now god dammit

i should be working on that blur adaptation paper. i could finish it if i would just put 4-6 hours into it. why am i not doing it? let's ask me.

HAZ, why are you not working on that revision? what is wrong with you? you know what you have to do, so do it. jesus christ. stop procrastinating. you're embarrassing yourself. do it.

do it. do it now. no excuses. there are no excuses. there's nothing more important. do it now.

now

endojan

it's the end of january, so why not throw in another entry?

i revamped my priority ranking system yesterday, surprisingly quickly, in the form of a matlab script (the spreadsheet had gotten too complicated, as tasks were completed and added and modified..). right away it showed me that i should do one small job that i had been putting off for months, and so i did it.

it's kind of sad how by forcing structure on my life in such a simple way - write a computer program to sort out a list of the things i have to do - it immediately becomes undeniable that i have to do something. without this little trick, i am apparently lost in a haze, unable to see what is right in front of me. i suspect it is because i am hiding things from myself, and i still do not understand why.

also, tuesday afternoon, i was smacked with an idea and sat down and wrote a story. i satisfied a secret desire today by sending it in to the Nature Futures series. of course, i'm sure a hundred people do this every day, but i couldn't think of a reason not to attempt it - and i decided not to go through a dozen rounds of revising the story, showing it to friends, etc. etc., just because it's so nice not to have to do that for once. anyways, when it's rejected, i'll put it here so we can have it all to ourselves, won't that be nice?

enough. it's time for february.

year

briefly, because we don't want to dwell on this:

what did we accomplish last year? what did we intend to accomplish?

1a. submitted a fellowship proposal, which was rejected
1b. submitted an R01 proposal, which will be reviewed in 2 weeks (and likely rejected)
3a. submitted 2.5 papers, one published (so we are not zero for 2012), one more accepted, one heavily revised (if all goes well, should be 3+ for 2013)
3b. wrote the classification spectrum paper that is in a holding pattern
4a. completed a binocular rivalry experiment that will make a paper someday, and learned to model binocular rivalry
4b. started a new and improved blur adaptation experiment that is interesting
4c. created a model of my visual cortex that can be fit to my migraine auras
5. wrote a lot in HAZ public journal
6. applied for my first real job
7. learned 14/15 of the bach inventions (9 or 10 of which i didn't already know)
8. trained for my black belt in tkd (testing soon) without getting seriously hurt
9. settled on some new ways of organizing my work (subversion, dropbox, zotero etc etc)

what for this year?
1. find a new job
2a. finally publish the blur adapt paper
2b. submit/publish the classification spectrum paper
2c. write and submit the rivalry paper (short and model-free)
2d. present the new adaptation work and write a paper
3a. learn at least half of the bach sinfonias
3b. learn to sing and play piano at the same time
4a. continue with the journal entries, get back to work-related, less of the self-stuff
4b. start writing journal entries in chinese with some regularity
5a. do the computational experiment in the R01 proposal, funded or not
5b. find somebody to collaborate with on something... hm...
5c. plan some new experiments beyond the proposal stuff

probability/likelihood

probability of an event occurring
likelihood of a condition existing

how often have i misused these words? unknown.

if i search this blog, i find one clear misuse of 'likelihood', in "a specific instantiation..." ("likelihood of a pass"); i use the term two other times, in the first post ever and in a later one that refers to that one. in those instances (likelihood that you are alive at age x) i think it's ambiguous, but i'll count those as accurate.

amazingly, there is only one post where i use the word 'probability' in the relevant context. and i can't tell if i'm using it right or not. i'm kind of disappointed in myself.

seems i've fallen off the HAZ-PJ wagon. writing is going well, though, which is good.

government as a design problem

trying to work on a paper revision due sooner and sooner, but i keep thinking about politics. of course, it is The Time to think about politics, but i wish i could escape it.

anyways, here's what i've been thinking, a tiny idea:

from the institution of a new state or government, for a time, it is reasonable to expect the government to grow and acquire new features. this is just because upon its institution, the government must be incomplete or flawed. virtually nothing complex can approach perfection, especially in its first design.

however, at some point, we might consider the institution - or, and here's the real idea, a given version of the institution - to be complete. that is, we have this complex structure, with many parts and many layers and many functions, and it is intended to accomplish many things under particular constraints. presumably, changes made to this structure over time are intended to fulfill these intentions. we could think of this as efficiency, i.e., how much of what the system is meant to do is it actually doing? this is a funny idea, since it implies that if the system exceeds its mandate, it is being overly efficient. i will get back to this in a moment.

the idea is that a version of the institution can be considered complete, in that a time will come when it's clear to everyone that no changes, or only basic maintenance changes, are necessary to meet the objectives of the system; or, it might be decided that the objectives are outdated, and that new objectives have arisen, and that a new system needs to be designed to replace the old one. have we ever reached that point with the american federal government? i think maybe we have, and it was a long time ago: pre-civil war, really. in the 1850s, the federal government wasn't really creating many new responsibilities for itself, and was instead preoccupied with its intended functions of maintaining relations between the states, applying tariffs in international trade, occupying new territories that would eventually become states, etc. i think this is the tail end of what historians refer to as the "second party system": FED2.0. FED2.0 was rolled out in the 1830s, had some successes early on, and then crashed and burned.

it was around the time of the civil war that the government basically went through a big redesign, acquiring new responsibilities which then required new features to be fulfilled. this was the "third party system" that lasted until the 1890s, when it was replaced with FED4.0, which lasted until the great depression. versions 3 and 4, i think, are not really considered to be very good versions (and probably could be collapsed into subversions of FED3), while a lot of people are clearly very nostalgic for versions 1.0 and maybe 2.0 (and might see those as subversions of FED1).

in the 1930s, the government went through a huge redesign: FED5.0; the end of the 1960s saw a big advance on this (FED5.1), and now we're probably at version 5.3 or 5.4. version 5 is the longest-lived political system that the US has had (or similar with FED3/4). clearly, i think, it's time for a redesign. at this point, the two parties are just concerned with adding, subtracting, or modifying features, with a strong tendency towards addition (the 'ratchet effect' or 'featuritis'). i think that a lot of people thought that with o* and the d*s, after the 2008 election, we would be moving on to a new version 6; a lot of people thought that in 2004 with b* and the r*s. neither succeeded; i don't think that either really succeeded in moving a new subversion, either: we're stuck in beta, at 5.3.2 or something like that.

so, back to 'excess efficiency'. what is that? it's not what it sounds like. when a system isn't quite fulfilling its promised aims, if it wants to preserve itself (consider that institutions don't want to die), it might throw up new proxy aims. it can them give the illusion of accomplishment or fulfillment by moving to meet those new aims, thus obscuring the fact that the old aims aren't exactly complete; or, that they're no longer valid, and that the system thus is working to fulfill aims that no longer exist. i.e., excess efficiency is a sign that a system is desperate and needs to be replaced.

why do i keep writing poems

Batten down the hatches!
In this electric squall
Or else we'll be sent to the deep -
The web will drown us all.

So home I'll go! To printed word,
With pen and paper work.
No opportunity to drift
Through forums or to lurk

In hiding from my calling,
I'll forge ideas by thought
And stare down syntax, words reform
To make all logic-wrought.

So batten down the hatches!
And keep the ship afloat
For though I'll try to steer us,
The net may wreck this boat.

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

two out of three ain't enough

okay, so, really, i spent the labor day weekend watching youtube videos, looking at funny gifs, reading the news, and other random things, while running half-baked model simulations for the blur adaptation revision.

first thing i did was to run the video-based model through the experiment on the same three adaptation levels used in the original experiment. it worked at an operational level, i.e. it matched sharper things with sharper things and blurrier things with blurrier things, and the effects of the adaptors were correctly ordered - it didn't do anything crazy. on an empirical level, though, it was wrong.

for the original subjects, and most of the replication subjects, the perceived normal after blank adaptation should be matched to a slightly sharpened normal-video-adapted test; the simulation did the opposite. not a huge problem, but like i said, against the trend.

bigger problem is that the simulation failed to get the 'gain' peak for the normal adaptation condition; instead, gain just increased with sharpness of the adaptor. now i'm rerunning the simulation with some basic changes (adding white noise to the spatial inputs, which i don't think will work - might make it worse by increasing the effective sharpness of all inputs - but might have something of a CSF effect; and windowing the edges, which i should have done from the start).

one funny thing: even though the gain for the sharp adaptor is too high (being higher than for the normal adaptor), the gains for the normal and blurred adaptors are *exactly* the same as the means for the original three subjects: enough to make me think i was doing something horribly weirdly wrong in the spreadsheet, but there it is:



weird, but too good to be true. undoubtedly, every change to the model will change all of the simulation measurements, and the sim is definitely as noisy as the humans - even the same one run again would not get the same values.

unifications of china 1

Random idea from this weekend: create a set of spatiotemporal maps illustrating the unifying conquests of China. For fun. Let's make a list:

1. Qin: Ying Zheng and Guanzhong
Qin was one of many Warring States in the centuries leading up to the first true unification of China in 9780HE. Qin was based in the area around and to the west of Xi'an, which is protected by mountain ranges and accessible only through narrow passes (I traveled through the Hangu pass to visit Xi'an in 12010HE): hence the region's name of Guanzhong, "within the passes". The conquest has an ill-defined starting point, since the different states had been in contention for centuries. However, it was with Ying Zheng's rule that most of the work was done: between 9771 and 9780, China proper went from seven states to one. This period, the Qin Unification War, could be taken as the first.

2. Han: Liu Bang and Guanzhong
Qin didn't long outlive Ying Zheng, who died in 9791. Soon after his death, Qin was overthrown and broken up into a number of kingdoms, united in theory by the Emperor of Chu, who was in fact a puppet of the warlord Xiang Yu. Xiang Yu's confederation quickly disintegrated into civil war between Xiang's Chu state and Liu Bang's Han state, which lasted from 9795 to 9799, when Chu was finally defeated and absorbed into Han. Han, by the way, based its power in the mountain-protected cities of Hanzhong and Chang'an, as Qin had done. Xiang Yu had placed his capital in Pengcheng, in eastern China. This war, and its result, was messy: at any given point in time, even for a decade after the war ended, it was unclear just who was in charge of particular regions, and a lot rested on the proclaimed allegiances of one or another warlord. However, there are standard interpretations of who was with who and when, that could be used to clarify an illustration.

3. Wei/Jin: Cao Cao and Guandong (east of the passes)
Han lasted for 400 years. When it finally collapsed around 10190, there were more than 20 years of war, followed by a half-century period of fracture into the Three Kingdoms of Wei, Wu, and Shu. The Wei state, based in the western edges of the central plains, just east of the mountain strongholds favored by Qin and early Han, eventually conquered Shu in 10263, was replaced in a coup by Jin in 10265, and finally conquered Wu in 10280. After this, Jin slowly fell apart, and China wouldn't be put together under one government again for another four centuries. The Wei/Jin unification was so slow, taking more than 80 years, that it can't really be considered a 'conquest'; it was a slow succession of local wars, with long spaces of quiet in between. I don't think this one would count.

I don't know much about the establishment of Sui - we'll wait until I've read a bit more on it before I continue.

ghosts

(I hate to go on and on about a stupid birthday, but it did cause some notable disruptions, including:)

Three nights of the 33rd birthday: three friends of birthdays past, present, and future.

Actually, they didn't come in that order. Here is the account, in pseudo-archaic English, for distance and comedy:

Birthday eve, I drank with the Man of the Past, in an empty pub in the Old Town. Fifteen years older than yours truly, this dissipated fellow, his life a perpetual shambles. Failed in love, in work, trapped forever in some youthful heyday. I have not followed his path, but he brings to mind other possibilities, other ways to fail. Should I feel fear or relief?

Birthday night, I met with the Man of the Future. Nine years younger he, the enthusiastic student, excited thinker. We drank in a crowded tavern in the student ghetto, talked philosophy and science. Across the street we went, and watched a metal show. I never was exactly in his place, but there are clear parallels. Wonder I where he'll go, and where I've gone. Should I feel elation or regret?

Birthday morrow, in the morning I met with the Man of the Now. Our age is the same, down to half a year. We drank coffee in a crowded diner, ate eggs and toast. We went to the market, and I shewed him the Cleveland Circle. We aren't the same, but neither is ahead, neither is behind, neither is greater, neither is smaller. The magnitude of our respective courses seems the same. I feel what I am today.

This weird trilogy is a fact. I wondered if I could make a little parable out of it, and that's the best I will do. I'm going to tag this entry as a coincidence, although really it's an instance of symmetry, which maybe actually is a type of coincidence - or, maybe coincidences are types of symmetry. Argh.

a poem about physics

begin by recognizing everything
once all facts are forgot

only when all was forgotten
can we say it was known

then the tense is correct

air presses me, i press the earth
but we don't pass through

these texts,
they say what we once knew

you learn the math
and the shape of space

you learn the motion of the worlds
and the age of the expanse

and you learn its end and beginning
because these are what we remember

but the heart is forgot
these pieces, that produce these ends

see how they mesh together

all have these types
and all are countered

some are manifest
while others abide

some transmit
while others hide

the forces four are only fragments
at the start there was just one

but we can bring them back
together with effort

give it a try
some of the elements
are soft

break them apart
to see what they are

break space itself
see what a piece becomes

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.

priorities, summer 2012

augh... so bored... let's do a post on what i'm supposed to be doing right now, that i'm not doing: yes, it's time to catch up with the priority worksheet!

yes, i've been keeping it up to date every month or so.

there it is. the CI manuscript (MS_Class) is with E* right now, so i have a couple of days i could be devoting to the equivalent priority: ProjADI. but i don't want to do ProjADI. i am depressed about my failed fellowship application and all i want to do is work on modeling my stupid migraine auras, which is not what i am being paid to do, and which, as far as i can tell, does not promise to reveal anything sufficiently new or interesting to warrant spending my time on - i.e. unless i actually do start collection of real psychophysical data on that, it's not publishable. and, it's not on the priority list. migraine modeling has a priority of 0, do you hear that?

the next highest priority is ProjPrism, which i should get on with before all my subjects have moved on to other places. that's going to take some creative programming though, and i don't have a good idea yet of just how i'm going to do it. i really need to go and just sit down in the lab and figure it out. but i'm depressed, so that's my excuse. instead i'm here looking at the internet and writing a stupid journal entry on what i should be doing.

one more thing:

there you can see the evolution of my priorities over time. i do think this system is helpful in my evaluation of my projects. i do seem to be kicking off things with high priorities, though nothing has officially dropped off the list yet. waiting for reviews on two papers (MS_class and MS_blur); if those go okay, then maybe they can both be off the chart by end of the year. maybe MS_class, too.

Projs, though, need to get Projs moving. just sitting there. you're just sitting there. get up. go to the lab. go. go go go.

stupid lazy

Alright, two posts in a row of me admonishing myself. Publicly, in theory. In theory, this is more embarrassing than it actually is.

It's Saturday evening. I have done nothing all day. Nothing. Played a computer game all morning. Read the front page of the WSJ. Ate a bowl of noodles and drank a pot of coffee. Played some piano. Looked at lots of funny gifs. Tried again to get Endnote properly installed on this stupid computer, and failed. X.0.2 + Office 2007 + Windows 7 = not work.

I have that SID manuscript open. I need to clean it up, add in those two other references I found but haven't really read because they look really dull. They're just 'relevant', in a parallel sense, but nothing obviously consequent. That's what led me into that stupid Endnote cul-de-sac again. I can do it remotely, so what. Just now I opened up the For Authors page on the journal site.

The CI paper is fine. Adding the MTF into the calculations didn't have as big of an effect as I expected, or hoped. Scaled filters are pretty resilient.

I haven't studied Chinese much in a while. I could be doing that.

No, no. God dammit. SID paper. Finish the goddam paper and upload it. There is no excuse. The paper is finished. Send it in. Dammit. I hate you.

lazy friday dark adapt

Spent afternoon of Friday, 4-20-12, with a ~3 log unit (~.2%) ND filter over my right eye. Made the following observations:

(Took the filter off after about 4 hours. It wasn’t bothering me much anymore, but I think the plastic and rubber stuff in the goggles was irritating my eyes, which were starting to feel kind of dry and red. Light adaptation is really fast, it’s just been a minute and the (formerly dark adapted) right eye’s image only seems slightly brighter than the left’s.)

1. Noise: the dark adapted eye’s view is noisy, and the noise intrudes into the dominant view. It’s irritating. The dark adapted view isn’t being suppressed, though, it’s there like a ghost. Double images, from depth, are strikingly noticeable, not sure why.
2. Pulfrich effect: first time I’ve really seen this work. I put my index fingers tip-to-tip and move one from side to side, fixating on the still one, and the moving finger looks like it’s rotating. My hand even feels like it’s rotating.
3. Pulfrich effect 2: Fusion isn’t always working, but I seem to be ortho a lot of the time. I just noticed, though, that if I make quick motions, e.g. a flick of a finger, there’s a delay in the motion between the two eyes; the dark adapted image is delayed by several hundred milliseconds! Especially obvious if I focus at distance so I have a double image of the finger. Explains the strong Pulfrich effect.
4. Noise 2: Just looked at some high frequency gratings. With the dark-adapted eye, the noise was very interesting, looked like waves moving along the grating orientation, i.e. along the bright and dark bars there’s a sort of undulating, grainy fluctuation.
5. I still have foveal vision and color vision, but both are very weak. Dim foveal details are invisible. High contrast details (text, the high frequency gratings) are low contrast, smudgy..
6. Motion is kind of irritating, I think because it brings about lots of uncomfortable Pulfrich-type effects. Even eye movements over a page of text can be bothersome, because there is always an accompanying, delayed motion. I’m guessing that the saccade cancellation is being dominated by the light-adapted eye, and so I’m seeing the dark-adapted saccades. I don’t notice a depth effect, but walking around in the hallways I do feel kind of unsteady, maybe because of motion interfering with stereopsis. If objects are still, stereopsis seems to be okay.
7. If I take vertical and horizontal gratings (64c/512px), add them together, then look at them at 25% contrast from about 30cm (here at my desk), I don’t see a compound grating – I see patches of vertical and patches of horizontal. I’ve never noticed this before; I wonder what differences there are with scotopic vision and cross-orientation suppression..
8. I tried to watch my light-adapted eye move in a mirror, but the dark-adapted eye just couldn't see well enough. I think a weaker filter would make it possible.

Memes and Pharmacies

That rivalry proposal went in last Monday with no problems, along with a long-festering manuscript, so it seems I took a week off from writing. Now I have progress reports to do, presentations to prepare, other manuscripts to complete, on and on.. I need to make sure I keep up with this journal, which seems to be helping in keeping my writing pace up.

Vacation is over!

About 12 years ago, I read the Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore. It was around the time that I decided to major in psychology, and I was reading all this Dan Dennett Douglas Hofstadter stuff, but it was her popular science book that really had a big effect on me - I would say that it changed my worldview completely, to the extent that I would identify myself as a memeticist when discussions of religion or that sort of thing came up (it was still college, see) - I really felt like it was a great idea, that human culture and human psychology could be explained as essentially a type of evolutionary biology. I still believe it, and so I suppose this book still really sits near the base of my philosophical side, even though I don't think about these things so much anymore.

I bring this up because the other night Jingping and I were talking about being tricked, since this was the topic of a Chinese textbook lesson I had just read, and I recounted the story of being completely conned by a thief once when I was a clerk working at CVS. I wound up going on more generally about working there, and I remembered that I had worked out a memetics-inspired 'model' of that store, which I hadn't thought about in a long time. One of the things about the memetics idea that had really gotten to me was that you could see social organizations as living creatures with their own biological processes - not that this is an idea original to Blackmore, and I'm sure that's not the first place I had heard it (like I said, I was also reading Dennett and Hofstadter at the time), but she did work it into a larger sort of scientistic system which seemed to simplify and unify a lot of questions.

Now I realize that the criticisms of memetics that I heard from professors in college (when I questioned them about it) were mostly right, in that it mostly consists of making analogies between systems; only in the last few years, with the whole online social networking advent, has a real science of something like memetics actually gotten off the ground (this is a neat example from a few weeks ago), and it's very different from what had been imagined when the idea was first getting around.

Anyways, I thought I'd detail here my biology-inspired model of a CVS store, ca. 2001. I have a notebook somewhere where I had detailed a whole system, with functional syntax and everything, for describing social organizations in terms of cellular, metabolic systems. This might have been the first time that I had tried to put together a comprehensive model of a system, now that I think of it. The store, I thought, was itself a cell in a larger CVS system dispersed across the city, which itself was a system dispersed across the country. I was mainly interested in the store level, where you could see different components acting as reagents. It was a strongly analogical system, but not completely analogical, to plant metabolism: a plants needs carbon, so it uses sunlight to break down carbon dioxide, releasing the unneeded oxygen back into the world. A store needs money, so it uses salable products to break down a money-human bond, releasing the human back into the world.

Of course, with plants the sunlight comes free from heaven - all the plant can do is spread out and try to catch it - while salable products must be delivered from another part of the CVS system: the distribution center. The distribution center emits reagents to the stores, where the money-human bond is broken down. The CVS system also emits catalytic agents into the world - advertisements - to facilitate the crucial reaction. The money absorbed by the system is energy which is used to drive the system through a reaction not unlike oxidation - the money-human bond is reformed systematically, with employees as the human component. This reformation is what really drives the system. Those new human-money bonds then go out into the world and fulfill the same function, breaking apart, as they interact with other businesses.

Looking at a business in this way totally changed the way I understood the world. Businesses, churches, governments, political parties, armies - all of them can be thought of as living creatures, or as organs of larger creatures, rather than as some sort of human means-to-an-end. By changing perspective between levels, we can see ourselves as means to the ends of these larger systems, just as our cells and organs are means to ours. Now I'm finally getting around to reading straight through Hofstadter's GEB, and so I can see that this general idea of shifting perspective across levels is an old one that has been astonishing people for a long time. But for me, coming to see human culture as as being alive was a fundamental shift in my intellectual development, one that hasn't really been superseded since. I haven't become a real memeticist yet, but it's all still there, underneath... these tiny tendrils of memetics live yet...

standing at fenway station, thinking, as usual, "what's my problem", and i came up with a nice little self-referential, iterative statement of it: it's pablum, but i'm not usually this verbally clever, so let's write it down:

don't do what you don't believe
can't believe what you can't understand
won't understand what you won't do

so that's the problem; it's not exactly as i would normally say these things. if you asked me before i formulated this, i would probably say, "i don't like to do what i don't understand", and that's what i started out thinking. but then i asked, "why is that?", and decided that if i don't understand it, i can't really attach to it - then i saw the loop.

interestingly enough, the solution is the negation of the problem, literally:

do what you believe
believe what you understand
understand what you do

both of these statements have a sort of inertia; once you have one of the predicates, it starts rolling and keeps going. since they aren't specific, both statements are generative or productive - the referents don't need to be the same on each loop, but of course they should be logically linked.

(really, the middle statement isn't necessary in either one, with 'believe' replaced with 'understand' in the first line. i feel like the middle line adds some depth, though, so there it is.)

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...

Two Dilemmas

The Train Dilemma:
If you run to catch a train which from a distance you saw pull into the station, it will depart just as you arrive. Next time, you will believe you can't catch it, and you will walk. If you walk to the station believing you can't catch the train, it will still depart just as you arrive. You will believe that if you had run you would have caught it, so next time, you will run. Ad infinitum.

Assume that all other things being equal, walking is preferable to running.

e.g.
run_speed >> walk_speed
distance / run_speed = "t_to_departure" + epsilon (very small interval), therefore just walk
distance / walk_speed = "t_to_departure" + epsilon, therefore run

The illusion here, or the problem in reasoning, is that the departure time of the train is somehow correlated with your decision to run or walk. If this is so, then the correct solution is to retain your dignity and walk coolly to the station every time. But it is unlikely that this is so.

Clearly the solution to this problem is to run every time, but it might take you a few failures to convince yourself of that. I've been in this situation many times on the way home from TKD, walking down the alley off Brookline that leads to Fenway Station; that's exactly where the D-Train comes out of the underground, and if when I get to the end of the alley I hear a distant screeching of metal wheels on metal rails, I know the train is coming, and I know I should start running.

The Bus Dilemma:
Let's say you have multiple paths to a destination, one of which includes a bus ride, but you don't know the schedule, only that the bus comes at a certain interval.

The dilemma here is whether or not to take your other option. Often, you might feel that you have committed enough time to waiting for the bus that you should abandon other options and just wait until the next one comes - otherwise, you've wasted all that time.

If the following propositions are true, then the dilemma occurs:
1. time_by_bus < time_by_other
2. time_by_bus + bus_period > time_by_other
3. bus_phase is unknown or undependable

If these are true, then it can be hard to decide just what to do. Keep waiting, or take the other route?

Again, the answer is probabilistic. If the bus phase is unknown, we can represent 'wait time' as a uniformly distributed random variable in the interval [0 bus_period]. We can then combine the after-weight travel times for the bus and the other route in the following way:

t_wasted = rand[0 bus_period] + t_bus - t_other

If t_wasted is positive, then the wait was too long and time would have been saved by taking the other route. If it's negative, then the wait was worth it, and time was saved by taking the bus. How do you use this to decide what to do? First off, look at what happens if t_bus and t_other are equal - in that case, t_wasted will always be positive, i.e. it makes no sense to wait at all, and you should take the other route every time.

At the very least, you want to break even on average. To do this, (t_bus - t_other) has to be equal to negative half the bus period, i.e. taking the other route should take as long as taking the bus plus half of the maximum wait time. Otherwise it's just not worth it, unless you get lucky. That's why those three propositions are necessary; otherwise you'll always know what to do.

After writing this out, I googled "bus dilemma", and what do you know: there's an arxiv paper on a similar problem. Here, he's considering whether to wait or walk along the same route (in which case you can also try to account for the chances you might have to catch the bus as you're walking), which wasn't how I was thinking of it, even though it's similar to the main example I had in mind. I was thinking about two situations: the bus stop in front of my old building in Louisville, where the bus came every 20 minutes or so, took 5 minutes to take you to campus, and was set against a 20 minute walk to campus. On average in this case, you would come out ahead, but I eventually decided waiting was boring, and the few minutes gained on average were better spent walking down 3rd Street.

The other example is of coming home from Davis Square in Cambridge, and deciding whether or not to catch the 86 bus home from Harvard Square or to take the D train home from Park Street. That one is more complicated since there are multiple waits involved, but since several times I've gotten lost looking for the 86 bus stop, the problem has run through my mind several times there...

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...