Wonder?

Christina Agapakis of Oscillator recently wrote a thought-provoking post about biosafety and synthetic biology. I was particularly struck by this passage:

Why is biology scary to so many people? We've done a very good job of sterilizing our lives, separating ourselves from biology to the extant that when we think of the word bacteria we immediately think of infection that needs to be wiped out, not something that is part of our bodies, part of our everyday ecosystem that keeps us alive.

I've often wondered myself why biology is so scary to so many people, and I think this is a particularly insightful way of putting it. If only more people would play around with sourdough starter or homemade yogurt, or manipulate soil pH to change the color of their hydrangeas, or hell just think harder about the fact that bacterial cells vastly outnumber human cells in a typical human body...

But of course, it's not that simple. Biology is hugely amazing or terrifying to a lot of people -- is there perhaps a good reason this is so? I feel like bio lab work has a really jading, mundanifying tendency: "I have the godlike power to manipulate the very genomes of bacteria!... and the result is that some of these spots are blue where none were blue before." The vast majority of the experiments I've personally done have ended either with a resounding "meh" or with a facepalm and a starting-over. Has this blinded me to the fact that, given sufficient equipment and time, I can engineer freaking life? How wondrous might genetic engineering seem to someone like Leeuwenhoek or Mendel?

What do y'all think? Especially you nonbiologists in the crowd? How weird does it seem to you that biologists collectively have these abilities? (And who's planning on seeing Splice?)

My brain just isn't interested in itself.

Reading through jhamrick's last couple of posts at Artificial Awareness made me think about how I used to be enamored of all this stuff -- AI, philosophy of mind, cognitive linguistics... That was everything I was into, around the last two years of high school and first semester of college. It was who I was. I was Going To Be A Cognitive Scientist, I Was. I read all the right blogs and tried to drag my way through some of the right books (though most of the time I ended up rereading The Language Instinct, which I must have read upwards of a dozen times in its entirety).

Then I changed fields. Long, mostly unrelated story.

But I got to wondering why I'm no longer particularly interested in cognition, AI, or related subfields ('cogsci' for short). I think it's a combination of several factors.

• I had lousy teachers for my introductory psychology and neuroscience classes, and a lousy research experience in cognitive linguistics.

This is not cogsci's fault, but it is a plain fact of my experience and a large part of the reason why I chose to change majors.

• The field is immature; it hasn't had its Watson and Crick.

I consider biology a mature field because so much of it comes down to simply "DNA makes RNA, RNA makes proteins, proteins build the cell's traits and perform its behaviors (and affect DNA)". This was all elucidated in its basic form many years ago. It provides a framework for understanding new experimental results and generating new questions. It is a Coherent Overarching Theory. Cogsci does not appear to have a Coherent Overarching Theory yet, though it seems to have plenty of contenders. I should note that I would expect the Theory Of Cogsci to be significantly more complex than the Theory Of Biology, and take a much longer time to discover.

(I think this point actually applies to basically all of the brain-related fields, although you could argue that basic neuroscience had its Watson-and-Crick moment when people figured out the structure and function of the neuron. I suppose it's also hard to reconcile my assertion that brain science is immature with the current, legitimately amazing progress in brain-machine interfaces -- but I don't know how well we actually understand how they work, or how well we can distinguish them from magic. Anyone who actually follows the news in that area, care to enlighten?)

• I'm too lazy to have philosophical opinions.

Perhaps in a few years I will have the energy and the intellectual horsepower to grapple with the philosophical side of cogsci. But as it is, I can only stomach it in the kind of small doses Douglas Hofstadter likes to sprinkle into his books about poetry. I have always had a hard time motivating myself to think hard about philosophical arguments, figure out their axioms, pick holes in them, etc. etc. -- or, most of the time, to even figure out whether I actually agree with them or if I'm just reading along. I'm much more comfortable playing with cells, or even models of cells where the error is quantifiable.

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There are enough cognitive/AI people amongst my acquaintance that I expect I'll hear some eloquent defenses -- and I'll be glad to hear them, I really will. I'm just happy the field is in such competent hands. If you put me in charge of AI, after all, we'd never discover anything.

Exposing oneself to disturbing things

[If anyone's here from Iron Blogger, welcome!]

Home for the holidays, I've been rewatching a few Firefly episodes with my family. Because everyone gets to pick, said rewatching has not consisted solely of "Heart of Gold" over and over and over :) -- and I end up watching the episodes with disturbing bits that I don't like.

What don't I like? I don't like stabbings or incisions (and I'm not fond of injections either, or at least the needle-entry part, though IVs are OK). I don't like torture scenes. I don't like when characters walk alone through dark creepy hallways where it's implied that Reavers or similar will suddenly jump out at people. I don't like half-rotted or mummified corpses.

I'm not sure what the common thread is between these things -- or between the things I don't mind (blunt trauma, gunshots... or most anything not listed above).

Somehow I keep making myself sit through movies that have this stuff. I managed to freak myself out pretty badly at a free showing of 28 Weeks Later a couple of years ago, when I could have just got up and left. Perhaps I feel it's unseemly for a grown, voting adult to have to not watch things. After all, when I was a kid I didn't have any compunction about leaving the room when it got to the Emperor-electrocutes-Luke scene in Star Wars. My dad's philosophy on scary things is that he leaves the room because "I don't need that stuff in my head, it's not worth it", which strikes me as very sane. What, after all, is the higher purpose served by my watching Mal and Wash get electrocuted repeatedly?

However, I feel that there should be a corresponding policy to not avoid watching (or reading about) the horrific things that go on in the real world, because in that case a horrified reaction can translate into a call to action (charitable giving, political action, whatever). This is actually one of the strongest arguments I've heard in favor of free speech, and in particular freedom of hate speech: let's get it all out there so everyone's at least aware that this sort of badness exists, rather than letting it stew in private gatherings until it becomes hate crimes.

To be intellectually uncomfortable

From one of Uncertain Principles' link dumps comes this piece from Inside Higher Ed: Tolerant Faculty, Intolerant Students. Apparently, despite the myth of the politically stubborn professor forcing his views on poor openminded students, the truth is more like students haranguing each other and professors doing fairly well at not inappropriately expressing political views. (Well, at least in Georgia. The study might have turned out differently if done on CRAZY CALIFORNIAN COLLEGES!!!!1!11!one.)

(I should note that I have only been in actual political discourse once all year, and it was with a student on my hall who fervently supported Ron Paul. Perfectly friendly, civil discussion; I didn't enjoy it because I don't enjoy political discourse, period. I haven't seen any politics in classes, probably because I haven't taken any classes where it's even marginally relevant. Coulomb's Law? Politicize that, bitches.)

The thing that really struck me about this article, though, was one particular quote: universities are a place to go to feel uncomfortable intellectually. Obviously, the article means this with regard to one's political beliefs -- but it's applicable in a much larger sense.

When I encounter something I can't understand, something really confusing, I get anxious and upset. This happens a lot because I'm at a difficult school, and it's to be expected that I will encounter confusing things. But why should I get upset? This is an artifact of tying understanding to Success and Achievement (TM), rather than understanding for its own sake. Even though I went to one of those hippie elementary schools where there are no grades, I suppose I still have kind of a hang-up about 'succeeding' versus being way outside of my comfort zone.

I really admire people who respond to confusing things by first feeling humble, and then feeling happy that they have another puzzle to solve. People who get suspicious if it looks like they understand everything. It's not that I think such people never get frustrated, but that seems like a highly useful mindset for a scientist or intellectual, much more so than getting upset and frustrated. (Certainly, given the complexity of the real world, if you think you understand everything about X, you're almost certainly wrong.) This mindset should also make for a happier person overall. Apart from that, it feels like the right thing to do -- it appeals to the idealist in me.

Universities are a place to go to feel uncomfortable intellectually.

The world is a place to go to feel uncomfortable intellectually!

I'm going to try and embrace this mindset, embrace this mantra. A form of "intellectual asceticism, perhaps?" Hopefully I can change my knee-jerk reaction to the difficult and the confusing.

Why I am a hard agnostic

I believe that the nature of deity is both unknown and unknowable (by humans).

As I understand it, "the nature of deity is unknown (and may or may not be knowable)" equals 'soft' or 'weak' agnosticism, and my position is 'hard' or 'strong' agnosticism. I was a soft agnostic up until relatively recently.

(Quick aside: that terminology bothers me because it's possible to be a strong weak agnostic -- i.e. you believe very strongly in the soft-agnostic position -- or a hard soft agnostic, or also a soft hard agnostic ("I'm pretty sure the nature of deity is unknowable as well as unknown"). Not sure what would be good alternative terms, though. Also, hard agnosticsim != militant atheism.)

I've been fairly sure for many years that the nature of deity is unknown, what with implausible theologies and the power of science, etc etc, blah blah woof woof -- this argument has been made, and people have responded to it, a million times.

There are two possible arguments, I think, for why we cannot know the nature of deity (as opposed to merely "we don't know it, but we might figure it out"). One is the "perverse liar god" argument, and it's sort of tongue-in-cheek. If there's an omnipotent deity, then it could make itself unknowable, never mind why it would want to. It could even put on an understandable mask while leaving its true nature hidden.

The other possible argument is "fundamental limits of human understanding". The human brain may be the most amazingly complex awesome thing in the universe, capable of conceiving arbitrarily complex and abstract ideas... but is it capable of understanding something omnipotent, omnipresent, omni-everything, possibly vaster than the universe? I highly doubt it, given how hard it is to truly grasp (say) the sheer size of a galaxy. (And I do mean truly grasp. Saying "oh, it's so many frillion light years across" does not count.) A galaxy has got to be a lot smaller than an omni-deity.

You'll note I said "fundamental limits of human understanding", not "fundamental limits of any understanding". I don't doubt that an omnipotent deity could understand itself perfectly well. It's perfectly possible that there are forms of understanding out there that are orders of magnitude more powerful than our piddling little thoughts, or maybe even have a completely different basis -- call them "super-understanding". But given that humans are limited to human understanding, can we understand super-understanding? I doubt it.

(For a very readable, math-flavored analogy to the topic of super-understanding, see Scott Aaronson's fabulous essay Who Can Name the Bigger Number?, which you should read anyway. He discusses Turing machines and Super-(Super-Super-...)Turing machines, among many other fascinating topics.)

And by the way, I have high standards for what I'm willing to call understanding deity. I'm not willing to settle for a grammatical string of English words, or a bunch of math, or whatever, that describes deity perfectly. I am perfectly capable of 'understanding' (sneer quotes!) a sentence like "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth", in that I know what all its words mean and I can parse the sentence, because that is perfectly fine English. But can I fully appreciate the impact of a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in its being, wisdom, power, etc? Can my body generate a sufficiently large visceral/emotional reaction to the import of that idea, or will it run out of neurotransmitters first? Can my humble heart and mind contain the infinite? I think not.

Now, since I'm feeling a bit Hofstadterian, try this one on for size: "God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, truth, abstraction, recursion, subtlety, and inscrutability." Can this new, improved sentence give us a true, visceral understanding of an omni-deity? It's certainly an improvement.


(God-sentence is from Chapter 7 of Anne of Green Gables. I love that book.)