It seems like people are really stuck to this idea that we’re unique. Perhaps they lose something if they feel we aren’t special. Back in the day, it was that we were at the center of the universe, and anyone who said otherwise was a heretic. Now we’re in the midst of some people saying we have to be unique from the animals, we couldn’t have evolved from them. And then there’s intelligence. We have to be the only ones who are intelligent right? According to Searle, even if we have a machine that behaves and acts indistinguishably from a human, it can’t be intelligent - it doesn’t have our secret brain stuff. Well I’ve got news for everyone. We’re are unique. Each one of us is different in subtle or not so subtle ways. But we’re not special, other creatures can be intelligent, other planetary bodies can have things orbiting around them, other planets can have life. Accept it.

In this talk, Seth Lloyd talks about the universe as a giant computer and the implications of that notion.  As I’ve described before, the universe is a giant computer because all of the atoms and molecules in the world represent information through their various qualities such as spin, etc.  Every interaction between atoms or molecules is, in fact, a computation.  Since the universe is infinite, this giant computer will compute everything possibly computable.  Since a computer can simulate any other computer, this includes computing more computers.  Namely, us.  As the universe computes all possible computations, some of this create increasing complexity, eventually leading to bacteria, animals, humans, and the computers we have today.

I find this idea pretty interesting.  In essence, the universe is a giant computer simulating us (who are also computers).  You hear about this philosophical “Brain in the Vat” question where we may just be brains getting simulated inputs and outputs from somewhere (the Matrix).  This takes it to a whole new level, essentially our whole existence in the universe is inside a giant computer that is computing everything.

Here’s an interesting article by Freeman Dyson on “Our Biotech Future.”  Basically he predicts that we will soon have personal biotechnology devices and all be able to be genetic engineers.  He suggests that this will create solutions to many problems and also perhaps help eliminate poverty.  One aspect that I found particularly interesting was that with this genetic engineering, there will be more competition between genes of various species.  So perhaps this new era of personal biotechnology would lead to faster evolution?  Although instead of being guided by Darwinian evolution, gene selection would be guided by lots of genetic engineers.  It certainly could result in some interesting (or dangerous) things.

This is a very interesting theory that the cause of the industrial revolution was the evolution of the values of the people of the world.  Gregory Clark has data showing that wealthier people had more children than the poor leading up to the industrial revolution.  Because of this disparity, some of the children of these wealthy families were forced downward economically and spread throughout society.  Their values of saving, hard work, non-violence and literacy spread throughout the population until they reached a sort of tipping point where the industrial revolution hit and the economy exploded.  Basically his suggestion is that natural selection worked over this short period of time from 1200 to 1800 and resulted in a population of people with a different set of values that led directly to the industrial revolution.  The idea of evolution working this way so recently and in such a short period of time (from 1200 to 1800) is pretty cool.  I wonder what the current societal forces might be selecting for currently…

There was an interesting article by Andrian Kreye in the Edge this week on religion and reason.  Specifically it discusses some of the scientific research into faith that has been going on and has been mostly ignored by the “militant atheists” Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett.  Kreye discusses research by Scott Atran, who wondered what benefit religion had that made us pay such a cost in time and effort and lives to try to overpower rational explanations.  His conclusion is that religion must have had some evolutionary benefits such as the closer communities it can build.  Justin Barrett has done research showing that faith may be important developmentally, as small children have unwavering faith in their mother’s infallibility when they are young.

I thought the most interesting part of the article was its conclusion, which said:

“One advantage faith has over atheism is that it offers hope for an afterlife. Thus far, we have found only religious answers to assuage the fear of death. It always comes down to a choice between delusion and reality. Reality just may make you love your life so much more.”

This echoes something I have tried to say in previous blog posts on religion but I don’t think I was ever able to state it as clearly or eloquently as this.  It may be more difficult to accept the shortness of our lives than the afterlife promised by religions but I think understanding reality allows us to appreciate and live our lives that much better than living it for some supposed afterlife.

I recently read Republican Presidential candidate Sam Brownback’s op-ed in the New York Times explaining why he doesn’t believe in evolution. I have so many problems with it that I don’t know where to start. I think this whole evolution debate is very similar to the debate over whether the Earth revolved around the sun in the 1500s. It’s so important to some people that we be “special” and have a place at the center of the universe. In the previous debate, hundreds of years ago, they literally believed that we were at the center of the universe. And no matter how much evidence there was, people wanted to believe we were at the center of the universe. The same thing is going on today. It’s very hard for some people to accept that we’re not “special” and that we weren’t place here by “God” for some special purpose. I’m not really sure why people think this takes so much away from us. So we randomly evolved. Is that so terrible? We should just enjoy the fact that we’re here and savor every instant of our lives.

To go specifically into Sam Brownback’s op-ed, he makes a number of points that bother me. First he claims that “Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love.” So apparently without faith we can’t understand suffering, love, values, meaning, or purpose? I’m not sure why believing that we evolved instead of being created by some God would prevent us from understanding these things.

Then he goes on to say that evolution isn’t science but philosophy and that any “theory” that says we weren’t created by some guiding intelligence must be false.  Basically Brownback wants to reject the institute of science any time it conflicts with his pre-assumed beliefs.  Science is fine, but if it disagrees with what he believes, then its just “atheistic theology” instead of science.

Finally, Brownback gets the point that I brought up at the beginning of this post, that we must be unique and special. Specifically, he says “The unique and special place of each and every person in creation is a fundamental truth that must be safeguarded. I am wary of any theory that seeks to undermine man’s essential dignity and unique and intended place in the cosmos. I firmly believe that each human person, regardless of circumstance, was willed into being and made for a purpose.” Evolution does not undermine our dignity or uniqueness. We’ve evolved into what we are and we will continue to evolve and I don’t see anything wrong with that. If we were “willed into being and made for a purpose” what was that purpose? I understand how difficult it can be to accept reality and understand that we evolved. But it doesn’t make us any less special or mean we have any less capacity to love or suffer or find meaning in life. I would much rather believe and understand the truth of life and enjoy the great luck we have in being here than believing in a creation by some superior being for an unspecified purpose.

Here is a great video of a talk given by Richard Dawkins at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia.  Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University is in the same town and its students showed up with all sorts of entertaining questions, making for an lively Q&A session.  Here’s the link for the video.

Here is another good link, a short Wired interview with Marvin Minksy and Daniel Dennett on the mind and emotions.

There is a great talk by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins available on the web from TED talks called Queerer Than We Can Suppose: The Strangeness of Science. He talks about how our understanding of the world is something we evolved. Our models of the world evolved because they were the most useful to us and helped our survival. Even though these models may not be entirely accurate in reality, they evolve because of their usefulness to us in the world we live in. The aspects of the world we normally live in, based on our size, our lifespan, our normal daily lives, greatly affect the understanding of the world that we develop.

For example, we see rocks as solid objects because that is what is useful for us in the world. We pick up and use rocks as solid objects so we understand them that way. In reality, rocks just have a denser collection of atoms than air, but there is no clear distinction between these two patches of atoms. If our bodies were on the scale of atoms, then we would have evolved an understanding that saw things as collections of atoms rather than solid objects and the facts of quantum physics would be standard knowledge for us. If our bodies were on the scale of universes then we would have evolved an understanding of relativity. One example that he gives is that water striders probably have a model of a 2-dimensional world (the flat surface of the water) and surface tension is a key component rather than gravity.

Dawkins also applies this theory to our personification of things. Since we live in a social world and interacting with others is important to our lives, we have evolved this theory of self and personality. We don’t attribute someone’s actions to the fact that they have extra dopamine in their brain at this moment or because some certain set of neurons just fired, we attribute their actions to their personality and decision making. This model makes it easier for us to interact with others. Since it works so well with other people, we often apply it to cars, dogs, etc, giving them names and personalities as well. It is quite interesting that something as ubiquitous as idea of selves and personality could exist just because they were the best ways of understanding the world around us.

Here are a few more random thoughts that I’ve had from reading Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained:

• Not only are regions of the brain multi-functional, but so are some of our genes. So when one trait or gene is selected and continued on, other aspects affected by that gene are affected as well, this is called collateral evolution. In Olivia Judson’s blog on the New York Times, she mentions a case were hunters bred foxes to be more friendly to humans, but in addition to that the foxes got shaggier ears and wider heads.
• Color was evolved as an imporatant way for us to spot predators and food. Much more than just the frequency of light reflected by something affect what color we see it as and the ability to see these differences evolved so we could spot a red fruit in a forest of green. But Dennett says that not only did we evolve to see that difference but also the apple evolved to be a color that we could spot (so we could spread its seeds). Dennett says “first there were various reflective properties of surfaces, reactive properties of photopigments, and so forth, and Mother Nature devloped out of these raw materials efficient, mutually adjusted “color”-coding/”color”-vision systems, and amont the properties that settled out of the design process are the properties we normal human beings call colors.” It’s interested to note that there are some humans who are red-green colorblind and there are some other species (some types of birds) who can see things in the UV range. Dennett says “Why is the sky blue? Because apples are red and grapes are purple, not the other way around.”
• The Baldwin effect - Dennett describes another aspect of evolution were “good tricks” are learned. Suppose there is some “good trick” that will help a creature in their environment. Creatures that are born with the trick are better off but others are able to re-wire their brains to learn it as well. If you assume that the amount of re-wiring needed depends on their genes, then animals that have genes that put them closer to learning the trick will be better off than animals that have a difficult time re-wiring for the trick (learning it). So genes that are close to the wiring of the brain for the trick continually get selected until eventually the gene that starts with this brain wiring could be selected. In this way the plasticity of the brain helps to speed up the evolution of the genes (this is known as the Baldwin effect).
• Memes - Memes are similar to genes, but they are instead ideas that try to reproduce themselves. Our brains and our cultures are were memes are stored and they are transferred through communication. Similar to the way life is just a vessel for the propagation of genes, our conscious minds may just be a vessel for memes to propagate. It’s interesting that the memes replicative power is based on its “fitness” rather than its contribution to our fitness. So memes or ideas that are harmful to us but spread easily are good replicators. This is a very interesting way to think about ideas, first proposed by Richard Dawkins.
• The concept of self is very abstract. It is important for us to be able to separate ourselves from the outside world so that we do not eat ourselves, etc. But in reality this is not such a clear line. There are lots of bacteria inside us that help us digest but are they really part of us? Dennett says that each normal person “makes a self. Out of its brain it spins a web of words and deeds.” He equates it to a snail building a shell or a spider making a web. Its just something we do. It is important for our self-preservation. And with the parallel thoughts (Multiple Drafts) theory of consciousness it is possible that a person could have multiple selves (multiple personality disorder) or even that one self could be spread across two people (in the case of the twins I mentioned in my last post).
• From what I understand about consciousness and the mind now, I find it hard to believe that we actually do have any free will. Our thoughts and mind are completely a result of physical and electro-chemical reactions in the brain. Do we really have any control over these reactions? Any control we would have would just be other electro-chemical reactions. It may eventually be possible to predict these reactions and fully predict the decisions of the brain. Our idea of free will may just be an illusion that these various electro-chemical reactions create for us.  It may seem that we have free will because the process that creates our decisions and thoughts is so complex.  An analogy would be the weather, surely the weather patterns and tornados and hurricanes and things could be predicted if we better understood the system and all the inputs, but since we don’t it seems quite random whether a tornado or hurricane will be created or not.

I’ve been reading a great blog on the New York Times by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson. It’s got me thinking about lots of things relating to evolution. One thing is that evolution occurs faster when there is more death. Death is essential to evolution. If no one dies and everyone can reproduce then there is no evolution, if a few die, there is a little evolution, and if only a few survive then there is very fast evolution (the genes of these few are quickly selected).

If you get into a state where there is very little death and nearly everyone can reproduce, then you can end up in de-evolution (DEVO). When mutations occur to the genes there are no longer any pressures to eliminate them. Our civiliziation may be approaching this state (or be in it). Medications allow many diseases to be survivable, artificial insemination allows couples that wouldn’t be able to conceive normally to do so, and cesarian sections allow women with small hips to still have babies. Of course any new diseases that pop up, or perhaps an ability to live in higher temperatures (with global warming) will create new pressure to evolve. But otherwise, what does this mean for humans? Mutations can start collecting up in our genomes, will be survivable with modern medicine and technology, and will continue in our genome. Might we reach some point where these mutations become too much and we die out? Hopefully some sort of technological solution will be found through genetics research (rather than going back to letting these diseases and things kill tons of people).