Rational Philosophy

On a stroke victim’s experience of nirvana, Supreme Court justices’ rendering surprising decisions, and a father’s $45K investment in his son’s self-motivation.

I watched The Simpsons movie over the weekend, which uses the twin drays of pollution and global warming to help drive its plot. I thought it must have been during the Simpsons movie that I heard a witticism about an endangered species being one simply less able to survive, but my daughter corrected me; David Letterman cracked the joke about the great blue heron when he hosted the Piedmont bird impersonators on a recent show.

Which is a long way around (what do you expect?) to introducing the subject of my curiosity today — exceptions. An endangered species might be considered an exception in that it is one of a minority of the species on the planet doomed to imminent extinction, but maybe another way of looking at this is that every species is endangered, we’re just each on our own time-lines.

Other exceptions:

A stroke victim experienced an informed nirvana after her stroke disabled the egotism and analytical dominance of her left brain. Doctor Jill Bolte Taylor, now recovered but having learned a new skill, can still tap into the peaceful, euphoric oneness that her stroke foisted upon her. Unusual in her pragmatic perspective on the sensation, Dr. Taylor describes her experience as a sudden understanding the relative and all-connected reality of her existence. But since we’d need a stroke, and a lucky stroke, to get to the same euphoric sensation, what use is Dr. Taylor’s unique affliction?

The Supreme Court rendered two surprisingly non-conservative decisions today in favor of workers versus employers. The particular details are less pertinent to this post than their out-of-wackness.

And lastly, I’ve written variously before on the value of education as an end in itself. I was just talking about this yesterday to my wife’s aunt’s mother (such are family gatherings) who made the pertinent point that the value of an education is to teach one how to learn. But today I read the compelling story of a man who bribed his son to apply himself in school by promising him a Shelby 427 Cobra. (Those kids who’ve been duped into performing for $50, read no further…)

Alright, so what gives? We like evolution, survival of the fittest, but we love the endangered species. We pride ourselves on our mastery of language, on our analytical heft, but our jaws drop as we think about freedom from ego and stress. We hate the conservatism of the court with such vehemence that we try to read conservative subplots into its more liberal decisions. And we don’t believe in the value of financial incentives in encouraging our children to learn, but we wonder how we’re going to pay for the Shelby Cobra…

Exceptions.

Does an exception tell us that the rule is wrong?

Not necessarily. I think they perhaps give us a new overarching rule that we should be careful of absolutism. We love to categorize. Categorizing has been such useful skill for the conscious mind that it has become a ready defense against uncertainty. In some cases perhaps too ready.

Dr. Taylor’s experience tells us that we may have a very different perception of reality if we could find ways to counter the less helpful strategies of the left brain.

The Supreme Court justices remind us that we can’t necessarily judge people by their past actions and ideas.

And the father who bought his son a Shelby Cobra for making the honor role thumbs his nose at those of us who hove to the higher ground of learning for the sake of learning…

Bill Clinton and dumb ideas, memory loss and wisdom, and enhancing mental sharpness.

“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.”
Plato

Brain researchers should be studying Bill Clinton; Bill is a smart man, by all accounts. Why then does he sometimes say stupid things? As Hillary battles on against the odds, Bill, speaking off the cuff outside Lynn’s Paradise Cafe in Louisville Kentucky, said that not counting the votes in Michigan and Florida would be dumb, even though the states were disenfranchised prior to their primaries, and despite the fact that Obama didn’t campaign in either state and took himself off the ballot in one.

Brain researchers have in fact been finding that, Bill Clinton’s apparent example to the contrary, older minds may well be wiser minds. Aging brains pay more attention to what may seem to be extraneous information, mulling over it and absorbing it much better than younger minds. This seems to indicate that younger minds tend to power through information happily dispensing with seemingly spurious data, sticking to the highways. Whereas older minds have learned that the journey itself can be as informative and valuable as the destination.

(I’m quite prepared to believe that Bill Clinton has as much fun with his illogical statements as he does with his logical ones. He doesn’t really expect anyone other than those blindly partisan to his wife’s cause to agree with him, but he doesn’t really care. Why he doesn’t really care is a much more interesting question, and I can only hazard guesses.)

Other scientific evidence points to the benefits of activities that improve brain function. Exercise, diet, mental stimulation, engaged and engaging social and family contacts — all can contribute to our ability to stay sharp. As the article points out, and as I’ve written about here before, the idea that the brain inevitably declines and can’t grow new cells or forge new pathways has been debunked and cast aside. A very exciting turn, and one that can give us some optimism in these times of dumbness in high places.
As Socrates said and as Plato reported, “I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” This seems in keeping with the concept that as the brain gets older it is less likely to discard seemingly irrelevant information. It understands better that wisdom comes through accepting fallibility, rejecting absolute knowledge.

Socrates was also saying that we can never know anything. We can only perceive and infer. To claim absolute knowledge is to posture, to attempt to overpower someone with the assertion of knowing.

Bill Clinton cannot know what the voters in Florida and Michigan would have done if the delegates from those primaries were to be seated and the candidates campaigned accordingly. He can only posture and infer. While it’s understandably frustrating for Hillary to have perhaps missed out on a couple of wins and some delegates from those states, it is far from fair for her to convert this frustration into a claim of victory.

Related posts from around the Internet:

Alzheimer's Plaques And Tangles

 Why Brain Fitness Training Works to Combat Cognitive Decline

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist And What We Must Do To Survive.

On why we learn, and why it’s not always a good thing.

The NY Times Science section features an article today on remarkable research scientists have been doing into the positive benefits and surprisingly negative side-effects of learning — “Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Always Better.” The research arrives at a somewhat banal conclusion: When it comes to the evolving characteristics of living things, the benefits of learning will always be balanced against the benefits of other adaptations, so that species reach the best balance for them not necessarily the highest level of learning capability possible.

To paint a less arid picture of this finding, bees that capture just one type of pollen have adapted to recognize that type of pollen — it’s of no use to them to be able to learn about other pollens. Whereas bees that need to gather nectar from many different kinds of pollens have evolved to be better learners because the ability to learn from their experiences with different species of plant benefits them.

The research struck me as remarkable in part because of the ingenious mechanisms the scientists had used to better understand learning processes in all kinds of unlikely organisms from the microscopic vinegar worm, Caenorhadits elegans, which can learn using its meagre brain capacity of 302 neurons, to more familiar research subjects like the fruit fly. The scientists selectively bred fruit flies that were better learners (this took fifteen generations) by hand selecting those with naturally better learning capabilities (the description of this process is worth a read all in itself). When they pitted larvae of these smarter fruit flies against larvae of regular fruit flies in a primitive survival challenge, the smarter fruit fly larvae fared poorly.

Then we have the two questions that the research teased up but didn’t answer — why have human beings evolved to be such good learners? And in what situations might it be disadvantageous for humans to be better learners?

Before diving into these murky pools of inquiry, I’m inclined to explore the concept and origination of learning itself.

In the process of learning, an entity (let’s not confine ourselves to living things) develops a new response to a stimulus. Simple as that. Better learners develop improved or refined responses more quickly.

It might help to consider a non-organic example: The most recent versions of Microsoft Office have had a built-in learning function. After you’ve executed the same keystrokes a few times under similar circumstances, the program can prompt you to ask whether you’d like to do that same thing every time those circumstances arise.

In a living organism, instead of keystrokes the stimulus could be something like tasting a new food. After tasting the food a few times and finding it good to eat the organism can learn to seek out the food. (The research scientists trained the fruit flies in the lab to unlearn the attraction of orange jelly by spiking it with quinine.)

I would argue that the concept of and possibility for learning follows inevitably from the fundamental principles of space and time. Every change in state in space over time results in a set of stimuli with corresponding responses. It is an intrinsic possibility of space and time that a feedback loop will accompany some set of stimuli and responses so that a certain response is reinforced over others. This is learning.

Jumping forward to living things, the learning process, to a certain point, gets reinforced because it produces better adapted organisms. (Just as the scientists bred better learning fruit flies, so nature breeds better learning organisms, so long as other survival mechanisms aren’t disproportionately compromised.)

So, now we’re back to the key questions: Why do people learn so well? And what are some of the limiting factors for us as learners?

Giving an accurate but unhelpful answer to the first question we could say that people evolved into such good learners because it served them well as a survival mechanism. But I’d like to present a more helpful hypothesis — human beings evolved to be better learners because for us getting smarter became its own feedback loop. The smarter people got, the less able we were to survive without being smarter still. Early humans developed tools and built shelter. This had the effect, over time, of reducing our ability to live without tools and shelter. We ventured into new lands, forcing ourselves to learn to live in those places. We gathered together into societies, forcing ourselves to learn how to live together.

This theory also goes toward providing an answer the question about what limits our learning. We can be pushing up against our limits in many ways — rely too much on your use of tools and what happens when you’re without your tools? Rely too much on the protocols of human society and what happens when those protocols break down.

But again, there’s perhaps a more subtle and direct answer to the question. What we really want to know is why we wouldn’t want to be as smart as we possibly could be…

My wife’s uncle is an incredibly successful man who disdains high intelligence. He opines that being too smart makes someone unhappy. It’s difficult to argue with this as a general hypothesis; very smart people do tend to be unhappier than less brilliant people. Bertrand Russell, himself an exceptionally brilliant man, expressed this well when he said: “I’ve made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I’m convinced of the opposite.”

For a rational, science-based explanation of life’s meaning and purpose, please refer to my book: LIFE! Why We Exist… And What We Must Do To Survive.

On the purpose and principles of education, and the perils of ignoring them.

Living in New York, it’s hard to avoid the whirlpool of anxiety around schools and education. What’s the right school, what’s the best school, how are we going to get our kid in there? Even before a child turns three parents are fretting and fussing over plans for his or her education. And while the particular circumstances may vary from place to place, concern over educational standards seems global.

In Japan, parents have begun to worry about the slip in educational standards relative to India and China. Once leading the world in math skills, Japan has fallen to 10th place. In the NY Times report, Japanese parents concerned over test scores and competitive educational achievements, and envious of India’s surge, sound just like New York City parents. Another current report focuses on concerted efforts to improve the organizational skills of schoolboys, thereby improving their grades.

When we have a child in school, the emphasis on testing and grades can overwhelm us. We forget the true purpose of education. If we’ve grown up through a competitive system ourselves we may never even pause to consider whether there may be anything wrong with it. But since we submit our children typically to more than a dozen years of school with the stated goal of giving them a good start in life, it seems to make sense for us to actively question whether and why those years should be spent chasing grades.

Education should serve the fundamental purpose of teaching a body of knowledge and thinking skills; it should only secondarily serve the subordinate purpose of furnishing qualifications. In modern times these primary and secondary purposes have been flipped. But why?

Ironically perhaps, one reason may be the relative democratization of education in developed countries. When all children have access to school, the focus for many shifts from acquiring knowledge and skills to getting or giving our children the upper hand. We start to want our children to succeed in school by achieving quantifiable, bankable grades, rather than by absorbing useful, valuable brain food.

When I think about my own time in the educational system, I tend to be impressed by how much I’ve forgotten rather than by how much I learned. The process of learning remains with me, even when the product of learning fades. Put another way, I doubt I’d score very well now on high school tests, but I have a clearer sense these days of how to approach a set of educational material in order to appreciate and learn from it (I watch myself doing just that with my high school age daughter). The boy in the NY Times story improved his grade with some intense focus and help from a tutor. But did he learn more, do his improved grades equate with a person who thinks better?

This nation faces a critical time in its history. It is no coincidence that these eight years of democratic dismantling have been presided over by a man who is so famously lax in speech and thought, who brazenly values faith over reason, victory over right, ends over means. Bush and his entourage have taken us down a perilous and irrational path. Yet though the current administration has eroded the principles of freedom and democracy in insidious and worrying ways, the country as a whole hangs back and takes it on the chin. Where is the outcry? Where are the howls of protest? They are few and faint.

When we teach our children not how to think but how to achieve social and economic success we bankrupt the foundation of a democratic society. If we cannot think for ourselves, if we cannot question and criticize, we cannot participate effectively in our democracy. As parents and citizens I believe we have an obligation to encourage our children to pursue knowledge, reason, and truth, not grades.

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