Tag: brain science

The NSA database

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words 417

Firstly, that database is a sociologist’s wet dream. It is without question the greatest sociological analytical tool ever to come into existence.

The NSA database—using just metadata alone—is capable of discovering and describing in near-perfect detail nearly all social networks in the world.

It is possible that some very secretive groups figured out which way the wind was blowing twenty years ago and have kept away from all electronic surveillance since then, but I doubt that even they can be certain that their membership is not known, or knowable, to the NSA.

In addition to being able to find and analyze all, or virtually all, groups and networks in the world (secret or otherwise), the NSA almost certainly has the capability to reach back years into the content of those groups’ phone calls and other forms of communication.

This makes the database even more than a sociologist’s wet dream. It is also a tool for exceptional good or evil.

First, the evil—anyone with access to the database can spy on virtually anyone anywhere and use the information gained to blackmail, steal inventions or investment ideas, bribe, intimidate, or otherwise do bad stuff behind the scenes.

For the good, the database has the power to figure out groups that are doing bad things and stop them. The database could be used as a massive national and international “lie-detector” or “shit detector.” Just about any group of people up to anything unsavory should be discoverable through the database.

So who controls it? Is there one person at the top? Or a group? Who watches the group?

I am all but certain we will never be rid of that database. If by some miracle the US destroys the NSA database, some other country will surely set one up.

So liberty and goodness now mean that we have to figure out how to make sure the people controlling the database are good people. That they will never do bad things with the information available to them.

How do we do that? Is there any conceivable politics that can bring that about? We need databases watching databases all of which are controlled by groups that are watched by other groups. If we have perfectly reliable lie-detectors, could we establish groups like that? Is there any way forward other than massive transparency of everyone’s life?

It looks to me like our traditional political system is finished. Checks and balances and individual rights are meaningless in the face of that database.

Panopticism

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A Panopticon is a circular building with an observation tower in the centre of an open space surrounded by an outer wall. This wall contains cells for occupants (for example, inmates in a prison). This design increases security by facilitating more effective surveillance. Residing within cells flooded with light, occupants are readily distinguishable and visible to a guard/official “invisibly” positioned in the central tower. Conversely, occupants are invisible to each other, with concrete walls dividing their cells.

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault builds on Jeremy Bentham’s conceptualization of a panopticon as he elaborates upon the function of disciplinary mechanisms in the prison and illustrates the function of discipline as an apparatus of power. (Source)

An aspect of power is how do you know who is spying on you? How do you know who your real friends are? How do you know if you are on top? How do you even know who is on top?

Joseph Stalin knew he was in control of everyone in the Soviet Union because he knew that he was able to use the NKVD (his secret police) to control the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union) and he knew that he could use the CPSU to control the NKVD. He also knew there wasn’t any other power base.

Even still, to be certain he imprisoned and shot millions of innocent people. By doing so, he removed imaginary (and sometimes real) threats and, just as importantly, he proved to himself and others through mass murder (the ultimate crime) that he could do whatever he wanted.

Who controls the NSA? How many people have access to that data? The metadata alone will tell anyone who has access how everyone in the world is connected and to whom. There are several whistle blowers (probably including Snowden) who claim the NSA is also storing phone calls and other digital data.

Information, as Foucault knew, is the basis of power. The NSA has a massive amount of information and thus massive power, but the question fairly screams—Who is at the top of all that power? Who controls and has access to all that information? Who gets to see how the metadata fits together?

I doubt that in today’s world just one person is at the top. We know Congress is not, nor is the president. Does the head of the NSA or the CIA know who is on top? I doubt they are. Is there a group within those bodies that knows? If there is a secret group (not publicly known) that is on top, or thinks they are, they will be able to get a sense of who their competitors are by metadata analyses and by more direct means of spying.

But who may be spying on them? Is there another group within their group or outside of it that knows even more than they do?

Digital panopticism in today’s world implies the profound likelihood that there is more than one “observation tower” or group on top. This is a massive problem for those of us without any power, but it is also a deeply disturbing problem for those with power because none of them can ever be certain if someone is above them and who that might be.

Is that the core reason the spying grows and grows? Because, futiley, they have to spy more and more to be sure they are on top or to be sure they know who is on top, and yet they also know that they can never be sure.

Repost: Why you can’t fix it with generalities

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Psychological, cognitive, emotional, or communicative problems cannot be fundamentally corrected by using general analyses or generalized procedures. You can teach someone to think and see differently, even to behave differently, by such procedures, but you cannot bring about deep change by using them. The reason this is so is change through generalizations does little more than substitute one external semiosis for another. The person seeking change will not experience deep change because all they are essentially doing is importing a different explanation of their “condition” into their life.

This happens with Buddhists who remain attached to surface meanings of the Dharma as well as to people seeking mainstream help for emotional problems. Any change will feel good for a while in most cases, but after some time stasis and a recurrence of the original problem, or something similar to it, will occur.

Continue reading…

Repost: Idiolects and idiotics

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An idiolect is the “dialect” of one person. It is unique to that person. We all speak an idiolect unique to us. No one else speaks in exactly the same way as you do. In fact, the varieties of idolects among speakers of even the same dialect can be quite pronounced, to say nothing of speakers who have been acculturated to different dialects.

Virtually, the same thing is true for our use and understanding of semiotics. Each one of us has a unique tangle of semiotics even if we share the same culture. Even if two people were born and raised in the same very strict cult, they will have different takes on their “shared” semiotics; they will see thier semiotics in individual and unique ways.

The term “idiolect” is a blend of the prefix idio, which means “own, personal, distinct to the individual” and the suffix lect, which is taken from the word “dialect.”

Continue reading…

Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine

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The main substance of the linked piece is an interview with Sam Parnia, who practices resuscitation medicine. Below is a quote from the interview.

It takes time for cells to die after they’re deprived of oxygen. It doesn’t happen instantly. We have a longer period of time than people perceive. We know now that when you become a corpse, when the doctor declares you dead, there’s still a possibility, from a biological and medical perspective, of death being reversed. – Sam Parnia

In Buddhist traditions it is widely believed that consciousness stays with or near the body long after the point in time that standard Western medicine says this is not possible.

NIMH Delivers A Kill Shot To DSM-5

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Source

From the article:

DSM diagnoses are based on a consensus about clusters of clinical symptoms, not any objective laboratory measure. In the rest of medicine, this would be equivalent to creating diagnostic systems based on the nature of chest pain or the quality of fever. (Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health)

I think this is very good news. Notice how it changes the semiotics of mental illness. A better paradigm for mental illness is that intolerable stress causes a wide variety of symptoms in people. A major stressor of this type is, of course, interpersonal stress. FIML cannot by any stretch of the imagination fix all mental illness, but it can help suitable partners greatly reduce interpersonal stress.

Edit: Yesterday, I read reasonable objections to Insel’s statement to the effect that we are not able to obtain “laboratory measure(s),” or biological markers, for all mental illness. I completely agree with this objection.

The synthesis of the two points of view (Insel v/ the DSM) seems to me to be that drugs should only be very guardedly prescribed, if they are prescribed at all, in situations where there are no “laboratory measures” or biological markers (both are fairly vague terms).

Does interpersonal stress produce biological markers? I bet it does. Does interpersonal stress of the type that can probably be cured by FIML practice produce biological markers? I bet it does. But I also bet that it would be far better to try FIML, or something else, long before resorting to drug therapy.

Another point: I believe it is probably healthy to feel nervous, anxious, depressed, repulsed, etc. when around people who communicate dishonestly, manipulatively, or with strong ulterior motives. Since I also believe that most people communicate pretty badly, it actually seems to me that many psychological “problems” are thus healthy, valuable responses.

Venn diagrams and FIML

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Our understandings of each other at any point in time can, at best, be visualized as Venn diagrams. At worst, there is no overlap, no comprehension, no mutual understanding.

Each of us uses language in unique ways and each of us understands the semiotics that underlie speech differently. This is why we can never expect another person to entirely understand what we mean by any statement, even when we know that person very well and even when we are certain they are very well disposed toward us.

It is a fundamental characteristic of language, speech, semiotics, human biographies, and the human brain that two people will never be able to make perfectly overlapping Venn diagrams concerning any utterance spoken between them, no matter how trivial. You might guess correctly once in a while, especially if your context is very limited, but as a rule you can never be sure of your guess and you will very often be completely wrong, especially if the context is complex.

Interpersonal contexts are virtually always complex. FIML practice is designed to work in real time with complex interpersonal contexts. FIML helps partners understand where their Venn sets overlap and where they do not.

If you do not frequently pursue in real time where your Venn sets overlap and where they do not, you will have a bad time. It cannot be otherwise because the divergence in mutual understanding that accrues between many poorly understood Venn sets will snowball.

I can’t think of another way to pursue the Venn sets of interpersonal communication besides FIML practice or something very similar. If pursuit of these sets is left to “take care of itself” or done solely or mostly with extrinsic generalities, it can’t work. It can’t work because generalities are the enemy of interpersonal set analysis, while things “taking care of themselves” is the mother of all generalities.

FIML and sociotics

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In a previous post we coined the term idiotics to mean “the idiosyncratic agglomeration of the semiotics of a single individual.”

An individual’s idiotics indicates the agglomeration of public and private semiotics that comprise the unique signaling system of their mind; this signaling system is what we normally call a person’s mind.

Each individual brain has an idiotics that is unique to it. The signaling system that employs and organizes this unique idiotics works internally within the individual and externally as a system that signals to other people.

Problems in signaling—both internal and external problems—occur when the signaling systems of two (or more) people are not in good accord. That is, when two (or more) people misunderstand the signals they are sending to each other or the signals being sent to them. Obviously, mistakes in signaling can and frequently do compound, or snowball, leading to very large errors.

To control for error, human beings have probably evolved master semiotics that provide general ways for people to comprehend (pretty badly or well-enough, depending on your perspective) the signaling of other people.

Let’s call these general semiotic categories that allow for crude comprehension between people sociotics.

Sociotics is a compound of the words sociology and semiotics. It means the “public semiotics,” or socially agreed upon and accepted semiotics, of just about any group you can think of.

Most sociotics is emotional. A good deal of it is very emotional. The beliefs of a religion, the stories of an ethnic group, the values of a community can be extremely emotional.

In this respect, a great deal of sociotics binds very deeply with human emotion to form an intoxicating blend of meaning and feeling.

Most people do not see any choice but to adopt a sociotics. Without one, they feel lost, empty, undefined. Even the sociotics of science can be very emotional, to say nothing of the sociotics of political, gender, or ethnic identities.

FIML partners will surely find that their idiotics have strong sociotic components. Rather than accept their inherited and often mindless and emotional sociotics, partners would do well to analyze them and transfer their emotional allegiance away from them and toward rational bonding with each other based on FIML principles.

FIML has much greater power to organize the sociotics and idiotics of FIML partners than does any other traditional communication system. This is so because FIML practice provides a means for partners to understand each other without resorting to thoughtless extrinsic sociotic categories for mutual definition. FIML practice helps partners form wholesome bonds with each other without becoming entangled in the emotional and irrational sociotics of large groups.

Another way to say this is FIML is a sort of “operating system” for the mind/brain, while sociotics are broadly shared public references that are fairly static and not too complex.

Ideally, good scientific practice is also an operating system rather than a static sociotic. The scientific method deeply informs FIML practice, but since FIML is an interpersonal operating system, it cannot be the same as science. FIML can be investigated by the scientific method and it can be confirmed or falsified by the scientific method, but this is not strictly (in the sense of formal science) the job of FIML partners. FIML partners, however, if they are doing FIML correctly, are engaged in a practice that is fundamentally rational and objective and that removes mistakes from partners’ signaling systems, including sociotic mistakes.

Idiotics and mental illnes

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In a previous post (here), we defined idiotics to mean a combination of “idio” and “semiotics.” A person’s idiotics are unique to them and are not the same as the idioitcs of any other person.

Idiotics is a useful term as it allows us to denote the tangled web of meaning and symbology that underlies language and is woven into everything we say or do.

When there is no organic cause for mental illness, we would be right to strongly suspect that the source of the “illness” lies in the individual’s idiotics—the unique web of meaning and sensibility that gives rise to their perceptions, communicative acts, and self-awareness.

Since idiotics underlie language, cognition, and perception and give rise to virtually all acts of communication, a person with disturbed idiotics will also show disturbances in these areas.

Why do we need a separate term—idiotics—to describe mental/emotional problems when existing terms already work well enough?

The reason is the core problem in mental illness without an organic cause is not speech, not communication, not perception, and not cognition per se. The core problem is a person’s uniquely acquired and uniquely interconnected semiotics, their idiotics when these are  filled with mistakes.

If we investigate only a person’s experience and extrapolate from that “causes” of their mental illness, we will very often be led astray because we will be attempting to cure a fairly concrete malady by addressing the ambiguities of memory and the falsity of self-assessment through the use of a subjective appraisal based on a general theory. It doesn’t matter that vague statistics can and have been compiled on what kinds of experiences lead to what sorts of mental disturbances, because there are as many exceptions and deviations from these data as there are comformances to them. At best, data of this sort describes correlations. But correlations of what? No one can really say.

If we use a concept like idiotics, we can begin to work with good data that can be called objective by many standards. The gold standard for working with data of this sort is FIML practice and the gold standard of psychological objectivity between two people is the degree to which they can agree on what has just been said or communicated. If both partners agree on what was just said, their standard of objectivity is quite high, probably as good as can be achieved without very sophisticated brain scanning equipment, which does not yet even exist.

When a patient works with a professional analyst, this high degree of objectivity cannot be attained. This is so because the analyst, at best, can only rely on an extrinsic standard of objectivity and this standard is fully subject to the faulty idiotics of the analyst herself. If an analyst tries to avoid this problem by sticking strictly to “objective” extrinsic standards, she will fail to address the subjective, intrinsic idiotics of the patient she is trying to help. She can only communicate with her patient on a useful level by engaging the patient’s idiotics with her own. But there rarely is enough time for this and it is unlikely that patient and analyst will be compatible for this sort of practice.

So what’s an analyst to do? If the patient has a friend they can do FIML with or if such a friend can be found for them, teach them how to do FIML. Check on them often enough to be sure they are doing it correctly. In some cases, advanced instruction can be given in areas of particular interest to the FIML partners if the analyst feels competent to do so.

What about patients who have no friends and for whom no friends can be found? Or patients who are not capable of doing FIML? Patients of this type can and should be treated by the other best practices of the day.

5 Psych Disorders Have Common Genetics

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This article is quite good. It describes a large study that seems to show fairly conclusively that five of our most important psychological disorders have a close genetic foundation. The five disorders are autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia.

This supports the model that nature (genes) when stressed (nurture) can lead to a variety of psychological disorders, which when diagnosed by behavioral manifestations alone may seem to be very different.

In my view, a major psychological stressor that affects virtually all people is the low resolution of the language of interpersonal communication. In sensitive individuals, this stressor can and often does lead to psychological problems.

By “low resolution,” I mean that our language (gesture, symbols, words, semiotics) of interpersonal communication is crude compared to what our brains/minds are capable of. The crude nature of this language forces us to blur subtleties in communication, and this leads to confusion and dissatisfaction, which in turn may manifest as a psychological disorder.

No doubt, some instances of the five disorders described have a strong genetic foundation making them all but inevitable. But all things human can be understood as lying on a spectrum of varying degrees. Thus, most human beings at one time or another will experience aspects of one or more of these disorders due to problems in their interpersonal communications.

Edit. Here is another article on this subject: Same Genetic Basis Found in 5 Types of Mental Disorders.

Signal quality

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Schizophrenia is characterized in part by difficulty in telling the difference between internal and external signals. My guess is that virtually all “normal” people are characterized by their difficulty in telling truthful signals from bullshit.

Normal interpersonal relations are conducted with signals that have low resolution. By that I mean, signal references are rarely unambiguous. In fact, they are very often not even truthful. An ambiguous signal will frequently be interpreted wrongly and lead to problems as serious as those that result from untruthful signals.

The same is true in the public sphere.

Because low signal quality in the social/interpersonal realm is so common, we typically do not identify it as a problem. Furthermore, because we don’t know what to do about it even when we do notice it, we largely ignore it. But that does not mean it isn’t a huge problem.

FIML practice can fix this problem for participating partners. In the future, brain scans may help fix it in the public sphere.