The poster highlights a very well-known problem in statistics that folks doing brain research are well aware of and almost always correct for. The issue is that, when you're doing a large number of statistical tests, like you are with brain imaging data, you're likely to get a lot of false positives. You can correct for this by using a very conservative significance threshold (i.e., "p-value"), directly controlling for the proportion of false positives using a statistic called the "false discovery rate," controlling for false positives via monte carlo simulation, etc. etc.
Most neuroscientists who do brain imaging are very familiar with these correction methods, and apply them with great success. If anything, neuroscientists tend to be too concerned with false positives, such that they end up actually missing real activations because they're over-correcting.
So it's actually really unfortunate that this study is getting so much popular media attention, because it's giving people the impression that researchers aren't aware of this problem and/or that that they aren't doing anything about it. That couldn't be further from the truth.
Seriously, consulting sci-fi authors? How about consulting superheros like Captain Common Sense?
Unfortunately, there's good reason to believe that Captain Common Sense is a homophobic theist. To draw the kinds of enlightened conclusions that the parent does, it turns out that we need to override our common sense tendencies. Consulting sci-fi writers is actually quite a clever way of dealing with the limitations of common sense.
I've run several fMRI studies with human subjects on a 3T scanner (Siemens Magnetom Trio) without issues. Every now and then, you get a warning saying that the bore temperature is higher than recommended. But, when that happens, you can easily change a scan parameter or two (e.g., TR or number of slices) to reduce the load on the gradients and bring the bore temperature back down to comfortable levels.
Also, the research center where I work regularly runs human subjects at 7T, and the situation is the same there as it is at 3T. I've participated as a subject in such a study, and experienced no discomfort with regard to the bore temperature. The bore is smaller at 7T than at 3T, but that's really only a problem for subjects who are claustrophobic or a good bit larger than average. (I'm 6'1", 225lbs, and I fit in the 7T without a problem.)
The same region that makes something happen is also responsible for inhibiting that action... The same problem emerges when different regions "light up" in the different conditions. It can't be determined whether that is excitatory or inhibitory activity.
I am just a grad student in cognitive neuroscience. But from what I can tell from reading the literature, this comment is, at best, a half-truth. While there may be common gross anatomy for inhibitory and excitatory processes in a subset of task domains, there's good reason to believe that this is not generally the case, especially for the kinds of high-level cognitive processes (e.g., beliefs and preferences) that have been the main topic of this discussion. Specifically, early imaging work utilizing the Stroop Task provided evidence that there are a particular set of brain regions (viz., anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) reliably involved in inhibition of prepotent cognitive processes. As is often the case with imaging studies, this correlational finding has since been established as causal through the use of behavioral manipulations such as cognitive load, neuropsychological lesion studies, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. (But note that we wouldn't have had a clear idea of where exactly to look for the causal underpinnings of cognitive control in the first place if we hadn't first done the correlational imaging work.)
While it's true that both the spatial and the temporal resolution of bloodflow-dependent functional imaging measures currently has practical limitations, it's not so limited as to provide no insight into how the human mind/brain works, as the parent post seems to suggest. Examples of things we've learned from functional imaging are easy to come by, from the previously mentioned finding concerning the neural basis of cognitive control, to quite striking demonstrations of the spatial organization of visual processing (i.e., "retinotopic mapping"), to the existence of imagistic/non-propositional mental representations, to (more recently) the finding that there is shared neural real estate for remembering the past and imagining the future, which yields the surprising yet quite plausible suggestion that memory is not as much for recalling past events, as it is for planning for future events. (Again, all of these findings, save perhaps for that last very recent finding, have been extensively confirmed by convergent evidence from behavioral manipulations, neuropsychology, and the like.)
So that's just a sampling of what we've discovered about the human mind/brain using the current imaging methods, which are limited with respect to their spatial and temporal resolution. And that's to say nothing of all of the amazing technologies that vastly improve the spatial and temporal resolution of functional imaging, which aren't yet widely available, and thus aren't yet in common use among cognitive neuroscientists. Examples include high-field magnets (current studies commonly utilize either 1.5 Tesla or 3 Tesla magnets, but 7 Tesla magnets do exist), improved head coils (8 and 16 channel head coils are commonly used, but 32, 64, and even 128 channel varieties exist), and multi-modal methods that combine, e.g., the relatively high temporal resolution of EEG (which directly measures electrical potential rather than blood flow) with the relatively high temporal resolution of fMRI (and especially spatially restricted fMRI, which increases spatial resolution substantially by zooming in on particular parts of the brain, instead of imaging the whole thing).
So I don't see why folks like the person who wrote the parent post are so skeptical of functional imaging. Yes, it has currently has some practical limitations, and is sometimes misused, as in the esquire piece. But it's quite clear that we've learned a lot from functional imaging, and will continue to do so well into the future.
I'd even go as far as to say that current trends should encourage us not rule out the possibility
If mental states are brain states, then they can most certainly be directly quantified...
Perhaps I should have said "indirectly" here, since I go on to talk about fMRI, and fMRI doesn't directly measure brain activity, but rather changes in blood flow, which seem to have a very high correlation with actual brain activity. However, there are more direct ways of measuring actual brain activity (e.g., EEG) with which you could use methods similar to multi-voxel pattern analysis (although I'm not familiar with any particular studies that have done this, yet). So, ultimately, I would still hold that mental states can be directly quantified, if mental states are brain states.
The aim of science is often to provide quantitatively rigorous and accurate descriptions of the world based on repeated observation. Behaviorism was quantitatively rigorous and based on repeated observation. However, it didn't accurately describe human experience. So talking about mental states makes psychology a science insofar as there actually are mental states.
So do mental states exist? There is a very complex and sophisticated philosophical literature on this, which I won't rehash here, but that you can review by taking a look at major publications within the last forty years or so by Jerry Fodor, Dan Dennett, and Paul Churchland (among others). The current consensus is that there are indeed mental states, and that we are at least pragmatically licensed in believing this, because of the explanatory power of such states.
Can mental states be quantified and observed? The answer to this depends heavily on your metaphysics of mind. If you believe that mental states are soul states (states of an in-principle unobservable entity), or if you don't believe there are mental states at all (a la Churchland), then no. But if you believe that mental states are fundamentally brain states (which seems to me a pretty reasonable position), then you have to allow brain imaging to play a role here (which, for some unspecified reason, you don't).
If mental states are brain states, then they can most certainly be directly quantified (and perhaps even observed, in some sense) using brain imaging -- see, for instance, James Haxby's 2001 Science paper on multi-voxel pattern analysis. Using this and similar methods, numerous researchers have now developed models that are capable of predicting greater than 90% of the time what a person is thinking and experiencing. Although we still have a long way to go (due in part to being distracted by behaviorism for so long), this is clearly a huge step in the direction of staking a claim for psychology as a science, a practice that provide quantitatively rigorous and accurate descriptions of the world based on repeated observation.
Do you really find this result unsurprising? Given that the big-five personality factors have been shown to be nearly orthogonal, it is indeed surprising that a single word could lead to third-party personality assessments that significantly correlate with people's actual scores for four out of these five factors. To my mind, the fact that the word was chosen by the target to describe themselves doesn't make the predictive power of that word for accurate personality assessments any less surprising, given that near orthogonality.
Unfortunately, for sixty years after James wrote his Principles, we took a huge step backward in the form of psychological behaviorism. Only recently (within the last twenty years or so) have we fully embraced Jamesian ideas about the importance of internal processes to understanding human psychology, thus opening the door to real progress, and the establishment of psychology as a rigorous science that accurately describes human experience.
Mod parent up. This is what makes the study interesting. The fact that you can accurately infer a wide range of information about a person's personality from a few letters is rather shocking, imho.
As for the relevance of the study, if you are at all concerned with understanding what makes us who we are as human beings, then the study should be relevant to your concerns. The study is informative in this respect insofar as it tells us something surprising about ourselves.
Of course, if you're not concerned with understanding what makes us who we are, then this study may not interest you. And that's fine. But it doesn't follow from the fact that it doesn't interest you that the study is irrelevant, full stop. Perhaps it is irrelevant to you, but certainly not to human concerns more broadly.
... the Big Bang is a paradigm in its death throws?
Yes, of course! And by this logic, it would follow that, although there are no material celestial bodies in the void, there surely plenty of immaterial ones, like, say, God, and angels...
Finally, scientific proof for the existence of heaven!
Another study suggested that men may have swapped fighting for wooing and evolved into handsome hunks because of women's pickiness.
The article itself states "As our ancestors evolved, the ability to attract a female mate through good looks became [sic] may have become more important in the mating stakes than the ability to fight off male rivals..." and it goes on to say that the "changes were probably driven by choosy females who began to demand handsomeness, not brute force."
Unless I'm missing something here, the reasoning in the target article seems to be backwards. It could be that the author of the article in question is something along the lines of a Platonist about beauty (having a belief that there is an objective "form" of beauty that ancestral females had in mind when they were picking their mates). But, aside from that perspective, which is currently unpopular both philosophically and scientifically, I think that the reasoning usually goes more like this: we judge certain faces to be attractive (beautiful or handsome or whatever) because the people who have those features inherited them from ancestors who had greater reproductive success.
Although the details of this sort of reasoning may be somewhat debatable (e.g., why aren't the majority of people then considered to be beautiful or handsome instead of just your average Joe or Jane -- because of some technicalities having to do with the normal distribution of any given trait in the population and the fact that the people who happen to have all or most attractive features would be the statistically lucky ones at one tail of the distribution), it does make sense prima facie, as is evidenced by the use of a similar line of reasoning in the article on female attractiveness and fertility that is referenced in the same paragraph of the year in review.
I don't have access to the journal article that is referenced (in Biology Letters), so if someone is familiar with the particular article or the general debate in question, or if I'm missing some subtlety that makes things different in the male case, could you point it out to me?
I am curious as to what you think the conclusions of these debates in the "non-philosophical areas of cognitive science" have been. I could cite numerious articles that have come from people in cognitive science outside of philosophy in the past five years defending positions all across the board, from massive modularity to distributed connectionism and everything in between. Just look at the article from BBS that I mentioned above, particularly the replies, the response to the replies, and the associated citations in the bibliography of that article. It seems to me that the individual perception as to the current status of the debate depends on what area of cognitive science the individual works in.
People who work in AI seem to take modularity for granted, currently, so they think that the debate is over and modularity has won. People in linguistics seem to like distributed connectionism a bit more than people in AI, although they are not generally sold on it. Psychologists are either agnostic or split on the issue, depending on whether or not they think the evolutionary approach has anything to offer their field. Neuroscientists apparently often buy into the connectionism more closely resembles the actual brain line, and so the majority of them still work with PDP-like models, but only when they don't have regular access to real brains and fMRI or the like. Philosophers, of course, are open to some possibilities that people in each of the other constituent disciplines of cognitive science see as being silly, although some sort of modularity seems to be winning out among philosophers (except for at UCSD).
But my overall impression is that in no case except maybe for AI do most people consider the debate completely passe. Taking into consideration your "moist eyes" comment and your perception that the debate is passe, I'm tempted to believe that you were, at the very least, trained in AI. Is that right?
Modularization: Great for OO programming, crappy for the human brain.
IAWMUHTIPORI (I am writing my undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy on related issues) What sort of "modularization" are you referring to? Modularization of peripheral systems (input/output systems, i.e., the senses)? If so, you must realize that you would be in the extreme minority in opposing a modular architecture for these systems (see Jerry Fodor's Modularity of Mind, the standard treatment on peripheral systems modularity with which the vast majority of cognitive scientists agree).
If you are talking about central cognitive systems (belief formation, inference to the best explanation, theory of mind, etc.) things get a bit more complicated. Recent empirical evidence seems to indicate that anatomical modularization of central systems is probably not thoroughgoing in the human brain. However, a lack of any real anatomical modularity does not mean that the human brain is not ultimately modular, in some sense of the word.
The best evidence for conceptual modularity (that is easy for the non-expert to understand) is implicit in the arguments against the other major alternative for cognitive architecture: distributed connectionism (e.g., Parallel Distributed Processing). Specifically, distributed connectionist networks may be able to do certain specialized tasks -- such as optical character recognition -- rather well. But it is next to impossible to get a distributed connectionist network to do more than one thing well without the system eventually grinding to a halt. This is, in part, the result of the inability of a truly distributed connectionist network to maintain a manageable search space when serving multiple purposes.
A modular central architecture, in contrast, can do any number of distinct tasks without the sort of combinatorial explosion that a distributed connectionist architecture is apt to run up against. This is because the modules within a modular central architecture are thought to be highly specialized to handle specific tasks. This feature of modular systems also allows us to see how the brain develops and might have evolved -- one specialized system at a time (for the most part). It is extremely difficult to even imagine how a general problem solver, such as a distributed connectionist network, develops or could have evolved.
The most significant problem for modular cognitive (central) systems, then, doesn't involve a lack of thoroughgoing anatomical modularization, since we are often not talking anatomical modules when we talk about modularity. The main problem for the type of modularity that is popular these days has to do with the lack of a good way to tie all of the modules together to make a flexible system that has the surface appearance of being a general problem solver (as the anti-adaptationist Fodor points-out in his most recent book, The Mind Doesn't Work that Way, which is primarily a criticism of Steven Pinker's popular How the Mind Works).
In the past couple of years, several theories have been put forth to explain modular integration. Perhaps the most notable among these is that the natural language module serves as the modular integrator. The original article in which this theory was articulated in detail has been made available by the author on his website. The article with criticisms and the author's response to the criticisms is available only in the print edition of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences ("The Cognitive Functions of Language" in Volume 25, Issue 6).
Again, then, the issue is a good bit more complex than the parent post indicated. In fact, if the cur
Although we like to think that just because millions of people are doing it, it somehow makes the action not quite as wrong, stealing music isn't legal.
Not to split hairs over semantics, but, "illegal" is not necessarily synonymous with "wrong." Whether or not something is illegal depends ultimately on what the majority of the people in the legislature decide to do (e.g., vote for or against a given bill). Whether or not something is wrong, on the other hand, seems to need a more general justification.
For example, just because a legislative body passes a law making it "illegal" for whites and blacks to intermingle doesn't make it "wrong" for Rosa Parks to sit in the front of the bus. It all depends on her justification for doing so. If she had been doing it solely to annoy the driver, then it probably would have been wrong. Since, however, she was doing it as an act of civil disobedience because she did not agree with the law, we historically regard her as being in the right.
Now, comparing the sharing of copy-protected music to the civil rights movement is certainly a stretch. But if someone doesn't agree with the US copyright law, it can be just as much an act of civil disobedience to participate in file sharing. As many others have already pointed out in this thread, the major difference with the latter type of disobedience is that you are challenging not only US copyright law but also the RIAA -- an organization that has greater financial and, hence, legal resources than any individual that they are likely to go after.
Because of this, the copyright law as applied to the sharing of copy-protected music is unlikely to get a fair challenge, as did the laws that represented the "separate but equal" doctrine. What, then, really can be justifiably said to be wrong are the RIAA's bully tactics. In contrast to what they say, they are not interested in what is objectively (or at least more highly inter-subjectively) right and wrong. If they were, they would allow a fair challenge. But if they did that, their entire business model (extort from the poor, lazy, scared and/or ignorant in order to keep their pockets lined -- remarkably like the business models of some folks in Redmond and Lindon, I might add) would fall apart.
The dire thing that multinational globalization seems to be doing is reducing the amount of genuine stuff in the world and replacing it with imitation genuine stuff.
To speak of visionaries, this is actually an important theme in PKD's The Man in the High Castle. Of course, even PKD had a tendency to (unknowingly?) refashion ideas that were first put into writing by Plato and Aristotle. I guess it is true, in some sense, that there is nothing new under the sun.
As long as we recognize pseudoreality, then there is still hope for us. When we finally fail to distinguish between truth and lies, then we will be at the mercy of the reality-makers. Perhaps, in some respects, PKD wasn't as radically paranoid as he is often made out to be.
Slashdot Mirror
The poster highlights a very well-known problem in statistics that folks doing brain research are well aware of and almost always correct for. The issue is that, when you're doing a large number of statistical tests, like you are with brain imaging data, you're likely to get a lot of false positives. You can correct for this by using a very conservative significance threshold (i.e., "p-value"), directly controlling for the proportion of false positives using a statistic called the "false discovery rate," controlling for false positives via monte carlo simulation, etc. etc.
Most neuroscientists who do brain imaging are very familiar with these correction methods, and apply them with great success. If anything, neuroscientists tend to be too concerned with false positives, such that they end up actually missing real activations because they're over-correcting.
So it's actually really unfortunate that this study is getting so much popular media attention, because it's giving people the impression that researchers aren't aware of this problem and/or that that they aren't doing anything about it. That couldn't be further from the truth.
Seriously, consulting sci-fi authors? How about consulting superheros like Captain Common Sense?
Unfortunately, there's good reason to believe that Captain Common Sense is a homophobic theist. To draw the kinds of enlightened conclusions that the parent does, it turns out that we need to override our common sense tendencies. Consulting sci-fi writers is actually quite a clever way of dealing with the limitations of common sense.
I've run several fMRI studies with human subjects on a 3T scanner (Siemens Magnetom Trio) without issues. Every now and then, you get a warning saying that the bore temperature is higher than recommended. But, when that happens, you can easily change a scan parameter or two (e.g., TR or number of slices) to reduce the load on the gradients and bring the bore temperature back down to comfortable levels.
Also, the research center where I work regularly runs human subjects at 7T, and the situation is the same there as it is at 3T. I've participated as a subject in such a study, and experienced no discomfort with regard to the bore temperature. The bore is smaller at 7T than at 3T, but that's really only a problem for subjects who are claustrophobic or a good bit larger than average. (I'm 6'1", 225lbs, and I fit in the 7T without a problem.)
The same region that makes something happen is also responsible for inhibiting that action... The same problem emerges when different regions "light up" in the different conditions. It can't be determined whether that is excitatory or inhibitory activity.
I am just a grad student in cognitive neuroscience. But from what I can tell from reading the literature, this comment is, at best, a half-truth. While there may be common gross anatomy for inhibitory and excitatory processes in a subset of task domains, there's good reason to believe that this is not generally the case, especially for the kinds of high-level cognitive processes (e.g., beliefs and preferences) that have been the main topic of this discussion. Specifically, early imaging work utilizing the Stroop Task provided evidence that there are a particular set of brain regions (viz., anterior cingulate cortex and bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) reliably involved in inhibition of prepotent cognitive processes. As is often the case with imaging studies, this correlational finding has since been established as causal through the use of behavioral manipulations such as cognitive load, neuropsychological lesion studies, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. (But note that we wouldn't have had a clear idea of where exactly to look for the causal underpinnings of cognitive control in the first place if we hadn't first done the correlational imaging work.)
While it's true that both the spatial and the temporal resolution of bloodflow-dependent functional imaging measures currently has practical limitations, it's not so limited as to provide no insight into how the human mind/brain works, as the parent post seems to suggest. Examples of things we've learned from functional imaging are easy to come by, from the previously mentioned finding concerning the neural basis of cognitive control, to quite striking demonstrations of the spatial organization of visual processing (i.e., "retinotopic mapping"), to the existence of imagistic/non-propositional mental representations, to (more recently) the finding that there is shared neural real estate for remembering the past and imagining the future, which yields the surprising yet quite plausible suggestion that memory is not as much for recalling past events, as it is for planning for future events. (Again, all of these findings, save perhaps for that last very recent finding, have been extensively confirmed by convergent evidence from behavioral manipulations, neuropsychology, and the like.)
So that's just a sampling of what we've discovered about the human mind/brain using the current imaging methods, which are limited with respect to their spatial and temporal resolution. And that's to say nothing of all of the amazing technologies that vastly improve the spatial and temporal resolution of functional imaging, which aren't yet widely available, and thus aren't yet in common use among cognitive neuroscientists. Examples include high-field magnets (current studies commonly utilize either 1.5 Tesla or 3 Tesla magnets, but 7 Tesla magnets do exist), improved head coils (8 and 16 channel head coils are commonly used, but 32, 64, and even 128 channel varieties exist), and multi-modal methods that combine, e.g., the relatively high temporal resolution of EEG (which directly measures electrical potential rather than blood flow) with the relatively high temporal resolution of fMRI (and especially spatially restricted fMRI, which increases spatial resolution substantially by zooming in on particular parts of the brain, instead of imaging the whole thing).
So I don't see why folks like the person who wrote the parent post are so skeptical of functional imaging. Yes, it has currently has some practical limitations, and is sometimes misused, as in the esquire piece. But it's quite clear that we've learned a lot from functional imaging, and will continue to do so well into the future.
I'd even go as far as to say that current trends should encourage us not rule out the possibility
If mental states are brain states, then they can most certainly be directly quantified...
Perhaps I should have said "indirectly" here, since I go on to talk about fMRI, and fMRI doesn't directly measure brain activity, but rather changes in blood flow, which seem to have a very high correlation with actual brain activity. However, there are more direct ways of measuring actual brain activity (e.g., EEG) with which you could use methods similar to multi-voxel pattern analysis (although I'm not familiar with any particular studies that have done this, yet). So, ultimately, I would still hold that mental states can be directly quantified, if mental states are brain states.
The aim of science is often to provide quantitatively rigorous and accurate descriptions of the world based on repeated observation. Behaviorism was quantitatively rigorous and based on repeated observation. However, it didn't accurately describe human experience. So talking about mental states makes psychology a science insofar as there actually are mental states.
So do mental states exist? There is a very complex and sophisticated philosophical literature on this, which I won't rehash here, but that you can review by taking a look at major publications within the last forty years or so by Jerry Fodor, Dan Dennett, and Paul Churchland (among others). The current consensus is that there are indeed mental states, and that we are at least pragmatically licensed in believing this, because of the explanatory power of such states.
Can mental states be quantified and observed? The answer to this depends heavily on your metaphysics of mind. If you believe that mental states are soul states (states of an in-principle unobservable entity), or if you don't believe there are mental states at all (a la Churchland), then no. But if you believe that mental states are fundamentally brain states (which seems to me a pretty reasonable position), then you have to allow brain imaging to play a role here (which, for some unspecified reason, you don't).
If mental states are brain states, then they can most certainly be directly quantified (and perhaps even observed, in some sense) using brain imaging -- see, for instance, James Haxby's 2001 Science paper on multi-voxel pattern analysis. Using this and similar methods, numerous researchers have now developed models that are capable of predicting greater than 90% of the time what a person is thinking and experiencing. Although we still have a long way to go (due in part to being distracted by behaviorism for so long), this is clearly a huge step in the direction of staking a claim for psychology as a science, a practice that provide quantitatively rigorous and accurate descriptions of the world based on repeated observation.
What do you think?
Do you really find this result unsurprising? Given that the big-five personality factors have been shown to be nearly orthogonal, it is indeed surprising that a single word could lead to third-party personality assessments that significantly correlate with people's actual scores for four out of these five factors. To my mind, the fact that the word was chosen by the target to describe themselves doesn't make the predictive power of that word for accurate personality assessments any less surprising, given that near orthogonality.
Unfortunately, for sixty years after James wrote his Principles, we took a huge step backward in the form of psychological behaviorism. Only recently (within the last twenty years or so) have we fully embraced Jamesian ideas about the importance of internal processes to understanding human psychology, thus opening the door to real progress, and the establishment of psychology as a rigorous science that accurately describes human experience.
Mod parent up. This is what makes the study interesting. The fact that you can accurately infer a wide range of information about a person's personality from a few letters is rather shocking, imho.
As for the relevance of the study, if you are at all concerned with understanding what makes us who we are as human beings, then the study should be relevant to your concerns. The study is informative in this respect insofar as it tells us something surprising about ourselves.
Of course, if you're not concerned with understanding what makes us who we are, then this study may not interest you. And that's fine. But it doesn't follow from the fact that it doesn't interest you that the study is irrelevant, full stop. Perhaps it is irrelevant to you, but certainly not to human concerns more broadly.
"This is no science. It is only the hope of a science."
- William James, The Principles of Psychology
... the Big Bang is a paradigm in its death throws?
Yes, of course! And by this logic, it would follow that, although there are no material celestial bodies in the void, there surely plenty of immaterial ones, like, say, God, and angels...
Finally, scientific proof for the existence of heaven!
Thin-slicing isn't always correct; it depends on having the right information.
Correct according to whom? Some panel of experts?
Two months and five days (31 days in March).
From 2004: The year in biology and medecine
Another study suggested that men may have swapped fighting for wooing and evolved into handsome hunks because of women's pickiness.
The article itself states "As our ancestors evolved, the ability to attract a female mate through good looks became [sic] may have become more important in the mating stakes than the ability to fight off male rivals..." and it goes on to say that the "changes were probably driven by choosy females who began to demand handsomeness, not brute force."
Unless I'm missing something here, the reasoning in the target article seems to be backwards. It could be that the author of the article in question is something along the lines of a Platonist about beauty (having a belief that there is an objective "form" of beauty that ancestral females had in mind when they were picking their mates). But, aside from that perspective, which is currently unpopular both philosophically and scientifically, I think that the reasoning usually goes more like this: we judge certain faces to be attractive (beautiful or handsome or whatever) because the people who have those features inherited them from ancestors who had greater reproductive success.
Although the details of this sort of reasoning may be somewhat debatable (e.g., why aren't the majority of people then considered to be beautiful or handsome instead of just your average Joe or Jane -- because of some technicalities having to do with the normal distribution of any given trait in the population and the fact that the people who happen to have all or most attractive features would be the statistically lucky ones at one tail of the distribution), it does make sense prima facie, as is evidenced by the use of a similar line of reasoning in the article on female attractiveness and fertility that is referenced in the same paragraph of the year in review.
I don't have access to the journal article that is referenced (in Biology Letters), so if someone is familiar with the particular article or the general debate in question, or if I'm missing some subtlety that makes things different in the male case, could you point it out to me?
I am curious as to what you think the conclusions of these debates in the "non-philosophical areas of cognitive science" have been. I could cite numerious articles that have come from people in cognitive science outside of philosophy in the past five years defending positions all across the board, from massive modularity to distributed connectionism and everything in between. Just look at the article from BBS that I mentioned above, particularly the replies, the response to the replies, and the associated citations in the bibliography of that article. It seems to me that the individual perception as to the current status of the debate depends on what area of cognitive science the individual works in.
People who work in AI seem to take modularity for granted, currently, so they think that the debate is over and modularity has won. People in linguistics seem to like distributed connectionism a bit more than people in AI, although they are not generally sold on it. Psychologists are either agnostic or split on the issue, depending on whether or not they think the evolutionary approach has anything to offer their field. Neuroscientists apparently often buy into the connectionism more closely resembles the actual brain line, and so the majority of them still work with PDP-like models, but only when they don't have regular access to real brains and fMRI or the like. Philosophers, of course, are open to some possibilities that people in each of the other constituent disciplines of cognitive science see as being silly, although some sort of modularity seems to be winning out among philosophers (except for at UCSD).
But my overall impression is that in no case except maybe for AI do most people consider the debate completely passe. Taking into consideration your "moist eyes" comment and your perception that the debate is passe, I'm tempted to believe that you were, at the very least, trained in AI. Is that right?
Modularization: Great for OO programming, crappy for the human brain.
IAWMUHTIPORI (I am writing my undergraduate honors thesis in philosophy on related issues) What sort of "modularization" are you referring to? Modularization of peripheral systems (input/output systems, i.e., the senses)? If so, you must realize that you would be in the extreme minority in opposing a modular architecture for these systems (see Jerry Fodor's Modularity of Mind, the standard treatment on peripheral systems modularity with which the vast majority of cognitive scientists agree).
If you are talking about central cognitive systems (belief formation, inference to the best explanation, theory of mind, etc.) things get a bit more complicated. Recent empirical evidence seems to indicate that anatomical modularization of central systems is probably not thoroughgoing in the human brain. However, a lack of any real anatomical modularity does not mean that the human brain is not ultimately modular, in some sense of the word.
The best evidence for conceptual modularity (that is easy for the non-expert to understand) is implicit in the arguments against the other major alternative for cognitive architecture: distributed connectionism (e.g., Parallel Distributed Processing). Specifically, distributed connectionist networks may be able to do certain specialized tasks -- such as optical character recognition -- rather well. But it is next to impossible to get a distributed connectionist network to do more than one thing well without the system eventually grinding to a halt. This is, in part, the result of the inability of a truly distributed connectionist network to maintain a manageable search space when serving multiple purposes.
A modular central architecture, in contrast, can do any number of distinct tasks without the sort of combinatorial explosion that a distributed connectionist architecture is apt to run up against. This is because the modules within a modular central architecture are thought to be highly specialized to handle specific tasks. This feature of modular systems also allows us to see how the brain develops and might have evolved -- one specialized system at a time (for the most part). It is extremely difficult to even imagine how a general problem solver, such as a distributed connectionist network, develops or could have evolved.
The most significant problem for modular cognitive (central) systems, then, doesn't involve a lack of thoroughgoing anatomical modularization, since we are often not talking anatomical modules when we talk about modularity. The main problem for the type of modularity that is popular these days has to do with the lack of a good way to tie all of the modules together to make a flexible system that has the surface appearance of being a general problem solver (as the anti-adaptationist Fodor points-out in his most recent book, The Mind Doesn't Work that Way , which is primarily a criticism of Steven Pinker's popular How the Mind Works ).
In the past couple of years, several theories have been put forth to explain modular integration. Perhaps the most notable among these is that the natural language module serves as the modular integrator. The original article in which this theory was articulated in detail has been made available by the author on his website. The article with criticisms and the author's response to the criticisms is available only in the print edition of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences ("The Cognitive Functions of Language" in Volume 25, Issue 6).
Again, then, the issue is a good bit more complex than the parent post indicated. In fact, if the cur
"Are there a lot of those kinds of accidents?"
Although we like to think that just because millions of people are doing it, it somehow makes the action not quite as wrong, stealing music isn't legal.
Not to split hairs over semantics, but, "illegal" is not necessarily synonymous with "wrong." Whether or not something is illegal depends ultimately on what the majority of the people in the legislature decide to do (e.g., vote for or against a given bill). Whether or not something is wrong, on the other hand, seems to need a more general justification.
For example, just because a legislative body passes a law making it "illegal" for whites and blacks to intermingle doesn't make it "wrong" for Rosa Parks to sit in the front of the bus. It all depends on her justification for doing so. If she had been doing it solely to annoy the driver, then it probably would have been wrong. Since, however, she was doing it as an act of civil disobedience because she did not agree with the law, we historically regard her as being in the right.
Now, comparing the sharing of copy-protected music to the civil rights movement is certainly a stretch. But if someone doesn't agree with the US copyright law, it can be just as much an act of civil disobedience to participate in file sharing. As many others have already pointed out in this thread, the major difference with the latter type of disobedience is that you are challenging not only US copyright law but also the RIAA -- an organization that has greater financial and, hence, legal resources than any individual that they are likely to go after.
Because of this, the copyright law as applied to the sharing of copy-protected music is unlikely to get a fair challenge, as did the laws that represented the "separate but equal" doctrine. What, then, really can be justifiably said to be wrong are the RIAA's bully tactics. In contrast to what they say, they are not interested in what is objectively (or at least more highly inter-subjectively) right and wrong. If they were, they would allow a fair challenge. But if they did that, their entire business model (extort from the poor, lazy, scared and/or ignorant in order to keep their pockets lined -- remarkably like the business models of some folks in Redmond and Lindon, I might add) would fall apart.
The dire thing that multinational globalization seems to be doing is reducing the amount of genuine stuff in the world and replacing it with imitation genuine stuff.
To speak of visionaries, this is actually an important theme in PKD's The Man in the High Castle. Of course, even PKD had a tendency to (unknowingly?) refashion ideas that were first put into writing by Plato and Aristotle. I guess it is true, in some sense, that there is nothing new under the sun.
the "ring of doom" aka "one ring to RULE THEM ALL"
Yes, my friend, if you want Fair and Balanced, you're at the wrong place.
/me hopes someone appreciates the double entendre.
[...] We recognize it. Every day.
As long as we recognize pseudoreality, then there is still hope for us. When we finally fail to distinguish between truth and lies, then we will be at the mercy of the reality-makers. Perhaps, in some respects, PKD wasn't as radically paranoid as he is often made out to be.
The latter image looks good in the root window along with fluxbox's "carbon dioxide" style.
/me ducks
I am a small businessperson[...]
I received an email a few days ago from someone who says that they can help you with this problem...
Checkout this video from the Howard Dean TV website.
"We promise not to spam you, except for the last three weeks of each quarter."
It was recorded on August 5th... oh, the irony...