Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label essays. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 03, 2014

Sorry May


Okay, so this picture illustrates why I am not a Tegmarkian. Tegmark, if you don't know, is a clever cosmologist at MIT who's put forward (a book on) the thesis that mathematics is the ultimate reality, and that all mathematics is in fact a kind of reality - that there is a mathematical multiverse, which we know exists on account of the mathematics existing.

So I don't buy this. I'm diametrically opposed to this idea. Not opposed, really - I don't care too much, but I am opposed in that I believe the complete opposite. Mathematics - and physics as a subset of mathematics - is an artifact of the human mind, that's all it is. The fact that the world exists in some form is curious, although it seems incoherent to me that we can actually know anything about its true nature - but to suppose that its true nature is mathematics seems so backwards that I just wanted to write some things down.

I get where he's coming from. The world does exist, there is a reality, and it is somehow regular and consistent - it has properties that repeat or sustain, and why should it? Its continuities and discontinuities are all so numerically describable, and why should they be? And the most basic elements that we know to exist - photons, quarks, magnetic fields - seem to be perfectly and completely described as systems of numbers. And why should this be?

My mind seems to have taken the easy way out, because it just screams: but numbers and math are things that human minds *do*! They describe the world because the brain is a description machine, that's what it *does*! If the curious thing is that the description is so perfect and complete, then I have two responses - the space of possible descriptions that the mind can form is so vast, so impossibly vast, that it would be surprising if we could *not* find consistent systems of description for the world; and no description of the world is by any means *complete*.

The completion point is worth going on about. The scope and complexity of the natural world is impossible to comprehend. It's absolutely impossible to describe it all - and I'm saying this as a scientist with full faith in science as an endeavor for helping us to understand the world. We might choose some very narrow sliver of reality and subject it to intensive study, and then, there, we can describe it in such detail that we feel that it's okay to say we've basically got it all down. But that's it - those little, tiny, infinitesimally small splinters, and we think we have a complete description? What we have is a consistent system - mathematical physics - that can be used to describe anything we come across, but each description will be new, different, from what has been seen before.

So no description is complete. Okay, maybe that's a straw man, but I don't think so. Tegmark wants to claim that not only is physics a (potentially) complete description of our reality - or no, not a description, but *the thing itself* - but that realities we haven't yet encountered, i.e. realities *outside our reality* are contained within it. He likes the example of the discovery of Neptune. Astronomers had noted disturbances in the orbit of Uranus, and finally realized that there must be another planet even further out - they realized this mathematically, in such detail that they knew where to point their telescopes to find Neptune, and they did so, successfully.

Tegmark wants to use this example to imply that mathematics is a kind of tapestry containing all reality, and that by following it out from what was known, an *entire planet* was discovered, first in the mathematics, and only later by human senses. But this doesn't prove any kind of point about the reality of mathematics, and it's not even true, strictly, that Neptune was first discovered in a mathematical form. It was first discovered in the form of its gravitational influence, which affected Uranus. It's just that at first, astronomers didn't understand what they were seeing - they had to *do some math* in order to understand. But the data were all there - the measurements of Neptune in the flesh were there already, before Galle saw it with his own eyes (and others had seen it before, all the way back to Galileo, albeit not knowing what they were looking at).

The point here is that, really, new knowledge about the world can only come from new data about the world. Mathematics based on reality that has been observed - i.e. physics - can then tell you how to understand those data, but it is only that, a tool, an activity of the human observers. It doesn't exist outside of human endeavor. I am dead set in this opinion.

Anyways, so I basically had that conversation with myself last night on my walk home, and then I made that figure. It should be self-explanatory, but just in case: the biggest circle, the purple one, is the realm of all possible human thought. The circles within are not to any idea of scale, of course. There are many domains of human thought,and the next two that I've outlined are descriptions and axiomatic systems. Both of these I mean in the broadest sense you can imagine.  Physics falls within the realm of axiomatic systems of description, or it should (Hilbert's sixth problem). Within axiomatic systems you have consistent axiomatic systems, which should contain a correct physics, if it exists - i.e. if the Standard Model and General Relativity could be united. Taken as separate systems, I think that each of these theories alone counts as a consistent system, but together, so far, they do not.

Tegmark's reality is the domain of consistent axiomatic systems of description, of which our physics is (presumably) just a tiny part. Any other consistent system of physics would also fall in this domain, and Tegmark believes that each of these systems must also correspond to its own universe, just as our physics corresponds to ours. I think it's a fantastic idea, which I might illustrate by putting a big 'fantasy' circle somewhere in there, in between human thought and physics.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

meaning and filling-in

Something I've been meaning to write about for a couple of weeks now: object meaning as filling-in, and how this idea is the explanation for cases of deja trompe.

We return to the idea that the visual field is a stack of properties that develop from one another along a relatively rigid hierarchy. So, a certain configuration of brightnesses, which can be seen as such (as brightnesses, or darknesses, or colors), can also be seen as an edge or some other broadband feature. In fact, given certain configurations of colors, given broadband percepts are compulsory and there is no choice but to see them. However, they do not exclude the more local aspects that seem to compose the features. From edges we go to surfaces and depths, and from there to objects and meanings and utilities.

All these levels of the visual hierarchy are experienced simultaneously and constitute conscious qualia - we are experientially aware of points of color or brightness, and we are aware of edges and lines independent of the surfaces they bound, and we are aware of surfaces independent of the objects the bound, and we are aware of objects (in the sense of depthful 'thingness') independent of the meanings they bound (what they "are"). But the independence of these qualia exists only in their separability, because in normal experience they are not causally independent - when a given configuration exists, the other levels are evoked compulsorily, and so qualia are correlated between levels.

Illusion often consists of violations of these correlations. So, we will see illusory contours where there are no variations in color or brightness to constitute them. Deja trompe, as I have described it, is seeing an object as something other than what it "is", and doing so repeatedly, involuntarily, and being aware of this repeated mistake (this is the literal meaning of the term). In the case of illusory contours, the normal correlation or association between patterns of color and edges can make one feel that something at that level is seen, i.e. that there are color or brightness qualia there, though I don't see them (what I see is an edge without any color variation). On the other hand, we certainly see the colors in the watercolor illusion, or in other filling-in effects, so it seems that it does happen that we can be tricked into generating qualia without the normal hierarchical causes, both up and down (and within) the hierarchy.

In seeing an object for something that it is not, what is happening? When I walk through the hallway to the kitchen, and see my cat sitting on the floor in one of her usual spots, looking up at me as I pass, only to realize in a fraction of a second that no, that's not my cat, those are my boots - what am I actually seeing, during the duration of the mistake? I see something there, a thing with similar color and size and shape as a cat or a pair of boots, and in a suitable location for either. So, am I seeing a cat, and then seeing a pair of boots? Or am I seeing a pair of boots, and thinking it's a cat, and then thinking it's a pair of boots? Or am I seeing something indeterminate and relatively formless, that can be either thing (deja trompe is really a creature of peripheral vision, so crowding is of course a thing)? What is seeing? What is thinking it is?

Obviously, I have an opinion. And, being a kind of expert in this sort of thing, it's an informed opinion. I think that seeing boots for cat, my low-level qualia are entirely boots-driven, so in that sense, I am seeing boots. If you put the boots and the cat side by side at the same location in the visual field, I am confident that I could discriminate them, though there's a test there. Actually, that's a nice idea: take the objects that are confused in a deja trompe, and measure their actual discriminability. So it could be that they are relatively indiscriminable, and what is seen is relatively indeterminate and formless.

Actually, whether the low-level qualia are distinctly bootslike or indeterminate doesn't matter much to my interpretation, just shifts things around a little. What is certainly not happening is that the low level qualia are going from being more catlike to more bootslike, or that they are changing at all. That is the striking thing here: that the low-level qualia do not change, although they seem to change, in what is either a metacognitive or memorial judgment. What is changing is the meaning of what is seen, and that is what is so interesting here. Because the low-level qualia are not sufficiently specifying the identity of the object, it is briefly mis-specified, something which almost never happens in normal visual experience. Once you know what something is, you virtually never mistake it for something else, except in cases where you do, and when that happens you note it or mention it to whoever else is in the room, because it's so surprising.

When it happens, deja trompe gives a strong impression that what is seen is changing from one thing to another. However, it only makes sense that this is happening at the highest levels. The lower-level qualia, I will maintain (when given the chance) are more determined by the sensory input, and the later qualia are determined by the lower-level qualia (and certainly also by other mechanisms that do not present themselves in consciousness). So, through this chain, errors or lack of specificity can build up, and you wind up with a mistake, at the top.

What it comes down to is that meaning, i.e. what a thing is, is a sort of filling-in, where in exactly the same way as the watercolor effect, but much more solidly and more vigorously, the multi-level boundaries of an object prompt it to be visually filled with meaning. I mean this literally, and I think it is obviously true: when you see a scene filled with objects, all of which you recognize, their identities are there within, in the same locations as the objects. So an object made of a certain size, and in a certain spatial location, and colored black and brown, is painted with bootsness, and that is what makes it boots. If I mis-paint it as cat, that is what makes it cat - nothing about the lower-level qualia, the shapes or the colors or the general configuration of the object's visual structure, are really directly associated with that meaning. You can destroy certain parts of my brain, and I will still see things as objects, but I won't know what they are.

So, these instances of mistakes in identification are interesting in how they reveal the dissociation between objects in themselves, and objects as they have meaning. An object in itself is still a perceptual construct, but it is meaningless. It only as existence in relation to other perceptual constructs. This is a middle place between the physical stuff to which the object presumably refers, and which is even more meaningless in that it has no relations at all to other stuff - there is simply stuff, and any effort to clump it into this stuff or that stuff is exactly that: effort, something done by an agent. So the object in itself is the way the brain deals that stuff into a usable form, and the meaning of the object, what the object is, is the set of all known relations of the object in higher levels: past and future, the stuff of cogitation and memory, beyond perception that exists only in the immediate moment.

That's enough of this. Just been thinking about these things on the train lately, needed to get it out of my system (or at least articulate it into something interesting - the discrimination experiment based on actual instances of deja trompe might actually be a good idea).

Monday, October 14, 2013

objectivity

I finished Chalmers' book - The Conscious Mind - this weekend. A funny thing was that the next-to-last chapter, basically just a set of musings on the relationship between his proto-theory and artificial intelligence arguments, didn't interest me at all. This is funny because if this was 2001, I probably would have skimmed the book up to that chapter and then read it over and over and over again.

It's an excellent, important book. I wish I'd read it back when, but now was good enough timing. As I mentioned in a previous entry, just about all of my thinking on philosophy of mind and consciousness in this book; I think some of the ideas I developed naturally, like a lot of people do, but I've also read many of Chalmers' papers over the years, and a couple I've read many times, so he's undoubtedly responsible for straightening my thoughts on the subject.

But this book, it's one of those cases where reading is like sharpening your mind. You may have a set of knives, but you've let them clatter around in a drawer for a while, used one here and another there, and so they get banged up and dulled and maybe a bit tarnished, and so finally you sit down with the whetstone and a cloth and sharpen and clean, and there, a drawer full of shining, sharp knives. That's what it was like, reading this book.

In a way, it just sort of set me up with new vocabulary, or ways to structure my thinking about perception and experience, and why they are interesting, and what the alternatives are in thinking about how they are interesting. Sometimes, this is enough to take away from a book - it helps you organize, doesn't revolutionize your thought, but it helps you straighten things out, like putting the knives into categories, with the tips and blades all facing together.

But he also inspired me, and hopefully just at the right time (though I was asking for it, looking for it, so it's silly to bring up the notion of coincidence). He talks about psychophysics - although in more basic terms than the conventional science - and he presents it as a way of using subjective experience as evidence, as a thing to be explained. This was how I felt about it for a long time, but as the years and papers and experiments wheel on, you can't help but start to see things operationally, in terms of functions and moving parts, and you operationalize your subjects too, and they become black boxes that press buttons. This is so wrong!

It's wrong, and I used to know it was wrong, and I've maintained a sense that it's wrong - I recognize that this sense is part of what sets me against the West Coast internal noise crowd in modern psychophysics, and which allies me so much to the European tradition. But I'd kind of forgotten, explicitly, how it's something of a travesty against psychophysics to operationalize your subjects, especially if you're interested in psychophysics per se, and not in using it as a means to another worthy end.

What I'm rambling about is what we all know - when you have a subject in a psychophysics experiment, and you give them instructions on how to do the task, you are asking them to take hold of a phenomenal object, and to give you responses based on that object. Often the object is so ineffable that it can only be explained by example - 'this, you see this? when you see this, press this button; or, press this button when you think you see this, here'. The central object in the entire experiment is the thing that is seen. The instructions to the subject are the closest that the experimenter comes to the phenomenon of interest. But it's too easy, I see now, to slip into the mode of giving those instructions and then thinking that the phenomenon is in the data, and that by describing the data or understanding the data, you're understanding the phenomenon.

Ultimately, maybe, it's just semantics. Ultimately, all you have to analyze in any rigorous sense is the data. But I think that many psychophysicists forget, and start talking only about performance - I've done this many times now. I've gone long enough without enough inspiration, for years now, only seeing it peek through now and then, always having trouble circling back to the real object of fascination. But this book, Chalmers' book - or probably, just a few choice passages from the book - has renewed my clarity, and as I said, just in time, because I feel that the importance of these ideas, for my research and my writing and my very career, is swinging right into center stage.

Also, I have a headache right now, officially it's been 59 days since the last, longest gap since record keeping began (May 2012). I gave it a 3.5, but I'm going to go raise that to a 4.5 now, it's getting worse.

Thursday, September 13, 2012

Deja Trompé

When I was in graduate school, I lived in Old Louisville, and walked, most days, down 3rd street to campus. Whenever I crossed the big road separating the neighborhood from campus, Cardinal Avenue, at a certain spot, I would see something up in my right peripheral visual field, and think, "Starlings!"

It was never starlings. It was always the tattered insulation hanging off a bunch of power lines strung over Cardinal. I remember this because even though I learned, pretty quickly, that I wasn't seeing starlings in that instant whenever it occurred, the fastest part of me - whatever part just automatically identifies salient stuff in the vast periphery - always thought that I was.

"Starlings!"

It not that I was hallucinating starlings. A bunch of speckly black stuff fluttering against the sky kind of looks like birds, even when you know it isn't. You can't blame me. I don't blame my visual system. It's an honest mistake. The interesting thing is that I kept making it, over and over again, with apparently no control over it. An inconsequential and incessant perceptual mistake.

I've noticed similar situations over the years, but right now I can't remember the others. I should start making a list. I bring this up because recently someone cleaned out the shared kitchen on this side of the institute, and because I always turn the lights out in the same kitchen.

I think that, because I always turn out the light when I leave the little kitchen, other people have started following my example, and now, often, when I go to the kitchen to get hot water for my tea, the light is already out. This makes me happy. It's happened very gradually. Change is slow, usually.

Usually. Recently, the development office got a new temp who is apparently a complete OCD clean freak. It's great. She cleaned this kitchen and the other one. She put up little signs everywhere telling people not to be such pigs. I love her.

Anyways, now, when I go into the little kitchen to get my water, I stand at the dispenser, watching it to make sure my hand doesn't stray and I don't get scalded, and the microwave with its little sign sits down in my lower left field. Often, lately, the light is out when I get there. I leave it that way, because there's enough light trickling in from the hallway. Every time I am in this configuration, with the light out, it looks for all the world that there is light coming out of the microwave window.

This happens over and over again. It's very robust; I can stand there and look straight at the microwave and its little paper sign, and that's what I see; then I look away, and the sign becomes an emission of lamp light from within the microwave. I can turn the mistake on and off by moving my eyes back and forth.

Again, I don't blame my visual system. It's doing the best it can. I've seen so many microwaves, and when they're cooking, they usually have little lamps inside, so you can see your whatever rotating on the little turntable. If the room is dark, the image is basically of a luminous rectangle in the front door of a microwave. Not many microwaves that I have known have worn little paper signs on their doors. To their disgusting, disgusting peril.

There must be a name for this, but I can't find it. So for now I'm going to invent a term: deja trompé‎, "fooled again". Deja as in deja vu, "again seen"; trompé‎ as in trompé l'oeil, "deceives the eye". Seems like the right flavor for this sort of thing. I'll start keeping track of these, however rare they are. I'll inaugurate the list with a new entry label.

BACK TO WORK

Sunday, July 08, 2012

sunday afternoon, procrastinating, politics

slight headache today. was reading this morning and kept getting a pre-scotoma sort of feeling, as though the letters were hard to see and overlaid with a faint sort of phosphene criss-cross, but there never was any scotoma, and the phosphene sensation was very ethereal. i suspect this headache is due to my having slept until 10:39 this morning.

***

not a very productive week. i managed to get the video rivalry experiment into working condition, but never actually cut a prism setup to start trying to collect some data. really, i want to get j* to cut the prisms for me, but she's never around. definitely will start early this week. i also finally started writing the ADI report. pretty dry stuff. most of the report will be figures showing that nothing is happening, accompanied by captions that explain as much.

***

i get randomly preoccupied with politics sometimes, so i thought i'd sit here and type out a bit on my political thinking. why not? i think writing this stuff down gets it out of the system. i don't like thinking about it - this sort of thing, writing it down and looking at it is sort of like spitting into a cup: you can't deny that it came from you, but you don't want to ingest it again. seeing this stuff in print might keep it out of my mind for a while.

okay, i'm basically a libertarian. i don't like saying that, because my general impression of libertarians is that they're kind of hateful and resentful of the way things are, and i feel that (even though, truly, i do have a lot of hate bundled deep down inside) i am more apathetic and discouraged than either of these qualities. i think that it is undeniable that in times of crisis, big and small, the state grows and accumulates power, and refuses to give it up. it just gets bigger and bigger, and acquires more and more power and responsibility, and consumes more and more resources, and becomes more and more inscrutable.

this sort of reaction to the government might also make me an anarchist, and when i was younger i considered myself one. the only books on political thought that i've ever read were proudhon, kropotkin, chomsky, and zinn. but as time has gone by, i have decided that anarchism, and socialism, can only be useful in the social sense, and not in the economic sense. people cannot agree on what they need, and what they deserve in return for what they produce, and on who controls what resource, unless there is a system of incentives and disincentives in place, and i think that the only such incentives that can work in the long term are free markets and law enforcement. so, i think we need capitalists and police, which means i cannot be a true socialist or an anarchist. i do think that capitalists should be more progressively taxed, and that police should be governed more closely by the people they serve.

i'm not impressed with democracy. i don't know why people must be able to decide on their own laws, when most people don't understand things very well beyond their own private spheres. i would be more in favor of a technocratic meritocracy running things, with democratically instructed public taxation and democratically elected police leadership. the main benefits of democratic government are that official corruption and state violence against the people are minimized. corruption is addressed by making it so that corrupt officials cannot possibly be reelected because of their reputations; violence is prevented because different arms of the state will be pushed by the people to prosecute excesses. i don't think that the way to get these benefits is, necessarily, to elect all legislators and executives, and even judges. the people need power to impeach corrupt officials, which can be done through referendum; they need power to investigate and monitor the bureaucracy, which can be done through some democratically controlled agency; and they need power to punish reckless state violence, which can be done through the same democratic means. it also would seem to be a good idea to put taxation in the hands of a democratic agency, or require all taxes to be subject to referendum. the state should only carry out functions that the people are willing to pay for.

basically, the democratic branch of government should be purposed with supervising the other branches, with the mandate of preventing corruption and violence in specific ways. the effective branches of the government would be run like a corporate meritocracy, setting goals for the purpose of improving and advancing the condition of the city or state that they govern. laws would pertain entirely to protection and advancement of commerce, public safety, and civil rights. there's the rub, i guess - what constitutes these pillars, and how to achieve them - but i think that a meritocratic technocracy, strongly bound by public supervision, would be better than the power and charisma driven system of institutional demagoguery that we have now.

so, i am in favor of a sort of libertarian technocracy. both the r* and d* party are corrupt, writing laws for the good of private industries, rather than for the good of commerce itself; they both lie constantly to the public and favor the opaque system of government that we have now, i.e. they both are opposed to public supervision of the state; the r* party is fine with social backwardness and feudal ignorance of human desire for freedom - a position they call "social conservatism", while the d* party pushes public reliance on dictates from the state, and the idea that all problems should be remedied by the state, which they call "progressivism"; they're both prone to doing stupid, wasteful things because in the short term it gets them reelected. i think that the people should be free to fail and be stupid and fat and suffer, unless they explicitly volunteer to pay for the alternative - not to say i'm against safety nets, just cradles - which i think means i cannot be a d*. i also think that traditionalism and nationalism are backwards and harmful, and that the state should be a modulatory force for progress, which i think means i cannot be a r*.

anyways, unless there is some big change coming, this year will be the first of many in the future that i will no longer vote for d*s as i have in the past (i did vote for a r* mayor once). i feel pretty stupid for having written this, but there it is. please get out of my head now, politics.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

vision includes the world

I need to procrastinate slightly more productively, so here is a short essay relating some of my thoughts on visual consciousness.

For years now, I've understood visual experience or consciousness (experience is easier to say and write, and has less near-meaning baggage, so let's continue with that term) as having two components:

1. The image. A part of vision is direct, which means that when you see an object, it is true to say that what you see is the thing itself, or at least the light reflected/emitted by that object (this similar to the idea of the 'optic array'). This is a difficult position to hold, but I think it is a necessary default. The alternative, which is definitely more popular these days, is to say that what you see is entirely a representation of the thing itself, instantiated in the brain. This sort of idealism is attractive because the brain is obviously a self-contained system, and because experience also seems to be self-contained, and because every aspect of experience seems to have a neural correlate. If I say that vision involves processes or structure outside the brain, I have to explain why we don't see what we don't see; why don't I see what you see, for example?

It seems to me that in placing the contents of consciousness somewhere in the physical world, there are two possible null hypotheses: either everything is absolutely centralized, completely contained within the brain, or everything is absolutely external, completely outside the brain. The second account is rare these days (see Gibson), as the only job it leaves for the brain is sorting out of responses to visual experiences. It seems clear that much of vision actually does occur within the brain, and I'll get to that in part 2, below. Now, these null hypotheses: that everything is internal is an objective hypothesis, based on e.g. a scientist's observations that the brain is correlated with experience; that everything is external is a subjective hypothesis, based on e.g. my observations that what seems to be in the world is actually there, i.e. that my sensations are always accurate.

Since visual experience is a subjective process which cannot be observed, I like to stick to the subjective null hypothesis: everything is external unless shown otherwise. Immediately on stating this hypothesis, we can start to make a list of the components of visual experience which are surely neural.

2. The brain. Let's start with the subjective null hypothesis: everything you see is there, in the world. Just a little thought proves that this can't be true: faces are a great example. Look at two faces, one of a person you know well - your sister or brother, maybe - and one of a strange that you've never seen before. There, in the faces, you see a difference that you can't deny, because one seems to have an identity and the other does not. This difference isn't purely cognitive or emotional, either, because one will easily make the admission that the face of his sister is his sister. Seeing her face, he will say, "That is her!" Clearly, however, the identity is not in the face - it is in the observer.

If this isn't a satisfying example, color perception must be. Color is not a property of images, it is a construct of the brain - this is not difficult to show, either with the proof that identical wavelength distributions can yield different color percepts in different conditions ('color constancy'), or with the inverse proof that different wavelength distributions can yield identical color percepts ('metamers'). We understand color as a brain's capacity to discriminate consistently between different (simultaneous or asynchronous) distributions of visible radiation. It is something that exists only in the observer.

These are easy, but it does get harder. Consider depth perception. In a scene, some things are nearer or further from you, but there is nothing in the images you sense that labels a given point in the scene as being at a particular depth. There is information in the scene that can be used by the observer to infer depth. So, depth is another part of the brain's capacity to interpret the image, but it is not a part of the scene. This is a more more difficult step than with faces or colors, and here's why: whereas a face's identity, or a light's color, is plainly not a property of the world itself, we know that the world is three dimensional, and that objects have spatial relationships; and, we know that what we see as depth in a scene informs us as to these spatial relationships. However, we then make the mistake of believing that visual depth is the same as space; on reflection, however, we can begin to understand that they are not the same. Depth is an neural estimate of space based on image information.

Let's keep going. Spatial orientation is another good one: 'up' and 'down' and 'left' and 'right' are, in fact, not part of space. I've already made my complaint about this one: spatial orientation is created by the brain.

If we keep going like this, what do we have left? What is there about visual experience that is not in some way created by the brain? How can I state that there is an 'external' component to vision?

The only feature of vision, it seems, that is not generated by the brain is the internal spatial organization of the image, the positional relationships between points in the image - what in visual neuroscience is recognized as retinotopy. Spatial relationships between points in the visual field do not need to be recovered, only preserved. A person's ability to use this information can be lost, certainly, through damage to the dorsal stream (simultanagnosia, optic ataxia, neglect, etc). This does not mean that the visual experience of these relationships is lost, only that it is unable to contribute to behavioral outputs. I think it is a mistake - commonly made - to assume that a patient with one of these disorders is unable to see the spatial relationships that they are unable to respond to. Assigning to the brain the generation of positional relationships needs evidence, and I know of none. A digital, raster image based system would be different, of course: a video camera detects images by reading them into a long, one-dimensional string of symbols. Positional relationships are lost, and can only be recovered by using internal information about how the image was encoded to recreate those positions. The visual system never needs to do this: it's all there, in the very structure of the system, starting at the pupil of the eye.

So, here is my understanding of vision: it is a stack of transformations, simultaneously experienced. The bottom of the stack is, at the very least, the retinal image (and if the image, why not the logically prior optic array?). Successive levels of the stack analyze the structure of the lower levels, discriminating colors, brightnesses, depths, and identities; this entire stack is experienced simultaneously, and is identical with visual consciousness. But, the entire thing is anchored in the reality of that bottom layer; take it away, and everything above disappears. Activity in the upper levels can be experienced independently - we can use visual imagination, or have visual dreams, but these are never substantial, and I mean this not in a figurative sense - the substance of vision is the retinal image.

This view has consequences. It means that it is impossible to completely reproduce visual experience by any brain-only simulation, i.e. a 'brain in a vat' could never have complete visual experience. Hallucinations must be mistakes in the upper levels of the stack, and cannot involve substantial features of visual experience - a hallucination is a mistaking of the spatial organization in the lowest levels for something that it is not. Having had very few hallucinations in my life, this does not conflict with my experiences. I can imagine that a hallucination of a pink elephant could actually involve seeing a pink elephant in exactly the same experiential terms as if one was there, in physical space, to be seen, but i don't believe it, and I don't think there's any evidence for vision working that way. Similarly, dreams are insubstantial, I claim, because there is nothing in that bottom layer to pin the stack to a particular state; memory, or even immediate experience, of a dream may seem like visual experience, but this is a mistake of association: we are so accustomed to experiencing activity in the upper stacks as immediately consequent to the image, that when there is activity with no image, we fail to notice that it isn't there! I think, though, that on careful inspection (which is difficult in dreams!), we find that dream vision has indeterminate spatial organization.

Anyways, that's my thinking. This has gone on long enough, I need to work on this proposal...

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Psychophysics and Consciousness

I reread this paper by David Chalmers yesterday morning for the first time in several years. I had been reminded of it because of this commentary by Kaspar Meyer in Science last week. The commentary was mildly interesting, and pointed out some of the current neuroscience perspectives as to just what consciousness is: e.g. is it the sensory experience with a background of knowledge and cognitive processes ("bottom up"), or is it a sort of best-estimate of what reality is given current and recent circumstances, using sensory input as a sort of reality check ("top down")? He finishes off in what seemed to me to be pretty fuzzy territory, but it was at least evocative of interesting ideas.

I'm vaguely familiar with some of this stuff, but I've never gotten too deep into because it doesn't satisfy me the way the philosophers do. The neuroscientists are looking for the "neural correlates of consciousness", which I guess is all that one really can look for. What this science reveals is the structure of consciousness, i.e. what is and is not included, what are the boundaries and how are they determined by the nature of the brain, and as indicated above, what exactly is the seeming 'core', or experiential reference point, of conscious experience, in neurobiological terms.

It is good stuff, but it always seems to me that the proposed theories far outstrip the basic science that is supposed to underpin them (e.g., in the commentary, Meyer cites experiments that demonstrate internally generated excitation of sensory cortex, and more generally recurrent activation, as evidence for the interesting idea that perceptual experience "would result from signals that descend through the sensory systems, just as behavior results from signals that descend along the motor pathways"). I don't know, that seems a bit of cart before horse, but like I said, I've only ever really skimmed the surface of this research. Meyer, Damasio, Dehaene, these guys are all basically frontal cortex cognitive neuroscientists, not perception scientists, and I've never really had cause to sink into that part of the science.

Now, the Chalmers paper. That's what I was going to go on about, not the Meyer commentary...

Anyways, in that paper Chalmers isn't really describing new ideas or new ways of thinking about consciousness (there is a subsection on some sort of "Kripkean" analysis of some philosophical point which I think actually subtracted from my comprehension of other parts of the paper, but it doesn't seem crucial). What he does is lay out a taxonomy of theories of consciousness - and the consciousness he's talking about isn't the "easy" kind, as he calls it, i.e. the NCC business that Dehaene is always going on about, but the "hard" kind, i.e. the fact-of-phenomenal-experience. I was thinking about that taxonomy yesterday evening, and wondering how psychophysics as a science fits into it, whether or not it biases one towards one or another way of thinking about phenomenal consciousness and just what it could be, or where it might come from.

As far as I know, the only visual psychophysicist who has written extensively (in English) on the philosophy of perception is Stanley Klein. I'm sure there are others, probably some I have heard of, but for now I'm guessing that if they exist they are writing in German or Italian. Klein is a proponent of the idea that phenomenal consciousness has something to do with quantum physics. Chalmers categorizes this sort of idea as dualist, since it supposes that consciousness is a quantum epiphenomenon of the activity of the physical brain. In other words, there is the brain and its physical structure, then there is a corresponding, consequent pattern or structure of quantum effects, and it is those effects that correspond to subjective, phenomenal consciousness.

I never liked this idea, at all. It usually relies on the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics to make the connection between observation and collapse of a wave function, which is the same thing that leads to that horrible Schrodinger's cat story. Not that I'm qualified to really have an opinion on this stuff, but that interpretation - that multiple possibilities exist simultaneously until selected by "observation" - is obviously nonsense, and just exists to show that something is not properly understood about the whole situation.

Okay, so I've shown myself to be a quantum mechanics ignoramus. Anyways, the QM-as-consciousness stuff is a type of dualism according to Chalmers, and I think it's quasi-mysticism, but does it have any currency among psychophysicists? I doubt it. I think Klein carries it because he was a student of Feynman who went into psychology, and he couldn't help but make the connection. He's an order of magnitude smarter than I am, maybe, but I think he's wrong.

As scientists, we might expect that psychophysicists should be materialists according to Chalmers' taxonomy. When I first got interested in perception and psychophysics was back when I was reading every bit of Daniel Dennett that I could find, and he is really the popular standard bearer of materialist theories of phenomenology (or was back in the 90's; this was the same time that I read Blackmore's "Meme Machine", and became completely obsessed with those ideas for a good couple of years). The idea here is that consciousness, in a way, doesn't actually exist; all that exists is the interconnected and multilayered and recurrent set of mechanisms for relating sensation to action over many timescales; in other words, "the mind is what the brain does". The fact that we have the impression of "looking out", or of being somehow spatially immersed in our thoughts and percepts, is a sort of necessary fiction that helps all those mechanisms to bind together and work correctly.

I'm not sure, but I think that J.J. Gibson might have been the closest thing (in the previous academic age) to a philosophical materialist in vision science. I suppose that most vision scientists adhere to a much more nuanced form of materialism, since Gibsonian materialism, or direct realism, is not really in good repute these days. I really like the idea in general, and consider it a good null hypothesis for study of perception - i.e. the perceptual world is the physical world that we tend naively to identify it with, and not a "representation" of the physical, and a given brain is a locus of limitations on what is known or remembered or simply accessible about this world.

Cognitive and perceptual neuroscience in general usually makes claims about consciousness that are consistent with the materialist position, i.e. that consciousness is the set of processes and functions of the brain. Chalmers says this (about neuroscience) explicitly. I always feel, though, (and I think that somewhere I've seen a talk by Dehaene where he says as much) that this is a terminological confusion, and that the neuroscientists must generally know, but forget sometimes, that the hard problem of consciousness, of phenomenology, is not addressed by their studies. Again, you know, I just have superficial acquaintance with this research, and maybe it's a common complaint amongst the Dehaenists that outsiders are always complaining that they (Dehaenists) are claiming that they're studying something that they aren't, when of course, duh, the Dehaenists know the difference. Oh well.

Finally, we wrap things up by mentioning what Chalmers calls monism, which is ultimately pan-psychism or pan-subjectivism. Reality has its relational, "objective" properties, and also its intrinsic, "subjective" properties. Phenomenal consciousness is simply the intrinsic nature of a functioning brain. This is an old idea, thousands of years old maybe, but it's not scientific. It's anti-scientific, even, since it's a claim that science, being the study of the objective nature of reality, can by definition not touch phenomenal consciousness. I think this is probably the truth of things, too, and it's kind of irritating. Anyways, is this a common feeling amongst psychophysicists, that the ultimate object of their study (whether or not they admit it; behaviorist materialism is a necessary stance for formulating good scientific theories of perception) is by definition un-attainable? That might be the answer right there; there's an operational stance (materialism), and a functional stance (monism), and only one of them - the wrong one - will ever get you anywhere.

I guess I'm going to have to start questioning psychophysicists. It will require a certain amount of drunkenness, I'm sure...

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Typical Monday through Friday

In the morning, at eight o’ clock, two alarms go off. The clock is next to his bed, and he reaches over to stop it, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. The radio is in the hallway, just outside the bedroom door, and he comprehends it to varying degrees.

Sometimes his wife is up before him, but usually not. He gets out of bed, finally, usually before nine. He makes coffee and takes a shower. He brushes his teeth and gets dressed. He packs his lunch and makes a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. He fills a coffee cup and a thermos with coffee, adding enough milk to make it cool enough to drink quickly. He sits by the front door and listens to the radio news, eats his sandwich, and drinks the cup of coffee. If his wife is up, maybe they talk, or maybe she’s in the shower.

If he’s planning to go to tae kwon do that night, he takes his uniform, which is hanging from the radiator in the bedroom, folds it, puts it in a plastic sack, and packs it in his backpack. He gets ready to leave, puts on his shoes, speaks with his wife, kisses her, and goes out the door. If it’s raining, he takes an umbrella. If she’s up, she locks the door behind him, otherwise he takes his keys and locks it.

He steps outside and picks up the newspaper. He stops by the wall in front of his building, sets the thermos down, and puts most of the newspaper in his backpack, except for the front page. He sets off for Reservoir.

Walking down Sutherland Road on the right side, he may encounter some other people, but usually there are few, because most have already gone. He passes several other apartment buildings on his way. Often, there are workmen at one building or another, unloading things from their truck. Maybe he can hear them speaking Spanish to one another.

When he arrives at Cleveland Circle, he’ll try to walk straight through. Half the time, it’s not hard to do, since half the time the traffic is running across Beacon Street. Even if Beacon has the light, they might all have gone. Sometimes he stands and waits. This crossing is a convergence point from several directions, and more people seem to arrive from along Chestnut Hill than from Sutherland. Sometimes he sees someone interesting here, and can watch them until they all arrive at Reservoir.

At the other side of the Circle is Reservoir, but before he gets there he passes his dentists office. He owes the dentist money. He thinks he might have a toothache, but he’s not sure. He wonders if you can give yourself a toothache by focusing all your attention, and the tip of your tongue, on one healthy tooth. His mouth tastes like metal sometimes, since he got all those fillings last summer.

He arrives at Reservoir. It’s random. Sometimes he’s just in time; sometimes he’s just missed it; sometimes he waits. If he waits, he watches the people accumulate. Most of them he doesn’t recognize, but some he does. The people trickle in, then arrive in a wave when one of the buses arrive upstairs, then more trickle in, then the train arrives. He always tries to get on first, on the very back door. Usually he manages to be one of the first.

Unless he’s really late, there’s probably not a seat. He stands or sits, finishes his coffee, reads the front page of the Wall Street Journal, and people crowd on the train. More get on at Beaconsfield. He stares at people when he thinks they aren't noticing, but he assumes everyone else is doing the same thing. He compares nose shapes between two people. He tries to find two noses that are most different, and two that are most similar. He looks for noses that look like his. He is ceaselessly amazed by the irrational variance of noses.

More get on at Brooklines Hills and Village, but some get off there too. At Longwood, half the train gets off. Postdocs, doctors, students. Most of them are Asians.

Station by station, he gets closer to Government Center. Sometimes they make everybody get off at Park, and get on the next train. At Government Center, he always tries to be the first person off the train, out the back door. He can usually do it. By the time the train gets to Government Center, which is the last stop for the D train, there aren’t usually many people still on board.

If the escalator is open, he walks up and out of the station. If someone is standing on it, he curses under his breath and runs up the stairs. It’s a narrow escalator, no room to pass someone who’s just standing there. If someone is just standing there, they might clearly be a tourist and he forgives them. If they're looking at their phone, he sneers. He wonders why the others all line up to stand quietly behind, when he knows they all really want to climb.

Outside is Government Center, City Hall, the Federal Building. The plaza is bleak and impressive, every day. He walks down Cambridge Street towards Mass General. To cross Staniford, to get into the Institute, he usually dodges through traffic stopped at the light. He enters the Institute through the front door now, since his office moved to the other side of the building, and the receptionist always tries to talk to him about the weather. He doesn’t slow down, though.

He goes up the stairs to the second floor, down the hallway by the human resources offices, past the elevator and the second floor wetlabs, past the conference room, across the bridge to 2West, takes a right down the hall by the driving simulator, past the little kitchen where he microwaves his lunch every day, past the meeting room, past the restrooms, take a left, through the research assistant office, says good morning to Jackie at her desk, steps into his office, sets his backpack on his desk, hangs his jacket on his chair, sits down, and wakes his computer.

Andrew has gone to work.

Wednesday, August 31, 2011

self

I have been thinking frequently about who I am, and about whether who I am has changed over the years, and if so, how.

One thing I keep returning to is this feeling that I am losing myself, or that my self is somehow diminishing over time. What I mean is, I feel more and more that I am what I do, and what I see and feel, and the people I interact with - mainly Jingping (not that I think I am Jingping, no) - and the random thoughts that run through my mind when I'm away from things to do or people to interact with.

This isn't necessarily a problem. I don't mind being my thoughts, or being an interaction with my wife, or being the work that I do, or the procrastination that I put between myself and my work. These things, or parallel things, are what I think we all are. But parceling your self into these discrete components makes them identifiable, and subject to direct analysis, which can reveal things in stark detail that you realize you just don't like. There are some specific features that bother me.

When I was younger, I spent a large portion of my free time writing. I wrote stories, essays on my thinking, letters, etc. I did this because I wanted to. Now, I write because I have to - I do research, and I have to write about it to sustain my personal profession. There is always work to do, and when I feel willing to write, I feel I have to apply this will to work, not fun. So, I almost never write for fun anymore. Even worse, I realize that I distract myself from this sort of unease by reading what others have written. It's as though I'm replacing parts of myself with parts of other people.

Also, over the years, I more and more began to think of my self expression as excessive, or pretentious, or useless, and so I suppressed it. I think that my entire character is suppressed. This has not had the result of simply bottling up my character, but instead I think that in some ways I am withering away - I feel that even if I tried to go back to my old ways, of writing out my thoughts regularly, there would be less to write. This is why I am writing this entry, which even as I write it feels excessive, pretentious, and useless. I feel like I have to get a ball rolling, though.

Another thing that bothers me is what I think about. We all have recurring thoughts that irritate us, things that we don't want to think about but that we do anyways. Some of these things are fine at a high level, because they are features of our lives. But other things - news, politics, etc., I find myself repeatedly going through these internal monologues, not daily but frequently, on topics like the American military, US history, religion, politics. Why? I tell myself that I don't care about these things, or I try not to care - I have no effect on them, and they seem to have no effect on me. I feel infected. I want to think about my life, my wife, my work, about things I enjoy. I'm not a politician or a columnist - why do I obsess over these sorts of things? I have not figured this out. I do get a strong feeling that these sorts of thoughts erode my self - they are not me, they are other people, other places. They make me forget who I am.

I am not bothered by thinking about sex or violence, or obsessing about the aesthetics of the Green Line tunnels, or wanting to see if someone sent me an email or a Facebook message, or my shabby piano playing. These are aspects of my life, they are fine in themselves - some of these things may specifically implicate odd aspects of my personality, but so what?

Conclusions: I still exist, but I have doubts about the vitality of my existence. I have suppressed myself too much, and the empty spaces in my mind are more and more taken up with irrelevant puzzles. I'm thinking that a solution may be to do something like this regularly, do more writing for fun, try to be more expressive with other people, stop always trying to hide myself from the outside.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Scariest Animals

I would choose "spider" as the scariest animal. This is because it has such a completely inhuman appearance. The scariest animals are the killers. Spiders, cats, sharks, and snakes. There are probably others, but those are the scariest. You could say that a killer monkey is also scary, and this is definitely true. You imagine yourself locked in a room with a killer monkey your size, and you are definitely scared. But a killer monkey is just one type of monkey. Many monkeys are not killers, and probably would not hurt you if you were alone with them in a room.

The point about the monkey is also true for bears and dogs, which by the way are closely related to one another. Bears and dogs can be killers, but they also eat garbage and fruit, meaning that killing is not all that they think about. A dog can be your friend, and you can be his friend in return. Bears have a reputation for being big and lazy, though this is not necessarily true. "Killer bear", as well as "killer dog", is a useful specifier.

Cats are killers. All they think about is killing other things. For fun, we might keep one around with us, to live with us, but only because that particular cat is small. Again, imagine yourself in a room with a cat which is your size, and you are scared. Notice that I do not have to say "killer cat", because we all know that all cats are killers. But cats are like us. They're warm-blooded, and they have babies which we all think are cute. A cat is a battle machine, but you can empathize with it.

Snakes can be scary. Like cats, all snakes are killers, and so it is redundant to say "killer snake". Going by the alone-in-a-room-with-it test, you can agree that a snake which is about your size is a scary thing. But there is something silly about a snake. It is scary in general, and is only concerned with killing things, but it doesn't have any legs, which makes it look like a noodle or a piece of rope. So in a way, snakes are kind of stupid looking. Noodles are not scary, and so this detracts from the scariness of a snake. But certainly, snakes are scary, I will agree with whoever claims this.

Sharks are also scary, but it is unlikely you will run into one, because they live in the ocean. To a fish, a shark is probably the scariest animal. However, to a human, or to any other monkey, a shark is not the scariest animal. You do not walk around in the woods at night fearful of being eaten by a shark. You can't even picture yourself alone in a room with one, unless it is a room full of water, in which case I agree it is very scary. Also, they look a lot like fish, and fish are not scary animals; so, like a snake, a shark looks like something which is not scary, which detracts from its scariness.

As an aside, I will mention that a crazy man with a knife, or a gun, or a chainsaw, or some other terrible thing, is undoubtably a very scary thing. But, like a killer dog or a bear, and indeed just like his brother the killer monkey, the crazy man is only one type of man. In general, men think about killing a lot, but they also think about other things which are not related.

What makes the spider so different from all of these scary animals? Well, obviously it is a lot smaller. This is related to another other thing which makes it different, and that is that it is an invertebrate. Further related to this invertebrate nature of the spider is its face: spiders do not have faces. They can have a dozen eyes all over the top of their head, and their mouths are not mouths at all, but orifices surrounded by poisonous hypodermic fangs and gripping appendages made to prevent you from escaping. They do not chew, but rather drink you as a beverage after they have dissolved you with digestive juices which they inject into your maimed, paralyzed body. This is terrible!

Now, at least a cat has a face. You can look a cat in the eye, and relate to it. A cat has a soul. A cat is a mammal. Cats have babies, which everyone calls kittens, and which everyone agrees are not scary at all. Imagine yourself in a room with a spider your size! Its exoskeleton would probably be bulletproof at such a scale. You couldn't look into its eyes unless it was a jumping spider or maybe a type of wolf spider, since those spiders do have frontally placed eyes which have relatively good acuity and color vision. But you wouldn't be fooled by these spiders. A jumping spider is a perverted mockery of a cat. You and the jumping spider have nothing in common. You cannot relate to the spider. Spiders do not love their babies, and no one thinks that their babies are cute. Spider babies will eat their mothers if they can't find someone else to kill first.

This is why I would choose the spider as the scariest animal. If you put me in a room with a spider which is my size, give me a big knife so that I can cut off my own head before the spider gets me. I'll fight the cat, or the snake, or the shark, especially if you give me a gun or a chainsaw. But not the spider. A spider is like an armor plated eight-legged poison-fanged tank. Man, I just thought the dumbest thought, which was, "I hope no spiders read this", because I am that scared of spiders.

Friday, August 25, 2006

i am hungry right now

My car has only traveled like 60 miles in the last few weeks, so we're still ~300 short of 200,000. Here, briefly, I will note those who have driven my car some significant amount of time.

Me: drove this car a lot
Jingping X.: is learning to drive with it recently
Samantha A.: drove it quite a bit in previous years
Lindsay H.: drove it a bit my first 2 years in knoxville

Me and 3 girls, wow!

hey, whatever, i was just writing an e-mail to somebody, and i used the phrase "one of them's" as a possessive. i thought it was funny because it sounds pretty wrong, but i think it's right. it was like, "two of my friends have a birthday today, and i know one of them's e-mail address". it would be kind of like if i wrote, "i know one of you's mama" (in this case it would obviously be easier to say "i know one of y'all's mama). i thought it was funny because it sounds pretty wrong, but i think it's right.

obviously it shouldn't be "one of their address", though i could have said "one of their addresses", with "one" referring to a member of the address group and not the friend group.

now, if we were speaking victorian pseudo-latin new-french english, maybe i could say, "i know one's of them address", but that sounds pretty weird.

In other news, I have been keeping track of all the loads of spam i get in my UofL account every day. Every hour actually. Every 36 minutes and 20 seconds actually. Here are some charts!

Here is the local period of junkmail message arrival. The vertical axis is in time-between-messages, and the x axis is date; the horizontal divisions are at noon every day.

{please click it so you can see the detail!!!}




So, a high dot means that several hours passed before that particular message arrived; all those dots on the 0 are from the messages that appeared simultaneously with other messages. There are a lot of those: almost 350 as of 5:05 pm on 8-25-06. We will probably break 400 sometime tomorrow morning. Now, I've just been keeping track for 17 days now, but 331 simultaneous spams is a big chunk of the 678 total since 8-8-06 (almost half, at 48.9%). Something may be going on here.. Here's a clue: the simultaneous messages are always identical to eachother.. Hmm..

Okay, next:

I'll just cite some statistics. For one, how many of these e-mails do I get every day? I will tell you. 678 e-mails divided by 16.9 days is almost exactly 40! Weird! I get almost exactly 40 crap e-mails a day!

Next, you wonder, how frequent are they? Are they getting faster? Very frequent! Yes, they are! On average, I get one every 36.33 minutes; however, the median interval is only 9 minutes, thanks to all those simultaneous duplicates screwing up the distribution. And they are getting faster!

I can average together the current intervals with each prior intervals to get an idea of the overall change in interval over time: if this number is 0, that means they're coming in no faster today than 16.9 days ago. If it's positive they're slowing down. But no, it's actually -23.85 seconds! The interval between junk e-mails is now 23.85 seconds shorter than when i started keeping track! (actually this isn't really accurate, since there's so much variance [just look at the plot above] i can't tell what the current average interval is or what the original average interval was.)

What next!

{please click it so you can see the detail!!!}




Here you can see the arrival of my junk e-mail collapsed across date, to see if time of day has an effect! Look! Obviously, the pink line describes the (normalized) number of e-mails that have arrived at that time of day- you can see that they like to arrive at lunchtime the very most, 12-13 o'clock.

The blue spots are just the inverse of the data shown in the first plot (actually the inverse of that data plus 1; otherwise all the simultaneous e-mails would get undefined values here). This means that it is a plot of frequency across time, get it? It obviously tracks with total arrival density (look at the blue line, which is just the average of all the blue dots, and compare it with the pink line).

Oh well, there you go!

Friday, January 06, 2006

Let's talk about the number '2006'.

What makes it special?

First, we should find its factors. These include 2, 17, and 59; a sparse number, with only 3 factors! Not as sparse as 2005, however, whose only factors were 5 and 401. What this means I cannot say, though I sense that big prime numbers are dangerous things. Maybe this will be a better year. Next year has the factors 3, 3, and 223, and while 223 is a pretty number it is also a relatively big prime (11% of the year of which it is a part, compared with this year's 3% and last year's 20%), so maybe we should take advantage of this year's maximum primeness of 59.

This is of course assuming that prime factors of years have any significance at all. It could be we should be using a lunar calander, or incorporating month, day, or even time along with year. These things are difficult and it is correspondingly difficult to understand them.

I must stress that while 59 may seem to be an innocuous number, it is not coincidentally also the sum of the days in the first two months of the year (or the second and third months of the year). So this may be a signal to do all you can in these days because then the next prime is 17, which terrifies me, coming as it does between 13 and 19.

Now, factors done and considered, what else could be special about 2006? Why, this is the future, and no one can know what the future holds. This could be the year in which fusion power takes hold, or man returns to the Moon, or he travels beyond! Machines could become sentient and enslave humankind, or a terrible Metavirus could sweep the Earth and destroy indiscriminately 99.7% of all human life.

I however suspect that 2006 will be suspiciously similar to 2005. On a small scale, of course, since we are so very small, noisy fluctuations due to the heat of the Earth's mantle may be perceptible to us, as changes in quality of life, love or comfort, or ups and downs in the state of politics. Remember, however, that this is just noise due to the heat emanating from the Earth's molten core, and that on the average 2006 is exactly like 1906 except with glowing LCD cell phones and lots of little Japonese comic books in the bookstores and probably fewer horses.

In closing remember, you have 53 days left (or possibly 84, but do not count on ambiguities) in which to crustify your dealings for the year 2006. After that time
it may be too late to turn things around.