Author: devangoldstein

Unconscious Consciousness?

devangoldstein2 Comments

A recent review at Scientific American covers “new and ingenious ways to measure consciousness” in noncommunicative (i.e., vegetative) patients:

[A researcher] placed the noncommunicative patient in a magnetic scanner and asked her to imagine playing tennis or to imagine visiting the rooms in her house. You and I have no trouble doing these tasks. In healthy volunteers given these instructions, regions of the brain involved in motor planning, spatial navigation and imagery light up. They did likewise in the unfortunate woman. Her brain activity in various regions far outlasted the briefly spoken words and in their specificity cannot be attributed to a brain reflex. The pattern of activity appeared quite willful…

But this small argument doesn’t work. I don’t see any way to structure it other than as follows, which I take as faithful to the terms of the article:

  1. Let “consciousness” be an awareness of one’s environment or of the people in it.
  2. Let “a brain reflex” be a brain responding to a stimulus in a way that does not require consciousness. (This last part makes the response a reflex, as opposed to what we usually think of as “cognition.”)
  3. Let “a noncommunicative person” be one who cannot indicate that he or she has consciousness. (The lack of such an indication in fact propels the researchers towards the search for signs consciousness in the patient other than deliberate communication.)
  4. Inversely, let “a communicative person” be one who can can offer such indications.
  5. Noncommunicative person x‘s brain responds to stimulus a in manner b, just as we would expect communicative person y‘s brain would.
  6. Person y‘s brain’s response b to stimulus a requires consciousness (in the “willful” imagining of the required material).
  7. Therefore, any brain’s response b to stimulus a must require consciousness.
  8. Given 1 – 7, x‘s response must not be a reflex.
  9. Given 1 – 8, x must have consciousness.

First, I question premise 5’s soundness. Although y‘s brain’s response would include b, y‘s brain would also likely respond in ways that led to things like talking—in short, the kinds of things that differentiate x from y in the first place. The section of the review covering this study mentions scans of 17 noncommunicative patients, but no scans of communicative patients, a clear lack of a control group. In short, premise 5 seems akin to arguing that, although you ate the ice cream and the cone and I tossed my cone away, we both ate the same thing.

More crucially, I see no reason to claim, as in 7, that just because we expect y to involve consciousness in her response b, we should expect every response b to involve consciousness. Let’s assume that conscious experience requires a functioning brain structure p, for example (as is widely held, and as some collected thoughts by the author of the review, Christof Koch, might lead us to believe). Couldn’t it then be that damage localized to p might allow for certain responses b in the brain that were not included in consciousness?

I grant that it’s difficult to imagine responding to a command to visualize playing tennis without consciously making the decision to do so. But that could be a failure of imagination. Couldn’t there be some analog to blindsight applying to the realm of consciousness? Do we require the filter of consciousness in order to imagine? Or, as during dreams or under anesthesia, can the brain operate in ways that resemble consciousness without actually having it?

The researchers would answer this charge, I take it, by pointing to the conclusion in 8 (hence also the flow of the argument in the article, in which 8 comes last). Even granting 7, though, the argument begs the question. Highly condensed, it looks like this: x has response b, which we take (because y also has it) to require consciousness; therefore b cannot be a reflex; therefore b requires consciousness.

To avoid the charge of circularity, you have to knock 8 out of the argument. Without it, though, you have no answer to my objection to 7. When we measure things that neither are nor certainly require consciousness, how can we claim that we’re measuring consciousness, even indirectly?

Where Do I Make this Joke?: Facebook-Twitter Integration & a Problem of Social Media

devangoldstein2 Comments

Last night, Jay had a few of us over to play cards. He tweeted:

Jay is waiting for the gentlemen to show up.

This morning, I @replied:

@thebristolkid Gentlemen? I guess you waited all night.

The joke’s a little predictable, a little modally antiquated, sure. But that’s not the point. I saw Jay’s status on Twitter, but I also saw it on Facebook. There, Jay has the Twitter app set his status when he tweets (as do I). So, his tweet about waiting for us to arrive updated his Facebook status more or less immediately.

The point, then, is this: The appearance of Jay’s message in more than one place—and the ways that such multiplicity positions me in relation to Jay and others—reveals one of the peculiarities of online social media, their simultaneously collaborative and competitive aspects.

We’ll get there by looking quickly at my reaction to seeing this message in many places and at the different roles of Twitter and Facebook status updates (in my life, at least). We’ll then consider the differences between online and offline mediators of our social relationships, and finally the two aspects of social media that motivate this post, perhaps best conceived as intersecting pressures on individual online services or platforms.

Perhaps an hour after I @tweeted Jay, when I got around to Facebooking this morning, I saw his status, and, in it, a missed opportunity. See, I meant my joke mostly for Jay, but like so much online comedy, I also meant it to have a public or semi-public aspect. That is, it might have been nice for someone else involved with our card game to see it and to respond. None of those people is on Twitter, though some are on Facebook.

Moreover, I might have liked for some friends who aren’t involved with our game, who may not even know Jay, to see the joke. I’m surely not the only one who’s identified a performative aspect to his social media behaviors; it seems to me that, among other ways, jokes like these function to complement or reinforce my meatspace persona. In a way, I want people who aren’t in on the joke to become in on the joke so that they can better understand who I am and how I think about the world. (Really.)

Given that I have far more friends on Facebook than I do followers on Twitter, should I have held off on making the joke on Twitter, and waited until I made my way to Facebook? Should I have re-posted it on Facebook, violating that strange but compelling prohibition on repeating a joke before the same audience (if not on repeating a joke at all, at least without acknowledging its travels)?

It might be nice if there were a way to tell the Twitter app on Facebook that, hey, that dude I follow on Twitter is this dude on Facebook. Then, it could ask that dude for permission to post my Twitter @replies as comments to his status messages, and we’d be off. (Such a configuration would no doubt require like nine databases and three APIs that don’t and maybe can’t exist.)

Then again, it might not be nice at all. The more I think about it, the more I think my uses for Twitter and for my Facebook status differ—or at least, should differ. Twitter “feels” more directed towards two-way communication—this despite the @reply’s absence from the service’s original conception (Twitter-blog post and napkin-sketch). One’s Facebook status, though it may draw replies, seems more about one-to-many transmission, less about soliciting a response.

My perception of this difference may derive from just how few Twitterers I follow, and how few follow me, as compared to my Facebook friends. That is, on Facebook, it would be as unlikely for others to comment regularly on my status as it is that I will comment on theirs; my Twitter circle is more intimate.

Still, I won’t remove the Twitter app; I continue to want my tweets reflected in my Facebook status. It’s not just that I’m lazy. It’s also that some of the value of these new-ish media forms derives from the knowledge that one has configured one’s digital life in ways that are compatible with those digital lives it intersects, at least for me. The upshot of my decision, though, is a lingering dissatisfaction with every tweet on the terms I’ve sketched here: Each is either too transmissional for Twitter or too solicitational (of a response) for Facebook.

However unique this situation, or idiosyncratic my response to it, it does belie a larger problem of social media. And it’s important that I don’t say “problem with”: I’m not criticizing, just critiquing.

For comparison’s sake, our offline interactions with each other are structured by lots of different institutions, among them school, work, coffee shop, club, public transportation, and movie theatre, depending on your inclinations.

The online institutions that mediate our relationships, if no less powerful, are far more transparent. I know more or less exactly how Facebook will shape my contact with Jay before I sign up, because Facebook has been designed with that purpose made explicit. This transparency creates a marketplace: We choose among competing platforms based on our conscious ideas and expectations about each.

This may be less true for very early adopters, to be fair; that a group of early Twitterers created the @reply without regard for the built-in purposes of the service—and that the service then assimilated the @reply—shows just how much power can come from the ground up. Still, at the moment in which one creates a Twitter account, I suspect the rule is that one expects to participate within the bounds of prescription.

An armchair Foucauldian analysis might tell you that each of the offline institutions works just the same, that spatial configurations and designations of authority have been implemented—perhaps no less by design—in order to shape social relations. Even if this is so, though, these functions are so obscured that it takes a Foucault to expose them in the first place. We participate in these institutions for reasons far more complex, entangled, and at times unconscious than those that motivate our signups online.

The problem, then, is this: The free-market competition among social media platforms and their underlying collaborational ideology—best demonstrated by the obligatority of the API—may be fundamentally incompatible, or at least, only partially resolved. The partial integration of Twitter and Facebook illustrates the conflict. The existence of a Twitter Facebook app is a foregone conclusion. Yet, in order to remain different, to remain competitive, the two can’t be integrated completely.

If my suggestion for a total (or more total) integration were implemented, the differences between tweeting and setting one’s Facebook status, between @replying and commenting, would be two: first, default privacy settings, which we can read as the developers’ ideas about who should see one platform’s version of the same message, and about how that behavioral aspect of the platform should shape our interactions with one another. Still, a user can (and many users do) override these settings on Twitter and, with considerably granular control, on Facebook.

Second, with more significant interplay between Twitter and Facebook, the choice of interface would remain as a difference. But even within either site, one already has dozens of options for tweeting or updating one’s status—not just from the computer, but from the phone, too. A list of applications for interacting with Twitter makes the head spin.

Finally, even in this hypothetical circumstance, brand recognition would still play. One benefit of affiliating oneself with a particular platform is that the affiliation is public. That is, for a variety of social reasons, one may want it known that one is a Twitterer. One may also be motivated professionally; I originally signed up for Facebook, for example, so as to be better able to advise higher education clients on its potential utility in their marketing efforts.

This last factor seems the most crucial difference that would remain, to be sure. But if Twitter and Facebook’s status feature were made virtually identical, I doubt that Twitter could remain important. That is, I think that although Twitter would continue to exist, it could not do so as more than a badge, an obligatory statement of one’s partaking in a certain broad movement.

The point I want to make here is just this: There are non-parallel forces—collaboration and competition—that press against social media platforms. Under certain circumstances, these forces can also come to press against us. In this context, we must look closely at the intertwining of our relationships and platforms. That is, if we’re better off after careful critiques of our classrooms, prisons, and cube farms, then we ought to derive similar benefits from thorough examination of our online institutions. I hope to have begun to provide a small example of how this might work.

General Motors: Laissez Mourir

devangoldstein2 Comments

I’m with Philip Greenspun on the question of whether to bail out the auto industry:

The government has already done everything that it needs to in order to help G.M. […] Chapter 11 was designed specifically so that employees can keep their jobs, albeit possibly at lower salaries, while shareholders and creditors suffer and/or are wiped out.

For me, it’s not a question of what G.M. “deserve[s],” as Greenspun puts it. The banks surely didn’t “deserve” anything; bailing them out made sense in terms of avoiding economic calamity worse than whatever we’re going to face anyway.

The point about G.M. is that Chapter 11 bankruptcy will probably suit the company and the economy better in the long term than will a bailout. The point is that the U.S. auto industry has to change in order to be more competitive at home, and that keeping G.M. afloat at a tiny fraction of last-year’s market cap will not restore value or even necessarily position the company to rebuild in the near future. The point is that this American powerhouse has already failed, and that a bailout now will not retroactively prevent that failure, any more than a bankruptcy proceeding could.

What a bailout will do is protect some employees from hardship and, in doing so, help an entire region see its way through financial crisis. However, this admirable goal would be more effectively served with economic aid programs targeting those without jobs (and not just in Dearborn).

You can’t force a company like G.M. to reinvent itself with a bailout, but you can spend that same money on the creation of new jobs whose output benefits the entire country—jobs that renovate our infrastructure and reduce our dependence on foreign, exhaustible sources of energy.

To put it another way, the fifty billion dollars’ worth of auto industry loans that we might see in the coming months represents a third of the budget of Obama’s ten-year energy plan. Where will the money be better spent?

Election Coverage Special Effects

devangoldstein2 Comments

NBC just showed Ann Curry’s green room, as though we though all those graphics she was throwing around were real, solid objects.

CNN pseudo-hologrammically projected Jessica Yellin into the Situation Room on CNN. Now Yellin is explaining that there are 35 HD cameras shooting her in Chicago, and those cameras are somehow tied to cameras in New York, such that the paired cameras’ movements can match. As a result, Yellin can appear in the Sit Room, spatially integrated, if jerky and haloed.

Does any of this add to the broadcast? The Curry bit I almost understand; tighter visual integration between her and the many graphics zipping by maybe helps comprehension or something. But isn’t there value in seeing the hordes lining up to get into Grant Park where Yellin is(n’t)? Wouldn’t it be more informative to hear the crowd behind her, as in a traditional broadcast?

Reminds me of Oswalt: “We’re Science—we’re all about coulda, not shoulda.”

Disgust Science, Disgusting Journalism

devangoldstein2 Comments

I’ve just read on LiveScience.com that “[b]ooks are just as powerful as movies” at triggering “delight, pain, or disgust” reactions in the brain. As is so often the case on LiveScience, this gripping opening represents a kind of yellow science journalism that has intensified its hold on the popular imagination in the last few years.

For one thing, in the single study writer Andrea Thompson discusses, a team of Dutch scientists (Jabba et al.) set out to test the triggering of disgust by various stimuli: print, motion picture, foul-tasting beverage. The study concerns disgust exclusively; there’s no hint of delight or pain in it, or for the rest of the article.

Moreover, contrary to what’s suggested by the article’s title—”Books Still Rival Movies For Stirring Emotions”—the scientists themselves make no quantitative comparison between the power of books and movies. That is, nobody’s saying “just as powerful” besides Thompson, not in their interviews or in the study. The parts of the study discussed on LiveScience.com only show that similar responses can be generated from various stimuli.

Finally, those portions of the study absent from the article in fact show deep differences among the responses generated by the stimuli. Let’s take a closer look at its methods to see why and how these differences emerge. At stake is not only a better understanding of the study, but the success or failure of the LiveScience article as a piece of science journalism.

First, participants in the study were shown three-second films of a disgust reaction: A person on the screen takes a drink and then appears disgusted. There were also control films showing pleasurable and neutral responses. As they watched, an fMRI machine captured changes in blood flow to various regions of their brain. During the disgust clips, these included an increase in activity in the region that injury and other studies suggest is a crucial part of the disgust reaction. (Jabba et al., 2)
One of the team members describes the next step in Thompson’s article:

“Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios. […] For instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth.”

In both cases, as well as a third in which the subjects tasted something, well, disgusting, the anterior insula and adjacent frontal operculum lit up the fMRI. (Jabba et al., 3-4) So, we conclude, books are as effective at provoking disgust as movies, right?

Not a chance. There are crucial differences between a three-second clip of a man taking a drink and then experiencing disgust and the process of reading and imagining a scenario like the one described above, and similar differences between participants’ reactions to the two stimuli.

First, the clips and the written scenarios differ in duration. The scripts given to the participants took much longer than three seconds to read and process; the study gives the reading times as 35 seconds (2). That the scripts required so much more time than the clips to induce the desired reaction belies any suggestion that the former are “just as powerful” as the latter.

Second, the clips and the scripts differ in terms of the depth of the empathetic reaction they allow. Reading a disgusting scenario and imagining oneself in that scenario seems much more likely to trigger deep emotional reaction than just seeing a face on-screen for three seconds (mirror neurons be damned). The study confirms this differing depth; the greatest average change to the fMRI signal during clip viewing was about 0.1%, compared to about .66% for the script-reading portions of the experiment (figs. 1b and 1c, page 3).

And of course, these clips don’t replicate the experience of watching a “movie.” Typically, narrative and generic context as well as cinematic style and technique allow or assist viewers in developing empathic responses to persons on-screen. All of that is absent or extremely limited in a laboratory setting, and in the films themselves. (You can find stills of the clips in another study, requiring a paid subscription or institutional access.)

Are these problems with the study? Or just with the reporting? The study’s abstract ends:

[T]his shared region however [sic] was found to be embedded in distinct functional circuits during the three modalities, suggesting why observing, imagining and experiencing an emotion feels so different. (1)

In other words, the study acknowledges the apples-to-oranges nature of the comparisons between the different stimuli-response pairs, even as it shows their similarities. So what do we make of LiveScience’s expansion of the conversation from the realm of clips and scripts to that of “movies” and “books”?

It seems to me that one of the biggest problems with science reporting in its current state—and not just on the web—is the indiscriminate use of the facts in the service of stories with artificially inflated “wow” factors. There’s a diminished ethical standard for much science journalism, in which obfuscation, equivocation, and fallacious conclusion or conjecture are all widely accepted, or at least routinely tolerated. By looking closely at one article and the study it concerns, I hope to have shown some of the problems to which this climate can lead.