Seeking A Middle Ground

You should read my previous post first. Otherwise this won’t make a lot of sense. In fact, this post contains a lot of links to older posts of mine which I thought might be relevant. Feel free to ignore them.

A little disclaimer first:

I’d toyed with the idea of starting a blog for a while before Seas Too Far To Reach. After all, I have a good number of opinions on a good number of things, and like to write. But I held off, partly because I found the whole idea of blogging sort of arrogant. By writing my thoughts every week and asking people to read them, there’s a huge danger in seeming prideful: as if my thoughts were particularly valuable or groundbreaking, and worth parading to a frequent “readership”. When my posts are very critical (like the last one) and words like “brilliant” gets thrown around in response, that danger only increases. I’d hate to come off an “internet personality” who rants about things as if he has a monopoly on the truth, and expects a group of followers to agree. That’s not my intent. I’m a flawed person with flawed opinions, and don’t pretend to know any more about this stuff than you do. I’m not brilliant, just angsty and longwinded. If you disagree, tell me. We’ll talk about it.

With that said, in the last post I was very critical of some trends I see in modern day Christianity. For better or worse, that criticism is not coming from an outside perspective: I’ve lived these problems. Intellectual integrity? I can’t count the number of online “debates” I had about the truth of Christianity, where I would throw out any “fact” I could find on the internet, just hoping for a conversion. Being vindicated was much more important than finding the truth. Vilifying others? Growing up as a Republican, I thought Democrats were an evil joke and no true Christian could be one. When I got to college, all of a sudden Republicans were the joke: gun-toting old white men, every one of them! I’ve tossed aside huge groups of thinkers like they were nothing. Personal integrity? I’ve had a sad amount of it in my life. The past few years I drank, smoked, cursed, broke a good number of professed boundaries in my relationship, and most every other vice, all while pretending to be the model Christian to model Christian friends. Meanwhile, during my Freshman year of college I pretended I wasn’t a virgin so my roommates wouldn’t think badly of me. In conversations with religion-bashing guys up here, I’ve had times where I more or less denied my faith altogether; in conversations at church, I’ve backed down from my beliefs for fear of starting an argument. I’m a people-pleaser by nature, and could give you a thousand examples of my two-faced behavior.

In other words, these criticisms aren’t coming from a soapbox. When I say these are things I hate about popular Christianity, it’s because they are the largest obstacles I’ve had with faith in the past. And when I say there has to be a middle ground, it’s a desperate plea: it has to be possible to maintain the Christian faith with integrity and respect. If there isn’t, I’m lost, because I don’t want my life to be found in a lesser of two evils.

I certainly haven’t found that way yet. But I have been searching for it, and part of that means having an idea of what I think the end result should look like. After all, to take a page from Plato, how can we find virtue unless we seek it? And how can we seek that which we do not know? And if we don’t know it, how will we recognize it once we’ve found it? Here are a few characteristics I would like to see in myself, and in the church:

Genuine Belief

I’m putting this first, because it is, unfortunately, probably the most unpopular. Plenty of people will agree with my problems with the Church on an intellectual level, but the conclusion is always the same: reduce it to a strictly personal faith, turn the Bible into a good but flawed collection of aphorisms, and let it be spiritual but completely devoid of real-world implication. Or at a weaker level, become apathetic about Biblical truth: take it when you want it, but when there seems to be an unpopular opinion in it, call it outdated or ignore it completely.  More than anything, I want to avoid that. I am not looking for Deism, or some sort of aesthetic grounds for living a certain way: I’m looking for honest, Biblical Christianity. There are a few ideas (Christian Existentialism, Christian Agnosticism, Deism, etc.) which I think happen solve most of the practical issues I have with the church, but they lose too much in the process. Spirituality isn’t enough; I want something concrete.

Intellectual Honesty

Like I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think Christians as a whole are very honest about what they know and don’t know. And I can’t really blame them: I understand. Unlike my opinions on global warming or whether P=NP (it totally doesn’t, by the way), matters of faith have eternal significance. Injecting healthy doubt into that can be incredibly scary. As critical as I can be of closed-mindedness, a part of me is very jealous of the confidence I had as a kid. I may have been taught less-than-convincing arguments and misrepresented the viewpoints of others, but I was so happy and confident. Sometimes I honestly wish I could revert to that way of living, where everything was obvious and doubts were unheard of. But I can’t.

Today on my way back from class, a few of my issues with popular Christianity were shown pretty concretely. A man was standing on campus, handing out free copies of The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition. The back cover reads: “This higher-education edition of The Origin of Species is for use in schools, colleges, and prestigious learning institution.”

Today being the anniversary of Darwin’s work, I was thoroughly unsurprised to get a free copy. What did surprise me was that the introduction was written by Ray Comfort. I recognized the name; christianaudio had recently published a title on evangelism he co-authored with Kirk Cameron. (After looking at his picture on Wikipedia, I’m starting to think he may have handed me the book himself. Too bad they couldn’t get Cameron to do it: that would have been a story to tell!) Something fishy was going on. I opened it up and saw that his “Introduction” is 50 pages long: almost 1/5th the length of the book. In it he talks about, among other things: the legitimacy of Young Earth Creationism, evolution as a religious belief much like Christianity, Hitler as Darwin’s “Famous Student”, the racism and misogyny of Darwin, and ends by leading you in a prayer to accept Christ.

Talk about a sneaky tactic! If we need to resort to this Trojan Horse method of argument, we’re in a very sorry state of affairs. Can you imagine the uproar if atheists started handing out free updated editions of The Case For Faith on church campuses, with a 50-page introduction by Richard Dawkins trying to debunk it? It is a very deceptive, if not technically dishonest, thing to do. Of course, student groups on campus retaliated with their own free handout: a bookmark “to be inserted at page 59″ (the end of the introduction and start of the actual book) with sign pointing right saying “Science”, and another pointing left saying “Bananas”. And the war rages on!

I hate the idea that the church and the world of academia need to be in collision, and I really believe the best solution is to abandon the God-of-the-Gaps mentality so much of Christian Apologetics falls prey to. The strategy is simple and convincing to the masses: if science can’t currently explain it, claim it as proof of God. The problem, of course, is that science is always progressing, and what is a gap today may not be a gap in a decade. This applies to your standard Young Earth Creation figures, but even more respected thinkers of the Intelligent Design movement like Michael Behe (Darwin’s Black Box) or Francis Collins (The Language of God) are running a big risk, in my opinion. By hedging their bets on current gaps in our understanding (irreducible complexity, the lack of a Missing Link, a Boeing 747 being created in a junkyard, etc), they imply that belief in God is predicated on those things being unexplainable, and gamble against future discovery.  If history is to be any indication, that’s a poor and potentially damaging bet. If biologists were to find a way of explaining the complexity of the human genome in evolutionary terms, would Collins recant his faith? Or would we shove God into a smaller gap, and resume the tactic?

Instead, I try to attribute my belief in God (beyond faith and personal conviction, which are at the forefront) to other things which are not in the domain of natural science: the existence of anything, the presence of consciousness, the perception of beauty, etc. We live in a world which is not lifeless, and I see design in it not necessarily by the complexity of its parts, but the meaning which is abstracted above it; a meaning which, I feel, is completely neglected by naturalistic explanation. Here are more of my thoughts on the matter. I am not saying this is necessarily the right approach or only route to intellectual honesty. But it’s the one I currently take.

Peaceful Coexistence

That phrase has “tree-hugger” written all over it. Sorry. I don’t mean the kind that litters bumper stickers (the one where the C is a Crescent Moon, the O or X is a star of David, etc). Not the universal acceptance Bahai claims to have, or some sort of “every belief about anything is equally valid” nonsense. I’m only saying that we need to recognize our status, in our country and in the world. We do not live in a like-minded theocracy. We live in a world populated by many conflicting faiths, and a country whose First Amendment claims it will not respect or prohibit any particular religion. Whether or not “Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship” is your motto, we are included.

I don’t think we gain anything by shrugging off other beliefs as illegitimate and therefore not worth acknowledging. We need to show love and respect, and part of that means sympathizing with the plight of the minority. Professed Christians form a vast majority in the United States, and there is no denying that, historically, legislation has gotten through as a result of our bullying. Other people do not believe in the Christian God, and certainly don’t believe many Biblical imperatives are worth following. I think we need to be mindful of that, and be mindful of the religious freedom we value and which others deserve, in the country and in the world. I’ve got plenty of specific opinions on where to draw the line in legislating morality, and on certain recent Propositions about which the church feels strongly. But those are touchy subjects, and this isn’t the place I’d like to start arguing. My point is a much more general one: we need to truly respect other people, and that means trading the strawmen for true empathy. “Love the sinner, hate the sin” is an adage we love to throw around, but like it or not, most of the world fails to see any observable distinction between the two. That the Church is seen as a hateful place by outsiders, is a travesty. If we truly claim to represent the love of Christ, our words and actions should reflect it. Here is my vague “creed” on the issue.

Personal Integrity

The church is full of hypocrites. Anyone will admit that. And for all of the reasons people are put off by us, the strongest, by far, is our hypocrisy. The majority of people in this country will claim to be Christians, and the majority of people will not show it in any measure.

Sadly, it seems that the further you stray from the typical “fundie” stereotype, the more likely you are to throw your values out the window. It’s strange and a little ironic, but true: those of us who are turned off by hypocrisy in the church tend to respond not with devotion, but with even more hypocrisy. All of it, of course, is under the guise of avoiding legalism, or being approachable to others, or challenging the world’s notions of what a Christian is. But in the end, it’s almost always an excuse for being complacent. Somehow, it’s possible to deceive ourselves into thinking that by refusing to live by our faith in the most obvious ways, we are being good examples. We’re not.

Having integrity, to me, means two things: following your beliefs to their logical conclusions, and being entirely transparent about it. A lot of this blog has been about my (mostly failed) attempts at both. It’s still half-hearted. I’ve attempted to start by following issues of conscience (no pot, no more underage drinking, attending church weekly, etc), but I am not there yet. I’ve been going to church about 50% of the time. I’ve determined to stop drinking as a rule, but when I am urged to do it, I tend towards excuses (“I’m not feeling well, maybe later”) instead of honesty about my conviction. Last weekend, peer pressure got the best of me, and I drank anyway. All that flowery talk of following my conscience and trying to live differently, abandoned at the first sign of discomfort. That is sad. Meanwhile, I’ll publicize my faults on a blog I know 10-20 people read, but am secretly thrilled that certain friends or family members have yet to find it. That’s not sincere. Genuine transparency ought to mean there is no question as to who I am and what I believe, in any group I am a part of. I am still far from that. At the best, all of this is only a small step in the right direction. But if I delude myself with pride or a “holier-than-thou” attitude about my convictions or opinions, I’ve done more damage than good.

Accepting the Limits of our Understanding

This is an idea I’ve beaten to death on this blog, so I’ll be concise. Only to say that as far as I am inclined to be a logical person, faith in the end will involve some abandonment of pure reason. I will never systematically prove my belief as if it were a scientific theory. Neither will you. While I want to my belief to be justifiable, I don’t want it to be reduced to science. I see that as a dead-end, and the fact that some Apologists genuinely seem to think this is a worthwhile goal, is scary to me. Here’s more, if you’re interested.

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That’s it. Those are a few characteristics of the life I’d like to have — the life I’ve largely failed at making for myself in the last 20 years. It is far from a complete picture: it is a list of things which I think are necessary, but not sufficient, to living in a way which is both rational and faithful. Like most things, it is probably liable to change. But for now, this is about where I stand, and what I am aiming for.

I would love your input.

A Christian Critique

Not many people read this. That’s not a bad thing: in fact, it’s largely my choice. While this certainly isn’t a secret blog, I purposely  don’t advertise it much. You can find it in my contact info on Facebook, but I’ve never actually posted something like “I have a blog! Check it out!” It’s just not the type of thing I’d want everyone to read. Even though I’m trying to be transparent, there’s something to be said for not beating Grandmom and Guy Who Sits Next To Me In Physics over the head with my thoughts and confessions. That puts my small handful of readers in a pretty unique place. If you read this regularly, you know me quite a bit better than the majority of people. There’s a certain intimacy in that which would be lost if I knew hundreds of people were reading.

All that to say, most days I get less than 5 views. On days that I post, I might get 10 or 15. So, what happened here?

Almost 70 hits on Sunday; a day I didn’t even post. Seriously. What’s going on?! Where did all those people come from, and more importantly, why did they leave so soon?

Oh well. Let’s move on to a nice, friendly, non-controversial topic.

Things I Hate About Christians

The flashy title should obviously be taken with a huge grain of salt. I am a Christian, and this isn’t a post about self-loathing. Many of you are Christians too, and these criticisms may not apply. What I mean by “Christians” is a stereotype: but unfortunately, it is a very accurate stereotype for many, many people. It’s the Christian Culture, the one that fills churches and youth groups, that I have major problems with. And what I mean by “hate” is not a personal vendetta against people who (often unwittingly) fit the stereotype, but a huge frustration against a movement which, I think, has turned the American Church into a very bad joke.

A. Lack of Intellectual Integrity

Working for a Christian Audiobook company, I get exposed to a lot of books by a lot of Christian publishers. Most are books on theology or spiritual growth, which I have no problem with. But when it comes to apologetics or politics, most are a joke. Even the classic ones I grew up with.

Take Lee Strobel’s books. If you’ve been a Christian the last decade, you’ve probably heard of them. The Case For Christ, The Case For Faith,The Case For A Creator, The Case For The Real Jesus. They all have the same theme. “A skeptical journalist investigates issues of faith by interviewing experts in the field, and boy is he not afraid to ask the tough questions!”  I’ve never read the latter two. But growing up, The Case For Christ and The Case For Faith were staples. I read and reread them, strengthened in my faith and convinced that everything was solved. After all, the guy who wrote the book was skeptical himself! If the experts could convince him Christianity was true, they could convince anyone!

Looking back, I can’t believe how naive I was. Maybe going into his first book, Strobel was truly a skeptic, but can you really publish 4 bestselling Christian Apologetics titles and still pretend to be unbiased? Not likely. If he was a skeptic, he was certainly not a very good one. First of all, he only interviews like-minded Christians. Anyone, especially a “skeptical” journalist, should know that healthy inquiry means hearing both sides of the debate. And rather than asking the “tough questions”, he accepts everything these people say without question; his questions are clearly designed to lead the “experts” into whatever point they wanted to make. Even when it’s clear that those points don’t hold any water. Like this argument, put forth by Peter Kreeft on the topic “If Evil and Suffering Exist, a Loving God Cannot”:

“There would have been plenty of time for evolution to have finished and evil to have been vanquished. But there is still evil and suffering and imperfection, which proves that atheists are wrong.”

Anyone with even the smallest understanding of Darwin would immediately recognize that argument as crap. No proponent of evolution says that the end result should be the “vanquishing of evil.” But mischaracterizations like that litter the book, and without giving any credence to opposing viewpoints, they stand. To those of us who didn’t know better, they seemed convincing.

It’s that sort of thing that really bothers me. I grew up thinking that all of these arguments we had for Christianity were so infallible, any atheist hearing them would be put to shame. So they were forced to ignore them. In reality, they ignore many of them because they’re bad arguments. Like the historical Ontological argument, the classic example of a terrible argument which is still sometimes quoted.

“God is, by definition, the most powerful being we can imagine. A being which actually exists is more powerful than one which does not. Therefore, the most powerful thing we can imagine must exist: if it did not, it wouldn’t be the most powerful thing we can imagine. Therefore, God exists.”

Boy, I’m glad that’s settled. Now that I don’t need to worry about the existence of God, I can spend my time doing other things, like eating the Super Burrito that must be in my fridge. What’s a Super Burrito, you ask? Why, it’s only the best, most delicious food you can imagine. And since something is better to me if it’s in my fridge than if it isn’t, clearly there’s a Super Burrito in my fridge. Yes!

Fortunately, there are fewer proponents of that argument these days. But there are others: one I read in a very recent apologetics book attempts to prove why the universe must have had a beginning. The authors called it one of the “most convincing” arguments they had ever heard.

“1. An infinite number of days has no end.
2. Today is the end of history.
3. Therefore, there were not an infinite number of days before today.”

Again, this is just trickery. It’s equivalent to proving that there aren’t infinitely many numbers. Why? Because an infinite number of numbers has no end. -1 is the end of the set of negative integers in increasing order. Therefore, there are not infinitely many numbers less than -1. The number line must have a beginning!

See, my problem isn’t necessarily that these arguments exist. Bad arguments exist everywhere. But usually, there will be those playing devil’s advocate who will look at an argument and say “This is wrong, we shouldn’t use it anymore.” Until we get to issues of faith. When it comes to Christianity, bad arguments absolutely refuse to die: as long as it can still convince someone, that’s one more person to add to the flock! Then books like this, filled with misleading arguments and half-truths, are allowed to stand uncriticized. People will say things like “This book may not convince anyone new of Christianity, but it will strengthen your faith.” What that’s code for is “This book will only convince you if you don’t know any better. And since being convinced of our faith is a noble end, the less-than-satisfactory means aren’t important.” If an argument can be shot down, you shouldn’t use it and you certainly shouldn’t become rich selling it. Period. That’s what it means to have integrity.

B. “Us-vs-Them” Mentality

This is the logical conclusion of Problem A. Since there is a severe lack of intellectual integrity, many Christians never get a fair understanding of what other people actually believe. Instead, they’re stuck with caricatures and strawmen, invented by Christians and mocked by Christians. One particular memory that has always stuck with me took place at Indian Hills Summer Camp. I went there with my Church every summer, from 1st – 4th grade. We were sitting in the chapel, watching a skit about the creation/evolution debate. The Evolutionist was played by head counselor Curly. He had thick-rimmed glasses with duct tape, a big plaid shirt, a pile of books in his hand, and a very goofy grin. The Christian was cool and casual. They each presented what they believed. The Christian said something like “I believe in one book, the Bible, which hasn’t changed in 2,000 years. How many books do you have?” Curly looks uncomfortable. “W…w…well, our b…b…book has been revised over 42 times! But we’re sure it’s right this time! Hyuck, hyuck, hyuck!” All the classic zingers followed: “You seriously believe I came from a monkey?!” “If evolution is true, why are there still monkeys that didn’t evolve?” etc. We laughed and laughed at poor Curly The Evolutionist, so willfully ignorant of things we 4th graders could all understand. What an idiot!

Now, that’s a strawman if I ever saw one. And things like that happened all the time growing up: really, any time atheism was discussed, it would be in the realm of ridicule. Portraying your opponent as an imbecile and then teaching kids to laugh at him might breed nice confident children, but it has serious repercussions when those children grow up. They wind up believing that everyone out there really is that stupid, and that we Christians are the only ones willing to accept obvious truths. At it’s core is a serious belief that most of the world is not only wrong, but idiotic. This has a few very bad effects.

First, it makes us very pushy. Why? Since we’re so used to seeing every other viewpoint mischaracterized and  belittled, we take for granted not only that we are right (which isn’t a bad thing: everyone believes they’re right),  but that our correctness should be obvious to everyone. Making us immune to the separation of Church and State that other religions are rightfully subjugated to. While we would be furious if a prayer to Allah took place in a classroom, we are indignant when our right to a prayer to God,  in Jesus’ name, is taken away. Why? Because Christianity is true, and obviously true. Therefore, we should be privileged above those other joke religions. Our beliefs should be upheld through legislation, and if the government is giving us clear preferential treatment, so be it.

In other words, it leaves us unwilling to put ourselves in others’ shoes. We know, deep down, that if any other faith were given the sort of preeminence we expect of Christianity in America, we would feel uncomfortable and alienated. And if we actually understood that those of other faiths weren’t dumb caricatures, but instead real people with valid concerns much like ourselves, we might be able to make that connection. But when the world is full of two types of people, the correct and the stupid, that is unthinkable.

Second, it makes us very rude and very stubborn. And it extends beyond the realm of faith, into almost every area of life. Since we’re often brought up only hearing one side of every issue, we cling to every belief with equal stubbornness. Take politics. Beyond a few ethical issues like abortion, is there any reason one particular party (cough Republican cough) should be almost exclusively associated with evangelical Christianity?  When I look at the core principles of each party, neither seems especially moral or immoral. There are some good ideas and some bad ones, but aside from those issues which are obviously ethical, not much of a Biblical imperative. Yet Christians, at least where I come from, cling to their politics with almost religious fervor. Even in the college group I go to, the attitude is common (but not universal!). Otherwise very friendly people will say things like “Democrats are morons.” “Those stupid liberals are ruining our country.” Bitter, disgusting name calling. Imagine if a liberal person (and I identify myself as, at least, moderately liberal) came to the group for the first time. They would have been welcomed in, sung a few songs, heard about the love of God, and been called a moron a few dozen times. I’ve developed thick enough skin to not let that bother me: but let me tell you, it happens a lot. And it’s symptomatic of more than politics: it’s this prevalent idea that because we’re right, no one else’s opinion matters. And it’s embarrassing.

C. Lack of Personal Integrity

Finally, there’s a lack of real personal integrity. What I mean is this: for all the books we have “proving” our faith and every rude misrepresentation of everyone outside our faith, we don’t take our faith very seriously at all. Sure, we say we do in an argument, or in the middle of an emotional worship song. But I know so many people that have been stars of their youth group, have Bible verses in their Facebook Quote’s section, and then proceed to completely ignore the tenants of their faith. There are the obvious flaws: they’ll sleep around, get trashed every weekend, etc. But there are more fundamental flaws: they don’t love their neighbor, they don’t care for those in need, they don’t respect the authority that, Biblically, God established. Name-calling, gossip, rudeness, hatred. No, Christians aren’t perfect and, yes, there is always forgiveness. But Christian liberty is too often used as an excuse for total complacency. If you claim to be a Christian, you should act like one. When you fail, you should genuinely want to fix it, not schedule your next failure the following Friday Night. I know pointing out hypocrisy in the Church is the trendy thing to do now, but it’s hard to ignore. It’s everywhere.

It seems that there’s a tendency for Christians to fall into one of two camps. Either they are ignorant but devout, or loving and respectful but don’t take their faith seriously. It’s like we’re forced to take an extreme. In order to follow your faith devoutly, you’re often convinced of it at the expense of vilifying and misrepresenting others. And if you actually concede that other people’s opinions are worth your time, faith often becomes such a “personal” thing it loses all outward manifestation.

I don’t like either option. Closed-mindedness is suffocating and vaguely-spiritual openness is hollow. There has to be a middle ground.

Mind/Body Part 3: The Machinery of Perception

Previous relevant posts:
Part 1: Free Will and Physics
Part 2: Where Are You?

Postscript: This didn’t  really go in the “Mind/Body” direction I wanted it to. But oh well. It’s still part 3!

A couple of nights ago, I attended a seminar by a guest lecturer from MIT, Jean Jacques Slotine. I heard about it through an e-mail from my research professor, who frequently points me in the direction of talks and papers which I might find interesting or useful to our work. Usually I pass on guest lectures; they’re generally meant for a professor from one school to share innovative research with Berkeley professors, which makes them almost impossibly difficult for anyone unfamiliar with the field (a 3rd year undergrad, for instance) to understand. That’s the nature of science these days. For better or worse, math and physics have moved far beyond the realm of the intuitive: most groundbreaking ideas take years of specialty in the field to understand, let alone apply. This one, though, caught my eye.

ABSTRACT
Although neurons as computational elements are 7 orders of magnitude slower than their artificial counterparts, the primate brain grossly outperforms robotic algorithms in all but the most structured tasks. Parallelism alone is a poor explanation, and much recent functional modelling of the central nervous system focuses on its modular, heavily feedback-based computational architecture, the result of accumulation of subsystems throughout evolution. We discuss this architecture from a global
functionality point of view, and show why evolution is likely to favor certain types of aggregate stability. We then study synchronization as a model of computations at different scales in the brain, such as pattern matching, restoration, priming, temporal binding of sensory data, and mirror neuron response. We derive a simple condition for a general dynamical system to globally converge to a regime where diverse groups of fully synchronized elements coexist, and show accordingly how patterns can be transiently selected and controlled by a very small number of inputs or connections. We also quantify how synchronization mechanisms can protect general nonlinear systems from noise. Applications to some classical questions in robotics, control, and systems neuroscience are discussed.

The development makes extensive use of nonlinear contraction theory, a comparatively recent analysis tool whose main features will be briefly reviewed.

(Coffee, Tea, and Cookies will be served)

See what caught my eye? Free coffee and cookies! Count me in.

More seriously, that Abstract really intrigued me. Not in the specifics — although it’s probably more meaningful to me than it is to you (unless you’re pretty mathematically minded), it still goes over my head. What caught my eye, though, was exactly that: it goes over my head. The function of the brain is being described by math, and not just simple intuitive math, but by complex linear algebra and differential equations. I had no idea neuroscience had progressed to that level. While I am bogged down with the very possibility of the brain as a massive computer, these researchers have taken it for granted, and are redesigning physical hardware accordingly. What results they’ve achieved, while interesting in its own right, pales in comparison to the very fact that it’s possible to formulate any thought processes mathematically. I never imagined the field to be so…legitimate.

Of course, computation is a far cry from consciousness. While they may be able to model more routine aspects of brain function — performing a calculation in your head, processing visual data, etc. — none of that takes us anywhere closer to understanding the self-originating inner light of consciousness which we feel.  At least, not by my estimates. But even the fact that these sensations which seem so basic to us can be understood at any level is frightening to me. If these small things that once seemed irreducible — what I perceive, what I feel — are now able to be modeled and manipulated, it’s hard to not feel like we’re losing some of the mystery.

One common problem in robotics is working with computer vision: going from an image (collection of pixels from a camera) to an idea. A simple example we’re working on in my research group is trying to get a surgical robot to take two images (one for each “eye” in depth perception) and identify where a needle and thread are in 3D space. For you or me, that problem is trivial. We do it constantly, without thinking about it. Even if you can’t do simple addition in your head, you can look around the room and identify objects like “chair”, “keyboard”, “computer screen” almost instantaneously. You may have never even seen a chair from that particular angle before, but you know immediately what you are looking at. It feels, to us, like there’s no work being done. We certainly don’t feel like we’re sorting through sensory data, matching patterns to small segments, and ignoring the rest. But that’s exactly what we do, unconsciously. And we do it very, very quickly. Our high-end computers, which run over ten million times faster than the brain from a hardware perspective, fail miserably by comparison.

When you are looking around you, you feel like everything is sensory input. But when you actually look at what the brain is doing, reality has very little to do with it. Only 5% of the input to your brain right now is visual: the other 95% is feedback. If you’re not an engineer and don’t like the idea of a “feeback loop”, what it means is this: only 5% of “seeing” is actually seeing. The rest is thinking about what you saw, what you expect to see, what you’re looking for, etc.

Here’s an example the professor gave.

You’ve got a checkerboard with a shadow cast on it. There’s a dark square labelled A, and a lighter square labelled B, right?

Wrong. A and B are exactly the same color. Stare at it and eventually you’ll convince yourself of it. But most, if not all of us, saw A as “dark” and B as “light”. During the presentation, there was a mild uproar of people insisting there was trickery going on, and that the two were different colors. Seeing otherwise unflappable professors baffled by an optical illusion was very entertaining.

I’ll assume you fell for it — even though, unfortunately, it worked much better from far away than up close on a computer screen. Why did you see the exact same color twice, and take one to be darker than the other? The answer is context. Even if you didn’t think about the checkerboard pattern, your brain took note of it. It saw an alternating pattern of dark and light squares, and assumed the same was true of all squares on the grid. It saw a green cylinder, calculated roughly what type of shadow an object of that size would cast, and knows that shadows make objects look darker than they would otherwise be. So, before you even knew what you were looking at, it compensated for the shadow, telling you to interpret B’s color as lighter than it actually was. (When I first inserted the image into the post, I suddenly didn’t see the illusion at all. It was obvious that A and B were the same color. Then I realized, it was because I wasn’t able to see the whole picture from this WYSIWYG editor — just A on the top, B on the bottom, and a few boxes in between. Since I couldn’t see a whole checkerboard — even though I knew, by memory, what it looked like — my brain wasn’t telling me B was a light square anymore. Funny how that works.)

That’s an example of cognitive science at work. The designer of the pattern didn’t just walk by a checkerboard with a green cylinder casting a shadow on it one day. He studied the visual processing algorithm of the brain — the machinery we don’t even realize we use — and manipulated it. I thought it would be fun to see how I (and maybe you) process images, so I went into Fireworks (a legal copy; I’m the only nerd on earth who hasn’t pirated Photoshop) and made a series of pictures. They’re not actually optical illusions, but I’m still curious about what people can or can’t see.

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

From A – E I can see my name (STEPHEN MILLER) perfectly fine. Not only can I figure out what it says: I actually see the letters in white, almost as if they were more white than the white background. Especially the letter “M”. The switch from E to F — even though it’s only removing a solid black rectangle — makes it much harder for me to read. I can still make out what the letters are, but I don’t have them jump out at me like I did before. From then on it gets continually more difficult, until the very last image. Then, again, the name jumps right out at me.

What the nerd in me can’t help but wonder, is could a computer do this? I’ve had to code very basic letter classifying programs before, but those are different: you’re given a hand-drawn character, and use probability (and a nifty bit of math) to try and identify the most likely choice using a few general questions (i.e. is it symmetric? is it wider on the top or the bottom? how many regions of white space are there?) Even then, it sometimes gets it wrong. But in pictures like this, there really is no letter there. If you consider the background to be white, all you’re really seeing is a series of oddly shaped black blobs. But you’ve learned to recognize that collection of imprints as the tops and bottoms of the letters S,T,E,P,H,N,M,I,L, and R. So the mind fills in the blanks, even if there is not an actual letter there. Any objective study of the pictures will tell you “There are no white letters.” But I wanted to send you a message, and — given a little bit of context — you saw it.

If you think I’m sending mixed signals, you’re right. On the one hand, optical illusions seem to indicate a fault to me: we think we’re seeing something that isn’t there, because the “machinery” of the mind is being tricked. There’s something mechanical going on, and it’s imperfect at that — it’s an estimate, based on context and prior experience. And sometimes it’s incorrect. But at the same time, that makes it infinitely more powerful than a perfect mechanical replica: we can read between the lines, injecting our experience into the present in a distinctly human, irreproducible way. You see a message that isn’t there — but what isn’t there is everything.

Like I’ve mentioned before, a few months ago I was diagnosed with a panic disorder. Meaning on random (infrequent) occasions, I’ll get a panic attack. Head spinning, heart racing, general discomfort — all of the physical symptoms of actual panic, without any fear. But it can last for quite some time. Learning how to deal with it and lead a completely normal life even when these bizarre heart-attack symptoms might strike, has been difficult. I take a mild SSRI pill every morning, so things have been much better these days. But when I miss a day, I realize how awful it is. I’ll be out walking, or driving, or sitting in a lecture hall, and suddenly feel like I’m falling apart — physically, not emotionally. Emotionally I’m very, very frustrated.

It has been always been hard for me to come to grips with that. I hate the idea that if I forget to take a pill, my life be significantly worse. That is humiliating to me, having always fancied myself the pinnacle of stability. It’s like a mean-spirited optical illusion — but mental, not optical. The mechanism beneath — chemicals, hormones– is imperfect, and the wrong input will trigger feelings that shouldn’t be there. A stupid trick, reminding me that I’m not as strong as I think I am. My emotional response is not objective, as much as I’d love for it to be. It’s flawed, and human.

But the more I attend lectures about “imitating the mechanism of the brain” and try to write intelligent programs, the more I realize that these flaws are what set us apart. And in some strange way, our inability to see the world exactly as it is is what pits us above even the most powerful machine. We feel feelings that don’t logically follow, and see a white message in a collection of black squares. But it’s these things we feel and see which aren’t objectively present that define our character. I sense beauty in a random collection of molecules in the sky. I feel sadness at the loss of a friend when, logically, no benefit comes from sadness. And I see perfection in the ones I love when ugly flaws are staring me in the face. My failure to see things exactly as they are is my greatest strength. I’m not sure Shakespeare had that in mind when he said “To err is human.” But it fits.

A Moment of Sound

The strangest thing about living alone is that no one ever says anything.

I don’t think about it often, but when I do it always comes as a surprise. On an average day I’ll be home from class by 7:00, and be in bed at 2:00 at the earliest. Unless I go out for dinner or coffee, need to meet someone in the lab, or get a phone call from home, I most likely won’t utter a single word. At first that seems too obvious to point out; the alternative, that I sit around talking to myself all night, would be disturbing. But how many times in my life, prior to now, have I been able to say that I spent 7 solid, waking hours, without making a sound?

Take last weekend. From Friday to Sunday evening, I didn’t leave my apartment. That’s 48 hours of almost unbroken silence on my part. Imagine, for a second, if a video camera had been placed in my living room. You would see a quite shaggy, unshowered college student, sitting in a chair. He’s staring intently at a screen, alternating between typing and clicking, typing and clicking. You hear the backround noise (a TV which has been on almost the entire weekend, partygoers screaming next door, etc.), but from our sole mic’ed character not a single word. This goes on for hours. Tap tap tap, click, tap tap tap, click, aaaand Rivers tries to connect with Antonio Gates but OH! he just, tap tap tap, click, tap tap tap, click, looks like it’s going to be  ruled an incompletion, tap tap tap, click…

Then, after about 12 hours, you hear the sound of a phone vibrating. It’s his friend Beth, calling to say she’s sorry he couldn’t make it to the Halloween party. After about four vibration triplets (three consecutive vibrations, followed by a second-long pause), the protagonist picks up the phone and flips it open. He holds it to his ear. Tension builds as you see his expression. His mouth begins to open. Through the impenetrably dense fog of white noise surrounding him, comes a loud, jarring “Hello?”

Seriously. It’s very off-putting to realize how long I can go without speaking. Sometimes it’ll be so long, that once I am finally required to say something — a phone is ringing, the cashier is ready to take my order, or I’ve sat down in the back of a lecture and the friend next to me says “Hi,” — I wonder if I’ll even remember how. Volume and pitch control are clearly gone. Do I need to clear my throat? I won’t know until I try. What comes out starts as an awkward croak, before it all comes flooding back to me, and I can proceed as usual.

To compensate for the silence, I hide behind entertainment. From the time I come home until the time I go to bed, the TV is usually on. Half the time I’m not watching it — my research laptop, where I do most of my work these days, isn’t even facing it! It’ll usually be on a network that requires no thought to watch, like ESPN or the Food Network. Just a little white noise, giving me the familiar comfort of a human voice to keep my sanity despite the ever-growing workload. It’s particularly comforting to fall asleep in front of it — I’ve always thought so, anyway. A bit jarring when you wake up 15 minutes later and have no idea where you are or who you’re talking to, but oddly peaceful just the same. When I’m sick of TV, music is always there to fill the void.

But on occasion, like tonight, I turn off the TV, mute the speakers, and just sit. Usually out here on the balcony. And right now, at any rate, something about the sound feels…well…beautiful. It sounds cliched, and I really can’t explain why; when I’m alone it’s just easy to be swept up in random, unfounded emotion. Like when I’m walking home from the lab at night and find myself struck by an extreme feeling that I can only describe as melancholy — not sadness and not happiness, but something distinctly comforting and very quiet. Right now I’m surrounded, largely, by the wall of noise created by the chilly bay breeze, mingled with the sound of distant traffic…I can’t pick out where one ends and the other begins. Beyond that wall, a single bird is letting out a steady, high-pitched chirp. Further still is the occasional sound of lone footsteps passing by my building.

That’s it. Nothing is being spoken, no melody is being played. Nothing is even particularly memorable. But I think that’s what’s so peaceful and (yes, I’ll bring myself to say it again) beautiful to me. It’s the sound of a world entirely outside of myself, which has been playing out here while I sat with the TV blaring, and will continue once I go back inside to sleep. In there the hours will fly by. Out here, time seems to stand still. Every minute feels like an eternity. And I wonder, if I were to spend the entire night sitting out here, how many lifetimes of solitude I could live in that otherwise instant spent sleeping before the sun comes up. Brewing a pot of coffee, closing the laptop, sitting back, and just existing.

Of course, I won’t. I have class in the morning, and I really couldn’t justify “I wanted to sit on the balcony and do nothing” as an excuse. But just knowing that I could, like knowing every time I step in a car that I could drive all the way to Escondido, gives me inexplicable comfort. It’s unreasonable, and it’s nearly impossible to transpose the mood into something concrete. But somehow moments like this make me realize: I am very, very happy with my life.

Get Well Soon

It’s 3:30 a.m. on Halloween night. No, it’s 3:30 a.m. the morning after Halloween. No, thanks to Daylight Savings Time it’s 2:30 a.m. (the second one) the morning after Halloween. Whatever time it is, Halloween parties are still going strong. I know because my windows are paper-thin, and I hear many people shouting non-angrily. And the only reason massive amounts of people who aren’t angrily protesting something would shout is if they’ve been drinking. Therefore, it’s still Halloween.

I’ve come up with a great costume this year. I call it: Stephen wearing yesterday’s clothes, home all day catching up on work and robotics research, sick and unshowered.

Note the detail! The bright red shirt I would only wear if I were home all day, the big zit on the bridge of my nose and unkempt hair to give the illusion that I haven’t showered, the bloodshot “stared-at-a-screen-too-long” eyes, the pale-except-around-the-eyes makeup to make me look sick and lacking in sunlight. Sure, that’s a lot of work to put into a costume for one night, but who could put a price on the memories? Plus, I’ll probably be wearing the same thing tomorrow.

Of course, I’m home sick. In fact, I’m fairly certain I haven’t even looked out a window today. From the time I woke up until now, I’ve been staring at a screen working — alternating between my research laptop for research, and my designated work laptop for christianaudio work. (In case you’re wondering, I’m writing this on my little EEPC, which could be called my designated blogging laptop. And my designated reading Dinosaur Comics in class laptop.)

(I just spent the past 30 minutes reading Dinosaur Comics after linking to a random one. Every comic has the same images and just different text. It’s very addictive and very nerdy. Where was I?)

Since I had been invited to a few Halloween parties, the prospect of working through the weekend didn’t sound great to me. But I wasn’t too upset about it. While I’m healthy, I have an almost romantic view of sacrificing time to work. I can always approach everything I’m doing from some higher vantage point and “reason” (whether true or false) that in the long run I will be happier for having made the sacrifice — I’ll have achieved some goal, been able to impress a boss or professor, or at the very least feel proud when I finally do sleep. Throw sickness on top of it, though, and you have a very unhappy person with no heroic excuse.

There’s just something about being sick while living alone that makes everything seem so pathetic and empty. Making yourself a bowl of soup late at night in a dark apartment, working with a jug of apple juice on your desk which you systematically take swigs from to “get better”, taking your own temperature with the Children’s Spongebob Digital Thermometer you got from Walgreens last night because it was the cheapest one they had, etc. If you’ve never lived away from home, or if you have but you still had a mother figure around, you might not know the feeling. While healthy, I feel fully capable of looking out for myself. When actually sick (beyond a little cold), I emotionally revert to a 5-year-old. I want this place to feel like a real home — a safety net from reality, overflowing with care and sympathy. I want someone to put their hand on my forehead and tell me “Stop working, you’re sick and will only get sicker,” send me to bed with a cup of tea, and call my school to let them know I’ll be sick. Instead I have nothing keeping me from overworking myself, no care aside from my own efforts, and no one who will take sickness as an excuse. If I don’t do research, the robots won’t be able to plan their trajectories by the deadline (tomorrow). If I don’t work I won’t get a paycheck, and Spongebob thermometers don’t grow on trees. End of story.

It’s pathetic and maybe a little sexist, but at times like this I always wish there were a girl with me. Not for any romantic reason; there’s just a sort of care I can get from my female friends that I would feel very uncomfortable asking of a guy. An almost maternal thing. Freud would tie it into Oedipus, I’m sure, but let’s not psychoanalyze. A girl’s voice feigning undue sympathy (“Awww poor thing”), a hand on my shoulder, a figure standing in the kitchen making soup (okay, now this is starting to feel sexist). On nights like this, that would be amazing. I would love to go out in the living room and find someone with a serious concern for my well being.  But, of course, no one is in this apartment but me, and aside from a “How are you feeling?” I can’t reasonably ask that of anyone in this city.  I have friends; not mothers. Or girlfriends.

One of the perks of being in a long-term relationship was the intense personal attention at my disposal, whenever I needed it. Sometimes I didn’t need it, and it sometimes it would feel burdensome to know there was a desire for my companionship when I felt like being alone. But when I was sick, nothing could beat it. Even living away from home, I could revert to that childlike dependence and relax, knowing I was taken care of.

Now the best I can ask for is a phone call home or to an old friend. Some short, rejuvinating distraction to let me imagine, for a second, that I am back at home with no responsibility but the universal imperative “get well soon!” and nothing but sympathy from the world around me. But the call will end. Then it’s back to work, juice in hand and Spongebob thermometer in mouth. It may not be much, but I’m not dead yet.