cheese it, the cops!

violence, violins, silence

one thing about 'science': surprisingly, the word seems to turn off all critical reasoning faculties. but of course you have to like the conclusion; then any argument is a good enough argument, as in this tissue of strange fallacies by lisa feldman barrett in the new york times, arguing that speech can be violence and that she has a scientific basis for distinguishing speech that is from speech that isn't.  

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

the argument runs like this: what causes physical harm is violence. stress causes physical harm. words can cause stress. so words can be violence. as usual, the neurology does nothing at all, especially if you already knew that stress can cause physical harm. but it describes the harm: stress = violence shrinks telomeres. so i wonder what else shrinks telomeres; it's all violence.

seriously, boiling down the argument, it's this: doing anything that stresses someone out is assault.  think about that for just a minute, alright? 

on the other hand

total pacifism and resulting anarchism from william lloyd garrison:

We cannot acknowledge allegiance to any human government; neither can we oppose any such government by a resort to physical force. We recognize but one King and Lawgiver, one Judge and Ruler of mankind. We are bound by the laws of a kingdom which is not of this world, the subjects of which are forbidden to fight; which has no state lines, no national partitions, no geographical boundaries; in which there is no distinction of rank, or division of caste, or inequality of sex; and which is destined to break in pieces and consume all other kingdoms.

(amdef 152)

i'll just remark again that no matter who drew the conclusion (tolstoy, for example) or who did not, anti-statism follows obviously from pacifism, because the political state rests on force.

garrison was a big hero of my step-father, richard abell, who was a beloved teacher at sidwell friends in dc and walt whitman in montgomery county, md. of granite new hampshire stock, like nathaniel rogers, he was a quaker on and off, a conscientious objector in world war 2, and a draft counselor during vietnam. during his co service, he contracted polio and used a wheelchair after that. also, like garrison, he was a free speech fundamentalist: a lifetime supporter of the aclu, among other causes.

[richard and my son samuel abell sartwell, rolling around the farm in rappahannock county, va on the 'richmobile'. a handicapped-accessible organic vegetable farm. my mom still lives there.]

he took me to a few quaker meetings. silence is hard when you're 14 and known informally as 'the mouth.' well, 50 minutes of silence is still hard for me as an adult. i've had some influxes of spirit, though, in such circumstances. one thing that's helping in my time of trial is the beautiful quaker document a testament of devotion, by thomas r. kelly.

 

 

apartheid of the hemispheres

apropos of the below, people actually do want to make the left-right spectrum neurological and genetic. they really do want to make left and right 19th century-style races, literally. and as in 19th century races, people are supposed have different racial/biological natures and destinies, different roles in history. then like the caucasoid race in relation to the negroid and mongoloid races, according to british gentlemen in 1880, the progressive race can assume its destined domination. otherwise we go backwards in history, or even in evolution.

if whether or not you support obamacare is genetic, then we could breed out the right-wingers, or maybe medicate them. so certain are people on either side of the rightness of their own positions, so soaked in empty dogma are they, that neither side would hesitate to fix the other surgically or through starvation-and-reinforcement in order to...whatever, save the earth from warming or keep you from choosing abortion or save the very essence of american freedom, or whatever. this degree of certainty is a feature of beliefs that are taken for social rather than for epistemic reasons; it is entirely out of proportion to any evidence or argument. to have even a normal degree of certainty, or the possibility of backing up should new evidence emerge, would be a betrayal of your people. even to listen to the reasons other people have for believing things would be a betrayal. in this sense left and right are like religious faiths or perhaps i meant to say cults.

that's how committed people are to this completely incoherent bulljive: they really do regard it as a baseline of human existence - so of course it's in the brain - even though the left-right spectrum emerged only in the 19th century. this shows you for one thing the quality of this neurofad and its dangerousness: really it's as good as race theory joined to evolution and phrenology circa 1880. if you listen to people on the left, they keep suggesting that people on the right are at an earlier stage of evolution, like neanderthals or trogoladytes, etc. nature has imprinted on our dna a wretched series of contradictions, as though the people who think 2+2=17 and those who think it's 71 have different neurotransmitters or different cerebral swellings. or it's as though you found that people who like season 2 of scandal have a different forehead slope than those who prefer season 3. jeb bush and hillary clinton don't have different positions on anything, but their brains are different or they wouldn't belong to different political parties. 

indeed, from my point of view, the positions amount to the same thing: enthusiasm for the very same hierarchy, slightly differently described (the left loving political hierarchy, the right economic, and these coinciding almost perfectly on the ground). i'd breed that out, if i could.

understand that where you are on the political spectrum correlates with gender, sexual orientation, race, region, income level, age, and so on. so you'd have to make all those things neurologically connected somehow. just spitballing now, but a basically social explanation is actually going to work easily in a million obvious ways, whereas this is just an complete non-starter. it's worth saying, though, that neither the neurological nor the social explanation is relevant to the truth of the positions, so if either works overall, no one believes any of these things because they have reasons to think they're true. well, that much is obvious anyway.

Daniel Dennett and Free Will and Salon

I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a B-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper
And I was free. -- Ray and Saliers

When I turn to philosophy and pick up a new work, the technical stuff makes me think that perhaps the idea to burn the Great Library of Alexandria was not such a bad one after all. Langugae that serves only to drive the potential reader away deserves to be forgotten. Of course, doctoral disseratations don't succeed so much by provoking new thought as by providing variations on an accepted theme of bullshit. The great thinkers succeed in reaching us by doing other things that producing tomes suitable more for tombs that thought, realization and excited discussion.

Daniel Dennett is an interesting and provocative thinker; while I like his simile about human beings as "moist robots", he seems here to be edging away from that. The robot part takes us so far, and then there's an entirely different set of functions,problems and issues. Two things I liked here is the issue of intentionality -- free will requires philosophical intention, that is, conscienious direction and awareness and it requires the ability to recognize and prevent manipulation. The moral actor has to go into situations with eyes wide open and a poker face. The other, which I think is implied, is that the initial reaction to radically new perspectives seems to be to regard it as either naive or cynical, until you think about it.

My other thought is simple. I find Dennett's technical philosophy, the neuroscientist-philosopher stuff incomprehensible, but when he writes or speaks to communicate with actual living people, he's very good indeed. Is that a trend? Crispin's thought is much the same way, although since he doesn't babble about neurons and synapses and blood volume and all  the rest, he's more approachable. Sartre was the same way -- you can read "Being and Nothingness", or you can read "The Words" or "No Exit and three Plays" and  the first will drive you to distraction, solitary despair and  isolated absinthe sucking through a sugar cube; the others will engage, provoke conversastion and maybe...cause thought. 

Maybe even in Salon...it's a thought. 

 

research this, bitch

i'm all up in the comments in this review of the worst line of "scientific" "research" ever pursued. you'd think it would be impossible to be as disingenuous and doltish as "scientists" of this stripe, but at least they have achieved self-fellation.

try to concentrate as i tell you what went wrong

so it turns out that 11% of american children have been diagnosed with adhd, and the figure is twice that for high-school age boys. there are many theories, evidently, including something in the water, overdiagnosis, and so on. but i am going to explain this to you clearly and, i believe, decisively. even though psychologists want to go with 'chemical imbalance in the brain' and so on, with the usual completely vague scientific-sounding hooha designed to flummox and reassure us and establish their epistemic authority, adhd is not a condition of the brain. it is a condition of a person in a context. what has changed, i propose, is not anyone's brain, but the institutional context in which those brains are embedded. the american educational system has become ever-more authoritarian, rigid, mindless, and unconnected from anyone's actual body. the dedication to standardized tests means that sitting still and doing the prescribed task in exactly the same way everyone else does it at the same time are more or less all that's left. my daughter, who's in seventh grade, does not have recess. etc etc. 'adhd' the supposed dysfunction or illness or imbalance, would be perfectly normal or useful in a less structured or authoritarian context, or in a context that deployed any basic understanding of or connection with children as human beings. these institutions are really merely diagnosing themselves.

let me just remark that by a state of perfect chemical balance or health, these people just mean capitulation and extreme passivity. psychologists, far from being scientists of any sort, merely reflect the authoritarian institutions from which they emerged and the effortless self-subordination to authority which they literally define as health. say you're an inquisitor. the harder you crack down, the more sinful everyone appears, the more heretics you detect. you are manufacturing heretics by your definitions and the way you conduct your church, but then you think, as you define your arbitrary dogmata ever-more narrowly, that society is degenerating because there are more and more heretics. that's exactly as scientific, as reasonable, and as reflective as this.

my self, my disease

let's think about one of the most basic assumptions of contemporary psychology: there is a self, and then there are diseases or dysfunctions that distort, interrupt, or encrust this self. the illnesses could be removed from the self - with medication, for example - leaving the self free and unencumbered. this appears to be completely uncontroversial within psychology and its neuroversions and also kind of the basic cultural stance. but particularly in any very clear or simple form, it's just false. at least in many cases, what we perceive as mental illness is, i believe, as essential or integral to the selfhood of the person involved as any other basic trait of personality. the relation of a person to their so-called mental illness is not at all like the relation of a person's body to a tumor, for example. i don't think i'm a crispy with an addict module added on; i think i am an addict. we think of illnesses as some sort of humunculus or demon, or sheer neurological mistake. but take the neurosis out the neurotic or the bipolar out of the bipolar, or the adhd out of the boy, and you do not release the true or free self within, you re-make the self on the surface. possibly, you mess with the essence of the patient, which might of course be needful. no doubt it is possible to feel that your mental illness is oppressing you, or is an alien entity occupying you like a demon. but i think that our psychological institutions enforce that account, and make it a condition of treatment, etc. i don't think that's the way it's usually actually experienced. and the idea that you could get a picture like that out of the brain scanning is ridiculous: y'all brought that to every research project, and didn't problematize it for an instant.

you're an animal

somehow, the new york times op-ed page has become the journal of empty brain research.

The part of the brain where the instinctive “fight or flight” signal is first triggered — the amygdala — is situated such that it receives incoming stimuli before the parts of the brain that think things over. Then, in our ongoing response to potential peril, the way the brain is built and operates assures that we are likely to feel more and think less. As Professor LeDoux puts it in “The Emotional Brain”: “the wiring of the brain at this point in our evolutionary history is such that connections from the emotional systems to the cognitive systems are stronger than connections from the cognitive systems to the emotional systems.”

look you've just imported the most primitive old-time dualisms into your interpretation of the imagery. human beings are torn between rationality and animality, between reason and passion. it might as well be spirit and flesh. 'the part of the brain that thinks things over': are you sure this is the clearest way to espress what you're saying? i am telling you that 'emotional' and 'cognitive' systems are just not going to turn out to be distinct. try to persuade me that you didn't just presume this dualism as a completely unjustified conceptual structure within which you conducted your resarch.  

now you want to know why rational animals like ourselves believe and behave so irrationally. does it strike you that 'the irrational part is stronger than the rational part' is just a restatement of the problem, not any sort of solution? it's exactly as though i explained why people fail to be rational by pointing out that it's because they are seized by irrationality. why is michael jordan so good at basketball? because the good-at-basketball part of him is stronger than the sucks-at-basketball part.

the fact that you call the animal in us 'amygdala' only gives a slight patina of obscurantist authority for your entire augustine-style picture of human psychology, complete with original sin. you want to account for the fact that people behave irrationally. the answer: it is the beast within. even aristotle had a more sophisticated moral psychology. but what i love about it is that no work at all is devoted to questions like: is rationality distinct from the emotions? is that distinction where we want to start, as opposed to a bunch of other possible distinctions? if you don't start by really working through the definitional questions, you'll have no idea whether you're seeing the irrational bit or not. i don't doubt that y'all are pretty sophisticated in generating data. what i doubt is that you have any ability even to become aware of your own most obvious assumptions. possibly your higher cognitive module is being seduced by your amygdala.

as hume put it, the pre-frontal lobe is and ought only to be the slave of the amygdala. or kant's theory was that we could be motivated by pure application of the executive region, which should subdue the amygdala entirely. robert louis stephenson illustrated the brain research in his novella dr. pre-frontal cortex and mr. amygdala.

mdma and power

Contrary to expectations, psilocybin decreased cerebral blood flow, particularly to brain regions that act as "connector hubs" responsible for filtering and co-ordinating the flow of information through the brain. These hubs impose a top-down control on our awareness, integrating sensory inputs and prior expectations into a coherent, organised and censored experience of the world.

thus the guardian, reporting on possible therapeutic effects of psychoactive drugs of 'abuse.' i just want to make sure that y'all are clear that connector hubs etc are metaphors. and the metaphors used for brain activity always seem to draw on whatever the contemporary technology might be. now: i guess maybe you could see on an mri things that sort of look like connector hubs. but can you see the 'top-down control' they supposedly exercise? possibly  this is a notion you are bringing to the data rather than deriving from it. when you look at an mri scan, do you see a political system? a hierarchy of powers? you might ask yourself how a connector hub, much less a whole bunch of connector hubs, exercise(s) top-down control over anything. so maybe when you say that connector hubs exercise top-down control, you mean that they effect events elsewhere in the brain, but are not by affected by such events. this would, however, sort of keep them from being connector hubs.

finally...

this is almost the first thing i've seen in the popular press that even notices that this neuro-stuff is a fad, and is more or less completely empty in many contexts.

brain shit

this brain shit has just become a completely ridiculous fad. ok ask yourself with regard to any particular application - let's say naomi wolf's brain/vagina connections or whatever, or in education: what work is the word 'brain' actually doing? so an english prof puts people in an mri and makes them read in different ways. alright let's pretend that everything is ok with this whole idea. then the conclusion is: close reading is different than casual reading: look at the way the things lights up etc. now, did you know that already? let's say the brain crap fell apart and actually the two things looked more similar on scans than we thought. would that entail that casual reading and close reading aren't different after all? say the vagina/brain connection isn't at all the way naomi wolf thinks it is. would that mean that her orgasm doesn't feel the way she feels it or have the deep meaning she thinks it does? i am not arguing for an immaterial mind at all. all i'm saying is that the brain crap is completely incessant, a mere fashion, and that it rarely does any work at all. as in iraq, the evidence is fixed to support the pre-existing conclusions. but in cases like this, there is just nothing happening at all. it's just adding random functionless parts to your machine. or rather it has one function: it is a claim of epistemic authority for conclusions reached in anything but a scientific fashion. really, it functions in the same way as an appeal to scripture or to 'the rules': it's merely a power play without any actual epistemic relevance.

please stop

this here is complete horseshit. and the idea that there is a difference in the political psychologies of left and right has even gone brain. notice the irresistable undertow of self-praise that accompanies these notions: that conservatives have a bigger irrational-fear zone, or that liberals are more open to experience. i want you to feel good about yourself, but i'd suggest therapy rather than "science." the academic left is absolutely unanimous and each person believes what she believes for reasons of social cohesion. actually open-minded people questing for new experiences would not chant the same litttle cliches in unison. really this is the most pitiful way imaginable to defend your political positions: it would be irrelevant to the truth of the positions even if it were true, which it isn't. put em in a scanner and the self-deception lobe lights up like hong kong at night.

if a white scientist tells you that white craniums are bigger, or if a man tells you that men have a bigger reasoning facility and women a bigger emotional region, you should just ignore it and let it blow over. the american academic leftist is achingly desperate to belong epistemically and yet is a monster of hubris. that anyone could possibly disagree with themselves is a bizarre fact that needs some sort of explanation, and there can be only one: our opponents are cognitively defective. they might as well just scream 'tard!' and have done. if you are making grants for this kind of 'research,' stop right now. at an absolute minimum, if you are going to do any sort of research on 'political psychology,' you need to make sure the researchers are politically diverse. the fact that that would basically not be possible with american academic psychologists shows precisely how open-minded they are.

no doubt everyone sort of entertains the notion that disagreement with themselves is a pathology. like i assert that there's something defective about people who think lou reed made good records. say i proposed to show that with empirical studies, scientifically...

the idea that there are brain differences between liberals and conservatives is frigging pathetic, and it shows why it matters what you know when you start: dude the left-right political spectrum was invented at very earliest in the french revolution. it had no purchase in american politics until the late 19th century. there have been many other ways of conceiving the political spectrum. it is a textbook case of the sort of problems i outline below: we're going to imprint momentary cultural fads or mistakes into your very biology. people's political positions correlate to things like income levels, state or region of residence, gender, race, sexual identity, and so on: so you'd better be willing to connect all of these with brain configuration. now we're really, really in interesting territory, the territory that begins to show that the researchers are actually reactionaries, which they could prove by self-dissection, which would also do the world and human knowledge a favor. i'm going to put it like this: until you can do something less self-serving and less historically ignorant, until you can actually show some openness to new ideas or experiences, i'm not even going to look at the 'data.' really if someone's paying me i'll try to smash the methodology. (well, it's psychology; the methodology comes pre-smashed.) but there's no more need for that than there is to sift through the pile of shit bit by bit to account for the stench. that there is a pile of shit there is evident from the smell, and we don't need to do the chemical analysis.

contd

so say the neurology folk started, more or less unquestioningly, with freud. i predict they'd find the id region; maybe they have. if they started with demon possession they'd find the demon regions etc. what you're detecting is only as good as the theory you bring to bear. say it's the dsm...

now, it's not that they're not seeing anything. and i actually think that at the more careful or open-minded levels they are starting to realize what i believe certainly to be the case: the systems are far far more connected than they might have thought. so, for example, i don't think that reason and emotion are separate functions or states or activities. now if you start with the presumption that they are - that is, you sort of start with some greek philosophy or something, on a superficial read - no doubt you'll find centers of animal irrationallity and centers of higher cognitive functions etc. oops that is a mistake: you started with a theory or a cultural nostrum or a star-trek spock v bones conceptual structure. but that's not to say that you couldn't learn something else if you really loooked without treating the distinction as a full-fledged unquestioned dogma. 'higher cognitive functions': in that phrase lurks an entire bourgeois value system or the part of the culture where the kids have to go to college, or something; or maybe it's just the pride of the ph.d. doing the research.

if you think there can be linguistic processing units in the human head that aren't at the same time rage processors or desire processors or visual and auditory procesors, i say you're tripping. not that there's a wire running between them: they just are not distinct. and if you just think of this whole thing as software running on hardware, i say you'll be working with an entirely different metaphor after awhile, like descartes thought of the whole thing in terms of hydraulic lifts, or when they figured it had to be a clockwork, or was a lot like a big industrial facility. i think - i want to say i know - that we are far more coherent and interconnected than that, and with the outside world, and that if there are modules we will find them not, you know, recapitulating descartes or an ethics where reason makes you good and animal instinct makes you bad and so forth. if it were science, you would not know what you were looking for, and you would not find what you expect. to study the human brain, you're going to have to think like an alien who hasn't absorbed, say, the presuppositions of western culture or latest fad in psychiatry. you're going to have to think like someone who never went to grad school...