Author: James Vornov

As we continue to load greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and race toward certain destruction, I’m pleased to have a new 13″ Macbook Pro with Touch Bar. I offer some personal thoughts.

I have no doubt that this is the best available notebook computer for my needs right now. I depend on Apple’s culture, one that works to provide a user experience by combining hardware and software. The screen is incredibly bright, high resolution and has extended color range that surpass anything else I can buy. As a portable device it is light, provides great battery life and performs what I need to do fast enough that it never gets in the way. As far as I’m concerned, as long as I’m not waiting for my computer to complete a task, the process is seamless.

For now, the tools I use require a Mac. There's Eastgate's Tinderbox, Devonthink Pro, R Studio, and Mendeley (my reference manager of choice even though I’m forced to use Endnote with collaborators). I was sorry to see Aperture go, but Lightroom won that war and Adobe has prospered. I don't use Pages and the suite, because Office 365 is fully interoperable across Windows, MacOS and iOS. The iPad acts as a more portable, more personal extension for selected activities, but can’t provide the seamless workflow yet.

This isn’t my first Mac of course. In fact, I collected recordings from neurons deep in the brain for my PhD in 1980 with an Apple IIe using an analog to digital expansion card. I bought a 512K Mac as a Neurology resident and used it to write my first grants. These were expensive and not mainstream choices at the time, but they provided an experience that was worth it. I stayed with the Mac through my academic career, even buying a Mac clone for my lab at one point.

As a mature product now, the Mac is on a long product cycle. The current technology improvements are incremental and still involve tradeoffs between speed and battery life. This new notebook is not much different from the last, but overall improved. Good enough for me and those using Macs in science, art and photography. If you need more power for simulation and AI research, you tend to move back to centralized big iron available on the network easily enough if you’re working in that environment. The last time I had to run long simulations in R, I offloaded it to a Mac Mini I use as a server.

The truth is, I’ve felt funny as Apple has become the default choice among my peers for mobile, tablet and notebook. In academic settings, most of the computers at the conference table are Macs. It seems no longer cool, just smart. Maybe I’ll even admit to a little comfort from the price rise as Apple has moved to Retina screens across all the notebooks. These are great tools and worth a bit extra to ensure their continued development.

“Fake news”, false stories on the Internet, are generally just a byproduct of web commerce. Sites make money through advertising and the measure of exposure is purely the number of views. Anything that provokes a click is rewarded in this attention economy.

If we understand a little bit of what we’re doing, maybe it will help us to find our way out of the maze of hallucinations that we have created around ourselves.
– Gregory Bateson Steps to an Ecology of Mind

Fake news is like environmental pollution. Like particulate matter from a coal plant or trash dumped into the sea, produced with no real thought of consequences. After all, the information environment, like the sea or sky seems really big. Large enough to absorb the pollution released by industrial processes.

This of course an illusion. The atmosphere is big but not infinite. A planet of hairspray can destroy the ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons. Burning all that fossil fuel can increase the level of greenhouse gases like CO2, melting arctic ice.

Its not surprising that once there’s enough fake news to create some truth dead zones, there are effects in the wider data environment, choking off real journalism and affecting the climate, cultural and political in this case.

Gregory Bateson described this relationship between what’s “out there” and the structure of our thoughts. His theory of an ecology of mind is based on the model of belief being an ecosystem, based on an interaction between what’s in the brain of an individual and the information, the ideas, that the individual is exposed to. You can’t separate the organism from its ecological niche

Falsehood is poison to a healthy ecology based on trust and acceptance. Bateson would tell you that, like any complex system, this ecology will eventual reach a new state that may be quite different from what came before. I see the beauty of the stark desert landscape, but prefer the verdant diversity of the Eastern Forest.

“In the course of biological evolution the brain’s innate capacities for representing the world came to be considerably enlarged, from the immediate physical and biological environment to an almost unlimited domain of social and cultural interactions.”

Jean-Claude Changeux

The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge

We scientists are an optimistic bunch. We actually believe the reality out there beyond our perception is an orderly, understandable place. We learn by systematically manipulating the world.

Science is limited to that which is observed. We only talk about truth that can be measured, summarized and reported. I still feel the spiritual and the sublime. Maybe those emotions are deepened by an ever greater appreciation for just how remarkable this world is and how marvelous the people in it. We can all stand in awe in a huge underground cavern, carved from the seemingly impenetrable rock. Understanding the process, geology and patterns makes it all the more amazing and more worthy of my gratitude.

In writing about brain and mind, the amazing facilities of awareness, agency, will and aspiration are never far away as inspiration for the endeavor. But as manifestations of brain, I appreciate them in their own right, much as I appreciate the cavern’s majesty in its own right, informed by some limited, incomplete knowledge of how it got there. But make no mistake about it: Life is a miraculous physical event and needs no extra “vital force”.

Children have a strong urge to explore because interacting with the environment is how the world gets put together. These models of reality we build in our brains are preconditioned by genes and development, but then honed to be fully useful once born and out in the world to play.

By playing with others, we build what Changeux called “shared social consciousness”. Living in the same culture, language and symbolic environment allows us to believe we know what others are thinking. Of course I’m usually way off the mark, because I’m thinking it not you, really. And my own shared consciousness is not that well shared, I guess.

All signs and signals get combined into chunks and simpler over time. That’s why you and I now can communicate with a subtle gesture or indirect, indiscreet use of words full of irony and sarcasm.

Play and make believe are safe simulations of life, where roles can be tried on for size and mistakes become jokes. Reward drives behavior. In knowing, in the pleasure of feeling right, in the social standing that results from social achievement are powerful reinforcers. You can see how this works in the very origins of language, in the role of speaking in forming deep personal bonds, in seeking approval. your facial expressions are my behavior cues.

The young scientist who enters a well-equipped laboratory for the first time—–well equipped not only in the physical sense, but also because it has the intellectual atmosphere required for carrying out important research—–has not merely entered a particular set of rooms. His formal training at school and college, the discussions with his first supervisor, his earliest experiences in a research institution, the community of scientists that he has joined by becoming a member of this institution—all these things leave profound and lasting traces in the neural circuits of his brain.

― Jean-Claude Changeux

The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge

What is the difference beteen man and great ape?

The brains of the two species share the basic cortical regions, but somehow man has gained an extra capacity for this symbolic work. Both man and ape can see the lines and patterns that make up letters, but only man can put the letters c-a-t together as a set of arbitrary phonemes of the word cat which triggers an associative avalanche regarding this furry creature, infesting our homes, yet related to lions and tigers. Those shapes signify both orange and black, fancy and stray, all activated within the reader’s brain, entirely absent from the brain of any other creature on earth.

Whether you call this culture, learning or the stabilization of common neural networks across brains, language is a metalevel concept, but entirely subsumed within individual human brains. It is both a pattern of sound or lines– “cat” and an individual pattern of neural activity that is represented differently in each brain. The language and reference to the furry creatures maps across brains, the pattern within the brain is entirely individual.

How could anyone ever “read out” my thoughts? The patterns inside are are arbitrary and private. It would require running through everything I know and looking at the pattern of synaptic and neuronal activity for each stimulus to create a map between the cultural concepts and my private cortical encoding of the meaning and associations.

And that’s just a three letter word.

“All human beings have three lives: public, private, and secret.”
― Gabriel Garcí a Márquez,
Gabriel García Márquez: a Life

I can choose to look, but once I see I have no more choice.

I have no choice about how I percieve what I see. The meaning is there, unbidden. I see the letter form “f” or the word “fox”. I have no choice but to see a letter or recall that creature to mind.

It’s then quite remarkable that I can choose to think of other animals whose names begin with the letter “f”. I can switch to any letter or any other object category with fluency and the words come to mind, again unbidden. It takes mental effort, this active reflexive thinking. And I have absolutely no understanding of how I do it; my ability to describe how I think up a list of animals is missing as completely as my ability to describe how I know what “fox” means.

Whether you call this ability “language” or as Changeux in The Physiology of Truth would have it at the mechanistic level, “stabilization of common neural networks across brains”, meaning itself is an abstract idea, made real by the activity of brains, needing to be embodied in the flesh. Between brains, language is an arbitrary but common pattern of sounds or ink on paper. Within each brain its own individual pattern of neural activity. Amazing that the word is the same, but patterned differently in each brain; every word that is hear is a unique human experience.

“What was I thinking?”

How many times must I thoughtlessly blunder in my actions before I wake up and really start thinking about my actions? I sit and plan, mentally rehearse the conversation, plot out the moves and countermoves. But then in the moment I am myself and act the same way I always do, saying the wrong thing, ignoring the warning signs all around.

Self acceptance helps, but feels like an evasion or an excuse. I really want to be better, but after all, I am who I am, the product of so much not in my control. Genes and human biology. Culture, education and my own unique experiences. All of these forces have shaped my reactions. It’s like I decide to do something, but in the doing, my good intentions are forgotten. I act as me, not who I wanted to be.

“There is a difference between the name of the thing and what goes on.

In order to talk to each other, we have to have words, and that’s all right. It’s a good idea to try to see the difference, and it’s a good idea to know when we are teaching the tools of science, such as words, and when we are teaching science itself.

There is a picture of a dog–a windable toy dog–and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says “What makes it move?” Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question, “What makes it move?” Then there is a picture of a motorbike and the question, “What makes it move?” and so on.

If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around.

What a good way to begin a science course! Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things. That’s good.

The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.”

―Richard Feynman
What is Science?

It’s very useful to talk about mental models, but if they are invoked as explanations in themselves, “nothing whatever is learned”. What are these mental representations? Are they how we think? What we think?

Here’s a big list of them: Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful. As I look down the list, I mostly see abstract constructs that most likely would never influence behavior in the moment.

How does one drive an abstract concept like “Sunk Losses” deeply enough into one’s psychology that the next time it comes to deciding whether to get off the highway to get gas, this heuristic actually comes into play? Somehow they most become habits, true mental models of how the world is perceived in the moment. They must be known, not applied.

A mental model can only become an unconscious mental habit with deliberate practice that develops an effective mental representation. That mental representation is, at the brain level, no longer a concept but a set of connections that lead to a perception that works better in the world, that improves performance. Mental models without consequence don’t concern us if the goal is deciding better.

“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”

― Gregory Bateson
*Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity*

“Our life consists of materials that have not been assimilated. Where is the centered mid that can absorb all that we have collectively wrought and make poetry–or any art–from it?
Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age

I am often puzzled by the abandonment of the modern idea of art making progress. Have we reached our maturity? For the most part, music being made now could have been made 20 years ago. When I graduated from high school in 1974, our music and art seemed light years away from the art, music and culture of 1954.

Is this a pause? A period of historical quiet?

Or perhaps the change is going on all around us and since we’re living it, we’re too close to notice how much the world has changed in ways that don’t involve how a guitar is played or how paint is put on a canvas. Maybe this transition to the abstracted world of digital media will be viewed as one of the most significant shifts in centuries. A time when the physical became substrate and data became the world in which we live.

Those who were born into the old ways fear that we now live in a world with no reading, no contemplation, no intelligence outside of the hive mind of Twitter. A loss of human interaction.

Instead of worrying about what we’ve lost (it’s not coming back), why not look around at the birth of the new art?

“Although often grouped together under the banner of “mathematics,” the techniques and attitudes of pure and applied forms diverged significantly in the nineteenth century. By the end of the century, pure mathematics and its associated realm of symbolic logic had become so abstract and removed from what the general public saw as math—that is, numbers and geometric shapes—that Bertrand Russell could famously conclude in 1901 (in a Seinfeldian moment) that mathematics was a science about nothing. It was a set of signs and operations completely divorced from the real world.”
Searching for the Victorians
Dan Cohen