Graham Glass, etc.

Superorganisms and The Lucifer Principle

Superorganisms are one of my favorite concepts.

A superorganism is an organism consisting of many organisms. For example, an ant colony can be considered a superorganism because its members are highly specialized and somewhat simple and yet the colony generates sophisticated behavior as a result of the interactions of its members.

Following these lines, our own society can be considered a superorganism. In his book The Lucifer Principle, Howard Bloom postulates a fascinating theory related to superorganisms. He believes that long-term depression is a person's built-in mechanism for self-destruction, similar to the programmed cell death that occurs when a cell is given certain signals from its neighbors, stress, or DNA damage.

The idea is that if a person is shunned by their friends and relatives, can't hold a job, or otherwise is rejected by society, then they are a drain on the superorganism and should therefore self-destruct. So depression kicks in and weakens their immune system, thereby increasing the chance of infection and death. It's a slow process, so fortunately there's plenty of time to change and recover!

Overall, the theory makes sense to me and has expanded my understanding of emotion.

Update: Bloom refers only to depression that is caused by social isolation, not to depression that results from, say, a chemical imbalance. Apparently social isolation and/or uncontrollable punishment consistently induce depression in laboratory animals.

'Tis the Season for Giving

It feels wonderful to help those in need, so I decided to kick off the Xmas vacation with some donations to my favorite organizations and charities. If you haven't heard of them, I encourage you to check them out and perhaps make a little donation of your own!

Kiva - loans that change lives
WSPA - World Society for the Protection of Animals
Smile Train - changing the world one Smile and a time
World Wildlife Fund - there are only 4,000 wild tigers left!
ACLU - because freedom can't protect itself

Lucid Dream Theory

I recently wrote about my first Lucid Dream. Two things distinguished it from a regular dream:

1. I knew I was dreaming
2. It was extraordinarily vivid, as if I was wide awake.

I've been reading about the visual cortex recently and have a theory that might explain (2).

After some processing, input from the eyes arrives at the visual cortex area called V1. V1 performs high-resolution pattern recognition, finding lines and movement in your visual field. Outputs from V1 feed into the V2, V3, V4 and V5 areas which perform higher-level pattern recognition.

Funnily enough, visual processing is not a linear pipeline. Most areas both send and receive information from their neighbors. For example, although V1 sends a lot of outputs to V2, it also receives a lot of inputs from V2.

If my theory about dreams is correct, a dream is simply the result of portions of our brain waking up while the rest sleeps - the workings of a partial mind. When we sleep, the brain actively suppresses the V1 area. If V1 is suppressed and other parts of the visual cortex wake up, we cannot dream in high resolution because the area that corresponds to that level of resolution is asleep. So we would be conscious of higher-level shapes and motion, but not see the details.

However, if for some reason the active suppression of V1 did not occur, we would be able to dream in high resolution; V2 could feed it data which in the absence of the usual flood of input from the retina could be perceived as high-resolution imagery.

So my theory is that in order to have a Lucid dream, V1 suppression is somehow inhibited.

New Desktop Background

This one is just unbelievable (click for the full-size version).

Tracking EDU 2.0

I recently subscribed to trackur in order to track references to my company on the Internet. Here are a couple of good ones I found:

On-Line Tools Reflection: "At this site, you can view many available on-line tools, and most are FREE! Three of my favorite tools that I found were: BOJAM.com, dabbleboard.com, and edu20.org. Check them out! I love the fact that you can share almost anything, with anyone in the world."

EDU 2.0 Really Rocks: "I made a discovery about 2 months ago - Edu 2.0. The site was created by Graham Glass a former classroom teacher turned tekkie. It is absolutely awesome! I have been using it for my classes this year and the students really seem to love it. What is it you ask? It is sort of like Moodle, except easier to use, and is a web 2.0 software as it resides on the world wide web and not on your school server and is highly interactive."

Open Assessment

Right now, the school that teaches you a particular topic is also responsible for assessing your knowledge of that topic. So if you take a philosophy class with Mr. Smith, your knowledge of philosophy is also assessed by him.

The trouble with this approach is that it couples the concept of how you learn something with how you are assessed. So if you're super-bright and learn all the material taught in Mr. Smith's class in one week by studying in your evenings, there's no way to simply get assessed and move on to the next class; you have to slog out the entire semester. Similarly, if you learn something on your own via the Internet, you often end up going to school and taking a course in that subject simply to gain the official accreditation that employees expect.

I think it would be better if assessment was performed by a separate entity that used state-wide or even nation-wide standards. You could go to this entity whenever you like, pay a fee, and get assessed by taking the appropriate exams for a particular topic in a secure setting. If you failed, you'd be able to take the exam again after a certain period of time had passed, perhaps just a week or so.

By decoupling learning and assessment, you could learn each topic in whichever manner you preferred and get assessed for your knowledge whenever you liked. For example, you could study philosophy at Berkely, business at Stanford, teach yourself computer programming at home, and learn piano from a friend. Then when you felt ready, you could get assessed and have the option of retaking the assessment whenever you like.

I think that decoupling the method of learning from how it's assessed would allow more innovation in education. It's also a necessary precondition for truly self-paced learning.

Brain Waves are Snoring Neurons

I posted my theory about why we sleep and dream here. Here's a summary:

My theory is that sleep occurs because neurons need to dump their waste products and they are unable to process information properly while they are doing so. Rather than an average of 25% of your neurons being in "dumping waste products" phase throughout a 24-hour period, it makes more sense for them to synchronize this activity and do it all at once during a time where they are least needed - at night. Dreams are simply thoughts that occur when a subset of your brain wakes up and the rest is still asleep. As neurons dump their waste products, the probabality of greater numbers of neurons waking up approaches one, and eventually your whole brain "wakes up".

Here is my follow-up theory about brainwaves:

When a neuron is awake and processing information properly, it emits a train of electrical signals that have meaning and are used as inputs by other neurons. When a neuron goes to sleep, it's important that its signals are ignored since they no longer carry meaning. 

One solution would be that a neuron just stops outputting signals. However, because of its construction, a neuron cannot go silent; it's designed to *always* emit something. Given this constraint, another solution is for it to emit a steady stream of signals at a constant frequency (which does not naturally happen during waking hours). Other neurons would simply ignore all inputs that are at this constant frequency and only process those with non-constant firing patterns.

However, if a neuron receives inputs from thousands of other neurons that are all sleeping and firing at a constant frequency, it's hard for the signals to be ignored if they are arriving in different phases. It's much simpler to ignore inputs if they're all synchronized. So neurons that go to sleep fire at the same constant frequency as the inputs they're receiving from other neurons that are already asleep.

To summarize:

1. Sleeping neurons emit a steady stream of pulses to indicate they're sleeping

2. Sleeping neurons synchronize their pulses with other sleeping neurons

3. The result of (1) and (2) is a "brainwave" of pulsing signals

4. Awake neurons ignore signals that are synchronized with the background "brainwave"

If my theory is right, "brainwaves" are essentially just the sound of neurons "snoring" in synchrony.

Tribbles

Tribbles have invaded my cat's favorite place!

Horus and Jesus

Horus was a God worshipped by the Egyptians several thousand years before Jesus was born. Check out the similarities between the story of Horus and the story of Jesus!

Name	Horus	Jesus
Conceived	By a virgin	By a virgin
Son of	The God Osiris	Yehovah
Mother	Meri	Mary
Father	Seb	Joseph (Jo-Seph)
Born	In a cave	In a cave or stable
Signaled by	Sirius, the morning star	A star in the East
Witnessed by	Shepherds	Shepherds
Announced by	An angel to the mother	An angel to the mother
Birthdate	21 Dec	25 Dec
Age	Rite of passage at 12, baptized at 30	Rite of passage at 12, baptized at 30
Died	Crucified, then resurrected	Crucified, then resurrected

This is only a list of highlights; a more complete list with reference materials can be found here.

Making Minds, Part 5

In the last part of this series I described three ways to gain clues for building a Mind. In this part, I'd like to focus on (3), which is "a Mind is a general concept that is not limited to biological brains but instead is an emergent property of a complex system."

Complex systems like companies, cities, and countries exhibit all the qualities of a Mind that I listed in part 3 of this series. In many respects, this is not surprising, since like a Brain they're all built out of highly networked, self-assembling, non-trivial parts, each with their own individual goals. They also all interact with their environment and need to make intelligent choices in order to survive.

So one way to study a Mind and figure out how it works is to study large systems like countries. This is a lot easier and cheaper than studying neurons in a living brain!

In addition, any subsystem or feature of one Mind will probably have a parallel in other Minds. For example, if a biological brain uses a hierarchical way to recognize patterns, then it's likely that countries will also use a hierarchical way to recognize patterns. Of course, the kinds of patterns that a brain looks for will be different than the patterns a country looks for, but nonetheless a parallel should exist.

I will refer back to this concept of Mappings between Minds many times during this series.