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When we drew blood from our older adults and analyzed their white cells,” he writes, “we found that loneliness somehow penetrated the deepest recesses of the cell to alter the way genes were being expressed.” Loneliness affects not only the brain, then, but the basic process of DNA transcription. When you are lonely, your whole body is lonely.
- Positivity of the English Language and Godel’s Theorem
I got sent a link to this paper a while back which and found it interesting on a few different levels.
Positivity of the English Language
People use language in part to convey emotional information, leading to the central and contingent questions: (1) What is the emotional spectrum of natural language? and (2) Are natural languages neutrally, positively, or negatively biased? Here, we report that the human-perceived positivity of over 10,000 of the most frequently used English words exhibits a clear positive bias. More deeply, we characterize and quantify distributions of word positivity for four large and distinct corpora, demonstrating that their form is broadly invariant with respect to frequency of word use.
Sounds like a great, feel-good result but intuitively, it doesn’t make sense. A relatively high number of positive words does not necessarily mean that language has a positive bias. We humans ascribe meaning to words, some of the meaning we ascribe is positive and some of it negative. The researchers argue that languages can exhibit a negative or positive bias and they claim that this is evident in the frequency of (positive or negative) word use.
The part that doesn’t make sense is that, if (positive or negative) meaning is ascribed to words by something other than the words themselves (i.e. us) then an analysis of then surely words themselves do not reveal anything, no? For bias to exist it would have to be found at the where meaning is ascribed right?
For example, I may send you an email saying something along the lines of , ‘Just been told I have to work this weekend. That’s great!’ So ‘great’ is the only word expressing sentiment in that sentence and following the approach taken by the researchers it would be counted as a word with a positive bias but I’ve clearly not used the word in a positive sense. So simply counting frequency of a word’s appearance does not adequately capture positive or negative bias.
So I got sent that article sometime ago and something about my intuitive disagreement has been bugging me ever since. I disagree with its conclusion but haven’t been able to articulate (to myself at least) why. But I had a bit of a eureka moment a few days ago. My new flatmate was telling about the the logic exercises she was working on, which lead to a discussion of logic and truth and Godel’s Second Theorem which goes something like this:
A system of number theory cannot be consistent if it can validate itself; it requires validation at a higher level, a “meta-theory”, in order to be consistent. The metatheory requires a meta-meta-theory, and so on.
It struck me that this might be what that intuition stemmed from. Here are some everyday examples of the theorem:
Salesman: “I am honest”.
Me: “Why should I believe that?”
Salesman: “because I say so.”or
Salesman: “This data is valid.”
Me: “Why should I believe that?”
Salesman: “Because the data says so.”Language is one system or theory and meaning is its meta form.
Researcher: “Therefore English has a positive bias.”
Me: “Why should I believe that?”
Researcher: “Because the words says so.”Ok, that doesn’t quite work. Words are a system / theory to which language is its meta form, to which meaning is its meta-meta form. This argument requires a number of premises in between to make that work and the system hierarchy is not that neat and tidy but I do think the theorem applies though no? Not a bulletproof argument I’ll admit. I may come back to it later.
[In all honesty, the other source for that intuition is a knee jerk loathing of positivity biased people, you know those people that are just so happy all the time that you have to burst their bubble aka punch them in the face yelling ‘THE WORLD IS SHIT!!’]
That there are relatively more positive than negative words in a language is interesting though. The classic example is Eskimos having more words for snow. That line of reasoning leads to theories of linguistic relativity, which posits that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world. Which may be what the researchers are getting at. But that’s the subject for a whole other debate.
The basic question: Is Facebook more like a newspaper or more like a factory? The liberal answer: it’s a newspaper in that it gathers stories about people and circulates those stories back to its readers while leveraging reader attention for advertising dollars. Profit flows in from advertisers and the value of the company is determined by the marketplace. The progressive answer: it’s a factory in that it demands unpaid micro labor from its users, extracting surplus value from such labor. Profit flows from commons-based peer production and thus value is ultimately produced by users (making the ads merely the “last mile” of valorization). NYT claims the former, obviously. But it’s very important that we understand FB as a factory, not just another form of mass media.
Alexander Galloway, from Facebook (via nsrnicek)I came to theory because I was hurting… I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend – to grasp what was happening around and within me… When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice.
The analogy of color is an interesting way to think about [character]. Most of us think that colors are very discrete things — something’s red, it’s got redness; something’s blue, it’s got blueness. But we are creating these categories. They’re not natural kinds, they’re not given in ways that represent fundamentally distinct things. Ultimately, what determines what colors we see are the frequencies of light waves entering our eyes, so it’s along a continuum. It’s kind of the same with character. Things blend. We assume that if someone is good, that we’ve characterized them as good, that’s a discrete category, they can’t be bad. And when they are, our categories shatter. That’s because we have this illusory, arbitrary idea of what vice and virtue mean.
Out of Character – David DeSteno and Piercarlo Valdesolo on the psychology of good and evil (via curiositycounts)Stumbled across this crazy idea! a while ago, the mathematical universe hypothesis:
All structures that exist mathematically also exist physically. That is, in the sense that “in those [worlds] complex enough to contain self-aware substructures [they] will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically ‘real’ world”.
- The Brain on Trial
Via the essayist:
by David Eagleman
On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition. At the top, he killed a receptionist with the butt of his rifle. Two families of tourists came up the stairwell; he shot at them at point-blank range. Then he began to fire indiscriminately from the deck at people below. The first woman he shot was pregnant. As her boyfriend knelt to help her, Whitman shot him as well. He shot pedestrians in the street and an ambulance driver who came to rescue them….
He requested in his suicide note that an autopsy be performed to determine if something had changed in his brain—because he suspected it had.
I talked with a Doctor once for about two hours and tried to convey to him my fears that I felt [overcome by] overwhelming violent impulses. After one session I never saw the Doctor again, and since then I have been fighting my mental turmoil alone, and seemingly to no avail.
Whitman’s body was taken to the morgue, his skull was put under the bone saw, and the medical examiner lifted the brain from its vault. He discovered that Whitman’s brain harbored a tumor the diameter of a nickel. This tumor, called a glioblastoma, had blossomed from beneath a structure called the thalamus, impinged on the hypothalamus, and compressed a third region called the amygdala. The amygdala is involved in emotional regulation, especially of fear and aggression.
As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.
- mental notes / 23 June 2011
Just been reading Berg’s Week 315 (which is majorly thought provoking) and really like the random idea / thinking out loud format. So I thought i might give it a bash myself. Here goes
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Stumbled across Aporia in 10 Psychological States You’ve Never Heard Of — And When You Experienced Them over at io9. They describe it as…
“You know that feeling of crazy emptiness you get when you realize that something you believed isn’t actually true? And then things feel even more weird when you realize that actually, the thing you believed might be true and might not — and you’ll never really know? That’s aporia. The term comes from ancient Greek, but is also beloved of post-structuralist theorists like Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak. The reason modern theorists love the idea of aporia is that it helps to describe the feeling people have in a world of information overload, where you are often bombarded with contradictory messages that seem equally true.”
I’m particularly interested in how it might related to information overload. It’s a problem I’ve grappled with many times over the last few years. I’m an information junkie. I’m also a technology junkie. Technology is to information what crack is to cocaine. Wait, not quiet. It’s whatever you do to cocaine to make crack. Anyways, you get the idea. Basically I have a problem. This time round however it feel different. More on that later….
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I submitted my last philosophy assignment. Just two days late this time. That’s personal best this year! It was an essay about linguistic internalism versus externalism. The essay happily coincided with my discovery of the Extended Mind Theory over on (can’t find the original source now. must come back to it). EMT picks from the ideas covered in the essay and runs with it! EMT is also a sort of rediscovery of an idea I’ve been thinking about for a long time. It’s been 10 years since and it feel like I’ve gone full circle. Excited about that!
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Had a conversation with a friend about cities and technology. She’s studying city planning and somehow the topic of foursquare came up. The conversation serendipitously happened as I stumbled across socialfiction on twitter and his disillusionment with the location aware / digital cities movement. Something which I’d not thought about for a while but a disillusionment I actually relate too. I suspect this is indicative of the broader trend in computing / technology. Something I’d like to write/think out loud about later.
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I turned 30 yesterday. Not particularly fussed about it. Had a great dinner with a special person who was more fussed about it than I was which was great. But just another day to be honest. I had the existential crisis two years ago. They occur on a roughly 5 year cycle so I’m good for a few more years.
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Slowly building up some steam to get stuck back into my sentiment analysis engine. The big problem is finding the time in between work, studies and going out / listening to music / spending time with friends. Still haven’t found an approach that works, haven’t given up on figuring one out though.
a point of undecidability, which locates the site at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or deconstructs itself
Filmed on a summer evening in 2003, over 40 minutes, 15 or so members of legendary crews Roll Deep, East Connection and Nasty Crew squeeze into the makeshift studio – an all-star cast akin to getting the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Buzzcocks on the same bill. This was, in fact, grime’s 100 Club moment - Dan Hancox (The Guardian)
- How Deaf People Think
You know that voice in your head, the ‘inner voice’, the sound of you thinking? The voice that’s reading this article to? (Or is that just me?) It never occurred to me that our mental world would be different if you could not hear the voice or if it that voice wasn’t actually a voice but something else. But it is for some deaf people..
[funnily It just so happens I came across this on todayifoundout.com. huh]
Those who were born completely deaf and only learned sign language will, not surprisingly, think in sign language. What is surprising is those who were born completely deaf but learn to speak through vocal training will occasionally think not only in the particular sign language that they know, but also will sometimes think in the vocal language they learned, with their brains coming up with how the vocal language sounds. Primarily though, most completely deaf people think in sign language. Similar to how an “inner voice” of a hearing person is experienced in one’s own voice, a completely deaf person sees or, more aptly, feels themselves signing in their head as they “talk” in their heads.
For those deaf people who are not completely deaf or wear devices to allow them to hear somewhat, often represented in deaf circles with a “little d”, rather than “big D” as in those who are can’t hear at all, will often experience more vocal language in their “inner voice” in proportion to how much they can hear.
Interestingly, deafness is significantly more serious than blindness in terms of the effect it can have on the brain. This isn’t because deaf people’s brains are different than hearing people, in terms of mental capacity or the like; rather, it is because of how integral language is to how our brain functions. To be clear, “language” here not only refers to spoken languages, but also to sign language. It is simply important that the brain have some form of language it can fully comprehend and can turn into an inner voice to drive thought.
The next bit is particularly interesting
Recent research has shown that language is integral in such brain functions as memory, abstract thinking, and, fascinatingly, self-awareness. Language has been shown to literally be the “device driver”, so to speak, that drives much of the brain’s core “hardware”. Thus, deaf people who aren’t identified as such very young or that live in places where they aren’t able to be taught sign language, will be significantly handicapped mentally until they learn a structured language, even though there is nothing actually wrong with their brains. The problem is even more severe than it may appear at first because of how important language is to the early stages of development of the brain.
Essentially thats saying that we would not be able to think without language, or think abstractly at least. What does that include? What would non-abstract thinking be like? I’m coming back to that one later.
- ‘It’s Sort of a Good Thing’
An incredible story came up in Zite. I had no idea that April was Autism Awareness Month. Parents.com collected stories about living with autism from their readers and this is one of them.
In this, the final installment of the series, we are featuring a true voice of autism: the transcript of an interview conducted by Emily Willingham, author of the blog A Life Less Ordinary3, with her 9-year-old son, T.H., who has autism.
For obvious reasons, many autistic children are unable right now to articulate their lives. My son T.H. and I have discussed this issue before, and he has expressed a wish to let people know what autism is like, at least for him. (Responses are verbatim with non-sequitur interjections and vocalizations not included).
On Noises
Q: Why do you hum?A: It helps me get all my energy out. When I’m excited, I do that the most. It can also help me concentrate.
Q: When you make the “eeeeeee!” noise, what’s that about?A: It’s when I feel good.
On Eye Contact
Q: Do you have trouble looking people in the eye?A: Sort of.
Q: Why is that?A: It’s sort of scary for me because I haven’t done it that much.
Q: How do you feel if you try to look somebody in the eye?A: Weird. Tingly.
Making Faces
Q: When do you think you make faces the most?A: When I’m excited.
Q: What does making faces do for you?A: It makes me feel good because I sort of like doing it. I guess I have a lot of energy so I do all that stuff.
On Hugs and Contact
Q: Temple Grandin4 apparently didn’t really like people to touch her, but she liked being squeezed by
non-people things. Do you mind when people touch or hug you?A: When someone touches me, it feels really disturbing. When someone hugs me, it’s a little bit better.
Q: You squeeze my arms all the time. In fact, you are doing it right now. Why is that?A: Because I like you. And I like squeezing things.
On Flapping
Q: Why do you flap?A: Because I’m excited when I flap. It makes all my energy go out.
Q: Do you think other people notice it?A: No. (I loved this answer. Obviously, people do notice it…but he doesn’t care).
Social Interactions
Q: Is it hard for you to understand other children?A: Sort of.
Q: What do you find hard to understand?A: What they do, basically. I didn’t like being in big groups. It made it confusing.
Q: What is it like when you meet new people?A: It’s sort of scary. It’s embarrassing. If I meet people out in public, it’s embarrassing the most, and I don’t even know why. It’s just extremely embarrassing.
Comments on Being Autistic
Q: Do you like being autistic?A: Yes.
Q: What do you think about autism?A: I think it’s sort of a good thing.
Q: Why do you think it’s a good thing?A: Because I like it. You can be smarter about some things, and you’re also better at some things, like being excited, getting all your energy out. You can smell things really good. Another thing is that you see really good. I can list a ton of bad things about being autistic.
Q: What are those?A: It’s sort of hard to do things in class, especially first grade. Another thing is that you’re being bullied. And it’s sort of hard to concentrate.
Q: Why is it hard to concentrate?A: Because you’re so distracted by other things that are more exciting.
Q: Like what?A: Like just looking out this window (he points to a large window through which much vegetation and many birds are visible) and forgetting everything else.
We are often told that privacy is disappearing, that the most intimate secrets are open to public probing. But the reality is the opposite: what is effectively disappearing is public space, with its attendant dignity.
Slavoj Žižek, Good Manners in the Age of WikiLeaks- #FAIL and various online identities
Welcome to the nth iteration of my blog! If you’re one of my hardcore imaginary audience you would have noticed the my previous blog, thehumansare.com/ing , was offline for an age and then briefly reappeared again. It’s resuscitated now but not for long. Yeah, its a f*ck up. Life online is hard yo!
So, it turns out my longest running blog is one I setup at blogsome.com in 2004. It was a great service at the time but I left as the service deteriorated. It became got crap actually. But low and behold, it’s still there and freakily its still posting content, on its own! (I plugged my delicious and flickr accounts into the site so stuff just appears). So I left blogsome and I’ve been hosting my own blogs since.
Hosting your own blog is not the panacea you think it is though. Well, that’s a bit of a leap, you have probably never thought that. There is the real issue of ownership and Terms of Service. When you’re hosting your own blog it’s yours, the content belongs to you. Not Google or Facebook or whatever computing behemoth you’ve signed up to. That was one major motivation but mainly because I thought blog hosting companies were crap. It turns out web hosts are even worse! This fact of life only dawned on me as my blogs crashed and burned at one host after another. But I’m waffling…
A long frustrating journey of web hosting #FAIL has lead me back to a hosted service. Tumblr, isn’t great but it’ll do and it’s going to save me the hassle. I might have to agree to some Terms of Service which I’ve not actually read (have you EVER read a TOS?) but at least these guys/girls know what they’re doing and have jobs that depend on it.
Anyways. I’ve been digging through the old blogsome blog and it really interesting reading it now. My interests haven’t changed much. I’m still nerding out on our socio political cyborg evolution. But that blog is just a short, splintered history. I really wish I could have maintained consistent log of Warren’s Miscellanea Through the Ages, something to look back on, maybe even something for the kids ya know.
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