Sex and the Homunculus Problem of Mind

When it comes to theories of mind, cognition and perception, there are a number of tools philosophers use in order to separate potentially workable theories from hypotheses that just don't have what it takes to even get off the ground. One of these requirements is that a good theory must avoid the homunculus problem (also known under some conditions, such as dualism, as the ghost in the machine). In essence, the problem here is a logical one, because it forces us to assume the very same phenomenon we're trying to explain, which is the essence of a circular argument.

If you want to explain vision, for instance, and you argue that the lenses in your eye produce an image, which your brain, or a little homunculus inside your head 'sees' as if projected on a screen (which is why this problem is also known as the Cartesian theater), you haven't explained anything. All you've done is take the question one step back. Now you'd have to explain how the little homunculus 'sees' the image, and because of your original answer, you are committed to posit the existence of a smaller homunculus inside the head of the first homunculus... Lather, rinse, repeat all the way down the infinite regress you've just created and the mystery is not one step closer to being solved.

Unfortunately, apart from the creators of Terminator (whose futuristic robot had to read the information projected on a digital screen inside his own eyes, as you can see in the picture above), even such illustrious philosophers as Descartes, Locke, Spinoza and Bertrand Russell (among many others), have been guilty of committing this fallacy.

Incidentally, Leibniz did not fall prey to the homunculus problem of mind, but he did fall victim to the spermatic homunculus problem because he thought that the presence of homunculi in human sperm was evidence of an eternal and infinite world of human preformation, and of the massive genocide that would occur every time a man ejaculates, even when he knocks someone up :) He didn't know it then, but the notion that sperm contained homunculi was based on the grainy quality of lenses of his time: as it turns out, there ain't such thing.

Anyway, the following clip (from Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex) nicely illustrates both homunculus problems in an amusing way you'll probably never forget :)

Or am I just reading too much into this? :)

Learn more about the mysteries of mind in the Brainspotting tag.
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Temple Grandin - The World Needs All Kinds of Minds

For quite a long time, autism was investigated by researchers who did their very best to explain a phenomenon with which they had no personal experience. While their research was helpful, it did not manage to capture or understand the personal subjectivity of those afflicted with this disorder... that is, until Temple Grandin came into the scene. Through her public appearances, Grandin gave a voice to the hitherto silent patients whose families had never managed to understand or relate to them, and radically changed their lives in the process.

In this TEDTalk presentation, Temple Grandin advocates for the practical need to cultivate mental diversity, and explains some of the ways in which we can foster the natural typology of minds already present in children, whether autistic or not: visual thinkers, pattern seekers, verbal communicators, geeky minds, problem-solvers, integrators, etc. Because of their particularity, she argues, each set of specialized thinkers has the potential to solve problems that the rest of our neurotypical brains might fail to solve.

I'll be posting more on Temple Grandin's work with animals soon.

In the meantime, learn more about autism, or check out other fascinating TEDTalks.
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Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus

Consider your life. Most days you wake up, you follow some mundane routine to get yourself ready, you go to work (probably at a job you're not all that crazy about), you anxiously wait for your shift to be over, you go home, and within a few hours you get ready to continue the same futile routine all over again. And for what? Eventually you'll die and none of the work you've done will have any significance for you because there will no longer be a you to care. Sure, some people might remember you for a little while, or you might leave some offspring behind, but what does that matter to you? Your memory won't last that long, and even if it did, you'll be dead anyway!

Life is absurd. Good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, the unjust often go unpunished, and no matter how hard you try, this cold and indifferent universe just doesn't give a shit. So why do you even bother getting up every morning? Why don't you just kill yourself?

The French existentialist thinker Albert Camus (he did not like being called a philosopher) took this predicament of the human condition quite seriously, and masterfully compared it to the absurd fate of Sisyphus, the titan condemned to push a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down again. Here is a beautifully stylized animation of Sisyphus and his eternal struggle:

And here is Camus and his life-affirming thoughts on The Myth of Sisyphus:

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, however, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. I see no contradiction in this. Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets. Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by that disappearance and complained to Sisyphus. He, who knew of the abduction, offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. To the celestial thunderbolts he preferred the benediction of water. He was punished for this in the underworld. Homer tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror.

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain.

It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out: "Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing. Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

---Albert Camus

Check out more entries on existentialism and on the relationship between philosophy and happiness..

Chemistry: A Volatile History - Discovering the Elements

When the ancient Greeks inquired into the building blocks of the universe, they posited the existence of four fundamental elements out of which everything else is composed: earth, fire, air and water. Crude as this taxonomy was, it became so influential that it went virtually unquestioned for two millennia. In the first episode of this fascinating documentary series, Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the human quest to understand the basic constituents of the universe, how the elements were discovered, and how the modern science of chemistry was born from mystical foundations in alchemy.

In fact, it would be an alchemist, Phillipus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim (what a mouthful!), better known as Paracelsus, who would first challenge the ancient Greek wisdom when he proposed the existence of three spiritual substances: mercury, sulfur and sat. Less than two centuries later, while trying to isolate the philosopher's stone, that long sought-after legendary substance capable of turning base metals into gold, the German alchemist Hennig Brand would unwittingly become the first person in history to isolate an element in its pure form... and I bet you'll never guess where he found it :)

Once this spark was kindled, it would not be long until more and more elements were discovered and the revolutionary science of chemistry was established by luminaries such as Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley, Robert Boyle and Humphry Davy, but there was one more major and subtle theoretical hurdle that had to be overcome first: the ever-elusive phlogiston... which managed to elude everyone mainly because it turned out not to exist :)

Check out Joseph Priestley's contribution to the discovery of oxygen, Lavoisier's contribution to Einstein's e=mc2, or his contribution to the understanding of cold.
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The Hayek vs. Keynes Rap: Fear the Boom and Bust

Before we get into the complexity of two of the most influential schools of economic thought of the previous century, you might want to take a look at this hilarious explanation of the basic principles of economics first (if nothing else, it's worth a good laugh).

As you may or may not know, the perception of economics trends in the twentieth century seemed to be dominated by two main schools of thought: one spearheaded by the economic philosophy of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who argued that economic collapse can be best dealt with through spending and government intervention. The other was led by Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich von Hayek, who argued for free markets and the role of savings in helping to shape sustainable structures and financial institutions.

Despite their different approaches to the study of economics, as well as their divergent focus on the boom and bust stages of the economic cycle (which you can quickly learn in the following rap video), I tend to think that a unified understanding of these two scholars should always be considered by those in charge of setting up fiscal policy. Ignoring either of these two thinkers is a sure recipe for future failure.

For more goodies, check out the economics tag.
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A History of Pretty Much Everything

I don't know if you've been paying attention, but a lot of stuff has been happening lately, and by lately I mean roughly the past fourteen and a half billion years. If you don't have the time to sit down and read Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything or some such lengthy equivalent, here is an awesome flipbook designed to bring you up to speed in just three minutes of animated fun :)

If you haven't satisfied your hunger for flipbook awesomeness, have fun watching three-dimensional mathematical motion.

And if you're still craving animated histories, check out a short but hilarious history of guns in America :)
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Hubble's Ultra Deep Field in 3D

You've seen the entirety of the known universe in a previous entry. Today we'll focus on one of the most revolutionary pictures of all time, what's come to be popularly known as Hubble's Ultra Deep Field. The origin of this picture dates back to what must have seemed to be a downright foolish idea: point Hubble's powerful lenses for ten days toward what originally appeared to be a completely dark area of the sky. Given the very stringent allocation of Hubble time due to the high demand for observation time, I'm sure a lot of researchers weren't exactly thrilled...

The major thrill would come once the images were finally processed. Here is the story of that epic image, which you can now see in three-awesome-and-humbling-dimensions!

Can't get enough? Check out the space tag.

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Ghost Particles

Not only does the belief in ghosts pose practical scientific problems (how do you detect something which violates all the known laws of physics, and which refuses to appear to anyone but the naive?), it also raises logical problems:

If ghosts can be seen, then they must be interacting with the physical world and somehow send or reflect photons towards our eyes, and if they can be heard, then they must also be interacting with the world and emit sound waves that our ears can detect, and if they can be felt, then they must be interacting with our physical body and be detected by the nerve endings on our skin, and so on, but then, by any of these suppositions, they shouldn't be able to walk through walls... or, if they could, then they couldn't consistently interact with matter and move objects, or touch us and be felt, even in our no-no places :)

Believers might suggest that ghosts might be composed of neutrinos, which are notoriously -and dare I say, conveniently- difficult to detect, but like with the problems above, when you cover one hole in a holey belief, or is it holy? :), another hole reappears somewhere else...

Click here to learn about the philosophical problems with the idea of souls.
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Anthony Quinton on Spinoza & Leibniz

Once Descartes set the agenda and got modern philosophy started, the greatest thinkers of Europe divided into roughly two camps: the empiricists, like Locke, Berkeley and Hume, who argued that substantive knowledge about the world comes exclusively from experience; and the rationalists, who argued that reason alone, independent from experience, could produce substantive knowledge about existence.

Two of the most famous and profound rationalists were Spinoza and Leibniz. As rationalists, they believed that reason alone, independent of experience, can deduce the deepest of metaphysical truths. Science, on their view, is an attempt to explain the phenomena of experience and observation, and worthy in its own right, but it is ultimately incapable of dealing with questions of ultimate reality.

A good introduction to these two profound thinkers, I think, is their thoughts concerning substance. Both agreed that the Cartesian account of substance was logically flawed (if substance is supposed to be the most basic and self-sustaining constituent of the universe, and matter is extended through space, then matter could not be a basic substance, since it is infinitely divisible). They also agreed that Descartes' substance dualism was incapable of explaining the interaction of mind and body.

Their attempts to solve these theoretical difficulties eventually led them to postulate strange and fascinating views about the nature of reality that could hardly have been more different. For Spinoza, everything in nature, including God, is one: multiplicity is an appearance and God cannot stand outside of the natural world, since God is infinite by definition, and an infinite being cannot exist separately from anything that exists (else, He would not be infinite).

For Leibniz, on the other hand, the universe expresses God's infinite wisdom precisely through multiplicity and the unfolding of a pre-established harmony, set up by God, of course, between efficient and final causes. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, philosophers Anthony Quinton and Bryan Magee are here to explain the depth and intellectual influence of these two great thinkers.

And if you're wondering whether these philosophers actually matter, just consider that the very fact you're watching this on a computer or iphone can be traced back directly to Leibniz, since he invented the binary system upon which computation is based...

Check out more fascinating discussions about Plato, Aristotle, Hegel & Marx, and Schopenhauer.
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The Third & The Seventh

Most of the entries I post on this little-known blog are intended to educate, entertain and invite everyone to think a bit, hoping that at least some of the basic ideas covered in the various documentaries presented here inspire you to go out there and research in more depth whatever catches your fancy.

Today's masterful short film is simply an invitation to engage in some personal aesthetic contemplation of architectural subjects while you sit back, relax and possibly have a cup of hot chocolate. It may start kind of slow, but it gets better and better and better, and then you won't be able to take your eyes off the screen...

Oh, and did I mention most of the film is animated? Truly amazing work...

Check out the architecture tag for more goodies.
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Sarah Palin - Worst Hand Job Ever!

You've probably heard about Sarah Palin's speech in which she criticized president Obama for relying on teleprompters to discuss complex matters. The irony is that Palin delivered the speech while using her palm-prompter as a cheat sheet to remind herself of the vague and vacuous talking points the tea-baggers wet themselves over.

That's one hand job with no happy ending :)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
AmeriGasm
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

And here is Colbert's brilliant analysis on the issue:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Sarah Palin Uses a Hand-O-Prompter
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Don't you just love satire ;)
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Sports Science - Spiraling the Pig Skin vs. Shooting Arrows

I'm not a very big fan of watching sports. I'm not sure why that's the case (although I tell myself plenty of reasons), but there's something frustrating about sitting down watching someone else engage in an fun activity instead of being part of the action myself. Now, of course, I'm at a loss to explain my fascination with porn, but that's a whole other story:)

Anyway, and since everyone is probably still thinking about yesterday's SuperBowl, the following short clip shows the physics involved in a perfect football throw (and when I say perfect, I mean perfect!), understood from the detailed analysis of Quarterback Drew Brees' incredible and uncannily consistent accuracy.

Before watching the video, ask yourself this: who would be more accurate at shooting from a distance of 20 yards, a professional football player or a professional archer? The answer might surprise you...

Holy cow!
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Male Inequality

There are those who complain that men are emasculated by women... but more often than not, it's men who end up emasculating themselves... and making the rest of us look like total wimps :)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Male Inequality
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Crisis

I love Samantha Bee! :)
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The Secret Life of Chaos

There was a time, not too long ago actually, when complexity and order could only be understood and made sense of in terms of the wisdom, ingenuity and foresight of some intelligent creator. Despite depending on a viciously circular argument leading to an infinite regress (can it get any worse?), the mere appearance of design and contrivance was considered as direct a proof of God's existence as one could possibly demand, providing plenty of emotional support for believers while moving the question one step back and explaining nothing. Still, the idea that complexity could arise out of simplicity, or order out of chaos, wasn't simply ignored: it was considered anathema.

There are those who deny the fact of evolution. They think it impossible that the complexity exhibited by biological organisms could have evolved gradually and piecemeal over millions and billions of years... even though they are fully aware that a single fertilized egg can give rise to a remarkably complex baby only nine months later without any particular guidance or direct intervention.

And this raises the question, among others, of how all the individual cells in an embryo, all genetically identical to each other, somehow 'know' how to differentiate themselves and self-assemble into the different kinds of tissues and organs precisely located in their respective places.

It turns out, as Jim Al-Khalili shows in the following captivating and visually stunning documentary, that the physical world runs according to mathematical principles that make it seem as though order and complexity are almost the inevitable consequences of simplicity and chaos let loose.

To do this, the documentary seamlessly runs through Alan Turing's work on computational intelligence and morphogenesis, digital Darwinian evolution through natural selection, the physical implications of chaos theory and the butterfly effect, the mathematical insights derived from the Mandelbrot Set, and many other utterly fascinating and independent ideas, all converging on the same basic conclusion:

Complex systems, and even simple ones, though fundamentally unpredictable (due to the emergence of unexpected properties resulting from the stochasticity of initial conditions and the gradual accumulation of minute irregularities), are nevertheless fully determined and consistent with the laws of physics. In other words, the epistemological impossibility is nevertheless produced by metaphysical necessity.

If you're thinking this poses a threat to the stability of your belief in free will, I'd say you're probably right :)

And if you don't think you could be living in a computer simulation, you have no idea :)
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David Hume - Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Widely considered to be the most important philosopher ever to write in the English language, the Scottish philosopher David Hume's ideas are as profound, subtle and revolutionary as they are playful, ironic and elusive. Brave and daring to the end, and way ahead of his time, Hume's positions on various philosophical issues, paradoxical as they may seem sometimes, were based on the great power of his reasoning and the evidence he obtained from his acute observations of his own mind and the world at large.

Hume's empiricism is a devastating response to the rationalism of philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, but his philosophical virtue, courage and honesty also led him to take the very same empiricism he endorsed to its true logical conclusion, demonstrating in the process the limits of reason and human knowledge... oh, and your non-existence too :)

The following clip is a nice excerpt of some of Hume's most important ideas (as articulated in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding), starting with his distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact:

Here is a short, but very good analysis of Hume's ideas by Peter Millican in a Philosophy Bites interview:

And here is a sample (again from Philosophy Bites) of the work philosophers have been doing on the idea of "laws of nature" after Hume's powerful challenge to such a notion:

Check out more fascinating entries on The Masters of Philosophy.
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Rep. Seeks Retroactive Immunity for Anyone Who Hit on First Lady Last Night

She may look like a big flirt on the picture to the right, but Michelle Obama only reserves those hints of coquetry for her husband. Still, there's always the possibility that some socially awkward politician may confuse those vibes and get the wrong impression. Add some alcohol to the mix, and you might get some hilarious self-serving push for new legislation :)

Since this happened at the White House, could the expression "would you like to see my eagle get real big?" be covered under the new statute, please? :)
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Justice - What Is the Right Thing To Do?

Episode 12. When we, post-colonial citizens of liberal democracies in the 21st century, deliberate about principles of justice and the distribution of rights, we tend to think that respect for the plurality of competing conceptions of the good requires that we consider them from a neutral point of view, focusing only on the formal question of equality under the law, and not on any substantive or normative questions of value.

In these two final lectures, Professor Sandel tries to challenge this notion by suggesting that questions of justice and legal rights cannot be properly understood independently of our conception of the good. Try as we might, he argues, we cannot ultimately separate these questions from their historic and social roots without falling into the trap of self-delusion and wishful thinking. For citizens of a pluralistic society, this raises the question of how we can reason about the good life without establishing social institutions that end up imposing the tyrannical values of the majority on everyone else.

The development of this controversial claim takes place in the context of a discussion of same-sex marriage. Can we settle this question without considering the moral permissibility of homosexuality and the purpose of marriage? Or are these questions ultimately unavoidable?

I happen to disagree with this question of the inseparability of our conceptions of the good and questions of justice and the distribution of rights, but whatever conclusion you come to, I think we can all agree that moral and social progress can only be made when we are willing to engage in open, critical and generous dialogue with each other.

Using Rawls' concept of reflective equilibrium, Professor Sandel demonstrates the importance and promise of the deliberative and self-correcting method of mutual adjustment between particular considered moral judgments and general moral principles. Progress may be slow, but it is possible.

For someone who endorses the honest expression of controversial points of view, Professor Sandel got rather shy about the question of masturbation, huh? :)

Episode list: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.
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