Depersonalisation - the fear of self.

There's a mental condition called 'depersonalisation' that can be, for many, very distressing.  It's a failure of the mind to correctly deal with its own existence, leading to feelings of unfamiliarity about the familiar.  I'm going to have a go at describing what it is like, as I'm a sufferer.

Imagine you are actively involved in social interactions, perhaps having conversations with friends in a bar.  The atmosphere is happy.  Suddenly, you feel a chill.  A wave of anxiety passes through you.  You start to sweat.  At the same time, your perspective changes.  You aren't in a bar having conversations, instead you are in a cinema, watching friends having conversation.  They look at the camera and mention your name.  You hear a voice respond.  Your voice.  Not wanting to appear deranged, you try and forget this new perspective, and the conversations seem to carry on.  You calm down, but you can't get the feeling of distance out of your head.  It's there, all the time, waiting to pounce.  Later on you try and recall what happened.  Your mind starts to whirl.  You imagined yourself in a cinema.  But what is the cinema?  It's your own mind, of course.  But if the cinema is your own mind, who is the person sitting in the cinema, watching your own life go by?  It's your own mind, of course...

You realise you have been going through life surrounded by the strangeness of yourself.  Reality is divided into two parts: the universe, the film running on the screen, and the you, the cinema, the projectionist, the director, the audience and one of the actors.  You can never escape this feeling.

As a child, I found that I needed to start wearing glasses.  Putting them on, I had a shock.  I realised that the glasses were separating me from the universe.

This is not a state of delusion, not solipsism.  You know what is real, and you know others are real.  But the deep strangeness of your existence is there all your life.  There can be long periods during which this strangeness can be accepted as normal, and there is no distress.  But during times of tiredness, anxiety and depression it can come back with a vengeance.

It's a phobia of your own existence.  It can't be run away from, it can't be avoided.  It has to be tolerated, minute by minute, day by day, year after year.

Why the mystery of consciousness doesn't tell us anything useful.

Back to the subject of qualia. Perhaps this way of looking at things best explains what my position is: A developing human brain gathers ever more experiences about the world it lives in. Every thought in the brain appears because of the interaction of brain cells with each other and with input from the senses. This direct mapping of thoughts to brain cell activity is of fundamental importance in understanding what it means to say we are conscious. It means that for every thought there are at least two ways of describing what is going on: at the level of thoughts, and at the level of brain cell activity. Both ways of describing what is happening are true, but one way may be more revealing at any given time. Anyway, as the brain develops thoughts may arise about the nature of conscious experience. Such a thought may be "what are these things which I shall call 'qualia'?". There are two interesting things happening here. One is that the brain now contains a concept of 'qualia', and the other is that there is a reason why the brain now contains that concept. Some process of thought, some reflection on experience, led to that concept.

The thing to remember is that all thoughts have an existence at the level of brain cell activity. What happens at that level is necessarily completely due to biology and so due to physics. There is no mysterious extra influence involved. And so, there is a complete explanation based on brain cell activity as to why the brain develops thoughts about conscious experience. and the concept of 'qualia' has a purely physical representation in brain states. Brain states can, of course, represent other things, including things that don't have physical existence, but for that representation of a thing to be correct, the brain has to contain true representations of the characteristics of that thing. For example, to have a correct representation of a dog, a brain must contain the information that a dog is a furry four-legged wolf descendant.

What about the characteristics of qualia does the brain have to represent for the concept of qualia to be correct? This is where the idea of qualia involving some extra property of the world runs into problems. How can a brain have a correct representation of the real property of something being more than just physics? Some say that qualia are something special because of what it feels like to have them. How can a brain truly represent that a feeling is that special? It can't. A brain can contain the belief that a feeling is special, but that belief can never be justified by evidence. That belief has no foundation other than a feeling of mystery.

This is my position: we can speculate all we like about the nature of consciousness, but we have to realise that our very thoughts have physical substance. There is no such thing as an internal sense of the non-physical, there is only the understandable feeling of mystery when we contemplate what it is like to be a self-aware being, and mystery says nothing about what is real.

[This is the core of the book that I hope to finish sometime... it's about what it means to be a human given what science has shown us about our place in the physical world.]

Brian Goetz on Java

This is a really fascinating presentation by Brian Goetz about why Java is as it is, and what is planned for the future. Interesting points include that Java is much more dynamic than usually thought, and the years of effort put into getting the introduction of functional code and lambdas just right.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/java-history-present-future?utm_source=infoq&utm_medium=videos_homepage&utm_campaign=videos_row2

How the Higgs field gives particles mass - it's simple!!

There are many common explanations of how the Higgs effect gives particles mass, and virtually all of them are either misleading or wrong.

One well-known explanation likens the Higgs effect to having space like a room full of people in a party, and when a massive particle enters that space it's like a famous person - everyone clusters around that person making it hard for that famous person to cross the room, so that fame gives people a form of inertia.  This is wrong.

Other explanations imply that the Higgs effect somehow slows particles down like a marble falling through honey as against falling through air.  This is also wrong.

How the Higgs effect gives particles mass is very easy to understand, and it doesn't involve any stickiness or clustering or slowing down.

To understand we have to use Einstein's equation  e = mc² - mass is related to energy: the more energy, the more mass.

Now, imagine you have a bar magnet, one end North, the other end South.  If you allow it to move freely, it will end up aligned with the Earth's magnetic field, the stable lowest-energy state.  The bar magnet will have a mass, which will include the energy of the interaction with the Earth's magnetic field.  Now, turn the magnet 180 degrees and hold it there.  The magnet is now in a higher energy state, with its field opposite to that of the Earth's.  This higher energy means that the bar magnet will have more mass: it will weigh more and it will have more inertia and a higher (but very, very tiny) gravitation field.  Changing the energy of interaction of the bar magnet with the Earth's magnetic field changes the mass of the bar magnet.

Magnetic fields, like many other fields, are directional.  They are described by vectors.  At each point in space there is a direction to the field and a strength of the field.  But not all fields are directional.  For example, it's possible to plot out a field of temperature in any system of matter, such as the atmosphere or the oceans.  Temperature only has an intensity, not a direction (although temperature can change with direction, that change is not a property of each point; it's only meaningful over a distance).  Temperature is an example of a 'scalar' field, one which only has intensity.

The Higgs effect arises because space is filled with another scalar field - the Higgs field.  The Higgs field is like an electric or magnetic charge, but it has no direction - particles can't turn in any way like the bar magnet in the magnetic field, to reduce the interaction.  Certain particles - electrons, quarks, neutrinos - have an energy of interaction with the universal Higgs field and it's that energy that gives them mass.  It's that mass that means they have a resistance to change in velocity - inertia.

The "Higgs Boson" itself doesn't give particles mass.  It's a particle what was predicted to appear if the universal Higgs field was given a certain kind of kick.  The Large Hadron Collider succeeded in giving enough kicks of the right kind to the universal Higgs field to allow the existence of the Higgs Boson to be convincingly shown.

GamerGate 1 - Down with SJWs and that sort of thing

My twitter feed is packed with GamerGate tweets.  I'm not what some would call a 'hard core' gamer, but I have played PC games for decades and I can understand some of the issues, and being a wishy-washy liberal I can see arguments on both sides, but what I almost never see are good, evidence-based and rational arguments on both sides.  The GamerGate situation is very similar to that of Atheism+ over the past few years, and 'Social Justice Warriors' have been central to both.  GamerGate seems less one-sided than the Atheism+ situation, where (in my view) the Atheist+ers were on the wrong side, and I have criticisms of both pro- and anti-GamerGate supporters.  The next post will deal with the pro-GamerGate arguments of Christina Hoff Sommers.  This post is about the style of argument of anti-GamerGaters, particularly Anita Sarkeesian.

This tweet inspired this blog post:

Whatever side of the GamerGate you are on, I hope you agree that this kind of assertion is seriously flawed, and it illustrates one of the main problems with feminists like @femfreq (Sarkeesian) - this is a hugely question-begging claim with no supporting data supplied. There are 'if's missing here - 'if' depictions are sexist, and 'if' those depictions are harmful. Personally, I have no problem accepting that depiction of women in some games are sexist. But there is a considerable amount of evidence showing that games don't have significant influence on adult behaviour; for example the link between games and violence just isn't there. If this is the case, why should sexism in games be assumed to lead to sexist behaviour? 

So many games are set in fantasy worlds where things are bad, to give a sense of danger and excitement, not reality. Some games show women with big breasts; others show a plumber leaping tens of feet into the air.  You can't just assert that games which show a different reality can be harmful, even if that reality shows sexism, because minds are just too complex for such question-begging assertions.  Some people play games of inequality in their sexual lives, and there is no evidence that such shared fantasies do any harm at all.

I'd love to see better, evidence and thought-based campaigning for equality, not evidence-free assertions,

Sarkeesian and statistics

I have had a lot of training in statistics as part of my degrees. A tedious amount. It helped me to understand about when it is or is not valid to draw conclusions. This brings me to the subject of people like Anna Sarkeesian receiving threats of violence and death. Such threats are disgusting and must be terrifying, but what do they actually mean? What is the problem that these threats highlight? Unless some data is provided, it's just not possible to come to any general conclusions, bad though the situation is. It's not possible to say "women are hated on the internet", or "gamers are misogynistic bullies". These statements might be true, but you can't get to their truth from the receiving of threats unless some hard statistics are provided.

What the threats do show is that the Internet often allows instant access to anyone. There's no security barrier - cranks, nutjobs and bullies can walk right up to you on social media and email. But what does this mean? It means that visible people on-line get crazy and vicious people sending them crazy things. There is no doubt that this situation can make the on-line experience bad for some people, but the problem can't be said to be the nature of people on-line.

Unless you expect all of any group of a million people to be utterly sane and reasonable, then the nature of the Internet is that if you are visible you are going to come across frightening nutters. This may have no more meaning than the fact that nutters exist.

Ideas and Mother-Lodes: Should we care about holy books and doctrines?

I'm sure just about everyone knows about the Affleck vs Maher and Harris battle recently.  A particular phrase Sam Harris used stirred things up: "Islam is the mother-lode of bad ideas".  I'm not going to agree or disagree with that phrase, instead I'm putting forward the suggestion that it might be an interesting and perhaps useful strategy to sometimes leave religion out of discussions of the consequences of religion, paradoxical though this may seem.

What do we really want most of all in the world?  Peace, equality, fairness, freedom.  That's a reasonable list, I think.  Does removing religion appear in that list?  Should it?  (A believer might ask the same about removing atheism!)  If you believe that some aspects of religion get in the way of those ideals, it might seem like a good idea to attack religion, and yet religion has considerable privileges and protection within our cultures.  Religion is precious to many people, and so there is understandable defensiveness when religious beliefs are challenged.

So, how about not challenging certain religious beliefs - not by ignoring those beliefs, but by putting aside the fact that those beliefs are religious in origin?

Suppose someone says that a woman's opinion is legally worth half that of a man's opinion, and they say that it is because of religious law.   How about responding that you aren't going to talk about religious law, you are going to talk about principles of equality?  Nothing strident, simply a statement like this: "Sorry, but I'm not going to discuss supernatural beliefs".  

You see, if you allow religion to come into things, you are allowing a barrier to be put up, a source of immediate conversation-stoppers.  So:

Don't talk about Christianity, talk about science and evolution.

Don't talk about Islam, talk about the equality of women.

Don't talk about Islam, talk about the importance of legal equality for same-sex couples.

Don't talk about Christianity, talk about the importance of stem cell research.

And, controversially, don't talk about Islam being full of bad ideas, just talk about the bad ideas.  If someone wants to mention Islam.... "Sorry, but..." etc. This is absolutely not a criticism of Sam Harris - it's only a suggestion for a parallel strategy for dealing with bad ideas.  

Who knows?  By not allowing the defensiveness that can appear when religion is mentioned, we might change more minds, and if someone believes in evolution and yet thinks they are still a Biblical literalist, do we care?