I watch too much teevee (bad for the brain)
What keeps you up at night?
I should be sleeping, but I figure one more blog entry for the road (vacation!). I also missed the 11 o’clock new episode of South Park, and with my addiction to biting humor, somehow watching the 1:30 rebroadcast seems vale la pena. And sometimes I seem to be possessed by a need to concatenate a series of thoughts and read them back to myself, sleep be darned.
I should start by saying, for your own health, don’t watch Discovery Health Channel. Or at least, if you have a worried mien in general, there’s definitely enough shows to make you both fret and marvel at how many ways the human body can go askew or fall apart. I’ve tried to look at it from the Panglossian perspective, how wonderfully resilient! But then I could’ve just flipped channels to Animal Planet. One of the arguments against the essential “specialness” of the human species that could be made are the design features that other species have that hopefully can be integrated in HS 2.0. (cf. limb regeneration, hope this isn’t a hoax)
The scariest show I’ve seen wasn’t “Ebola’s on a Rolla”, or “Your Goog-tuple Open Heart Bypass in Thirty Easy Steps,” sponsored by MickyD’s . (The “Addicted to Plastic Surgery” is a close-second, however.) Actually, there wasn’t a drop of blood, and not a scalpel in sight. I caught a fragment of a show about an Arkansas hillbilly (described in his own words, HB here out) who started speaking nineteen years after a car accident that left him partially paralyzed in an altered brain state (I don’t recall the specific “vegetable” classification being mentioned, I guess probably “okrah”).
Now, I’ve been interested in this topic philosophically for many years, and read a number of popular books on neurology dealing specifically with the odd conditions of brain damage that inadvertently provide a blunt means to reverse engineer the brain. Nonetheless, it was disturbing to see the video of someone in the condition of having an unshakeable, delusional reality. Specifically, due to the damage sustained patient HB was unable to form new autobiographical memories. HB didn’t start wondering why he had aged drastically (19 at the time of the accident 38, when he started speaking again), why there was a 19 year-old woman claiming to be his daughter, or even why he was in New Jersey, in a hospital, unable to move his legs. “Just ain’t compute.” In one scene, it showed him getting visibly and vocally angry at the neurologist just for saying he was in New Jersey and not in his native land.
The anger makes plenty of sense, we all have identity beliefs that seem unshakeable, and without any pathway for HB to update his beliefs about the world and himself, on the contrary we might imagine that it would seem like awaking and having the strong feeling that everyone you come across is strange, crazy or pulling off the world’s cruelest and most-coordinated practical joke. A secondary component of this is that damage to the frontal lobes can be associated with loss of impulse and executive control and other human characteristics that act as a social glue.
Another segment of the program brought this out more clearly by highlighting the case of a British man who after a seemingly trivial car accident and concussion, was robbed of the ability to feel love for his wife and child (but otherwise had retained the surface semblance of humanity and the ability to form new memories). The damage to his brain was microscopic, invisible to current brain scan technology, but nevertheless, his new personality was not recognizable to his family and by now, former friends.
No doubt some neuroscientist nerd could send a Valentine, “I love you will all my frontal lobe. You move my limbic system like no one else! You get my oxytocin pumpin’.“
I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that human identity is as firm as jell-o -- that’s the very texture of its building blocks.
So, my next thought at obtaining Internet Stardom is performance art: “The Safest Thing.” I would have to wear a helmet every single moment of the day, everywhere, put in it a digital camera to record reactions and create a stage character obsessed with safety and encyclopedic knowledge of everything that could possibly be a threat to wellbeing (such that life is deprived of all enjoyment).
I was reading an article in “Reason” about how there are many more mandatory seat belt state laws, whereas the motorcyclist lobby has been better successful at eliminating mandatory helmet laws. It would be interesting if legislatures had to formulate laws based on mathematical formulae and statistical evidence. For instance, if to pick a hypothetical number the chance of accident and death or severe injury from an accident was 10 times more likely for a regular motorcycle rider with a state-ordained helmet than a non-seatbelt wearing, law-breaking car driver, if the reason for the law was paternal, would logic state the next step would be to eliminate the freedom to ride a motorcycle to begin with, given alternate transport options (ignoring the umpteen other competing values to keep in mind for one moment)?
Along these lines, one could mention the amount of resources our government of the people spends combating terrorists in comparison to the more mundane threats its citizenry will face if you took a glance at actuarial tables. Now this involves subjective risk assessment, and the counterpoint is that with the spectacle of four years ago, there is the possibility of WMDs coming to a metropolis near you. (As well as we can only get limited information about the amount of other attacks that have been thwarted to gauge the ROI.) If we looked at raw historical numbers, and not any other factors in the use of resources (such as we want foreigners to keep their money invested here, and as such it makes sense to try to spend out of proportion to preserve an image of being a safe place so that everyone who votes stays economically fat and happy), it is a valid question whether it would have been smarter to address known threats with a greater portion of resources.
My dinner conversation starter for the night: If the government attempts to legislate safety, how far can it go if a la “A Clockwork Orange” to legislate a new identity under the goal of providing increased public safety?
For instance, the model in the past has been to put people in prison after the crime, or punish them monetarily and/or physically. But a common stated goal or justification for imprisonment has been to make a “new man” out of the criminal. And what if that will become possible through medical means? (In some sense, with forced hormonal treatments, and the less pleasant legacy of lobotomies this has also been attempted) And what if, in an echo of “Minority Report”, there could be a division of Pre-crime. Not in the psychic sense, but in the sense that a cluster of psychological and mental traits correlate with some forms of criminality that could be detected.
The classic trait is the psychopathic personality, who lacks sympathy for other human beings (although perhaps it depends on upbringing and intelligence whether the psychopath becomes the criminal or the lawyer defending or prosecuting him – not to point at lawyers in particular, just to say it wouldn’t be fair to say only the socially marginalized have this trait). Supposing there is a malfunction in the frontal lobes, and it’s not just another evolutionary strategy, what if this could be treated to add the lacking sentiments? Yes, the brain is beyond complex so I don’t see this working until everybody wears unisex spandex and sets their phasers to stun, but it is also self-organizing, which requires a process that is potentially “hack-able,” as other organs are being reprogrammed to force a re-growth process. By using computer terms, I’m being literal, in that there are parallel algorithms at work, as in a series of steps to generate a desired end-result.
Enough asides and tangents for today.
I should be sleeping, but I figure one more blog entry for the road (vacation!). I also missed the 11 o’clock new episode of South Park, and with my addiction to biting humor, somehow watching the 1:30 rebroadcast seems vale la pena. And sometimes I seem to be possessed by a need to concatenate a series of thoughts and read them back to myself, sleep be darned.
I should start by saying, for your own health, don’t watch Discovery Health Channel. Or at least, if you have a worried mien in general, there’s definitely enough shows to make you both fret and marvel at how many ways the human body can go askew or fall apart. I’ve tried to look at it from the Panglossian perspective, how wonderfully resilient! But then I could’ve just flipped channels to Animal Planet. One of the arguments against the essential “specialness” of the human species that could be made are the design features that other species have that hopefully can be integrated in HS 2.0. (cf. limb regeneration, hope this isn’t a hoax)
The scariest show I’ve seen wasn’t “Ebola’s on a Rolla”, or “Your Goog-tuple Open Heart Bypass in Thirty Easy Steps,” sponsored by MickyD’s . (The “Addicted to Plastic Surgery” is a close-second, however.) Actually, there wasn’t a drop of blood, and not a scalpel in sight. I caught a fragment of a show about an Arkansas hillbilly (described in his own words, HB here out) who started speaking nineteen years after a car accident that left him partially paralyzed in an altered brain state (I don’t recall the specific “vegetable” classification being mentioned, I guess probably “okrah”).
Now, I’ve been interested in this topic philosophically for many years, and read a number of popular books on neurology dealing specifically with the odd conditions of brain damage that inadvertently provide a blunt means to reverse engineer the brain. Nonetheless, it was disturbing to see the video of someone in the condition of having an unshakeable, delusional reality. Specifically, due to the damage sustained patient HB was unable to form new autobiographical memories. HB didn’t start wondering why he had aged drastically (19 at the time of the accident 38, when he started speaking again), why there was a 19 year-old woman claiming to be his daughter, or even why he was in New Jersey, in a hospital, unable to move his legs. “Just ain’t compute.” In one scene, it showed him getting visibly and vocally angry at the neurologist just for saying he was in New Jersey and not in his native land.
The anger makes plenty of sense, we all have identity beliefs that seem unshakeable, and without any pathway for HB to update his beliefs about the world and himself, on the contrary we might imagine that it would seem like awaking and having the strong feeling that everyone you come across is strange, crazy or pulling off the world’s cruelest and most-coordinated practical joke. A secondary component of this is that damage to the frontal lobes can be associated with loss of impulse and executive control and other human characteristics that act as a social glue.
Another segment of the program brought this out more clearly by highlighting the case of a British man who after a seemingly trivial car accident and concussion, was robbed of the ability to feel love for his wife and child (but otherwise had retained the surface semblance of humanity and the ability to form new memories). The damage to his brain was microscopic, invisible to current brain scan technology, but nevertheless, his new personality was not recognizable to his family and by now, former friends.
No doubt some neuroscientist nerd could send a Valentine, “I love you will all my frontal lobe. You move my limbic system like no one else! You get my oxytocin pumpin’.“
I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked that human identity is as firm as jell-o -- that’s the very texture of its building blocks.
So, my next thought at obtaining Internet Stardom is performance art: “The Safest Thing.” I would have to wear a helmet every single moment of the day, everywhere, put in it a digital camera to record reactions and create a stage character obsessed with safety and encyclopedic knowledge of everything that could possibly be a threat to wellbeing (such that life is deprived of all enjoyment).
I was reading an article in “Reason” about how there are many more mandatory seat belt state laws, whereas the motorcyclist lobby has been better successful at eliminating mandatory helmet laws. It would be interesting if legislatures had to formulate laws based on mathematical formulae and statistical evidence. For instance, if to pick a hypothetical number the chance of accident and death or severe injury from an accident was 10 times more likely for a regular motorcycle rider with a state-ordained helmet than a non-seatbelt wearing, law-breaking car driver, if the reason for the law was paternal, would logic state the next step would be to eliminate the freedom to ride a motorcycle to begin with, given alternate transport options (ignoring the umpteen other competing values to keep in mind for one moment)?
Along these lines, one could mention the amount of resources our government of the people spends combating terrorists in comparison to the more mundane threats its citizenry will face if you took a glance at actuarial tables. Now this involves subjective risk assessment, and the counterpoint is that with the spectacle of four years ago, there is the possibility of WMDs coming to a metropolis near you. (As well as we can only get limited information about the amount of other attacks that have been thwarted to gauge the ROI.) If we looked at raw historical numbers, and not any other factors in the use of resources (such as we want foreigners to keep their money invested here, and as such it makes sense to try to spend out of proportion to preserve an image of being a safe place so that everyone who votes stays economically fat and happy), it is a valid question whether it would have been smarter to address known threats with a greater portion of resources.
My dinner conversation starter for the night: If the government attempts to legislate safety, how far can it go if a la “A Clockwork Orange” to legislate a new identity under the goal of providing increased public safety?
For instance, the model in the past has been to put people in prison after the crime, or punish them monetarily and/or physically. But a common stated goal or justification for imprisonment has been to make a “new man” out of the criminal. And what if that will become possible through medical means? (In some sense, with forced hormonal treatments, and the less pleasant legacy of lobotomies this has also been attempted) And what if, in an echo of “Minority Report”, there could be a division of Pre-crime. Not in the psychic sense, but in the sense that a cluster of psychological and mental traits correlate with some forms of criminality that could be detected.
The classic trait is the psychopathic personality, who lacks sympathy for other human beings (although perhaps it depends on upbringing and intelligence whether the psychopath becomes the criminal or the lawyer defending or prosecuting him – not to point at lawyers in particular, just to say it wouldn’t be fair to say only the socially marginalized have this trait). Supposing there is a malfunction in the frontal lobes, and it’s not just another evolutionary strategy, what if this could be treated to add the lacking sentiments? Yes, the brain is beyond complex so I don’t see this working until everybody wears unisex spandex and sets their phasers to stun, but it is also self-organizing, which requires a process that is potentially “hack-able,” as other organs are being reprogrammed to force a re-growth process. By using computer terms, I’m being literal, in that there are parallel algorithms at work, as in a series of steps to generate a desired end-result.
Enough asides and tangents for today.
brainfart by Daniel at
7:44 PM
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