button was in the same order as the previous test. A second group of birds were presented with the colored buttons placed in a different order. Would having the colored in the previously learned orders help the birds to learn the correct sequence for pushing lines, diamonds and colors ? Pigeons that had the colored button in the old familiar order in the sequence learned the new sequence more quickly. The colored light and pattern buttons were randomly moved on the wall in the box to force the pigeons to learn the order concept and not to rely on the spatial cues such as button position on the wall. The ability of the pigeons to do this task satisfied Dawkins' criteria, who concluded that the birds were not responding to a "rule of thumb," but were, indeed, able to think.

G.M. Edelman (cited by Lindahi) states that mammals have primary consciousness and have mental images in the present but they may not have higher-order consciousness with both the past and future represented. Terrace's pigeons did not solve the problems using primary consciousness alone. They had to use both information from memory and information in the present. When I first considered my experience of avoiding the elk, I thought the experience depended on primary consciousness alone. This is not the case. In order to create an image of the elk crashing through the windshield, I had to have knowledge in memory of what happens when a car hits a large animal. I knew from memory that it often goes through the windshield. Without this knowledge, I might have pictured that hitting the elk would only cause a minor dent. I had memories which contained pictures of large animals crashing through the windshield. These memories were used to construct an image of that particular elk prone on the hood of my car just as the windshield was shattering. I pictured him a fraction of a second before his antlers would have gored me. Information from my memory was also used to create the simulated picture of a car rear ending me.

Brain Damage

Research on people who have brain damage provide much insights into consciousness. When one part of the brain is damaged, a certain aspect of consciousness is lost. Damage to the visual cortex where visual memories are stored makes it impossible for a person to think visually the way I do. Damage to the prefrontal cortex destroys the ability to integrate information between the senses. Brain imaging studies have shown that the transfer of information between the senses occurs in the frontal cortex. If a person feels a key in their pocket and then tries to find one that looks like the one lying on the table, activity in the frontal cortex increases. The frontal cortex is the CEO of the brain. It receives input from all other systems. It enables both animals and people to have flexible behaviors. People who have severe injuries to the frontal cortex can do routine activities such as cooking breakfast, but they have great difficulty dealing with novel things.

Damaging the frontal cortex in mammals has profound effects on behavior. Higher forms of consciousness probably require a frontal cortex to integrate information coming from the senses and from the limbic system, the emotional part of the brain. Rats with frontal cortex damage can perform species typical behaviors, but the sequence and pattern of the behavior is disrupted. Many types of learning are also affected. A normal rat can quickly learn that it can reach a piece of food through a small hole in a barrier. It will quickly shift strategies an use it paw to get to the food. A rat with frontal cortex damage will continue to make futile attempts to get the food with its mouth.

Damage to the hippocampus will interfere with some types of learning and memory but not others. Hippocampus damage affects conscious learning but it has no effect on unconscious learning. This indicates that conscious learning and unconscious learning work via different brain systems. A person with damage in the hippocampus can easily learn classical conditioning. A blast of air in the face and a light occur at the same time. After a number of trials the light by itself will make the person blink and flinch. However, a person with hippocampus damage can not learn the task if there is a delay between the air blast and the light. Having a delay requires them to be consciously aware of the relationship between the light and the air blast. Normal subjects Who were given the test only learned to blink in response to a delayed light when they were consciously aware of the relationship. Robert Clark and Larry Squire at the University of California suggest that a conditioning task with a delay between the two stimuli could be used as a test of conscious awareness in animals. A review of the literature indicate that rabbits can easily learn the relationship between two events that are delayed.

In the most severe cases of autism, consciousness fragments when the subsystems in the brain fail to work together. People with very severe sensory processing problems loose their body boundary when they become overloaded with too much sensory stimulation. Called mono-channel, these people are unable to determine where their body stops and a table or floor begins. They cannot attend to, or integrate both auditory stimulus and visual stimulus at the same time. What makes this even more complicated is the fact that in the visual system, separate subsystems of circuits process color, motion, and seeing edges. This was described to me in a conversation with Donna Williams, an autistic person with severe sensory processing problems. She related an experience she had while talking to a friend. A cat jumped up on her lap but she did not perceive it as a cat. All she saw was a vague black blob. The color circuits in her visual system perceived the black color of the cat, but the motion and edge detectors were shut down. She said; "Ongoing conscious awareness is a luxury that overload can not afford". In other words, when her nervous system is overloaded with too much stimulation, she looses conscious awareness of her actions. Her brain systems are no longer able to work together and she states that she has periods where she looses conscious awareness of her actions. She can go on sort of an auto pilot and not be fully aware.

It appears that the brain processes information in a compartmentalized manner. Seeing words, hearing words, thinking about a word and speaking a word activate different brain regions. Donna's experiences indicate that self awareness can become separated from the rest of the brain. When her sensory systems become jumbled, she looses some of the ability to extract meaning from sensory input. When she was a child, she described how she looked for meaning in the jumble of sensory input. Only a few sounds, such as the patterned sounds of the cat purring, the clock ticking, and the washing machine, had any meaning to her.

Research on people with autism shows that there are defects in the sensory processing and attention shifting mechanisms. The autistic brain takes longer to shift attention back and forth between a visual and an auditory task. A normal person can shift attention in microseconds, the autistic person can take a full second to shift attention. The cerebellum is underdeveloped and this may affect timing and coordination of all the different brain subsystems.

Self Awareness

Being able to solve problems in a flexible manner is necessary to have thought, but being able to think does not automatically make animals conscious. Thinking is not a necessary prerequisite for consciousness, but maybe intelligent behavior can occur without being self aware. LeDoux writes in his book The Emotional Brain, consciousness occurred when the brain expanded in mammals. Consciousness in animals enables them to relate several different things at once. This is a conception of the self as the experience. Chimpanzees have self awareness. When they look at themselves in a mirror, they do not react to the image as if it was another animal, and if paint is applied to the chimps face, it will try to wipe it off Because dogs are not able to do this, one should not jump to the conclusion that dogs are not self aware. Dogs may not be visually self aware, but are possibly smell self aware. A dog marking its territory is able to discriminate between its own urine and a strange dog's urine. It may be that self awareness can occur in one sensory modality and not in another. In Animal Minds, Donald Griffin writes how a bear must have a body self awareness to hide from hunters. I agree with LeDoux's and Griffins ideas about consciousness.

An ability to relate present experiences to memories is a critical component of consciousness. This agrees with both LeDoux's, and Griffins views on animal consciousness. In a natural environment, animals must learn about things in their environment, and learn to predict which of their actions are rewarding or aversive. This requires the integration of different sensory systems into coherent and meaningful memories. The brain receives input from the eyes, ears, skin, tongue, and nose, from which it learns and stores representations of valuable stimuli. Recall of these representations are used to control adaptive behaviors.

If you hold a peach, you need to be able to feel its shape and see its shape. Holding the peach to your nose can integrate smell into the representation of the peach. For adaptive behavior to occur, animals have to have some ability to anticipate the future. Even simple invertebrates can learn a conditioned response and use information from past experience. For example, in humans with the highest levels of consciousness, we are able to look into the future and know that if we don't eat the peach soon it will rot. How far an animal can anticipate the future may depend on the complexity of the brain. Dogs can anticipate a trip to the vet's office when the car goes down a certain road. They can also anticipate a pleasurable event. A dog will come running and will jump up and down when it anticipates being petted. The difference between a dog and a person is understanding that the past and the future is a matter of degree. A dog can anticipate an event which will be coming up in the next five minutes but it is probably unable to think a year into the future. A person with frontal lobe damage loses the ability to anticipate the future. However, some animals that hunt may be able to know that the food will go bad if it is not eaten in a few days. I agree with the biologists view that there are degrees of consciousness and that the degree of consciousness is due to the ability of different subsystems within increasingly complex brains to integrate information and make associations.

Conclusions

As brains become more complex the complexity of consciousness increases. Maybe in some animals only one sense is fully conscious. It may be easier to define consciousness by saying what it is not. It is not a reflex, it is not simple conditioning, and it is not a hard wired instinct which works like a computer program. Conscious behavior is flexible. Conscious behavior allows animals to make choices between different options. It is difficult for some people to imagine a consciousness that is different from themselves. Language based thinkers often have difficulty imagining that animals can think. They can not imagine thinking without words. Collin Allen in the philosophy department at Texas A & M University states that many scientists can accept the idea that animals have internal representations of memories and events. Some people think animals are not conscious because they do not have beliefs and desires like humans. I do not have some of the higher abstract consciousness most people have, so I have to define "belief" and "desire." If I say I desire chocolate cake I immediately see a slice of cake. In fact I see it at a particular cafe'. Desire has no abstract meaning. I just see pictures of things I would want such as an ice cream cone. I use the word belief to describe things where there is a high probability that something may be true, but I am not 100% sure.

There are four basic levels of consciousness:

Consciousness within one sense
Consciousness where all the sensory systems are integrated.
Consciousness where all the sensory systems are integrated with emotions.
Consciousness where sensory systems and emotions are integrated and thoughts are in symbolic language.

The second level of consciousness is where I am at. My thoughts are not linked with emotions. I think a hierarchy of consciousness is reasonable because damage to the nervous system will damage consciousness. The different brain subsystems no longer work together when the brain is damaged.

Monday, May 08, 2006

The politics of ignorance

I’m not sure why hurtling along at thirty-five thousand feet always brings out the philosophical in me, but this time I have a definite excuse.

I’ve been reading Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary (Scribner, ISBN 0-684-80360-7) and it has found me enlightened, challenged, and provoked to thought. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is a thinker of thoughts.

It is an excellent starting point for countless philosophical musings, and could serve as a defining reference for philosophical discussion so otherwise susceptible to foundering in the quagmire of semantics. For this use, it is not important that the parties present agree with Adler, only that they agree to use his work as a fixed point of reference, semantically if not philosophically.

This book will make excellent starting points in teaching philosophy to my boys, just pick a word, read Alders definition, discuss what he meant, consider the implications of his statements.

This brings me to the discussion of education. Why is it that we teach only symbol manipulation, political dogmas, and rote memorization of culturally significant “facts” to our students?

Conspicuously absent are critical, logic, and thinking skills – the very skills essential for every participatory citizen to have. Surely we must be able to read, write, and make change – but to govern ourselves mustn’t we at least be able to consider issues and alternatives intelligently?

After all, in a society of citizens, those governed of their own consent, the responsibility of the poll and jury should not be taken lightly. To do so is to risk government by industry, media, or whoever else can influence so gullible a population.

It is the poll that guides our nation, and the polls are guided by the populace. If the people cannot distinguish between fact and fallacy, between innovation and farce, then we are destined to stumble in the dark until the enlightenment or the loss of our sovereign, whichever comes first.

The lack of thinking skills in the majority of high school graduates may very well pose the greatest threat to the future of this nation yet.

Ignorance in itself is not dangerous, but an ignorant person armed with the force of governance is a dangerous person indeed.

To understand why, one must only understand the nature of government. Government as we currently understand it is merely the rule of society by virtue of a monopoly of coercive force.

This begs the question of who should be in charge of such a force? Surely the answer is thoughtful, intelligent, sensitive, and educated persons. To this end I submit that insofar as we fail as parents, educators, and human beings to provide succeeding generations with these qualities, we fail our nation, ourselves, and our children.

It is time that those among us who have abdicated these responsibilities be called to answer as to why, and for what. By those among us, I mean the parents of any child over five who cannot demonstrate the process of elimination, of any child over twelve who cannot list at least two common fallacies.

That’s right, I mean parents. Not educators, not politicians, not somebody else that spends more time with your children than you do. It is your responsibility to see that your child receives a proper education. The schools are merely one of your tools. The hammer takes not the responsibility for the house that collapses; it is the fault of the architect or the builder.

If you cannot find a way to be sure that your children possess efficient analytical skills, the least you can do is to discourage them from participating in government, a task for which they will be ill equipped without them.