Draconian policies?

WCPSS mandates a long-term suspension for a number of violations of the student code of conduct, and while many of these are offences for which most people would agree a child should be suspended, the repercussions of long term suspensions aren't well publicised. Students who are suspended for 365 days are placed in an alternative education setting; this punishment doesn't necessarily affect their academic progress. So, why then, are students who are suspended for less than 365 but more than 10 days not provided a reasonable means of getting an education? If a student is merely suspended for the rest of the school year, they're allowed to take 2 courses online. This assumes, of course, that the student has internet access, and that for some reason they only need to earn 2 of the 8 credits they can usually gain in a school year. If a student has internet access, but is suspended for the remainder of the year before the first semester is over, they can get a total of 2 credits, and if they don't have internet access they can't even earn that. WCPSS penalises students by automatically holding them back a year for certain offences, in essence. That has to be changed.

Definition of Irony

Ben Stein has been the root of games of creationist 'whack-a-mole' and here he is referencing it in his commercial for Free Score. Incidentally, this isn't the legitimate site for free credit reports, so don't buy into his BS. Anyone out there who can verify Stein's credentials as an economist, because I haven't seen him in anything other than commercials, Expelled, and The Wonder Years ?

I was starting to feel a bit stupid...

Donald Hoffman provies what he regards as a strong criticism to Dehaene on the Edge.org site here. The initial attempts at refutation revolve around the idea of quantum computation, wherein Hoffman states that quantum computation (citing a study in Nature in 2007) is responsible for photosynthesis in plants and green sulfur bacteria, and therefore could be coopted by natural selection for other purposes, such as consciousness. Well, that's a nice thought, but doesn't that bold an assertion require some sort of proof? Perhaps beyond the contributions of evolutionary game theory to thought experiments, which is what is proposed by Hoffman? If Hoffman wants to claim that the brain is a quantum computer, regardless of objections made by Dehaene about quantum computers not functioning at the temperatures needed for organisms to maintain chemical reactions (i.e. life), then Hoffman, or someone who does more than theoretical masturbation, might want to examine the human (or some other supposedly conscious creature's) brain for the wave functions and transmissions thereof that are the hallmark of quantum computing. That is, after all, what those researchers who published to Nature did.
No, the portion that made me feel stupid for a moment was Hoffman's referral back to his 2006 paper on "The Scrambling Theorem" (Science Direct Link). This beast reads like a post-modern masterpiece, and with good reason despite the claims of empiricism: He has nothing on which to actually base his argument. I don't mean he doesn't have much evidence, I mean that he literally hasn't a shred. Hoffman merely states the following: to disprove reductive functionalism in consciousness (the idea that one can reduce a cognitive process to the mathematical function, however complex, that explains it. In effect, that cognitive processes are mathematical functions carried out by neurons), one simply needs to be able to imagine that consciousness can work in another manner, thus making it logically possible (anyone see the flaw in that one?). He then goes on to say how, if he can logically and mathematically demonstrate that people can have different colour experiences from the same stimuli, yet perform the same on colour tasks, then he has effectively disproved reductive functionalism. Beautiful... and here's where I thought I was lost. Hoffman then jumps directly into a model that supposedly backs his claim, but fails to demonstrate how any of the pieces of his model are tied to reality, and that's purely because, as he admits later, they aren't empirically tied to anything at all. Translation from academia to English: Hoffman made this up, out of his own imagination, which brings us right back to the argument he claims he wasn't using. Sorry Donald, but just because I can dream up another way that might coffee might brew or my herb garden might grow doesn't mean that the manner in which we understand those processes is incorrect because of it. I can fully imagine Hoffman's paper being written by a 16 year old with a thesaurus and a horrendous grasp of elementary logic, but that doesn't make it so, althought it does, to some degree, resemble the product.
The invocation of probability at the end doesn't make this any better; If we want to show that Jack sees orange when Jill sees blue, we need to measure the signals coming from both of their optic nerves upon viewing identical wavelengths of light, and then test how each individual responds to the stimuli. ("what colour do you see?" "orange"). Hoffman's general point is that we can't tell, even from that sort of experiment, that Jack and Jill are in fact experiencing the same stimuli, and I suppose that's correct. It is, however, certainly not correct that it then precludes the conscious experience of either of them from being the same as the function used to represent that experience, it simply means that we've somehow substituted, via the internal system of the mind, a different value in the function for each of them. Hoffman, then, has demonstrated that we can't use the same function for each person, and that's about as useful as Hume demonstrating that we, logically, can't know anything. It isn't, at all.

* Whenever someone chooses to use an analogy on the internet, it is, shortly afterward, demonstrated just how poorly constructed that analogy actually is. If that doesn't occur in this case, I'll put it down to a lack of readership.*

Discussion of "Signatures of Consciousness", Stanislaus Dehaene

Edge discussion and original talk here.

Stan Dehaene always deals with interesting, deep problems in a novel and efficient manner. His last two publications deal with the evolution of a number sense in primates and the evolution of reading ability (a proposed volutionary change based on a cultural phenomenon), and now Dehaene attacks the problem of consciousness in terms of a global neuronal workspace. The quick and dirty version of his argument is that, based on fMRI and temporal EEG measures, it seems the consciousness exists as a kind of neural workspace in the mind; consciousness is something that parallels (or is?) our working memory and exists independently of neural processes and responses, following behind the initial response to stimuli by an average of a quarter second.
I have great respect and admiration for Dehaene, but there's a major flaw in his discussion (and since his talk is speculative, that's acceptable): He explains well the purpose of consciousness, and perhaps even what we might define as conscious, but he fails in any meaningful manner to demonstrate what causes it.
Sam Harris has a critique of Dehaene's points in terms quantum computers, which I won't even attempt to address.

Wen the Eternally Surprised?

My first post in a month, and it's pure, unadulterated fluff. Literally.



Then again, the cat is exhibiting the only correct reaction, as we have never experienced each moment until it occurs. Buddha has claws...

Happy Hallowe'en, don't eat the candy!

This would be hilarious if it were a joke... unfortunately someone actually believes this.

Chirality and Life

Marcelo Gleiser is, if not more intelligent, certainly more educated than I am. Thus I'm a but surprised to find such fundamental errors of thinking in his latest SEED article, here. Gleiser states, quite correctly, that all the proteins that make up life could, chemically, be right-oriented or left-oriented. He also cites his and colleagues' research that the early Earth appears to have contained molecules of both chiralities, and then asks why life only has left oriented molecules present. Marcelo, how is this not at least semi-obvious?
Let's start with a fundamental assumption; Life began once and only once on our planet, created from (insert correct answer here, we don't have it yet) to form self-replicating strands of nucleic acids and the proteins for which they code, somewhat like viruses or prions. This isn't that poor of an assumption, given the low probablity of spontaneous generation of life in the first place. It had to happen somewhere, given the numbers of stars and planets, and obviously it happened here or we couldn't write and read blogs written by graduate students of no current academic importance, but proposing it occured multiple times is a bit of a mathematical stretch. If you'd like, we can concede that life was unlikely to start more than once at a time, allowing the possibility that early life began several times sequentially, and that will not affect this dicussion at all. So, given that life occured once, or once to start, then the proteins incorporated in that first organism were likely of one chirality, given the simplicity of early life-like molecules and the coding for proteins written into whichever nucleic acid (likely RNA, from current evidence) was employed. That life had to replicate, using the available amino acids, proteins, and other molecules, and would replicate using the same structure without fundamental changes in the RNA (mutations). Molecules of the wrong chirality couldn't even interact chemically with those of early life, it'd be life trying to use the mirror image of a key. (Gleiser uses the mirror analogy to describe chiral molecules first, and it's apt, so I'm stealing it. Thanks Marcelo, you'll never likely see this, but I'm giving credit anyway)
Briefly, then, what we're seeing in the exclusivity of "left-handed" proteins is a what Dawkins calls a frozen accident, the vestige of the structure of our most distant ancestors and the necessary structures for their replication and survival, all the way down to us. There's no reason to suppose that life on other planets would necessarily follow this blueprint, and actually finding samples would be a requirement for making any statements of that kind.

Gleiser states it thusly:

If one traces life’s origins from its earliest stages, it’s hard to see how life began without molecular building blocks that were “chirally pure,” consisting solely of left- or right-handed molecules. Indeed, many models show how chirally pure amino acids may link to form precursors of the first protein-like chains. But what could have selected left-handed over right-handed amino acids? My group’s research suggests that early Earth’s violent environmental upheavals caused many episodes of chiral flip-flopping. The observed left-handedness of terrestrial amino acids is probably a local fluke.

Obviously we're not far apart on most of this view, it's the "it's hard to see how" statement that vexes me... his local fluke may be much more local than he believes, as in local to the particular location on the planet where life began.