“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity.” –attributed to Albert Einstein

Our subjective experience of how fast time is passing depends on the situation we are in. Waiting for a pot to boil while you watch it can feel like a frustratingly long time, and watching a clock as it ticks down the last minutes of a long meeting or class can be excruciating. (In fact, studies consistently show that we perceive a watched clock to slow down or stop briefly when we first look at it, an effect known as chronostasis).

On the other hand, when immersed in enjoyable activities, we often lose track of time and are surprised to find out just how much time has really passed while we were so engaged. Time flies when you’re having fun, as the expression goes.

The effect we’re all so familiar with also makes some intuitive sense. When you are in a state of flow, deeply focused on something, your attention is fully devoted to that activity so there is no chance for your mind to wander. If you’re in the middle of a fun game, you are simply too engaged to bother shifting your attention to a clock. When you finally do shift your awareness to a more objective measure of how much time has passed, there’s a sense of surprise.

Boredom might be thought of as the antithesis of flow, so it makes sense that those who are most prone to boredom make more mistakes at estimating how much time has passed.

So fun activities make time fly, and boredom makes time slow down. But does the effect work in the other direction? If time flies, does it make you perceive an activity as more fun?

A series of experiments published in early 2010 by A. Sackett and colleagues demonstrates just that. In one of the experiments, the researchers put participants in a clock-less room and told them they had 10 minutes to do a word search task. However, the task was actually stopped after either 5 minutes had actually passed or 20 minutes had actually passed (pretending it had been 10). Those who only worked for 5 minutes, thinking they had been working for 10 and thus feeling that time had flown by, perceived the word search task as being more enjoyable than those for whom time seemed to crawl.

Likewise, in another experiment, the researchers either told a participant that the task would last 5 minutes or told them it would last 20 minutes, then in both cases the task was stopped after 10 minutes. So everyone worked for 10 minutes, but some people thought they’d only been working for 5 (“those 5 minutes sure seemed to drag,” they might say), whereas others thought they had been at it for 20 minutes. Sure enough, those who thought they’d been working for 20 minutes considered the task more fun than those who had worked the same amount of time (10 minutes) but thought it was only 5 minutes. It appears that thinking time had flown by made the activity feel more enjoyable. In that sense, you’re having fun when time flies on top of time flying when you’re having fun.

The other experiments and controls that Sackett and colleagues performed are described by Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

To make a long study short, the effect seems to come at least partially from our belief that time flies when you’re having fun. Thus, when we discover to our surprise that time has flown, we assume we must have been having fun. In essence, we unconsciously commit a logical error known as affirming the consequent:

1. If HF, then TF (if you’re having fun, then time flies)
2. TF (time flew)
3. Therefore, HF (therefore I was having fun)

Logically, the conclusion does not always follow from those first two premises even though they are true. After all, time might fly for a multitude of reasons aside from having fun, and thus if we perceive that time flies by, we don’t automatically know for which reason it seemed to fly by.

As with many logical errors, making people aware of the error may eventually mitigate it. And sure enough, Sackett points out that those who are aware of the reasons why time appears to fly by are less likely to experience this illusion, and in turn may not find those quick-feeling activities as pleasant as someone ignorant of the effect.

The funeral was hard, just as it had been for Grandma Deanie (a quick descent following stroke) and just as it would be later for Grandma Etta (Alzheimer’s again). I had to face the reality that I would never see these people again, that all I had left were the memories.

My mom, Bill’s daughter, is an ardent Christian and strongly convinced she will see her dad again in Heaven. Being convinced of that fact doesn’t make everything better for her – she took it all so hard – but it means that she can wait for a time when she’ll be with him again, for eternity, along with all the other relatives who’ve died or will die. I can tell it’s a comforting thought to her, as it is to most everyone who believes in a Heaven.

In the famous song ‘Imagine’, John Lennon asked us to imagine there’s no Heaven – it’s easy if you try, he said. What’s long been more difficulty for me is imagining that there is a Heaven.

How would it work, I wonder? Which Grandpa Bill is in Heaven? The most recent version, with dementia and sadness and confusion? Surely not, if Heaven is the wonderful place it’s supposed to be. So perhaps an earlier instantiation of him? But if a younger Bill is in Heaven, then we’re deprived of the memories and personal development (for better or worse) that happened in all those intervening years. We’re faced with the opposite problem: again it doesn’t feel like the Grandpa Bill I remember from childhood, if he’s just a young man who hasn’t had a fraction of the life experience that older fellow had.

So maybe the Grandpa Bill in Heaven is the one that fits my memory? This doesn’t make a lot of sense, not only because my memories extend through time (and thus different versions of him) and are faulty (as all memories are), but because there are countless other people who remember him in many different ways from many different times. If we’re all to meet up in the same Heaven, then we need to know which Bill will be instantiated there, waiting for all his past relatives and acquaintances.

Frankly, no solution makes sense to me. I can’t imagine a Heaven that makes sense, and that’s because in a broader way, I can’t imagine a fundamentally unitary concept of identity that applies to people. We aren’t a static, well-defined thing that never changes. We are dynamic: we grow, we adapt, we make mistakes and we learn from them. Day after day we are reshaped, by our world, our experiences, our interpretation of those experience, and sometimes by sheer will to change and better ourselves.

There is no Absolute and Eternal “Me”. The kid who went by my name many years ago is fundamentally not the same person as the self that wears that name now; and surely by middle-age, the person going by my name will not entirely, not completely and 100% be identical to me-now.

This is a major issue in the philosophy of identity, called “The Ship of Theseus Problem”. The ancient Athenians tried for many, many years to preserve the famous ship in which Theseus returned from Crete as a sort of historical treasure. Of course, some planks of the ship decayed with time, so the caretakers would carefully replace them with new planks as it became necessary, but certainly over all those years the same ship sat in the waters – replacing one plank did not make it no longer the ship of Theseus.

Of course, eventually every plank of the entire ship had been replaced, and in fact we can imagine that not a single molecule of the original ship was still there. Would we still consider the ship floating in the harbor all those years later to be the same ship, the ship of Theseus? Some people contend ‘yes’, that the specific materials don’t matter, so much as the structure and continuity with the original.

But then, asked Thomas Hobbes much later, what if we’d kept all the old planks that had been replaced and used them to make a second ship? It is now a ship of the same design, made of the exact same parts, all of those parts continuous with the original. Which ship is the ship of Theseus? There’s no simple answer.

The same problem applies to us, not just in terms of personality, but even in terms of the physical makeup of our body. As Richard Feynman said, our brains are last week’s potatoes, made up of the dust of stars long before us, and it appears that something like 98% of our bodies’ atoms are completely replaced each year, on top of the constant structural reorganization. Whatever I am, “I” am a moving target.

I’ve thought about this issue for a long time and I’m not sure there’s a good answer. Maybe I’m just not thinking of it right. Maybe a person, an identity, is not something that can be pinpointed down at a particular moment in time. Maybe a person is more like a 4-dimensional object, a long, extended hyper-body with a child-size form at one end, growing as you follow it to an adult-size form in its middle, and finally an elderly form at its other tail, each ‘slice’ a full 3D person at a particular moment in time.

This may at first seem like a solution to the problem of Heaven. Maybe there’s not a young or an old or a Parkinson’s-ridden Grandpa Bill “up there”, but a 4D hyper-object that encompasses all that is and was Grandpa Bill. It makes for a nice story in the abstract, but it isn’t very comforting to think about in the concrete. Such a Heaven would not be Grandpa and me sitting in the living room watching Yankees games together; and maybe that’s okay.

But then I wonder, if Heaven holds these 4D hyper-objects of people from their entire lives, then do they interact when they get to Heaven? Do they change and adapt and grow? Can they make mistakes? (Surely a creature that makes no mistakes is not identical to the creature that is “me”!) If so, what kind of perfect world is Heaven?

And that’s where the idea really breaks down, in my mind. It just doesn’t make sense. As Greg Graffin put it:

“What pretension, everlasting peace / Everything must cease”
–Bad Religion, ‘Cease’

Part of what makes life interesting and worth living is that it is not static, but ever-changing. And at a fundamental level, change is mutually exclusive with perfection or permanence. If Heaven is, as various religions tell us, perfect and eternal, then it isn’t a place where dynamic things can exist. It isn’t a place where I or you could exist, without it becoming just another place, just another Earth.

The same problem applies to reincarnation. What comes back? Me-as-a-child instantiated in another body? Me-as-an-adult instantiated in another body? Or, if memory and personality are wiped, then how is it me being reincarnated at all, rather than just a completely different and unrelated person coming into being?

We either come to an end because we evolve into something different and the old form ceases to exist, or we come to an end because we become frozen in a static void of Heavenly permanence that is the very opposite of being. In that sense, the traditional conception of Heaven just seems impossible. Maybe we just need to learn to live with the idea of impermanence, and enjoy the moment we’re in, the slice of a hyper-life that we currently occupy and the only perspective from which we see able to experience.

It’s easy to think of them as ‘not you’, as little Others along for the ride on your body. They are parasites and symbiotes that feed off of us, help us digest food, might even protect us from infections – but they’re not part of me, right?

Enter Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoan parasite that infects all sorts of mammals but really loves getting into cats (the only place it can reproduce). In fact, its talent is finding its way from other mammals into cats. How does it do this?

By altering the behavior of intermediate non-cat hosts. If a mouse is infected, it starts hanging out in open areas. An infected rat actually seeks out cat urine, rather than running from it. Then, presumably, the mice and rats get eaten by hungry cats. In other words, T. gondii changes the behavior of its hosts in order to maximize the chance of finding its way inside a cat.

Of course, T. gondii doesn’t just find itself inside rats and mice on its way to cats. Often it gets into humans, through exposure to pet cats or from eating uncooked meat (a report in the UK discovered that up to 38% of stored meat was infected). Some infected people develop flu-like symptoms, but most people develop no symptoms and the infection remains latent and apparently inactive. For a long time, it was assumed that latent infection in humans had no real effect on the host.

However, more recent research suggests that T. gondii may affect human behavior and personality traits. As cited in this paper by Kevin Lafferty, infected women tend to be more intelligent, warm, outgoing, rule-conscious, dutiful and conforming. Infected men tend to be less intelligent, less rule-conscious and conforming, and less novelty-seeking. Both sexes tend to be more guilt-prone, self-doubting and insecure if infected.

Lafferty also shows a link between the rate of T. gondii infection in particular countries and the cultural prevalence of some personality traits in those countries. Specifically, countries with the highest rates of infection also show the highest rates of neuroticism in the population. In Western nations, masculine sex roles and uncertainty avoidance were higher in countries with higher rates of infection, which may have something to do with T. gondii’s effect on testosterone. Infected men are rated by women as more dominant and masculine than non-infected men.

(Note that T. gondii also appears to affect dopamine production and is related to schizophrenia incidence).

Of course, discovering that certain personality traits are more or less common in infected people (or countries) doesn’t prove that the infection causes personality change. It might be that people who had those personalities already are more likely to get infected (is a warm, conscientious woman more likely to own a cat?). Or perhaps something else behind the scenes causes higher infection rates and affects personality – for example, differences in climate might affect both personality and infection rate in the same direction and be the real cause of personality change.

However, a previous study by Flegr and Hrdy that found personality differences between infected and non-infected also presented some evidence that T. gondii was causing personality changes rather than personality causing T. gondii infections. Specifically, the longer someone had been infected, the bigger the personality difference. This doesn’t prove that the parasite is altering personality – something that will be hard to test since we can’t ethically infect people and then watch for changes – but it makes the idea pretty plausible, especially since T. gondii definitely causes the behavioral changes in rodents.

Obviously T. gondii infection doesn’t account for your entire personality; the effect might be subtle. However, personality isn’t the only thing affected. As pointed out here, infected people show worse reaction times (i.e. respond slower). In fact, people with T. gondii are 2.65 times more likely than others to be involved in a traffic accident!

If this were a rare infection, it might not be a big deal, but infection is actually pretty common. In some countries (e.g. France, Germany and the Netherlands), roughly 4 out of 5 people are infected. In the U.S., about 11% of the population is infected. Worldwide estimates of infection range from 30% to 65%.

Which means there is a decent chance you are infected with T. gondii, and it may have helped shape your personality, who you are. It’s always disorienting to contemplate, but it is hard to deny fact that our personality – how we think and act and respond to situations – is to at least to some extent externally determined, by genes inherited from our parents, by past experiences growing up, and even by latent parasitic infections.

”There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” –Camus

Let’s start by acknowledging that it is a serious question, a serious problem. The answer is not simple. We cannot get away from this issue by blanket affirmations against suicide because it is cowardly or because it is hurtful to others. These things may be true, but they do not answer the question.

Those with the benefit of an airtight faith in some religion or creed that prohibits suicide may seem to escape the problem; but only because they never really address it. To eschew consideration of suicide because it is against the laws of a god or against the imperatives of a philosophical system is to have already given up the reigns of your own life to an outside authority. Rather than face the question yourself, it is side-stepped; in removing that one threat to your life, you have given up claim to that very life.

No, we must deal with the question head-on, on its own terms, for and by ourselves.

“Should I go on playing bridge and dining, going in the same old monotonous circle? It’s easy that way, but it’s a sort of suicide, too.” –Antoinette Perry

We must recognize that there are multiple forms of suicide. You can release your claim to life by means of a rope, a gun, a tall building, or a bottle of pills. But you can also do it by more mundane means: by letting your life get stuck in a loop of repeated, shallow days, like a skipping record stuck on a boring track. In letting your future days become mere faded copies of your past days, you may not physiologically die, but you certainly cease to live. Some methods of suicide are just slower and less deliberate than others, but in that way perhaps they smack even more of cowardice.

We must take care not to assume that by shunning suicide we have thus chosen life. To truly choose life, having faced the ultimate question, is an action, whereas to merely not die is an inaction.

So we see that the question is not whether or not to cease eating and breathing. The question is whether or not to do something beyond mere eating and breathing. That is the choice we face; that is the problem of suicide, the fundamental question of philosophy: can my life be something more than that of a bacteria or tree or hollow zombie of a man? If the answer to that question is negative, then suicide is nothing more than the redistribution of molecules, or as Georg Lichtenberg put it:

“Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.”

There are plenty of other shapes my molecules could take, and there are plenty of other people both now and to come. If my life is no different from the rest of them, why care about my life, why value it? Life in general, life as a phenomenon, will go on without me; and if I am gone, there will be others to take my place. If we have no active reason to want to be around, then we may as well give back our body’s dough to nature.

So what is the answer to the question of suicide? It’s not a yes or a no, but a why. And it won’t be the same for every person; indeed it couldn’t be, for when we truly face the question ourselves, we face our own personal question. But maybe the act, the wholehearted, soul-shivering act of facing the question, naked in front of it, can paradoxically bring meaning into a life, whatever that meaning may be. For some, serious contemplations of suicide may be a much-needed jolt out of the shallow complacency of a redundant life.

“Anyone desperate enough for suicide should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do whatever they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.” –Richard Bach

“Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best counter argument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.”
–Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

We live in a world of many choices: the foods we eat, the careers we choose, the relationships we foster, every consumer good we buy. We tend to have more than a binary yes/no choice, but rather many options, often with complicated trade-offs involving many dimensions. I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but which peanut butter should I get: Crunchy or creamy? Reduced fat, normal fat or normal fat with extra omega-3′s? All-natural or not? Store brand or name brand? Which jelly: strawberry, grape, apricot-pineapple, or countless other fruit choices? Jam, jelly or preserves? Low sugar, low sugar with other additives, or normal? Relative balance of cheap, healthy and tasty?

Even simple decisions like this can present a crippling array of possibilities, over which we may feel some pressure to maximize and find the “right one”. But there’s a fine line between giving a little thought to decisions here and there, and agonizing over labels and minor cost differences at every choice.

Unfortunately, it’s not just minor matters that present us with myriad options. Buying a car: New or used? Lease or purchase? Cash or finance? Make, model, color, options, all of which we can easily find extensive information about. Presumably the more information we have — the better informed our decision is — the better our choice will be. This is what I might call the naive rationalist assumption.

Naive because informing ourselves and deliberating over options can take significant amounts of time and include plenty of stress, and those costs may not be worth it for minor decisions. Surely it is worth it for big decisions like a car purchase though, right?

Well, sure, on some level. But consider some other choices many people have today that they didn’t have to worry about as much. When you visit a doctor these days, you are rarely told what to do, but rather presented with information and options. The doctor gives her informed opinion, tells you the trade-offs, and maybe even gives you a rough estimate of the chances of various complications with each choice: but in the end, the choice is yours. Same often goes for those who invest their money in a retirement plan: we’re presented with many different options, lots of information and contradictory opinions, but in the end we’re expected to figure out what we want. Today we have more decisions — both big and small — than perhaps any time in history, and even just the big ones are often complicated enough that an expert can’t give a straightforward answer of what is best.

We are overwhelmed by options, in what psychologist Barry Schwartz calls the “paradox of choice”. Western dogma says that maximizing freedom and choice maximizes welfare, but he disagrees. Unprecedented control over our lives comes with an unprecedented responsibility; it places the burden of blame directly on us.

Schwartz suggests that for achieving happiness, it is better to be a “satisficer” (accept what is good-enough) than a “maximizer” (always aiming for the best possible decision). Maximizers are hit with an increased responsibility which brings with it increased stress and other accompanying problems.

For one thing, it can lead to indecision: Mark Lepper at Stanford did a study presenting people with a choice between 6 jams or a choice between 24 jams, and people presented with just 6 choices were more likely to make a purchase. The others may have been overwhelmed by all the options to the point that they avoided the decision altogether. Of course, with some choices we can’t avoid a decision, or at best we can put it off a while (the danger of this being that nothing ever happens, a life lived on auto-pilot).

Another problem, perhaps deeper than indecision, that comes with maximizing is regret. As humans, we can engage in “counter-factual thinking” (imagining alternate possibilities for what happened) as well as construct visions of multiple possible futures. We may look back on our choices and see what could have been, and unfortunately, we may have a tendency to emphasize the good sides of alternate-histories and gloss over the potential downsides.

As psychologist Dan Gilbert has shown, people tend to be really crappy predictors of how much and especially how long emotional events will affect us (for example, whether you become paraplegic or win a lottery, your overall happiness tends to go back toward a baseline level in a matter of months, much faster than you would likely predict). We may look at counter-factuals to our choices and overestimate how good things could have been. Likewise, we may look at multiple possible futures that branch off from a choice and be horrible at predicting how happy certain outcomes or paths will make us in the long run compared to others.

Perhaps regret does serve a useful function, say as a mechanism to improve bad situations — we are pushed to remove the cause of regret in order to remove its aversive effects on our emotional and mental life. Interestingly, though, control seems to be an important factor in the equation of regret. The less ability you have to change things, the less regret you may feel. This might be why old people tend to actually score higher in self-reports of happiness. (Though recent research suggests that happiness and life satisfaction seem to follow a general U-shaped curve, high in youth and old age, and dipping down in middle age). Once the ability to change your mind is gone, regret no longer serves a useful function, and it may in fact be diminished.

Getting back to the main topic, this suggests a tantalizing clue at one way to deal with the paradox of choice. Satisficing, as Schwartz suggests, is important, and we already do it to some extent (else we could spend a life trying to choose the best car for our situation). More than that, though, there may be significant benefits to just forcing yourself to make a choice and committing to it wholeheartedly. If you can leave yourself no options for going back, all the better; once the element of control is removed, you might find that regret is eased, and the stress of the choice no longer confronts you.

More likely, though, every path you choose to go down won’t be irrevocable, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities for change. This can be a blessing — remember, you’re not stuck with the choice, so why fret so much? — but as we’ve seen it can also be a curse. Thus, training yourself to mentally stick to a decision, big or small, once it is made may be a distinct advantage when it comes to satisfaction with your decision. You may make the “wrong” choice — one a maximizer would call irrational — but likely your life will go on. And remember that the maximizer is just as bad at predicting long-term emotional outcomes as you are, so even major negative consequences may not sting as bad or as long as we think. More importantly, they may sting less than the paralysis of indecision, the pain of agonizing over options, and the stress of constantly worrying about making the ideal choice.

It may seem irrational to just pick something and dive in, rather than worrying over finding the best option, but if it actually leads to a happier life in the long run, isn’t that the rational choice? Thus, as Nietzsche says, an occasional will to stupidity might be called for, lest we stupidly sit on our choices so long that we miss out on every opportunity.

“Maybe all one can do,” wrote playwright Arthur Miller, “is hope to end up with the right regrets.”

Thinking in terms of more than the familiar three spatial dimensions can be challenging. In the late 1800′s, Edwin Abbott used his novel Flatland to show us how a 2-dimensional being could eventually come to recognize its world as being contained within a higher-up 3D world, and to suggest we three-dimensionites might have similar trouble recognizing higher dimensions that contain our own.

Of course, mathematicians have long dealt with non-Euclidean geometries, including those of higher dimension, and cosmologists today continue to debate the possibility of even more dimensions actually existing. For example, some string theorists are now investigating M-theory, which posits 11 dimensions of space-time, and may involve multidimensional objects called ‘branes’. In this theory, our universe would be considered a 4-brane (with its three spatial dimensions and one time dimension), but there could be other branes of different dimension.

Building off of this (still-nascent and controversial) field, John Smythies over at The Psychological Channel presents what a “new paradigm” of consciousness he calls extended materialism.

Basically, it seems like our mental workings (ideas, thoughts, perceptions) have spatial extension, yet it is unclear how they could simply be identical with things in the normal 4D physical world: when I perceive redness, the neurons in my brain need not actually be red. Something about the phenomenological experience differs from the brute physical events in the brain (even if the neural activity is correlated with the subjective, conscious mental events), so eliminative materialism doesn’t seem to work.

In its place, Smythies proposes extended materialism. He explains it in pretty fuzzy terms in the article, but it goes something like this: the physical world brane exists, and then another spatially-extended brane exists which is populated with conscious experiences, perceptions, ideas, and so on — basically, mind. So mind exists in a separate plane — I’m sorry, brane — than physical matter like our brains and bodies. But, crucially, these two branes — physical and mental — interact in some (unspecified, but causal) way. There is an isomorphism or congruence such that through this intersection between branes, the physical influences the mental, and vice versa.

It sounds like an okay conceptual speculation, though I’m not sure it gets us anything very new. The terminology is updated, but is it that different from traditional dualism that puts the mind in some other ‘realm’ (though traditionally that realm has been seen as without spatial extension), and suggests an interaction between the physical and mental realms (be it Descartes’ pineal gland or something else)?

Smythies’ account was initially engaging, though I admit I’m unqualified to judge his explanation or application of brane theory (which itself is far from yet being accepted as applying to our reality). For most of the article, I was willing to just go with the speculation and let the details remain vague, but toward the end Smythies panders to the absurd:

“A third advantage of the new paradigm. emphasized by Carr (2008) is that it can account quite simply for the facts of parapsychology. All we have to suppose is that the psi forces have their normal focus on the brain but also have a ‘penumbra’ that can extract information from other objects and other minds. This can account for the transfer of information that take place during telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis (see Carr 2008) for details).
[...]
“A fourth advantage is that it enables us to look at the possible nature of after-death experiences in a rational manner. [...] In this view the physical world becomes a communication device between individual consciousness modules located in different branes. Therefore, on the death of the physical body, most of the consciousness module would become redundant, as there would now be no brain for it to interact with. However, the Self could remain, and perhaps the sensations, that used to be organized by the brain via the visual and other sensory fields, could rearrange themselves, or be reorganized by something else, into new forms of experience.”

Seriously? Sure, it *could* potentially account for phenomena like “psi forces” and consciousness after death (though nothing in brane theory predicts these, specifically, nor explains how this would work), but that assumes these things even exist in the first place!

I’m sure lots of interesting speculation can come out of brane theory (though I’m not sure Smythies has any better grasp of it than I, in my mathematical ignorance, do). But it makes no sense to argue for brane-based dualism on the basis of its alleged ‘advantages’ over the old paradigm, when those advantages are things like explaining hypothetical phenomena that don’t even directly follow out of the new paradigm unless they’re first assumed.

Sorry Smythies, but you lost me as ‘psi forces’.

Some limited personal DNA profiles are now available for under $400 and people are worried that as this information becomes commonplace, it may be used against them. That is, we may find job discrimination based on genetic makeup: “Well, this candidate appears a good fit, but her profile shows a predisposition toward anger problems and a high chance of developing health problems that impair her ability to work or stay with the company.” Likewise, insurance companies may refuse to insure those with risky genes, or to make their coverage exorbitant. If someone has an allele that makes them 87% likely to develop M.S., an insurance company may deem them too risky to insure.

Of course, the reality of genetics is not as simple as identifying which alleles a person has and then knowing how they will turn out. Sure, some things are determined strictly by which version you have of a particular gene: if you have a particular defective gene, you are guaranteed to develop Huntington’s disease eventually.

But other genes — almost certainly the majority of them — are more complicated than that. We don’t know exactly how they interact with other genes, or how they interact with the environment (epigenetics), and at best we can attach probability estimates to the outcome of having a particular allele. If 85% of the people with allele X for a given gene end up developing cancer, and 15% with that allele don’t, then we might conclude that the gene is involved in that cancer.

But it is hard to apply those numbers to an individual. If 45% of the people with allele Y have green eyes, and I have that allele, does that mean I’m 45% likely to have green eyes? I can look in a mirror and know that I do or do not have green eyes. At best, we could say that before being born, not having any other information, we should have about 45% confidence that I’d end up with green eyes. But that’s because we lack information about how that gene interacts with other genes and with the environment. As information increases, predictability goes up. Or as Pinker puts it:

[T]here is nothing like perusing your genetic data to drive home its limitations as a source of insight into yourself. What should I make of the nonsensical news that I am “probably light-skinned” but have a “twofold risk of baldness”? These diagnoses, of course, are simply peeled off the data in a study: 40 percent of men with the C version of the rs2180439 SNP are bald, compared with 80 percent of men with the T version, and I have the T. But something strange happens when you take a number representing the proportion of people in a sample and apply it to a single individual. The first use of the number is perfectly respectable as an input into a policy that will optimize the costs and benefits of treating a large similar group in a particular way. But the second use of the number is just plain weird. Anyone who knows me can confirm that I’m not 80 percent bald, or even 80 percent likely to be bald; I’m 100 percent likely not to be bald. The most charitable interpretation of the number when applied to me is, “If you knew nothing else about me, your subjective confidence that I am bald, on a scale of 0 to 10, should be 8.” But that is a statement about your mental state, not my physical one. If you learned more clues about me (like seeing photographs of my father and grandfathers), that number would change, while not a hair on my head would be different. Some mathematicians say that “the probability of a single event” is a meaningless concept.

Knowing that I have a gene that predisposes me to lung cancer (people with that gene are three times as likely to end up with lung cancer than those without) may seem dire, until you investigate my current health and behavior (regular exercise, healthy diet, never smoked and don’t work in hazardous conditions). Then, the genetic information seems a lot less important and useful as a predictor. The more information we have beyond population-level gene data, the less accurate those summary percentages become. Especially since present genetic data may involve relatively small effects on the chances of particular outcomes:

The two biggest pieces of news I got about my disease risks were a 12.6 percent chance of getting prostate cancer before I turn 80 compared with the average risk for white men of 17.8 percent, and a 26.8 percent chance of getting Type 2 diabetes compared with the average risk of 21.9 percent. Most of the other outcomes involved even smaller departures from the norm. For a blessedly average person like me, it is completely unclear what to do with these odds. A one-in-four chance of developing diabetes should make any prudent person watch his weight and other risk factors. But then so should a one-in-five chance.

As long we are stuck with just population-level data about trends in the population that have that allele, we can’t easily apply it to predict an individual outcome with any certainty. Because of the myriad influences that go into your personal equation, it is often nearly impossible to know how someone will turn out.

You can attribute the ability to defy our genotypes to free will, whatever that means, but you can also attribute it to the fact that in a hundred-trillion-synapse human brain, any single influence can be outweighed by the product of all of the others.

This may be especially true when it comes to complicated traits like personality and intelligence, making it all the more easy to misread the results of our DNA scans:

For all the narcissistic pleasure that comes from poring over clues to my inner makeup, I soon realized that I was using my knowledge of myself to make sense of the genetic readout, not the other way around. My novelty-seeking gene, for example, has been associated with a cluster of traits that includes impulsivity. But I don’t think I’m particularly impulsive, so I interpret the gene as the cause of my openness to experience.

We are susceptible to cognitive errors like confirmation bias that make us likely to interpret what we see in order to fit our preconceived notions. In this case, if we are told our genes predispose us to be or act a certain way, we may in turn take extra notice of the cases where this applies and take less notice of the times where it doesn’t. Or it may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies: if I’m told that I am predisposed to depression, will I be less likely to bother attempting to cope with depression because it’s just in the cards for me?

So we see the dangers in overinterpreting population-level results to individuals, given how complicated the influences on an individual may be. Thus in the article Pinker discounts the worries about abuse of all the new data that will come out of widely available personal genomics:

Many of the dystopian fears raised by personal genomics are simply out of touch with the complex and probabilistic nature of genes. Forget about the hyperparents who want to implant math genes in their unborn children, the “Gattaca” corporations that scan people’s DNA to assign them to castes, the employers or suitors who hack into your genome to find out what kind of worker or spouse you’d make. Let them try; they’d be wasting their time.

But he seems to be ignoring exactly the point he took so much pain to clarify. Yes, we may not be able to use our genes to easily predict or interpret our individual character traits, but the data *do* tell us something about aggregate chances in the population. Which means it is perfectly useful information when, say, companies have access to many different individuals.

“Sure,” a hiring manager might muse, “you could be in the 15% of people with allele X that don’t develop problems, but it is simply cost-effective for us to just not risk it and instead choose people with allele Y.” In other words, the data that summarizes population-level trends is perfectly applicable to those who can apply it to a large group, and not worry about the chaos that determines a single individual’s outcome. Insurance companies will be the first in line to use such information against us, given the chance, because it makes perfect sense.

That is not to rage against the inevitable technological developments of the future: personal genomics is here to stay. But we should remain on guard against the potential downsides of having this information widely available, and especially against inappropriate or unfair applications of that information to discriminate.

The differences in our genes may be a source of inherent unfairness in the first place (being beautiful or tall may make you more popular, more likely to get hired, better paid, etc.), but further amplifying that effect by rewarding those blessed with lucky genes and punishing those not so blessed is contrary to the egalitarian spirit of equal opportunity. Perhaps the more this happens, the more pressure there will be toward increasing use of gene therapy and modern eugenics (as I wrote about here).

The future will no doubt look vastly different.

Meanwhile, here in the present, we will just have to deal with the inequalities. And likewise, we may soon face our own existential crises in investigating our genomes, if personal genomics enters the family doctor’s office on the cheap.

As Pinker mentions, variants of the ApoE gene imply a many-fold increase in the risk of developing Alzheimers (again, this is summarizing population data — it may be that looking at other genes tells you whether you’ll be one of the people with that ApoE variant that develops Alzheimers or one of those that does not).

Pinker decided not to find out which version of that gene he had, which brings up an interesting question: would you want to know? People are no doubt bad predictors of how they would handle such news (Pinker mentions in passing some preliminary evidence that people handle the news okay), but it’s interesting to consider how you personally would handle that choice.

More banally, in what ways would knowing you were predisposed to certain behavioral traits (risk-taking, or neurosis, or neophobia, or depression) influence how you perceive yourself and interprete your own behavior? Are people naturally genetic fatalists, even if the information they are given is merely probabilistic? It would be interesting to systematically study how people handle such information (personality, as opposed to just medical risks), if such work hasn’t already been done.

Abbie Hoffman was a smart kid born in 1936 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family that was assimilating into a somewhat anti-semitic America right before World War II broke out. Kicked out of high-school, he was a trouble-maker and a hustler early on. His parents managed to get him into a fancy academy to finish high school, which brought him to college at Brandeis.

There he ran into some big name teachers, like Abraham Maslow for psychology, Herbert Marcuse for political philosophy, Leonard Bernstein for music, Eleanor Roosevelt for foreign affairs. He ended up getting his masters in psychology, coming out of Berkeley right at the birth of the 60′s. He saw Castro speak. The CIA had just been born and was already pulling dirty tricks abroad. Students were demonstrating. Allen Ginsberg was composing poems right across the bay (they later would become friends).

In 1960, a couple events shaped Abbie from a college student into an activist. First, Abbie attended a silent vigel for a man who was to be put to death based on circumstantial evidence after a 12-year legal battle.

The only person who could spare his life–Edmund “Pat” Brown–sat in the governor’s mansion and issues a statement: “Although I personally am opposed to capital punishment, the laws of the state of California must be obeyed. My hands are tied.” [...] The warden came out and served coffee and doughnuts. He made a short speech through a megaphone explaining that he, too, was opposed to capital punishment [...] how everyone had done all they could to save his life. [...] Around me people were in tears. Someone moaned, ‘No! No!’ as if he had been wounded. No one shouted. No one threw a rock. Dazed, we piled into cars and headed back to Berkeley in silence. “How does that work?” someone asked of no one in particular. “In a democracy, I mean, no one wants to see him die and the state kills him?” There was silence.

Soon after, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) came to town to investigate subversive activity in Berkeley. Students protested, and Abbie was among them when riot police came in with clubs and “knee-bender” hooks for breaking bones. Students were clubbed, thrown, and kicked. A pregnant woman was tossed down a flight of stairs. Abbie saw his first real police abuse.

Later that year, at the end of a film shown by the HUAC which claimed student protestors were communist agitators, Abbie stood up and questioned the propoganda. The performance led him to be recruited by the ACLU to tour with the film as the ACLU’s representative. At each showing of the film, he stood up during the Q-and-A period and fought to undercut the red-scare message in towns across the state. Thus began his community organizing efforts, as he fought to rouse opposition to the HUAC’s persecution and scare-mongering (and risked the threats of the local good ol’ boys, American Legion and others).

For a while after that, Abbie worked in the civil rights movement with the NAACP, facing the dangers of a community organizer in a small town, like threatening phone calls and dead animals on the doorstep. The group picketed stores with bigoted policies, set up landlords for discrimination suits, published a newspaper, set up daycare centers and held voter registration drives in the black community. Soon after, he traveled through the South working on the civil rights movement, and became a leader of The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC):

The stories I learned in the South now seem like ancient history [...] but this was the mid-1960s and they were real. As real as NO COLORED SERVED HERE signs and two drinking fountains, one a foot lower than the other. Wall, Mississippi had a barrel where a Negro was supposed to stick his head when he felt like laughing. Even in the state capital a black was to step aside on the sidewalk when a white wished to pass.

Local civil rights organizers were killed. The group held a march in Jackson where three thousand people were arrested. The Ku Klux Klan tracked and hunted organizers after getting fed their license-plates from police. Abbie took part in a few 100 mile-per-hour chases with gun-toting Klansters behind him. Klan members, local police, and FBI agents all gave their fair share of beatings to the SNCC when the group picketed racist businesses. Arrests were commonplace for Abbie during this period.

Not long after, Abbie ended up in New York’s Lower East Side, where he established Liberty House, a store sold goods from Mississippi co-ops to support the civil rights movement in the South.

In 1967, Abbie moved on from the civil rights movement to protesting the Vietnam War, organizing mass demonstrations, marches, rallies, guerrilla theater, and anything else to stop the war. He co-founded the Yippies (the Youth International Party), something like politically-active hippies, representing youth rebellion and radical 60s activism.

The Yippies got 50,000 people to march on the Pentagon in a mass demonstration against the war. They used theatrics to convince young people to become more active in politics — the crowd attempted to levitate the Pentagon with psychic energy. Another time, Abbie and some other Yippies snuck into the New York Stock Exchange and threw piles of dollars onto the floor from above, briefly interrupting the ticker as stock brokers scrambled frantically on the floor to grab up each dollar. The Yippies’ activities became media events, but Abbie is clear to point out:

I never performed for the media. I tried to reach people. It was not acting. It was not some media muppet show. That is a cynical interpretation of history. [...] Guerrilla theater is probably the oldest form of political commentary. The ideas just keep getting recycled. Showering money on Wall Street brokers was the TV-age version of driving the money changers from the temple.

They dropped 10,000 flowers on New York from a plane. Held huge be-ins in the park. Lit up the sky with gigantic explosions of magnesium on the rooftops around St. Mark’s Place. Organized a flower brigade to walk in the right-wing Support Our Troops parade. Exploded soot bombs in the Con Edison utility company. Plastered “WAR” below “STOP” on stop-signs across New York. Snuck into subways at midnight to paint huge murals. Held 5,000-strong celebrations declaring the Vietnam War over (“If you don’t like the news, we reasoned, make up your own”).

On Valentine’s Day, Abbie mailed a care package out to 3,000 randomly selected people, in each one a joint and a card saying: “Happy Valentine’s Day. This cigarette contains no harmful cancer-causing ingredients. It is made from 100 percent pure marijuana.” (Jimi Hendrix funded the marijuana mailing.)

But theatrics aside, Abbie was a serious full-time organizer bringing together huge protests against the war. And those protests in turn brought together bands of police, riot cops and angry pro-war conservatives, who were not afraid to dish out harassment, beatings and even the occasional death to the anti-war crowd.

I respected [other organizers'] pacifist beliefs, but something in their approach jarred my American heartland upbringing. I practiced nonviolence as a tactic, but was far from a follower of Gandhi. Confrontation always demanded surprise and uncertainty. By saying “If you punch me in the face, I’ll turn the other cheek,” you could often get hurt more than if you kept a threat of returning the blows. While Gandhi was fasting in jail, guerrillas blew up trains throughout India. When Martin Luther King, Jr. prayed, blacks rioted, and armed groups formed in the ghettos. Violence and the threat of violence have a good track record when it comes to changing the minds of people in power.

While the Yippies came about as a political offshoot of the hippies, Abbie says “Personally, I always held my flower in a clenched fist. [...] Troop levels in Vietnam had risen to 500,000 men. The apocalypse was upon us. We activists had to harness our manic energies. Sure, I believe in the power of love, but the time had come to make outrage contagious on a grand scale.” While the hippies were content to make love and smoke dope (which Abbie did plenty of!), Abbie had the itch to act, to get into the street and make things happen.

Abbie and other activists brought together a massive anti-Vietnam War protest in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The protest turned ugly, largely thanks to police harassment and brutality instigated at the behest of Mayor Daley (the ensuing violence was later declared a “police riot”). Regardless, Abbie and seven others were arrested and tried for conspiracy to incite a riot. One of the eight, Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, was given a separate trial, and the remaining organizers became known as the Chicago Seven.

Abbie and the other defendants ridiculed the judge, refused to dress up (Abbie and Jerry Rubin came in one day dressed in judicial robes), and generally fought the process tooth and nail. Five of them, including Abbie, were found guilty of crossing state lines with the intent to incite a riot, and numerous contempt charges. The appeals court later overturned the riot charges.

Abbie continued agitating against the war, and earned himself countless arrests, and plenty more beatings by police and vigilante right-wingers. He was pulled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee, and showed up in a star-spangled red, white and blue shirt, which led to him being the first person arrested under a new federal flag-defacing statute. The conviction was later overturned.

In 1973, Abbie was arrested on charges of intent to distribute cocaine; he claims undercover police had entrapped him and planted evidence. Regardless, after some more time spent in jail, he skipped bail and went into hiding, living underground for much of the next decade, during which time he wrote his autobiography.

Even while underground, he couldn’t stop community organizing. He ended up coordinating an environmental campaign to save the Saint Lawrence River under one of his pseudonyms, Barry Freed. Eventually, in 1980, he turned himself in and served a year in jail; upon getting out, he remained an activist.

In 1986, he was arrested along with Jimmy Carter’s daughter and thirteen others at the University of Massachusetts protesting CIA recruitment on campus. In their defense, the defendants called witnesses to describe the CIA’s role in illegal, violent activities over the previous decades. They sought to put the government itself on trial. Acting as his own lawyer, he quoted Thomas Paine on civil disobedience:

Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. Man has no property in man, neither has any generation a property in the generations which are to follow. [...] Paine was talking about this spring day in this courtroom. A verdict of not guilty will say, ‘When our country is right, keep it right; but when it is wrong, right those wrongs.’

The defendants were found not guilty, in essence finding the CIA guilty. Around this time, Abbie was in the media spotlight giving lectures about CIA covert actions. He made a cameo in Oliver Stone’s ‘Born on the Fourth of July’, an anti-Vietnam War movie. He wrote (he published a number of books during his life).

And in 1989, he died on an overdose of phenobarbital, officially ruled a suicide, though some close to him believed it accidental.

Since then, his life has been portrayed on film by Vincent D’Onofrio in ‘Steal This Movie’. He was a character in Forrest Gump. The Chicago trial has previously been the subject of an HBO movie, and is currently the subject of a new movie to be produced and directed by Steven Spielberg.

Abbie Hoffman is an inspiring guy. He represented the best of the love generation, but also fought his ass off for the ideals he believed in, and put his own freedom and life on the line against death threats, beatings, gunfire and way more arrests than most people have birthdays. Through it all, he never gave in, never abandoned his values, never bowed his head to judges and juries. And he never lost his theatric, ludic spirit.

“The inability of the Colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the revolutionary war.”
–Benjamin Franklin

The video below, by Paul Grignon, is a superb animated history of money, explaining how our current system of Debt as Money came about, and how it affects and traps us (and our government) today. It makes a strong case against the banking system, and suggests that our own ignorance of how money actually works leaves us in a hidden slavery we don’t even realize.

Some interesting points from the video:

Banks do not lend money. They create money from debt. When you pay off a loan, you are erasing money from the system.

The government makes about 5% of the money out there. The rest is invented by banks, and backed by nothing but our promises to pay on loans they give out using their invented money. Because the law lets them deal in dollars (fed notes), and people have to accept dollars offered for debts (“legal tender for all debts, public and private”, as it says on your dollar bill), we end up spending the imaginary money that the banks created.

And the whole time, they get interest on loans of this money that they never actually had in the first place.

If we had no debt, we’d have no money. This happened in the Great Depression. That’s why interest rates are so low right now — the system needs borrowing in order to have a functioning economy, because the banks need to invent that borrowed money which doesn’t exist otherwise. This is how our economy became dependent on banks, which is why we end up spending our taxes on a huge bailout to keep things stable when banks start having problems.

But since this system requires debt for there to be money, we constantly have to take out more and more debt and invent more and more money. In the long run, to keep up with this exponential growth (to keep interest — for which money doesn’t exist — from eating away at the system and collapsing stability), we require more and more resources to be harvested and consumed.

So if the current system is inherently unstable, economically and from an ecosystems perspective, what would be better?

Permanent, interest-free money, suggests Grignon. Basically, instead of banks inventing money and then collecting interest from us and the government (i.e. us again), the government would create money but not collect interest, freeing us from the problem of the runaway debt system. There would thus be no national debt either — we wouldn’t be in slavery to banks.

It’s a really interesting argument, full of historical perspective now completely lost to the average person. Seeing the quotes of past presidents decrying the evils of the banking system is kind of startling, because you realize this was a very real and recognized problem for a long time, and over time it just fades away in public consciousness behind layers of obfuscation in the ever more complicated monetary system we live under.

“All of the perplexities, confusion, and distress in America arises, not from the defects of the Constitution or Confederation, not from want of honor or virtue, so much as from downright ignorance of the nature of coin, credit, and circulation.”
–John Adams

When asked to imagine intelligence in the animal kingdom, it’s unlikely that the critters coming to mind would be octopuses, fish, birds or insects. But as a recent Scientific American article on comparative cognition points out, some branches of the tree of life that don’t normally get a lot of attention for their smarts have actually demonstrated some pretty impressive abilities.

In the sea, cephalopods (octopuses, squid, cuttlefish) are the mental badasses of the invertebrates. Octopuses, for example, are not only great problem solvers, but can learn to solve a problem simply from watching other octopuses do a task. Fish may be smarter than we give them credit for. Goldfish, for example, can orient their way through mazes (more efficiently than slime-mold, even). So can reptiles like turtles.

Calling someone a bird-brain may be an insult, but it turns out some birds are pretty smart. New Caledonian crows create and use fairly sophisticated tools to access out-of-reach foods, and other crow group members learn the tool trade from the experts. They appear to reason causally. Scrub jays appear to have something like episodic memory — those memories you have of experiencing a personal event, as opposed to simply remembering a fact. They seem to remember specific events when they put a particular food item in a certain place, and how long ago they did so. They also appear to plan for the future.

Birds aren’t the only ones unexpectedly using tools: adorable rodents called degus can learn to use tools in a way that demonstrates some understanding of how the tool works. Researchers recently demonstrated metacognition in rats — rodents that seemed to monitor their own state of knowledge and act based on what they did or didn’t know. The same lab showed episodic-like memory in rats, similar to that seen in the scrub jays described above.

Some dogs can learn new words almost as fast as human toddlers, hearing a word a couple times and associating it with a particular thing. They can even figure out the link between objects and pictures of those same objects. In fact, a 2008 study showed that a dog can use a lexigram board to make communicative requests to a human owner, much like some apes have been taught.

Elephants show mirror self-recognition, a feat previously demonstrated in primates and dolphins. They seem pretty smart overall, and seem to be taking a place along with primates and dolphins in the popular imagination as brilliant animals.

Meanwhile, at a much smaller level, intelligent swarm behavior in insects such as ants emerges despite individual ants being pretty simple; it’s hard to predict such complex and elegant colony-level problem solving from an individual ant’s behavior. Individual ants show some pretty interesting behaviors as well, though; something perhaps akin to teaching. When “tandem running”, one ant leads a follower by maintaining antennal contact, stopping when it loses contact, waiting each time the follower stops to make small loops to search for landmarks, slowing for the follower to catch up, etc. None of these behavior happens when the same ant is going to the goal alone.

These are just a handful of random examples of intelligence found in the animal kingdom outside of the usual places. These examples serve to highlight that intelligence didn’t develop in a linear progression up to monkeys then apes then humans, but rather has developed across many different taxa (groupings), with species often reflecting an intelligence uniquely adapted to their evolutionary environment. In some ways, they share a lot with us — so many previously ‘unique’ human cognitive characteristics have now been found across different orders of animal — but they also demonstrate their own brand of intelligence that reflects their ecology and evolutionary history.