Random

I think parts of the brain of the human species are going to atrophy as we use them less and less. Apart from all the things which we'll probably add to the human brain, natural processes might leave us unrecogniseable to people living today.
What abilities do you think might go first?
Memory?

Posts to come:

Psychology: Anxiety disorders, Adolph Hitler's personality, associations, dieting, masochism
AND
The UN, hosts in Japan, crowd behaviour, informal "preference surveys" (ratings) of different countries, fund managers.

Also, it's about time I got stuck in to religion; my attitudes to it have been obvious but I'm yet to explicitly comment on it.
- The presence of religion in language
- Environmentalism as a new religion (Paying to make oneself carbon neutral is like paying the church to forgive you for your sins..)
- Evangelicals

Late nights

It's 2am, and I'm doing a heavy gym session and listening to Stargazer, by Rainbow. One of the earliest metal songs. I'm in a pretty manic mood, fluctuating wildly. Very unusual for me.

In the heat and the rain
/With the whips and chains
/To see him fly
/So many die
/We built a tower of stone
/With our flesh and bone
Just to see him fly/
But don't know why
/Now where do we go?
...
Take me back/
You, give me back my will
I imagine a Mayan worship scene and a human-invented God, nourished on the blood of sacrifices.

The Weirdness Of Dreams

I used to keep a dream diary. Just read some old ones.
Ah, the weirdness of dreams

3/6/03: I am on ski trip, although I resemble myself now, not as I looked on ski trip. Andrew, the excitable “Jumbaroo Fun and Games” camp leader is behaving strangely. He approaches me slowly with an increasingly insane, deeply upset look on his face. I suddenly become aware that I am desperately close to the edge of a massive cliff. I actually pause momentarily to consider why we’re situated here…is today abseiling? His continuing approach forces me to disregard the circumstances, at least temporarily, and return to the reality of the situation. I become angry. Angry at the inattention I have just paid toward the urgent danger that he poses to my safety. In those seconds in which I had stopped to contemplate, he could’ve done anything. I tense myself, facing him. He cannot verbalise the reason for his state of distress. His jaw moves erratically, but only squeaks come out. People crowd around us, in a circle. They seem to be analysing my movements, rather than enquiring about what is wrong, or attempting to resolve the dangerous situation. My perception is that the overwhelming ‘opinion’ of the crowd is against me. I cannot qualify this opinion. Surely, I’m not responsible for Andrew’s frenzied state! I stare at him straight in the eyes, and then effortlessly toss him over the vertical cliff. He seemed to be weightless; my impression was that he was a bag of hot air. While in the air, he twists around. As he disappears, his body shape suggests he is meditating. He reminds me of a Buddhist monk. Why is he so calm, as he hurtles down?

6/8/03: I am at a concert of some kind..possibly Metallica as I recently bought a ticket off eBay (real life). The people who accompany me are the most unlikely Metallica fans; Terry, Dani, Danny. There is a metal framework stretching up high in to the sky (in an Eiffel Tower like fashion). All those at the concert are tugging on to the tower, however with no apparent fright of the fall that might occur at any moment. There is a pool below, but it would not provide safety as it is full of people. People are playing volleyball from ‘floor to floor’ on this metal tower. The smell of chlorine and summer warmth seems to be everywhere. Water seems to be streaming down from the top…..I adventure to the top and find that there is ANOTHER POOL at the top…I go up, and open a door through which I climb in to it…water does not come down on me as I open this trapdoor. At the top, is a “private party”, many of the girls are topless. I am glad to be at this party. Wakes up.

Weird indeed. I accept that some dreams give us insights in to our subconscious thoughts, but most of them are just random thoughts swirling around.

Growing up

Some people will inject themselves with botox more and more frequently
Have facelifts more and more frequently
Die their grey hair more and more frequently
Exercise frenetically to keep in shape
Continue to buy clothes that young people buy
and a myriad of other things to deny an obvious fact - that one is ageing.
I accept that some people still "feel young" or have a lot of energy, but what I'm talking about is people who've not grown up, matured, or those whose ego otherwise rests on them being able to do what young people can do. There are a lot of adults who refuse to grow up emotionally and intellectually; others still cling to tooth-fairy-esque notions of God or live in sharp moral worlds inhabited by God and the Devil, cops and robbers and other things.

Wouldn't it be easier to just accept ageing and do so gracefully?
To accept that your role in society and your behaviour will accordingly change?
Wouldn't that make it a little less hard when your turn to die comes? Or are you just preying for a way to reverse the signs of death too?

Addiction #3

Why is kicking an addiction hard, beyond the physiological reasons? Say, for example, a caffeine addiction. Caffeine enables a lifestyle that is impossible without it. One can do more of whatever one pleases. The cost, of course, is the come-down (although this can be made to fall at convenient times), as well as health risks eg kidney failure. Part of why kicking the addiction is hard is because you have to sacrifice the lifestyle benefits, and change your habits, and perhaps even your work/life balance...it's not only the chemicals themselves!

Psychology

Ah, Psychologists. The power to help humans or to manipulate them towards almost any ends. How sad it is that we can so easily be understood and manipulated by marketers, psychologists, politicians with an innate (or learned, heh) understanding of human psychology etc etc

Had a lecture was about Variable Reinforcement: If you reward a worker after them doing something 60 times, they'll invariably take a short break after doing it, then get back to working towards their next reward. Likewise if you reward them after every 180 times, except that they will break for longer; usally more than 180/60=3 times as long as before. But make their rewards arrive at uncertain intervals (eg sometimes twice in a row, sometimes with a gap of 100 in between), and they will break for almost no time. This is part of the reason why gambling is so addictive!!
There is such a fine science to the way in which certain pokie machines, for example, will reward people, to keep them on the track towards destruction (others simply pay-out according to a fixed probability-generating mechanism).
On that note, 21% of the world's pokie machines are in Australia. We really are a nation of losers.

Another one I've noticed: If a journalist simply states that public opinion is "overwhelming" on some matter, it influences people enormously. This is because (most) people don't generally like the idea that they disagree strongly with all their friends, and the rest of society. eg after publishing an article saying that "an overwhelming majority of Australians support gay marriages", experiments suggest people who have just read this article will profess more support for gay marriages than those that didn't read the article (although many who don't will lie in both scenarios, this is controlled for).
Some other funny ones
-- The man who works out why he left his wife AFTER he left her
-- You can help your chances of getting a job by imitating everything that an interviewer does during the interview. They lean forward, so do you. They talk faster, so do you. They lean back, yep, you've guessed it, you lean back. Just repeat his tone, direction etc.
A pity though that psychology, like other fields, often ends up serving the moral agenda of its practitioners.

*******
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjGkRFFBd0A

Archaeology

Historians of the future will have to be able to program computers, so as to interpret past data storage formats eg jpeg in 2030 and use their insights to piece together what has happened in the past. Or to create a program to convert old formats to new etc etc.

Scientists and Philosophers

Hey, Philosophy can be fascinating.
But one has to ask at some point why it is that it has essentially failed in many respects. Sure, philosophers will disagree with my criteria for failure. One of my reasons is that the same questions keep popping up, unsolved, and sometimes in different guises.

The questions of Philosophy might be eternal because they're relevant to the existential anxieties of humans (but do not have universal significance); I suspect religion shares this feature with philosophy, and naive, first-year-at-school philosophy probably activates the same areas of the brain (logic, ethics and philosophy of language would be less likely to do so!!)

Or Philosophy's questions be eternal because they are poorly phrased questions.
They might be poorly or imprecisely phrased. They might be phrased as well as is possible, but natural language itself is obviously inadequate for understanding natural processes, which, say, are modelled by computer models governed by mathematical equations or any number of other things. Why wouldn't the same be true for the brain, leaving neurobiology as the vital tool to understanding questions of identity, belief and other issues which appear in philosophy?

The questions often seem to basically refer to nothing, just artefacts of the human mind. They often create artificial dichotomies, contradict scientific evidence (which renders the question non-sensical eg Identity Theory), or contradict themselves when taken as a set.

Doing philosophy can give insights but eventually frustrates. Not because it raises more questions; that, I find an advantage. But because it never answers your questions. And science will. That is the lesson of the last few centuries; the scientific method answers questions to the required degree of certainty, metaphysical postulating does not. All that does is create religious warfare or leave humans too preoccupied to manage their own existence.
This is probably essentially the same problem religious people have - introducing a God may help you to "solve" your questions, only if you are complicit in convincing yourself that they're solved. Which usually involves NOT OBSERVING THE PHYSICAL WORLD, instead postulating axioms and drawing the logical conclusions from them.

I think Philosophy is best used as a tool to clarify one's thought processes, although I will think along the lines of its varying branches for the rest of my life.
I am becoming more aware of the fact that I agree with Rudolph Carnap and his Vienna circle of logical positivists. They call themselves the defenders of the scientific method.
Philosophers could claim that "only knowledge acquired through the scientific methods of hypothesis, test" and the techniques of skeptical enquiry, conservatism etc is itself a philosophical statement, an epistemological belief. That would like trying to claim somebody else as their own. Perhaps a Christian saying that a Muslim really is Christian at heart or something else weird like that.

Military People

Related to the blog post below;

Aren't military personnel often viewed as would-be-criminals?

I've heard that domestic crime levels in the US have fallen while 250,000 of tis soldiers are fighting wars in Iraq etc.

Michael Moore seems to insinuate that many of the soldiers in Iraq don't have many prospects back at home, and are reliant upon military salaries. Statistics would seem to confirm this view; soldiers predominantly come from lower-class, lower socio-economic backgrounds, with poorer education levels and fewer prospects.
It is probably a good bet that the average soldier is also more aggressive than the average person.

If war weren't so expensive, a smart but evil state might send its soldiers to war to
a) reduce crime levels at home
b) genetically engineer the population to be less aggressive by changing the gene pool

Aligning Incentives

Our society is based around getting people to do things by giving them the right incentives...

Although I dislike him in many ways, I've always thought Michael Moore's suggestion that US senators who vote to apply military force must send their own kids to war is....heading in the right direction. A little extreme and/or impractical, perhaps, but heading in the right direction.

Things have gotten so dangerous and ridiculous that even high-ranking military personnel have stopped going to certain areas of Iraq in which more lowly soldiers are fighting "because it is too dangerous". People who make such big decisions claim that they pay a price of conscience when it becomes apparent to them that they've made a big mistake, but I'd like to see them have a much greater, more tangible incentive to make informed, well-planned decisions on such big issues.

God as parenting authority

People often like to invoke the concept of a God to reinforce the virtues of obedience to blind authority.

For example, some priests, due to ideological reasons, would rather not supply condoms to African populations to protect against AIDS infection.

When they say that God is punishing those that come down with AIDS, this is what they're saying:

"I want only the obedient individuals who submit to my perception of my God's demand for abstinence to survive. I would rather the obvious solution (condoms), which allows promiscuity and is effective protection against AIDS not exist. I'd prefer to kill off those promiscuous ones, to punish them on behalf of my God, because I desire to live in a society which does not tolerate maximal sexual freedom for humans"

There are parents, too, who'd prefer to see their child come to serious harm in order for their child to learn some ideological 'lesson' rather than to just take measures to prevent that child being harmed

Nature vs Nurture, Learning vs Instinct

Learning vs Instinct (sometimes characterised as Innateness vs Learning, or Genes vs Environment, etc). People, again, things are NOT THIS SIMPLE. The above is a false dichotomy. There are extremely inflexible learnt behaviours, for instance. And then there's epigenetics, the inheritence of genetic changes due to environmental cues... Probe a little deeper and stop vascillating between two extremes, both of which are wrong. Matt Ridley's NATURE VIA NURTURE might be a good place to start

Dogmatism

The Swedes are less dogmatic than the rest of us. They're been exploring a substitute for nicotine, which is also addictive, but does less harm to the body and removes the craving for nicotine.
But ideologues in countries such as Australia still are opposed to such measures on ethical grounds. Utter stupidity, we really ought to be less dogmatic.

A funnier one - toilet manufacturers in the Netherlands often print a fly on urinals - turns out that men like to aim their stream of pee at the fly, and the bathrooms with such imprints end up being much cleaner than the average bathroom.

Voodoo and Haitian Science

Who would've known that Haitian Zombie science may actually have a basis in reality?

Haitian accounts write of men who went blue during death, were buried, and were 'resurrected' by a black-magician 12 hours later, and turned in to slaves. These were justifiably dismissed by Western Science as mumbo-jumbo.
It turns out, though, that there is a clinical state which scientists can now induce (using a Haitian root) in which the patient appears to be completely dead (but is not). Their hearts are actually beating though, just extremely infrequently, but enough. Giving them a psychoactive drug even two days later can sometimes "restore them" to life. Such a drug mashes parts of their brain, bringing them in to an obedient, trance-like state, during which they can then be turned in to slaves...similar to the phenomenon of hypnotism. Haitians wrote of another bush which could be used, which contains exactly this psychoactive drug.

Another group of scientists examined a claim of acupuncture, namely that a needle in a certain area of the (thigh, I think) can force a baby to re-orient itself within the womb so that it comes out head-first. In a trial of 1000 cases, in 70% of the cases, such a procedure worked. What I'd be interested to know, is how was such an "energy point" discovered. The methodology which might give rise to such a discovery is completely unknown to me.
Anyway, I take such things with a grain of salt, but the possibility of zombie slaves is too cool to ignore.

Introspection

Self-deception evolves to serve deceit.

It would appear that if you can be completely blind to aspects of your own personality, you can more easily deceive others about a range of things. If you think about this, the liar is more likely to be the one that fails to introspect. But then selective exposure and honesty is another way to conceal things...

Schizophrenia

Split between thinking and feeling.
This is what is known as schizophrenia. Although, see back to DSM IV post...
According to this definition, it seems certain that everybody has a mild case of it. Who out there really experiences their emotions and their thoughts as a perfect harmony...?
Few people act according to abstract ethical philosophies, because we do not usually have a deeply emotional response to intellectual realisations during our pursuits of abstract moral theories. And we often do not form our theories on the basis of what we feel.

The idea that thoughts and emotions could be mutually informative of the other can only be true up to a point...

Disorders and DSM IV

A 'disorder' is meant to not only make you weird/unnormal within a social group, but to reduce your ability to survive. (A friend put it that "weirdness" of character is usually a phenomenon which arises from analysing an individual relative to a SMALL group. That is, in amongst a group of 80, somebody might appear "weird", but in a larger population, say 20 million, there may be 50,000 others like that person. A humorous way to see this is that if a genius is a 1-in-a-million person, there are at least 6,000 geniuses in this world.). Once we've measured averages, we could construct Bell curves in many dimensions, and determine an overall "weirdness" factor for any given person.

As always, things which under many circumstances help people survive (but don't necessarily earn the affections of others in their social group) such as aggression/cunning/lying or even a compulsion to steal are characterised negatively, as disorders. Such a classification is understandable from the point of view of society. [We have an uneasy relationship with social manipulation, finding it at times funny and, usually, a flavour intelligence, which we like, but then, it is also exploitative, and we don't like things which threaten ourselves...so socially awkward people would be more likely to condemn socially exploitative behaviour]

But looking at DSM IV (Diagnostics and Statistics Manual, what psychologists use to diagnose their patients), it seems that a ridiculous number of normal behavioural traits are being called 'disorders'.
What DSM IV contains is nothing more than a moral straitjacket being put on the normal spectrum of human behaviour.
Often, the 'disorders' that it describes are HIGHLY adaptive, or useful under many circumstances. In other areas, its criteria are at times absurd, mutually re-inforcing or contradictory, self-fulfilling, or otherwise useless.

Hitler

Two random facts about Hitler which most people probably don't know

He is strongly suspected to have killed his niece, and 6 of his 7 fiances attempted suicide (some successfully)...
His hatred of Jews was contributed to by his jealousy of the famous philosopher of language Ludwig Wittgenstein, a Jew in his class who would always outdebate Hitler

Common Surnames UPDATED

My lecturer jokes that people with common surnames should be embarassed of themselves. But the not-so-funny thing is that many take this very seriously, and change their surname to a less common one, to cover up their so-called peasant, inferior predecessors.
Thus a (black)Smith becomes a doctor or a wise man.

Articles

Some particularly interesting ones:

The hidden racism often Nerds: I must say, I do dislike and try not to identify with rapper culture, although I definitely disagree that this makes me racist. And no way could I ever be a white supremacist. Those people disgust me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/magazine/29wwln-idealab-t.html?ex=1343361600&en=ac18fa16f2d11ac3&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Fascism on the rise in Russia
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=471324&in_page_id=1770