
The Neuroscientist Who Lost Her Mind - joshrotenberg
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/opinion/sunday/the-neuroscientist-who-lost-her-mind.html
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FreedomToCreate
This is the thing that mystifies me the most about the ideas of consciousness
and the soul. If we are more than our mind, then how do we explain how changes
to our brain, artificial or natural, can drastically change who we are. What
does that mean for an afterlife, if we can't even really say who we are in
this life.

~~~
bendbro
I think most tech savvy millennials already subscribe to determinism in some
form.

~~~
chrischen
Quantum physicists do not. Determinism has been experimentally disproven.

~~~
GolDDranks
That's not right. The combination of

1) local 2) realist 3) determinism

has been disproven by Bell's theorem. But I it's still a "pick two" kind of
choice.

I, personally think that by Occam's razor, the Everett interpretation ("Many
Worlds") makes the most sense, because it's simplest. And actually it retains
all of the above three, but it introduces "self-locating uncertainty"
([http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7907](http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.7907)), which
effectively has the same kind of effect from our perspective.

~~~
chrischen
If you subscribe to many-worlds, then you subscribe to quantum theory, which
means you subscribe to quantum indeterminacy. Non-determinism is literally the
name of the principle.

~~~
zardo
But the only thing that's undetermined is which universe you will find
yourself in. In many worlds the multiverse is determined.

It's a space-time graph (tree?) with a root at the start of time and leaves at
infinity.

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kittiepryde
I kept thinking in that last paragraph, where she describes everything as
going good again, what if its still a delusion like before?

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drdeca
Suppose you created a machine which, in the style of Solomonoff induction
(sorta), was designed to find as short or as "elegant" (in whatever sense of
that word) of a (computation based) description of the world (so, it makes a
model of the inputs it receives, and it receives many inputs, including from
the internet, etc.)

Further, pretend that it has arbitrarily large computational resources.

Even if it could completely predict the inputs it receives (modulo quantum
mechanics based randomness), would you expect that it's internal model of the
world includes some description of consciousness, of an internal experience?

I do not mean, would it have some sort of a model of agents, entities that act
in a way that tends to optimize some things or other,

Rather, I specifically mean the internal experience of things, not just being
able to predict that people would say that they experience.

I do not think that it would come up with a model of internal experience, And
yet, I experience, and so do you.

So, I think an understanding of reality based only on computation about
physical objects, is incomplete.

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Houshalter
Yes. If you ran Solomonoff induction on the world, it would generate
(countably infinite!) many simulations of people in the world, each of which
would act exactly as they do in the world. They would experience the same
things, say the same things, behave exactly the same way in every respect.
Including having the same thoughts and feelings you are right now, and typing
the exact same comment.

~~~
drdeca
Two things:

1) I didn't necessarily mean exactly Solomonoff induction, as what I was
describing would be for finding a single good description, rather than making
good predictions using a weighted combinations of many descriptions.

2)Well, whether they would have experiences is a topic which is of some debate
I think. They would behave as if they did, but, would they? If the simulation
is run twice concurrently, are the experiences had twice as much? There are
all sorts of potential complications with things like computation with secret
sharing schemes, and so I don't think the question is really settled.

____

My point was that even if something describes what occurs, what particles end
up in what configurations, that doesn't seem to be a description of what is
experienced, even if it predicts how people will self report their
experiences, and give causal explanations for their self reporting of their
internal experience.

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anon79
Interestingly, I could accurately describe my experience of mania due to
bipolar disorder using the exact same words / description as the author. The
similarity of the subjective symptoms is overwhelming. And yet, the pathology
seems very different.

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Alex3917
Meh. I always hate these articles about neuroscientists having non-ordinary
experiences. Either heterophenomenology is valid or it isn't, whether or not
you're a neuroscientist should be largely irrelevant.

If her training as a neuroscientist was providing some sort of special insight
into her subjective experiences then that would be one thing, but that's never
actually the case with these articles, other than intermittently having some
basic awareness of what might be going on.

By privileging the experiences of people whose backgrounds don't have any real
epistemological relevancy, I feel like these articles epitomize the hegemonic
aspects of science, which is troubling on multiple levels.

~~~
nkurz
I have almost the opposite reaction to it.

As an article designed for an educated but non-scientific audience, it's only
nominally about neuroscience, but really about conceptions of self. I think
the point of the article is that despite considering herself an expert, she
has no particular insight into her own disease. This is intended as a parable
for other experts, suggesting that they may be wiser to trust in the
collective wisdom of others rather than assuming they understand the world
better than others. It's not quite an anti-science article, but it seeks to
"cut science down to size", by (correctly) showing that its practitioners are
all too fallible and human.

What are the specific ways in which you find it troubling?

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Alex3917
I suppose this isn't as egregious as, say, some guy writing a book saying that
God is real because of a dream he had and you should totally believe him
because he's an MD.

That said, what's to say that her experiences (which perhaps highlight the
limits of science) are more valid than anyone else's experiences which do the
same.

The reason I find it troubling is because it fits into a multi-hundred year
paradigm of, say, indigenous people not being believed about their medical
knowledge until some white guy flies down to South America and puts his stamp
of approval on it. Or, say, some western religious studies scholars flying to
Japan and teaching them what their religious beliefs really are, or whatever.

I'm all for experts when they have real expertise and something to add. But
what I find troubling is when a supposed lack of credentials is used to
systematically invalidate the knowledge and experiences of certain groups of
people, especially when those credentials have no actual relevance to the
issue(s) at hand.

~~~
im3w1l
There were a lot of false indigenous beliefs. If people just listened to some
random native dude and took his stories at face value, they would have been
convinced of a lot of wrongness.

Basically you need a big institution that can exert quality control over
issued statements. Not necessarily a white one.

~~~
Alex3917
> There were a lot of false indigenous beliefs.

Sure. There's a lot of false non-indigenous beliefs also. I realize that a lot
of the time there is a real value add happening.

But there are research universities down there also that can do the same work.
And as often as not the research done up here isn't really any better than the
research that's already been done.

