I have realized that everything I consider romantic can be boiled down into my conception of the couple in New York winter (okay fine, John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale in Serendipity). Picture this in your head - two strangers holding hands, strolling through Central Park all bundled up in mittens and scarves, laughing as snow cascades and swirls all about them like a white tornado. You don't even have to have gone to New York to see this in your mind's eye - the movies have painted an image on us so strong that we can see them hovering under the lamppost, pausing to have a kiss, their breath freezing in the cold air into wet steam.
You see, everything I find romantic is from the movies - I grew up a dreamer and it continues still, albeit with a slight realist twinge because if I operated by the conventions of movies I would always be depressed by how it never turns out so. But think, everything I absolutely adore!: Steaming cups of coffee being sipped on the street corner waiting for the light to turn green, apple pie a la mode in some dingy diner across the street from a frozen ice rink where couples skating for the first time giggle as they hold the siderail and try not to fall over, Salvation Army santas standing at the corner of Times and 42nd Avenue ringing that fucking bell but people are in such a giving mood that there are a few twenties in there to help the less fortunate bless them, looking up into the endless expanse of darkened sky knowing that we are such a small portion of this universe but loving life nonetheless because we do exist here miniscule or not we are corporeal we are real we are part of something amazing; our gaze turns to the city skyline moving and shifting as the parallax from the falling snow dazzles and amazes us as the lights blink on the billboard sign displaying some ad for Mamma Mia.
So you and I, enjoying romance in the crisp winter air where love goes to live and, for the moment, escapes the clutches of reality, let us wander heels crunching through this snow, sipping our half-calf, avec whip, half-sweet hazelnut lattes, all bundled up in our winter parkas and just go nowhere because you know what?
This has nothing to do with Britney, except that she just happened to make a song titled Lucky. Random, I know, but that's how I've been feeling today. I've been pretty dejected this last few days, mostly because I've attempting to attain my goal that I hammered out at cell group last week. For those who weren't present, it goes something like this:
We were sitting around in a circle at cell group discussing the topic that Jia brought up, which was What should Christians do? It goes a little deeper than that, but basically it asks what Christians are called to do and what is their scope of practice, for lack of a better term. We somehow got into asking each other what we thought God was calling us to do, and Jia got excited and recorded them all down. I figure we're going to do a one-year post-op, followed by a five-year post-op and so on and so forth just to see where we're at with following the dreams God wants for us, so I'll share with you what I've been getting up to:
My goal according to how Jia worded it: Joey Mo: To feel and display genuine love to my friends, the people around me, and totally strangers. I know I don't display the perfect love to my friends, in fact I honestly don't really make an effort to care about them sometimes. I don't really realize this because I guess I'm a little self-absorbed in what I'm doing at the time, whether it be studying or if I have something else that I feel is more important for me to do. I ignore people's birthday parties, show up late to occasions I say I'm going to or don't even bother to show up at all. I ditch friends in social events, or when I get there I don't even say hello to them at all, but hone in on the food table, grab a bite to eat, then leave. I'm often cruel to my family, and am not there for them when they need me. I also walk by the same homeless Asian guy in front of Tim Horton's every day and when he asks me for change I think Change is good and That's a good thing to ask for, Obama would like that, but then I tell him "I don't give change" then go inside and get my extra-large double double like the gluttonous, self-centered, un-sharing beast I know I am.
I've been thinking a lot about how I'm acting towards friends, family, and people in general, and have been attempting to cognitively re-structure my thought process in order to actively recognize what I'm doing and change it. I'm trying to love, but it isn't easy, because I am often compelled to go elsewhere and do other things. It's difficult to love everyone without neglecting yourself.
It seems like I'm being very hard on myself, and I am. So why do I feel so lucky?
I think it's because God has given me wonderful support systems with which to share this learning experience. I was most touched by this one moment after church last Sunday, where Simon started talking to me. He asked me, "Joey, do you have a Bible?" and when I said, "No," he didn't hesitate to offer the one in his hand - his own personal Book of God where he's written all his marginalia and poured his hours and love into - saying, "Here, have mine." This is his gold, the word of God in purest form, and he was willing, so willing to relinquish it in a heartbeat in order to reach someone who didn't deserve it. I said thank you, but one of my personal goals is to find a Bible I really enjoy myself, to just peruse the Bible Store and go through it slowly to find the book for me. But it was this principle, this love for your neighbor that is so far-reaching and touching, even in the most seemingly mundane of events ("dude, it's just a book...") that really hit home.
I feel so lucky that God has introduced Jason and Steve into my life so that I can intersect groups of friends whom I have nothing in common with. These are people well versed in God's walk, and so will be invaluable resources in learning about God and what it means to be a Christian - which I feel I still know nothing about but am learning more about if that makes any sense. Through some strange statistical anomaly that I can attribute only to divine intervention, God's put like the only two people on this continent who actually like talking about neuro on a day-to-day basis into my life so that I can discuss religion, fulfill my goals of meeting and holding down groups of people with which I can share God's love, and also talk about Searle and the suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus. I've talked about consciousness with Jason at length, and just yesterday discussed with Steve about Crick's (of DNA's famous Watson & Crick) deathbed work on the claustrum and Gestalt-like integration in the sensorium. We discuss Ramachandran and Descartes, Beauregard and Sacks.
Of course, my friend Jia who is often my anchor in the tumultuous waves of my every day reflection, is also very good for stability. I have fought long and hard with figuring out in which direction my moral compass faces, and have often had a heated argument with my beautiful professional debater Magdalene over black and white and the gray that is supposedly between them that I have yet to see. I talk law with Law, pour over the Bible, dissect the Pharisees, the ways of the lawful man, how evil lawyers actually are despite following the law, and evil people in general.
Friends help me clarify where I stand; help me thin(k) and reflect. You give so much of God's love that I can't help but want to give God's love back to you. So with your help, let us try to make some small miracles happen with my fingertips and the relationships around me - friends you are my witnesses and God you are my hands.
Ah, Radiohead. Paranoid Android has long been touted as one of the greatest songs of all time which is both accurate as it is controversial. You either love Radiohead, or you love to hate them.
Anderson & Roe are a duo of Julliard graduates who've come together to create something quite magical, taking their inspiration from one of the most magical bands of all time. That being said, their rendition of Paranoid Android is no amateur-hour David Sides creation, but a well thought out and intelligently contrived work of art.
I've long loved the idea of a Paranoid Android that doesn't understand where it stands. Half-human, half-robot; it attempts to resolve the human condition and the robot one as well. It wonders aloud the arguments of Searle, whether it truly is more than just a Chinese Room, and if its emotions and understandings of reality are true. Is his consciousness the product of neural networks, or the circuitry of his motherboard? Does it matter?
Notice the following: ~0.43 - Parallel lines cascading upwards in a reverse harmonic waterfall ~2.20 - Paranoia. Exchange of lines between pianos with frequent changes in dynamics. ~3.20 - Controlled chaos. ~4:05 - An elbow? Why not! Unleash thy anger toward the world! ~5:40 - The Android's lament.
What a fantastic ending! Rolling chords, chaotic firings as if it never truly understands its identity. This is simultaneous pianistic virtuosity and identity confusion. Run, android - and learn to understand who you are like Sonny tried to understand himself.
Ah, the question. Where is my God? Is God housed in a region of the brain in the temporal lobes? Is religion a product of our consciousness, a fabrication entirely conceived by the marriage of neuronal firing and neural networks? Or is God everywhere and everything and everyone and forever and always? Is He faith and it is but for us to believe in His unceasing majesty?
Gosh, you guys are silly.
God's actually just hanging out on my new Freshjive t-shirt:
Neurophilosophy is all abuzz with the discovery of a new neurological disorder known as confabulatory hypermnesia, also known as severe false memory syndrome. The gist of it is that the one individual they've come across who is afflicted with it exhibits a surprisingly accurate detail of memories he's completely made up. While confabulatory hypermnesia resembles spontaneous confabulation, a disorder characterized by making up accounts that may be fantastical in nature, the defining feature of confabulatory hypermnesia is that this individual provides answers to questions that would normally be answered by both normals and spontaneous confabulators with "I don't know." (*Note: Oliver Sacks had a fantastic account of spontaneous confabulation in The Man Who Mistook HIs Wife for a Hat*)
For example:
3.3.1. Personal Semantic Memory Q. ‘‘What is your brother’s job? A. ‘‘Re´my is an artist. He works in variety shows.’’ LM confuses his brother with his son (Patrik) who actually works as an artist in variety shows.
3.3.7. Semantic Plans Q. ‘‘What do you think will be the most important advancements in the exploration of space in the next 10 years?’’ A. ‘‘We will land on the Moon and see if somebody lived there, if it is habitable.’’
3.3.10. ‘‘I don’t know’’ Episodic Q. ‘‘Do you remember what you had for dinner on Tuesday two weeks ago?’’ R. ‘‘Steak with French fries.’’ Q. ‘‘Do you remember what you were wearing on the first day of summer in 1979?’’ R. ‘‘A short and a T-shirt.’’ Q. ‘‘Do you remember what you did on March 13, 1985?’’ A. ‘‘We spent the day at the Senart Forest’’ (a place where LM used to go often with his family).
The curious thing about confabulatory hypermnesia is that there is no discernible organic lesion associated with it. Spontaneous confabulation and amnesia are often products of Wernicke-Korsakoff's Syndrome caused by severe alcoholism. L.M. was an alcoholic and exhibits the typical global tissue atrophy characteristic of alcoholics, but there is no defined lesion that separates the confabulatory hypermnesic from spontaneous confabulators.
The authors, however, propose an extremely interesting theory as to why this comes about. Before I go into it, Dalla Barbara proposed the Memory, Consciousness and Temporality Theory (MCTT), which suggests that the CNS does not just passively receive incoming information from the outside world, but actually has modes for understanding the object being perceived. In consciousness there are two very important modes that are central to understanding the object as it is rendered by the sensorium: Knowing Consciousness (KC - "the mode of addressing the object in order to know it") and Temporal Consciousness (TC - "temporalising the object according to past, present or future structures of temporality"). When consciousness processes the information, the object then has a Uniqueness (its determination) and a Multiplicity (its indetermination). Dalla Barbara and Decaix give an example:
"This pen on the desk is both a pen and the pen. In the first case it is an undetermined pen, something that belongs to the category of ‘‘pens’’, an object that I recognize and use appropriately because I recognize it. On the contrary, in the second case ‘‘the pen’’ is a determined object, is exactly this pen in front of me, the pen I bought yesterday and that I will be using tomorrow. So, the pen reveals a uniqueness and a multiplicity, the multiplicity of being a pen and not a different object of the object in front of me, the uniqueness of being precisely this pen and not another pen."
Visualized, it appears as follows:
What is hypothesized to happen in confabulatory hypermnesia is that TC is cut off from being able to perceive if an item holds a Uniqueness, so that only the KC is able to determine if an object has a Uniqueness. Unfortunately, this makes it so that pretty much any Multiplicity is deemed to be an appropriate memory, therefore memories are often born more out of association than of actuality. "What TC does instead in this condition is to address Multiplicity of the object as Uniqueness, so that the result is that not only unique personal episodes, but also habits or personal semantic information are considered in a personal temporal framework." "Most of his confabulations to ‘I don’t know’’ Episodic questions reflect the retrieval of personal habits or semantic information rather than retrieval of imagined events: the Senart Forest is a place where he used to go often with his family, steak and French fries are a very common meal in France, in summer many people wear shorts and T-shirts."
Visually:
Fantastic stuff, no? It crosses the domains of frontal executive functioning and memory in both episodic and semantic domains, combining them into a real questioning of the nature of our consciousness and our neurological integrity! There are so many questions that these authors suggest that are really burning questions into the study of memory and ultimately the study of how we perceive the world, like what delineates the boundaries of TC, is there a possibility for an episodic and semantic double dissociation in confabulatory hypermnesia, and what are the cognitive and neurological correlates of this disorder?
The fact that we're continuing to unveil new and undiscovered syndromes just goes to show that we are only barely beginning to understand the complexities of the CNS. How I love these uncharted lands!
Language is fascinating. I love the idea of words as symbols, as if they are grenades carrying the ammunition of meaning, and when used in the right spot, will explode into understanding. I find it so interesting that the way you use words can influence how a person thinks about what you say. Any first year psychology textbook has the story where participants watched a video of a car accident, then rated on a form how fast they thought the car was going. The only thing that changed between two conditions was the wording of the question:
"How fast was the car going when it bumped into the other car?" "How fast was the car going when it smashed into the other car?"
Of course, people who read the first had lower estimated speeds, while those who read the second had higher.
Words are so influential, that during the war they didn't refer to Jews as humans, they referred to them as objects: "Figuren" or "stücke", dolls, wood, merchandise, rags. There were no people in 'Nam that were the enemy, because the enemy were gooks, the same as how coloured people were niggers or coons, chinks or coolies, spics, nips, pakis. You oppress them, you kill them, who cares because there's no human rights violations on objects - they ain't human.
Words can turn something that is into something that isn't.
You can omit words too and pretend like the thing it symbolizes doesn't even exist. Some neurophilosophers have proposed eliminating words like "mind", "conciousness", "imagination" thinking that if they don't talk about it in ways that can't be explained by biology, then maybe there will never be a materialist/non-materalist split. As if you can just throw a rug over God and pretend He isn't there, and say that just because we don't have the word God and that we don't talk about Him no more, He musn't exist, and that God must just be something your proteins and electrical impulses make. "Words that have truly lost meaning become obsolete by common consent, not banishment".
We speak, but rarely do we realize that the words we utter have so much power. Think about what you say.
***
Beauregard, M., & O'Leary, D. (2007). The spiritual brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul. Toronto, ON: HarperCollins Publishers.
Michaels, A. (1996). Fugitive pieces. Toronto, ON: McClelland & Stewart Ltd.
Above all, the last weeks have taught me to be humble. I pride myself on being inquisitive, yet I found out that I don't ask very good questions or the right sorts of questions. I like to think I'm intellectual, but now I see it's just the glasses that make me look that way. I was proud of my top of the key standing three-pointer, but I have a long way to go, pardon the pun. I believe my piano was decent in its day, but I barely even glazed the surface.
The more I learn, the more I realize how much there is I don't know and might never know. Questions like: Who is God? Why don't I know more about pop art? How come I know nothing about history, and am content to keep it that way? Ditto for geography; I couldn't point out New Zealand on a map if my life depended on it. What would it be like to have a summer project of building a car from scratch? Am I lying to myself for not wanting to go to med? Am I actually a loser, but don't realize it because losers don't realize they're losers because only cool kids know who the losers are?
I believe mind is emergent from brain, but not thoroughly from the brain. I am a dualistic interactionalist, that is I believe that "consciousness and other aspects of the mind, which can influence neural events, can occur independently of the brain". I do not think therefore I am, but I think therefore I am that which I am, I think? As always, I feel pressured from eliminative materialists and fervent Cartesian dualists alike, a sordid side effect that accompanies straddling the fine line between two specific identities. I don't want to be what I am not, yet I am parts of what I am not.
If only it were so easy to choose, like choices were flavours of ice cream. Or perhaps it is true: Blessed is he who is ignorant, for he is blissfully unaware.
***
Question: If the mind can be emergent from the brain, can love be emergent from the heart? Is love a referred sensation? Perhaps I should pay more attention to cardiovascular, maybe it has a mystery all to its own.
I mentioned the other day that I was reading The Spiritual Brain. I came across a passage by Sir John Eccles, a Nobel laureate that worked alongside Hodgkins and Huxley to elucidate the nature of ion channels governing inhibitory post-synaptic potentials in a simple reflex pathway. While this work would be considered rudimentary in present day, this was the explosion of neuroscience in the '50s & '60s. Eccles pioneered research into the functions of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, which was known about since the 1920s but was only examined further by his groundbreaking work.
I am by no means interested at the low-level study of ion channels (in fact receptor physiology has been my lowest grade in a neuroscience-related course), but I do have respect for all levels neuroscientific research. Despite studying only a bud in a lush neurophysiological rainforest, Eccles still had the same burning question that I have, and I don't even need an Oxford philosophy doctorate to ask it. The question, in all its simplicity: "What am I?"
From the perspective of metatheory, we look upon ourselves and ask the question: "Did God create the brain, or does the brain create God?" Is there a neural correlate for religion? Is there an anatomical basis for consciousness? It seems so scientific to think that synaptic firing = everything, doesn't it? But is there any other explanation?
Sir John Eccles: "I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neural activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition...We are spiritual beings with souls in a spiritual world, as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world."
What do I think? I don't know, and I'm not sure anyone does. Ask me five years ago what I think about this idea, and I'd say, "Who gives a shit?" Ask me a year ago and I would say without hesitation that, by Occam's Razor and K.I.S.S. and all things elegant, there is no better explanation that we are just the product of neurons firing. Today, I am entirely uncertain, but I do think that one day we will find it like this:
A = God. B = brain. A∩B is where we will find consciousness.
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