Where Did My Soul Go?

Exploring the neurocircuitry of loss-of-consciousness seizures.

While the question of a physical basis of consciousness is batted around by armchair philosophers, it is no light or abstract matter for people whose consciousness doesn't work as it should. From coma to narcolepsy, epilepsy and schizophrenia, there are many ways that consciousness can be disturbed for organic reasons (not even to mention pharmacologic and recreational interventions). One type of epilepsy, absence seizure, is a particularly interesting example, characterized by brief (10 seconds) loss of consciousness with no other symptom, typically. The subject just stares into space, or lets the current action such as speaking slow to a crawl. Memory of this time is absent, and the subject is not conscious. Then everything picks up again as though nothing had happened. It sort of resembles a reboot of a machine or computer.

Epilepsy, of which there are dozens of kinds, generally is a syndrome of electrical/chemical over-activity and over-synchrony somewhere in the brain. Our normal state is a chaotic noise from which a surface EEG captures occasional regularities. Consciousness seems to be the occasional and restricted synchrony of coalitions of neurons reaching the various areas which give it content, whether visual, abstract, tactile, etc. Probably also not just any neurons, but coalitions anchored in the cortical and thalamic areas that are most closely associated with loss of consciousness when they are injured. Beyond this, it is not yet possible to say just what consciousness is in physical, anatomical terms.

Yet there is a good deal known about the electrochemical circuits of epilepsy, which is one route to learning more about consciousness in general. Many patients have been helped by careful investigation of where their seizures begin, and intervening by either removing some portion of that brain tissue, or implanting electrodes that give corrective shocks continuously. In the case of absence seizures, which may be a particularly incisive and minimal disruption of consciousness, the driver seems to be a circuit between the cortex and thalamus.

The thalamus sits atop the midbrain and brainstem, and is the gateway to the cortex, relaying sensory information from outside and motor signals back downwards. In the sensory direction, this is an inter-active process. The cortex sends many connections back, at least in part to direct the spotlight of attention to selected inputs. The thalamus also plays central roles in sleep/wakefulness, as it is the source of the slow wave patterns of deep sleep, and damage to it can cause coma.

But sometimes the cortico-thalamic connections get too strong, and evolve into a positive feedback loop of ~ 3Hz waves that characterize the absence seizure. In susceptible persons, (it is a syndrome of children, typically), brief hyperventilation can cause it routinely. This suggests a possible connection with the sleep circuitry, related to the yawning, dizziness, and other effects of hyperventilation.

EEG waves during an absence seizure, which lasts from a few to 20 seconds.

Obviously, the brain circuitry has been difficult to figure out. Not only is the brain in general, and the human brain in particular, hard to experiment on, but the thalamus is especially central and hard to get to. The authors of a recent paper resort to computational modelling, based on the experimental work of others (and their own prior work). The idea is to get as much of the detailed knowledge into a model as possible, and then ask whether the seizures can be reproduced, and if so, what can be done about them.

The answer is that .. yes they can. The model below describes what is known generally about the network involved. It brings in another key anatomical site, the basal ganglia, which sit right next to the thalamus and conduct signals from the cortex to it, substantially increasing the complexity of the network.

Circuitry diagram of brain elements and connections involved in absence seizures, as used in the current paper's model. Glutamate connections are excitatory, while GABA connections are inhibitory.

One theme is that not all connections in the brain are excitatory, as though neuronal connections were simple wires. The red (glutamate neuro-transmitter) arrows represent activating connections, while the blue (GABA) arrows represent inhibitory connections. Just like in organizational management or artificial circuitry, the careful balancing of positive and negative feedback results in optimal control. Here, after constructing a ~40 parameter model containing everything known about the circuitry, the authors find that an unusual and recently-found inhibitory circuit that points from the basal ganglia (GPe, globus pallidus externa) directly back to the cortex might be critical for damping absence seizures.

Dialing up the inhibitory circuit voltage (-Vcp2) from the globus pallidus externa to the cortex, to a modest degree, reliably shuts down the firing rate (Øe) that is characteristic of absence seizures.

A further example of their data, (below), plotting (A, B) the voltage (Vse) from the thalamus (SRN, specific relay nuclei) to the cortex, versus the delay of action (tau in milliseconds) of the inhibitory circuit between the thalamus internal nuclei, TRN (thalamic reticular nucleus) and SRN. Extending the delay, or increasing the excitatory feedback voltage, moves the graph up and right, towards higher-firing states, as show in the lower individual graphs. The absence-seizure type of firing is in graph D, corresponding to the light blue area of graph A.

The absence seizure oscillation (SWD) happens in a sort of sweet spot of voltage applied between the thalamus (SRN) to the cortex. The vertical axis (tau) describes the lag characteristic of the inhibitory circuit between the TRN and SRN areas within the thalamus, which is also influential over the absence seizure oscillation.

While this kind of modelling is no substitute for empirical investigation, it is tremendously useful to advance scientific theorizing and speculation about the systems at hand. Systems about which our knowledge is increasingly complicated to the point that we may not be able to understand them without the help of computerized models that can keep track of a myriad of details and dynamics. In this case, the hypothesis might be, that if treatment is really necessary, an electrode placed into the basal ganglia / globus pallidus externae, to stimulate its inhibitory action with modest constant voltage, may be one way to go about it.

• What's wrong with the office?
• Cringely on the state of the cloud.
• Upward redistribution, continued. With examples.
• Albuquerque offers a mini job-guarantee, which works very well.
• Jeb! screwed us over once, already.
• Republican deficits are OK, as usual.
• The labor market is still not working for labor.
• Economic mismanagement has permanent effects.
• Stiglitz, cont.
• Cruz, for the rich.
• Whither gun nuts? To civil and official disobedience, with a side of jaundiced constitutional interpretation.
• Isn't lying standard business practice?
• Annals of feudalism: training your H1B replacement.
• Green tip- use rechargeable batteries.

Consciousness and Unconsciousness Are Different

Further work on the mechanics of consciousness.

Of all the scientific problems, consciousness is among the most interesting. It is the study of ourselves, of our most intimate nature, whose very proximity makes investigation problematic, not to say perilous. Its intrinsic structure misdirects us from its physical basis, and it has thus been the subject of millennia of fruitless, indeed unsound and narcissistic, speculation. Not that there is any significant evidence that goes against the basic reductionist model that it all happens in our brains, but how it happens ... that remains largely unknown, due to the rather bizarre technology involved, which is miniaturized, rapidly dynamic, very wet, and case-hardened, in addition to being ethically protected from willful damage.

A recent paper took another step towards teasing out the dynamic differences between conscious and unconscious processing using EEG and MEG, that is, electrical and magnetic recordings from the scalps of human subjects while they are looking at various visual tests. Visual spots were very briefly presented, to register at the very limits of visual perception. Then the subjects were asked both whether they consciously saw the spot, and in either case, where they thought it was.

An interesting wrinkle in this work is that even if the subjects didn't consciously see the spot, their guesses were much more accurate than chance. This is because of the well-known phenomenon of blind-sight, by which we still process our visual perception to very high levels of analysis whether it enters consciousness or not. So the researchers ended up with three classes of brain state from their subjects- consciously perceived images, unconsciously perceived and correctly placed images, and unconsciously perceived but not correctly placed images. The last set is assumed to the most basic level of unconscious perception, which is interrupted before higher levels of visual analysis or transmission between the visual system and the conscious guessing system.

A technical advantage of this method is that in virtually all respects, the conscious, correctly guessed case is the same as the unconscious, correctly guessed case. The visual system found the object, and the guessing system was told where it was. Only the consciousness system is left in the dark, as it were, which these researchers try to exploit to find its electrical traces.

Real location plotted against reported location. Subjects perform far above chance, (on diagonal), whether they consciously think they saw the visual feature or not. A line was presented in one of  eight radial locations, as indicated on right.

They spend the paper trying to differentiate these brain states by their EEG and MEG scanning methods, and find that they can detect slight differences. Indeed, they try to predict the visual spot location purely from the brain signals, independent of the subject's report, and find that they can do a pretty good job, as shown below. This was done by machine learning methods, where the various trials, with known results, are fed into a computer program, which picks out whatever salient parts of the signals might be informative. This learned pattern can then be deployed on unknown data, resulting in novel predictions, as they present.

Programmatic classifiers perform better than chance in predicting the visual location, even in cases (unseen, incorrectly reported) where the subject had no idea where the visual feature was, either consciously or unconsciously. The classifiers also follow the internal processing of perception in the brain over time, which all happens pretty much within a second.

The researchers also show that even when unconscious, and even when wrongly reported by the subject, the brain data can pick up the correct visual location quite a bit of the time, and it is encoded out to quite late times, to about 0.6 seconds. This indicates that just because a percept is unconscious doesn't mean that it is much more brief or transient than a conscious one.

At this point they deepened their decoding of the brain signals, looking at the differences between the conscious + correct guess versus the unconsciousn + correct guess trials. What they found supported the consensus interpretation that consciousness is an added event on top of all the unconscious processing that goes forth pretty much the same way in each case.

Further classifier developed to detect the difference between conscious and unconscious perception. Those trained on conscious data (dark line) see extra processing when given conscious data, while the reverse is not true.. those trained on unconscious data (gray line) fail to see anything different when exposed to conscious data.

"These analyses indicate that seen–correct trials contained the same decodable stimulus information as unseen–correct trials, plus additional information unique to conscious trials."

Great, so where are these differentiating signals coming from? When they tried to deconstruct the programmed decoding by location, they found that they could roughly locate the signals in the superior frontal and parietal lobes. But this was a pretty weak effect. The consciousness part of the signal was difficult to localize, and probably happens in wide-spread fashion.

Two examples of localized classifiers. The superior frontal (bottom) sees (slightly) different processing in the conscious data, while the rostral medial frontal location (top) sees nothing different at all. Localization was relatively weak, overall.

Finally, the researchers tried another analysis on their data, looking whether their classifiers that were so successful above in modelling the subject's perception could be time-shifted. The graphs above track the gradual development, peaking, and decay of the visual perception, all in under one second. Could the classifier that works at 300 milliseconds also work at 500 milliseconds? If so, that would imply that the pattern of activity in the brain was similar, rather than moving about dynamically from one processing center and type to another.

Rough model of the researcher's inferences about processing steps consistent with time-shifting the classifiers over conscious (left) vs unconscious (right) data. They suggest that the conscious data points to successive and different processing steps not present in the unconscious case.

They found that, roughly speaking, their data supported a dramatic distinction between the two tested cases of consciously seen versus unconsciously seen and corrected located. Up to about 300 milliseconds, both were the same, characterized by a succession of visual processing steps where the classifiers for each time slice were useless for other time slices. Thereafter, for the next 500 milliseconds, the time-range of their models went up dramatically, but significantly less so for the conscious case than the unconscious case. This suggested to them the next model, where consciousness involves a series of further processing steps that are not just a long-term reverberation of the perception set up at 400 milliseconds (right side), but additional processes that look different in the EEG / MEG signals and require different classifiers to be picked up in data analysis (yellow, black, and blue curves on the left). These are not as tight as the earlier lock-step series of gestalts, but are detectably different.

 "The high level of decoding observed on seen trials, over a long time window of ∼270–800 ms, combined with a low level of off-diagonal temporal generalization beyond a fixed horizon of ∼160 ms, implies that a conscious location is successively encoded by a series of about four distinct stages, each terminating relatively sharply after a processing duration of ∼160 ms. Conversely, the lower decoding level and longer endurance observed for unconsciously perceived stimuli indicate that they do not enter into the same processing chain."

One has to conclude that these are mere hints of what is going on, though more accessible hints, via EEG, than those gained so painfully by fMRI and more invasive techniques. What these inferred extra processing steps are, where they take place, and how they relate to each other and to our subjective mind states, all remain shrouded in mystery, but more importantly, remain for future investigation.

• Who should pay for recessions? The FIRE sector, obviously.
• Pinkovskiy on Piketty. Another person seemingly fooled by the highly unusual nature of the 20th century, and the presumption of high growth as "normal".
• Jeb! says workers just need to be screwed harder.
• Has ISIS done what the US could not? Bring the Taliban begging?
• GOP gearing up for WW3.
• Lynyrd Skynyrd and all that ... the psychology of defeat and honor.
• One fiscal union works, the other one does not.
• A little nostalgia for early days of molecular biology.
• Bill Mitchell: South Korea has its economic head screwed on right.

Radio 1: Consciousness as a Streaming Information Service

The benchmark of modern theories of consciousness, by Bernard Baars, 1986: "A cognitive theory of consciousness."

One of the more contentious and mysterious areas in science is consciousness. Its existence was long denied by behaviorist psychology, yet long-standing schools of (idealistic) philosophy have held that it is the only thing that exists at all- that all else is an illusion, or at least subsidiary to the great reality which is consciousness. The universe itself is conscious!

Well, that is absurd, but it indicates the trickiness of a subject that attempts to explain our ability to think about subjects. One quickly gets into philosophical, if not logical, thickets. But it is pretty clear that inanimate matter doesn't think, while we and our fellow animals have, after billions of years of painful evolution, graded abilities to think about things, including ourselves, which arise from that organ behind our eyes ... the brain.

The study of consciousness is now a hot academic field, but that happened only in the last couple of decades, after the long hiatus of behaviorism. Bernard Baars's book from 1986 is a watershed in the field, presenting a functional theory of consciousness which has little to say about its physiological basis, but has profound things to say about its phenomenology, internal logic, and purpose. Its model (consciousness as global workspace) remains the basis for current work in the field.

In some respects, consciousness is extremely small, not to mention slow. We can barely attend to one thing at a time and remember maybe five to seven things in short term memory. Anything we do consciously must be done at a snail's pace, and only once learned becomes faster as it also becomes automatized, and sinks into the unconscious. The unconscious is, in contrast, endlessly vast, taking care of physiological functions all over the body, analyzing speech as we hear it, translating our thoughts into speech as we speak it, and on and on. It is a parallel, not serial, fleet of processors, some of which are very fast. Any action we take is made up wholly of unconscious mechanisms. All we are conscious of is maybe the goal of reaching for a cup, (or typing a letter on a keyboard), and all the calculation and activations in between are taken care of, like magic. A practiced typist won't even think about reaching for individual letters anymore, but will fluently type by the word, or more.

Yet consciousness does one thing that none of these other, learned, unconscious processes do, which is broadcast information extremely widely over a vast population of other (unconscious) processors. When reading some text- consciously, and only consciously- it is judged by a variety of processes that operate outside of immediate consciousness. Is the syntax correct? Is the style fashionable? Is the content interesting? Is the spelling correct? Is the meaning connected to the last sentence? The fact that these issues and many others can only be analyzed when one is "paying attention" has great meaning for the nature and role of consciousness.

I used to think that consciousness was the caboose on the train of thought. The classic experiments of Libet showed that for any action, even so-called voluntary action, electrodes can pick up activating signals well before one is conscious of a choice being made. And it is obvious with the slowness and high-level nature of consciousness that anything that enters it has gone through a great deal of prior processing at other levels of the system. But that doesn't mean that consciousness is only a spectator. No other process provides the integrating, broad reach across virtually every process in the brain, at a high level. Bringing something into consciousness means testing it for coherence at many levels, from spelling to consonance with our model of the world and hierarchy of goals.

Thus consciousness is an active function, specially tasked with broadcasting novel data far and wide over the multifarious pool of unconscious processes, which can each in turn comment on what they see. Is an object moving in the distance? Such an event exites special visual processors and calls to attention what may have not been there before. Conscious attention then allows us to consult our full cognitive battery of memory, world model, goals, etc. to decide what that object might be, in relation to our needs.

This leads to Baars to consider the stream of consciousness phenomenon. Why is it so tenuous and fluid? The fact is that we are virtually unable to attend to unchanging stimuli. Even loud noises, if repeated endlessly, fade out of awareness. The hedonistic treadmill is notorious for habituating us to any pleasure or good forture we may experience, which is soon taken for granted and cast aside in a search for the *next great thing. Consciousness concerns itself with information, in the formal computational sense. Whenever some activity starts to pall or become routine, it fades from consciousness. When learning new skills, this is a good thing, as sufficient repetition causes the whole process to go automatic and unconscious, like touch typing. Good or bad, the phenomenon seems to be universal as well as clearly adaptive. We are constantly on the hunt for novelty and information. Whatever is been-there-done-that is relegated to the dustbin of memory, or obliviousness.

It should also be obvious at this point why conciousness is so narrow and singular. If some data is supposed to be broadcast and commented on by many, indeed all available, other processes for integrated evaluation of an ambiguous or novel situation, there can only be one such item at a time. Consciousness is a radio station we listen to one story at a time. It is, and must be, a serial processor. Baars marvels at the then-trendy studies in biofeedback, which demonstrated that with enough training, virtually every part of the body and mind can be manipulated consciously. Individual muscles can be trained, blood pressure changed, etc. This phenomenon is coming into clinical use for various prosthetic appliances, which can be controlled by all sorts of muscles or thought patterns that wouldn't at first glance be candidates for actuators of voluntary action.

What gets access to consciousness? Again, unconscious processes lead the way. A big driver is our internal hierarchy of goals, one of the major unconscious functions that interacts with conciousness. Do we want a sandwich? A walk? A newspaper? Money? Survival? Life is complicated that way, as needs come up all the time at all levels. When a super-high level goal comes under fire, we are rivetted. Earthshaking experiences change conciousness itself, by re-arranging the unconscious contexts that underly it- it is not the earth that shakes, at least most of the time. Hallucinogens like LSD can have this kind of deep, long-lasting effect. On the other hand, if information comes along that violates a high-level model of reality particularly egregiously, we may also block it out rather than take on the problem of breaking down our painstakingly developed models of reality, (contexts, in Baars's teminology). Thus we fight cognitive dissonance to save them by rationalization, confirmation bias, denial, etc. Bears makes a point of the coherence that conscious contents must have to be useful, which rests on the cooperation of the many unconscious processes / contexts that join to create conscious contents. If these sub-processes conflict rather than cooperate, the result may not be conscious novelty, but rather indecision at lower levels and lack of consciousness on that topic.

Dreams naturally arrive on this train of thought as well, though Baars leaves that topic as an exercise for the reader. Baars does note that consciousness is heavily visual, with much less vivid access to abstractions than to scenes in front of our eyes. He speculates that this may indicate the evolutionary history of consciousness began in straight sensation, and only later attracted goal evaluation, retrospection, planning, inner speech, and all the other aspects that so enrich consciousness for us. During sleep we are released from the immediate layers of the goal system, so one might hypothesize that the consciousness apparatus turns towards free experimentation, using imagery to explore the deeper levels of our unconscious contexts- the goal, memory and prediction systems, which are susceptible to many complexities and internal contradictions. Dramatic role-playing, which is such staple of waking entertainment as a way into the mysteries of the human condition, are here personally staged for our continuing development.

Indeed, the theater is a leading metaphor for consciousness itself:

One can compare the mind of a man to a theater of indefinite depth whose apron is very narrow but whose stage becomes larger away from the apron. On this lighted apron [i.e. front of the stage] there is room for one actor only. He enters, gestures for a moment, and leaves; another arrives, then another, and so on ... Among the scenery and on the far-off stage ... . unknown evolutions take place incessantly among this crowd of actors of every kind, to furnish the stars who pass before our eyes one by one, as in a magic lantern.
-Hyppolite Taine, 1871

Lastly, one must wonder at how this is instantiated physically. The fact, and it does seem to be a fact, that consciousness involves wide broadcast of its narrow content, with far-flung systems both understanding what they are receiving and sending back ongoing commentary, requires a lingua franca of the mind. One aspect of this is clearly the gamma oscillation, which co-occurs with attentive consciousness and fits the model of something that unites broad but temporary coalitions of brain areas. But what is the code? What is the wave carrying? Is mere coordinated activation from one specialized area to another enough to form useful communication? That is hard to believe, but as yet, our tools are too narrow, or too crude in time or space resolution to figure out what this code might be.

Baars speculates that all goals and abstractions seem to have fleeting imagery in consciousness, again harkening back to the perceptual bias of consciousness. Our use of metaphor in language is naturally tied up with this phenomenon. Thus it may be imagery that is in some functional sense the lingua franca of the system, thought that still does not say how so many parts of the brain could recognize this language, especially the many humble parts that really do not seem to deal in imagery at all, like syntax checking, posture, "aha"- type solution verification, etc. Perhaps imagery forms a high-level language of aspirations, fears, planning, etc., without being needed for low level processes. This would tie in with the Jungian conception of the unconscious, with its core of archetypal images, our experience of them in dreams, and our need to develop and express them in art.

• Cognitive nature and nurture in Scrabble.
• But is the presidential campaign "news" enough to enter consciousness?
• People do have their own facts.
• On anger, and its cheap dismissal.
• Myths of the mythically-minded.
• A big key to poverty- violence, lawlessness, corruption.
• Like in Qatar.
• Best case scenario from the WSJ: wages are awful, peaked in 1972.
• The labor market won't do it alone ... we need better policy towards redistribution.
• Do we need "low cost, low wage" economies anywhere in the US? Where public assistance makes up the difference? No is the short answer.
• IBM luvs Louisiana.
• Reason prevails, barely, in Comcast merger.
• Props to the Hubble.
• Neonicotinoids even worse than thought.
• Islam: "But it also brought together peoples who’d never had a common worldview, or shared humanity, before." And.. "And there can be no freedom if we are stuck believing in people, like Hirsi Ali and her ilk." ... who had to move to the US due to Islamist threats on her life. The author is scattershot in his apologetics, but well-intentioned.
• Please don't use bar graphs for complex data.
• A little mesmerizing cymbalon.

The WSJ agrees- wages have been stagnant for a very long time in the US, clearly not related to productivity growth.

Brain Waves and Thought: Correlation or Causation?

A few studies start to use interventions to figure out what that symphony in the head is doing.

Electrical brain oscillations (waves) have been observed for over a hundred years, but it has been hard to pin down what they do. It has been extremely attractive to hypothesize that they knit together various areas of the brain in cognitive coalitions. The brain hosts a great deal of resting activity, and by this kind of theory, it is typically disorganized. The long-range rhythmic harmonization of various areas could form integrated cognition out of all this noise, both conducting information and linking it together, thus solving the binding problem in an elegant way that accords with the speed and spontenaity thought.

"Recently, it has become evident that these brain rhythms are not just a generic sign of the brain-at-work, but actually reflect a highly flexible mechanism for information encoding and transfer. In particular, it has been suggested that oscillatory synchronization between different areas of the cortex underlies the establishment of task-relevant networks."

But how can we tell whether all this is actually going on? Brain scanning can say what is active and when, to a rough degree, so we can trace a long train of activities that follow, say, the presentation of a face to someone's vision. But we can not see what is contained in those oscillations- the code remains rather secret. There are also many different oscillations, doing quite different things. Sleep involves some very heavy-duty slow waves, muscle coordination seems to involve medium frequency waves, as does restful but inattentive wakefulness, while the cognition-related hypotheses above generally invoke the higher frequency gamma waves.

Experimenters have started doing intervention studies that try to get beyond the correlation conundrum by actively manipulating electrical activity in the brain. Obviously, this is quite difficult to do. In rare instances, people are getting electrodes implanted in their brains for other reasons like treatment for epilepsy or Parkinson's, and allow limited research as a side project. The other option is to use transcranial magnetic fields or electrical stimulation, (shades of Frankenstein!), which are obviously rather gross interventions with little ability to focus effects to defined volumes inside the brain. Thankfully, however, some of the interesting activity of the brain happens close to the surface / skull.

The current researchers (review) use "transcranial alternating current stimulation", or tACS, which is pretty much putting current directly through the head with electrodes, presumably at low levels. They ask whether such stimulation, with its alternating current timed either in synchrony with the endogenous gamma rhythm (40 Hz), or against it, can alter a subject's perception according to the theory that brain oscillations constitute the cognitive binding of disparate brain regions.

Schematic of experiments. The visual area is in the rear of the brain.  Subjects were shown ambiguous dot designs that are interpreted as horizontal motion half the time. Then they were given direct electrical stimulation with electrodes at the back of the head, either in phase or out of phase with the endogenous gamma rhythm.

The perception they decide to use is visual motion, which has been correlated with gamma oscillation coherence between the right and left visual areas of the brain. An ambiguous motion on a screen can be interpreted as either vertical or horizontal motion, roughly half the time each. The subject is asked which one it is, and this reflects more about the state of their brain than it does about the visual stimulus. Some increased amount of coherence of gamma oscillations is known to correlate especially with (subjective) horizontal motion, intriguingly enough, and the researchers track that through their own subjects.

Then they apply the jumper cables. "A sinusoidally alternating current of 1,000 µA (peak-to-peak) was applied at 40 Hz continuously for 20 minutes during each session." What they found was that the perceived motion could be slightly, but significantly, shifted in the expected direction if brain oscillations are causally important to cognition. When applied in phase with the subject's endogenous cross-brain rhythm, subjective horizontal motion increased, while when it was applied out of phase, thus decreasing the cross-brain coherence, subjective horizontal motion decreased.

The result, that perception of motion is affected by the phase of the applied current.

Incidentally, the applied current causes slight but measurable change to the gamma coherence between the rear visual areas.

A couple of other papers use open-brain studies to reach the same conclusion, for other aspects of cognition:

"We found increases in high gamma (HG) power (70–250 Hz) time-locked to trial onset that remained elevated throughout the attentional allocation period over frontal, parietal, and visual areas. These HG power increases were modulated by the phase of the ongoing delta/theta (2–5 Hz) oscillation during attentional allocation. Critically, we found that the strength of this delta/theta phase-HG amplitude coupling predicted reaction times to detected targets on a trial-by-trial basis. These results highlight the role of delta/theta phase-HG amplitude coupling as a mechanism for sub-second facilitation and coordination within human fronto-parietal cortex that is guided by momentary attentional demands."

"Neocortical-ATN theta oscillatory phase synchrony of local field potentials and neocortical-theta-to-ATN-gamma cross-frequency coupling during presentation of complex photographic scenes predicted later memory for the scenes, demonstrating a key role for the ATN in human memory encoding."

So the role of high-frequency brain oscillations looks increasingly secure as a mode of information transfer, binding and management within the brain. Whether this phenomenon also constitutes conscious perception, forming the thoughts whose contents and sources are so disparate and wide-spread through the brain and body will be the next enormous question to tackle.

• What's up with the enlightenment, and the party of postmodernism and the ID?
• Too much of a good thing: people.
• What's so bad about inequality?
• Wingnut: Yes, I am a terrorist. And yup, I still want my guns. By the way, Christianity is true, Islam is a fairy tale.
• Rules, bureaucracy, freedom.
• "Several [studies] find that liberals score higher than conservatives on the need for cognition, which captures the individual’s chronic tendency to enjoy effortful forms of thinking."
• Judges caught taking millions to send children to private jails. Banks happy to do the money laundering.
• Lying ... pays extremely well.
• Worker's comp- another victim of class warfare.
• Grumpy bashes the US internet industry.
• Can one person drain a swamp of corruption?
• Can one person drain the world of hokum, lies, and magical thinking?

Epiphany Without a Cause: a Theory of Religion

Similarities between the near-death-experience, enlightenment, "spirituality", motivation, and the common core of religion.

I recently commented on near death experiences (NDEs), which have some very interesting characteristics. They are incredibly compelling, prompting both life changes in the person experiencing them, and gushing descriptions like "realer than real". They are highly emotional, typically positive, but sometimes negative. The subject feels love pervading the universe, and that this is knowlege which is not only true, but needs to be spread around to other people. But the experience is also vague, with a feeling of tremendous knowledge being gained, but an actuality of platitude after platitude, set in very stock archetypal images- angels, bright lights, butterflies, voices of god, telepathy, clouds.

Does this all sound familiar? It does to me. While one might take it, on the one hand, as evidence that religions are true in what they communicate, at least in some broad sense of a deep / alternate reality and motivation that unites them all, one might take it more skeptically as being a key to what makes humans so susceptible to religion and forms its internal wellspring, without being what it purports on its face.

But what is the point of such a mechanism, if we assume it is natural and biological, rather than a transmission from the beyond? The NDE may be the extreme form, by way of brain disconnection between areas that normally keep each other in check, of our normal positive motivational gestalt. As one is walking along, one occasionally reads into the landscape pleasant sensations- trees growing and birds singing, and more rarely, internal realizations and epiphanies of various kinds. We only know about some nice impression or great idea by way of an emotional reaction that wells up telling us that beauty or truth are at hand- that some nagging question has been solved, or some new perspective gained.

We must have a positive emotional system that is not simply the well-known, purely emotional reward system of drug addiction, but one that is more cognitively engaged, which labels our ideas and impressions with emotional valence and meaning. One might call it a key part of our imaginations. Untethered from inputs and more importantly, from its customary repression by normal cortical controls that harness it to only real, (or realistic) ideas, it might both gain intensity, and resort to dredging up archetypal dream-imagery for attachment.

Some partial form of this process might be at work in great art, and among the mystics of religion. Buddhists devote their lives to forms of meditation that fundamentally seek, I would suggest, to gain this NDE-like state of pure positivity and sense of vast knowledge and emotion, termed Nirvanna. Obviously, it is both extremely hard to attain, and all-to-fleeting when it happens. And it is not really knowledge of any this-world kind at all, merely the sense of knowledge.

This leads to a unifying theory of religion, where the NDE is merely the most intense form of a feeling that happens to everyone at various levels. Typically we seek to intensify this feeling through what are biologically and evolutionarily valid means- the true epiphany regarding a personal task which is indeed useful and oriented to the real world, and which gains us a precious practical advantage. But the lure of this feeling is strong. We can also seek it through what I would call false epiphanies, such as intense meditation, or the typical institutional religious apparatus of scripture, sermon, homilies, hymns, incense, etc. all purporting to vastly more meaning than they actually contain. Latter-day seekers even engage in postmodern philosophy!

This is reminiscent of Stephen Pinker's theory of music as being a kind of cheesecake for the mind. The evolutionary rationale of our capacity to make and appreciate music is not at all clear, but in any case, complex instruments like pianos that demand exquisite talent and dedication, and our unimaginable cultural wealth of composed and performed music, extend far beyond any evolutionary rationale. We are tickling pleasure centers whose original purpose was far more modest- perhaps the identification of a bird, or the seduction of a mate.

In similar fashion, religions seem to tickle a kind of meaning and positivity center in the brain, with more or less empty mantras and practices which yet carry intense meaningfulness. If they can inspire good morality, humility, and pleasant personal and communal feelings, that is wonderful. But religion can also form the nucleus of wider psychological complexes, attracting far darker tendencies like tribalism, magical thinking, superstition, intolerance, fanaticism, and patriarchial oppression, to generate thought and behavior systems that not only far outstrip their warrant, but go beyond all decency.

• A little pushback from the new atheists.
• Religion, violence, and psychological & moral primitivism.
• Religion, power, and Nietzsche.
• Religious morality is the least objective of all.
• Faith is a bad thing, generally.
• C. S. Lewis, revelation, heaven, etc.- uncritically reviewed.
• Greece has not been well-served by austerity. It can not "sink".
• Indoctrination, propaganda, and water-carrying for the 1% ... the war for home schooling.
• Terrorist or hero? You make the call.
• On the perpetuation of social class in the US.
• "Washington [state] now makes low-income families pay seven times the effective tax rate that the rich pay."
• Where does the Fed's free money go, and where should it go?
• Bill Mitchell on neo-feudalism and the degradation of our concept of citizenship.
• Gary Kasparov on the global culture clash, and why modern values are better than the other ones:

"It is less the famous clash of civilizations than an attempt by these 'time travelers' to hold on to their waning authority by stopping the advance of the ideas essential to an open society."

Realer Than Real

A second post on the topic of near death experiences, reviewing "Proof of Heaven" by Eben Alexander.

Santa Claus climbed down my chimney with a copy of "Proof of Heaven", another in a long line of books about the intense spiritual experiences that people have in many situations, but most frequently when close to death. The case is especially extraordinary in that the author is a practicing and scholarly neurosurgeon, and also in that his experience (NDE for short) was remarkably intense, lengthy, well-recalled, and unimpeded by inputs from the surroundings. There were no episodes of hearing what was actually going on in his room, rather just pure experiences of high and low spiritual engagement, interacting with god, angels, swamps, dark regions, etc.

There is no question that Alexander experienced all this, as he has recorded. The problem is with interpretation. His interpretation is absolute- that he was in contact with another reality, which he frequently describes as "realer than real", and "ultra-real", and that this reality was divine, culminating in god, and that he has an important message to bring back that we are loved, and that every one is important. This reality was outside his brain, and his good news is in part that "we are more than our physical body".

"Each and every one of us is deeply known and cared for by a Creator who cherishes us beyond any ability we have to comprehend. That knowledge must no longer remain a secret."

Alexander had long been an Episcopalian, and evidently an irregular church-goer while at the same time a somewhat religiously skeptical scientist. He is a bit unclear about his allegiences, really, but seems to have been a believer at some level (principally for family purposes, but not for scientific ones), and has spent his life in a church culture as well as in a scientific culture. The NDE dramatically confirmed him in his faith, but one has also to ask whether that long life of faith contributed to the content of, and especially to his interpretation of, the experience.

A good deal of interpretation turns on what various areas of the brain are responsible for, and when they were "off" or "on" during his (outer) coma and (inner) NDE. Alexander was in a coma for a week, and portrays his travels in NDE-land as taking place throughout this time, when his brain (the cortex, as measured by EEG and external responsiveness) was largely not active, by conventional metrics. Yet it is possible that it actually took place in a small portion of this time, say the last half hour before he woke up consciously. I certainly have had the experience of an intense, extensive dream taking place in a very brief time, clock-wise. Similarly, having one's life flash before ones eyes, as the expression has it, typically happens in a very brief clock time, but in a much longer subjective time. In short, our sense of time is another construction of the mind, and thus can not be taken at face value under these conditions.

He had a severe case of bacterial meningitis, from which he concludes that it was almost a perfect trauma for an NDE, debilitating the surface all over his brain, i.e. the cortex or higher functions, and possibly only in a layer-specific way. From this he concludes that none of his NDE experiences are possible by typically understood means, since all consciousness requires cortical functions, for instance for sensations of flying and seeing, hearing, etc. Even imagined and hallucinated experiences require their respective areas of the brain, as far as we know.

"The more I learned of my condition, and the more I sought, using the current scientific literature, to explain what had happened, the more I came up spectacularly short. Everything- the uncanny clarity of my vision, the clearness of my thoughts as pure conceptual flow- suggested higher, not lower, brain functioning. But my higher brain had not been around to do that work. 

The more I read of the 'scientific' explanations of what NDEs are, themore I was shocked by their flimsiness. And yet I also knew with chagrin that they were exactly the ones that the old 'me' would have pointed to vaguely if someone had asked me to 'expalin' what an NDE is. 

But people who weren't doctors couldn't be expected to know this.
...
Many others have seen that astonishing clarity of mind that often comes to demented elderly people just before they pass on, just as John had seen in his father (A phenomenon known as 'terminal lucidity'). There was no neuroscientific explanation for that."

That is all understandable, but I don't think we can be quite as categorical as he is. For the main issue is that we do not know quite how conciousness, let alone this kind of realer-than-real, trippy consciousness, works, even when clearly due to more mundane causes like LSD. It might well be an interplay between higher and lower brain functions, and it might additionally be that in consciousness, as in so many other aspects of cognitive science, cortical functions generally modulate and especially inhibit more central and primitive areas of the brain. The amygdala is a classic case, where its learning of fearful stimuli is permanent and gives rise to involuntary reactions, yet these can be damped by cognitive learning in higher levels of the brain, thereby keeping the subject on an even keel.

Similarly, one might imagine that some core of conscious awareness happens in the thalamic and lower regions of the brain, and that when the cortical brakes are off, that person might experience something precisely along the lines of the NDE- realer than real, incredibly moving, and patterned by very deep emotional archetypes and images, such as the flying through the air with angelic beings that Alexander experienced, among much else. It might be so moving that the person feels compelled to change his life or write books about it, and speaks of it as a scientific voyage, with great understanding and knowledge gained. But this knowledge boils down to very little in the end: that we are all loved by something. And that love seems, to put it mildly, inert, since people are still living and dying every day in misery, on our surface world. The only love in evidence out here is that which we give to each other.

Alexander is keen to recapture some of this experience, and does so in two ways. First is through greater church attendance. He movingly writes about realizing belatedly that he had not really appreciated the whole church experience, but that he now understands it as trying, in our mundane world, to recapture a glimmer of this spiritual experience, (whatever its interpretation), which some are fortunate enough to have intensely, but that all of us have some degree of appreciation for, accounting for the general celebrity of spiritual adepts, prophets, saints, etc. Second is an adventure into meditation, especially methods that claim to provide much faster achievement of out-of-body experiences than normal techniques provide. One has to ask, however, why repeating the experience is important if the knowledge he had gained was so certain, scientific, explicit, and useful. We don't repeat our greatest experiments in the lab just for the fun of it, typically.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to have eternal life and the ability to think outside the brain. Being eternally loved by some tremendous "Om" sounds a little less attractive, but OK. Alexander is understandably convinced by his overwhelming experience and his theological interpretation, but putting tradition & training aside, there is no theoretical reason from biology, computation, or physics, to take all this seriously as evidence of heaven or souls, etc. These are huge hypotheses (given the scientific corpus as it stands) that require different forms of evidence to address, particularly something less obviously subjective and archetypally templated. The weight of tradition may have arisen from a countless number of such mental / spiritual experiences, and if they are misinterpreted as I think they are, the tradition is not pointing us in the right direction, at least in scientific terms. That said, any encouragement we can have to not fear death is a good thing, since this is an important source of our worst characteristics- lack of courage, sentimentality about every reverse and misfortune, etc.

The heaven hypothesis, far from being proven, remains much more a matter of inner, archetypal reality than of any outer "real" reality, even on its own evidence. While it is true that much about the mind remains unexplained by science in its current state, that doesn't demand that vast hypotheses about alternate realities, and the invocation of quantum mechanics in consciousness (yes, Alexander even dabbles in this area) are reasonable, let alone proven. But it is such deep matter, and our consciousness remains such a mystery, both technically and theoretically, that it is understandable that those who go through the gauntlet of this ultimate, compellingly subjective experience would declare it not only real, but realer than real.

• Capitalism is not the only way.
• Stiglitz on credit, rent, and wealth. "It’s also true that people who make the most productive contributions, the ones who make lasers or transistors, or the inventor of the computer, DNA researchers — none of these are the top wealthiest people in the country. So if you look at the people who contributed the most, and the people who are there at the top, they’re not the same."
• Taxes have no effect on work effort.
• Demand-deficient recessions & stagnation are a scandal.
• Is god a proper name, or a form of capitalized cultural oppression?
• Good teachers are critically important.
• Millions of prime age workers are still on the sidelines.
• "We have managed to throw away between 5%-10% of the potential wealth of the North Atlantic, and we appear to have thrown it away permanently."
• "And that is tragic because if Alvin Hansen is right, and I think he is, the gap between these two lines represents an annual loss of output of approximately one trillion dollars."

Wave of in-Attention

The visual system uses rhythmic synchrony to gate data to higher levels.

While it is clear that the brain creates our mind, the vast mechanism linking the two remains mysterious in many respects. The connection is attested by countless conditions and experiments, more or less tragic, but while the science has been progressing well, the brain is an inscrutible organ, and much remains to be done.

A recent paper describes coordinated fMRI and EEG experiments on humans to tell whether top-down attention uses the mechanism of brain waves to filter visual processing coming up from the sensory system, so that we can look at what we want. The attention system is very interesting and perhaps not commonly understood. The executive areas of the brain reach back into all the sensory areas and elsewhere, such that information processing is a two-way street. Signals from the senses do not just all flood into consciousness at the same time, but we attend to one or another, and that requires not only filtering against all the other streams of incoming data, but also management of the active stream, to focus on what we are "interested" in. Indeed, with no sensation at all, we can, though the attention process, imagine a sensory stream, which actually animates the sensory regions involved to create an attenuated, but physically accurate, stream of internally-generated "sensation" information.

The researchers here were interested in the correlation between mental activity, particularly in the visual areas, and brain wave activity. They were looking at alpha waves, (7-12 kHz), not the gamma wave activity that has been associated (loosely) with consciousness. Alpha waves are known to be associated with relaxed, non-processing, but ready, states. The primary example is the visual (occipital, rear) area of the brain, with eyes closed and the subject relaxed but awake. The waves then decline in power / coherence when eyes are opened and a visual scene is being actively processed. Other forms of the alpha wave are strong in specific areas and kinds of sleep.

"... several studies using transcranial magnetic stimulation and visual entrainment of 10-Hz activity have demonstrated that the alpha rhythm plays a causal role in the allocation of attention, perception, and working memory maintenance."

Not surprisingly, the researchers found an inverse correlation between alpha waves and the attention someone is paying in a part of a visual scene. This suggests that alpha waves are used to quiet the waters in unattending areas, rather than to synchronize or convey data, as has been thought for other wave patterns. The unattending areas are still working and processing their visual fields, but they are closed off from attention and consciousness, more or less.

Visual processing pathway, showing how visual hemifields map to the respective occipital cortex hemispheres.

The setup was to place human subjects in an MRI machine, with EEG electrodes attached as well. They were shown visual images that had two parts, a left side and a right side. The left side (coming from each eye) maps in the brain to a left "hemifield", which is processed in the right side of the brain. The researchers instructed the subjects to pay attention to one or the other side, though images were presented to both sides. The attention was enforced by asking/testing whether the image was the same or different than a previous one.

Example of images presented to the subjects, where attention was directed to one or the other side (hemifield; arrows). This implies that the subject's eyes were kept straight ahead, focused on the center "X".

So the subjects were staring at a full visual field, but spent a couple of seconds attending (mentally) to one or the other side, either a face or a landscape. The MRI showed increased activity (i.e. blood flow) on the corresponding side of the brain's visual processing area, the occipital lobe at the back. It also showed increased activity in the facial recognition area (for faces; fusiform face area) or in a place recognition area (for landscapes; parahippocampal place area).

But the alpha wave pattern in the EEG consistently showed lower power in the areas active above, and higher power in the corresponding areas in the other hemisphere- the hemisphere where attention was not being focused.

Alpha wave power during directed visual attention, reflected by higher MRI signal on the R side, corresponding to attention to the Left visual hemifield. Alpha power is dramatically reduced as attention is being paid.

MRI signal simultaneous with the image above, with higher activity on the attending side (R).

What do they make of all this? They note that "Our findings add support to the notion that alpha band activity serves an active role in the allocation of resources." But not exactly in the way I had expected. As a last project, they look at something called the dorsal attention network, which is thought to be a mechanism where the frontal executive areas reach back to focus attention. This set of regions show similarly inverse MRI correlation with the alpha wave power in the visual area.

"We have demonstrated that the suppression of unattended information is reflected by active inhibition via increased alpha band activity in the unattended visual stream. Our findings add support to the notion that alpha band activity serves an active role in the allocation of resources." 

"We suggest that the mechanism of this gating by alpha activity is via phasic manipulation of higher frequency oscillations in the gamma band. In particular, the increase in alpha activity is important for the routing of information by depressing irrelevant processing of sustained stimulation, which is in stark contrast to the view that posterior alpha activity reflects idling or drowsiness."

Sadly, the work seems quite weak. They basically find that if one directs a person's attention to some item in a visual scene, the corresponding visual region in the brain shows dampened alpha wave activity, while the contralateral area in the other hemisphere shows heightened activity. That part was quite clear. The attention network result was not very strong. And the interpretation of all this is very unclear. Do some waves have something to do with attention and consciousness in some areas of the brain, while other waves at other frequencies and places relate to the opposite? That seems to be the lesson, which thus leaves us waiting for more work and insight into the matter.

• What worries you masters you.
• On the false consciousness of capitalism. "The capitalist marketplace generates a huge amount of anger".
• Same old fraud, same old Citi.
• "The oceans have become 30 percent more acidic over the past 200 years as a result of human activity."
• Which fosters more violence- Hollywood or Islam?
• Amazon goes evil.. towards coal.
• Eco-collapse by neonicotinoids.
• Inflation and growth still needed in Germany.
• Religion vs the internet.
• More on bankers, fraud, corruption, recurring economic catastrophe, etc.
• Why have a legitimate government at all?
• On the Takata story.

On the Truthiness of Morals

Are morals subjective or objective? A philosophical argument that really does have an answer.

It is hard to believe some of the topics that remain "live" in philosophical debate. Like the existence of free will, or the Christian trinity, or the existence of souls. Can you detect a theme here? Ideas from our religious history tend to have a very firm grip, coming as they originally did from our unconscious archetypes in the first place, no matter how little rational sense they make in a post-enlightenment intellectual world, i.e. reality. Philosophy departments the world over straddle a somewhat pernicious tension between keeping old philosophical questions alive out of honest historical study and respect for the past, versus, frankly, out of professional interest in having something to do and the safety of sticking to received perplexities, which is pretty much the opposite of what philosophy is supposed to be about.

I think the area of objective vs subjective morality is in this general position (See a lengthy discussion and series of apologetics by a proponent of moral objectivism). In theistic terms, morality is created by god, and either commanded via its prophets and scriptures, or, in more liberal versions, implanted by way of evolution to give us, if not universally moral behavior, at least close to universal discernment of what is good. The point of all this is sort of unclear, if god is all-powerful in the first place. Are we some kind of toy or weird experiment developed for its amusement?

And make no mistake, for the vast majority, religion is a its core a moral and moralistic enterprise. Scratch a theist, and you will find someone who believes that without god, all is permitted and society will fall to ruin. Indeed, the intense emotion these positions engender tell you right off the bat that something is fishy about the assertion of objective truth to morality. There are good evolutionary reasons for this nexus of groupishness and righteousness, of course, which makes it so odd that ...

Remarkably, the pull of objective morality goes far beyond the community of theists. Many philosophers, including the highly esteemed Derek Parfit, and even leading contributors to the atheist flagship magazine Free Inquiry, hold to the moral realist / objective position. Which is that morals have some kind of objective basis or "truth" value independent from our subjective pleasures and pains. This is a species of philosophical idealism, which generally believes in the reality of ideals, whether mathematical, like the ideal geometric forms, or moral, like those we feel ourselves striving for in some great communal project. Some even believe the ideals realer than the mundane reality under our feet. The connections to theism should be self-evident.

Parfit's recent work was reviewed by Peter Singer:

"Many people assume that rationality is always instrumental: reason can tell us only how to get what we want, but our basic wants and desires are beyond the scope of reasoning. Not so, Parfit argues. Just as we can grasp the truth that 1+1=2, so we can see that I have a reason to avoid suffering agony at some future time, regardless of whether I now care about, or have desires about, whether I will suffer agony at that time. We can also have reasons (though not always conclusive reasons) to prevent others from suffering agony. Such self-evident normative truths provide the basis for Parfit's defense of objectivity in ethics."

I do not see how this argument leaves the station. While there is a great role for moral reasoning in summing up our pains and pleasures to an optimized global judgement, the worm at the bottom of all this calculation remains pain and pleasure ... the very antithesis of objectivity, and the soul, if you will excuse me, of subjectivity.

This work was also reviewed by James Alexander (needs to be approached by a general internet search, not via this link):

"Parfit states the case against Political Theologians, against Nietzscheans, and against Kantian Constructivists as strongly as possible. His own position is unlike all of these in being resolutely impersonal. There is no privileged God, no privileged subject, and no intersubjective order emerging from the interaction of privileged subjects: there is, instead, an objective moral order. For Parfit this is an absolute presupposition: “If there were no such normative truths, nothing would matter, and we would have no reasons to try to decide how to live.” (Vol. II, p.619.) This view is what Parfit calls ‘Non-Metaphysical Non-Naturalist Normative Cognitivism’, or ‘Rationalism’ for short."

Excuse me, but this is nonsense. There is no need to go all axiomatic about where our reasons for "how to live" come from. They come from our inborn desires for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Or however else one might like to phrase it. They are fundamentally subjective, which one can cast either as the evil and selfish dictates of the struggle for existence, or our hard-won capacity to weigh our subjective interests in communities of interdependence.

Whatever one's view, morals begin as the simple, subjective dictate to stay alive, avoid pain, and seek pleasure. (And to get exactly as much ice cream as Bobby does.) The fact that we can record the past and forecast the future, and the fact that we depend on others for virtually every facet of our existence means that our moral universe is incredibly complicated, spinning from those simple beginnings an endless negotiation about what each person might reasonably want & get in a society where others are similar moral beings with their own aims and pains. In the reigning system of democracy, we have come to a stable stand-off where the right to be a subjectively guided human is accorded to each person, with maximal freedom to pursue happiness coupled with minimal freedom to impinge on the pursuits of others. (Except for corporations, which are specially blessed immortal, amoral, and politically omnipotent persons.)

None of this needs objective morality in any respect. The idea that what we think right and best is also objectively good, while the Nazis (to take a convenient shorthand) are incontrovertable, objective evil ... well, that is simply a fantasy, though one that is incredibly seductive and occasionally quite useful. Even if every person on the planet agrees with such judgements, they remain anchored in the founding motivation that what is good for us collectively is good, and the reverse is bad- a totally self-centered and subjective criterion for morality.

Suppose, for instance, that the world community of dophins used their powers of speech to tell us something truly momentous. That they are the superior beings on Earth, and we should, (by objective morality), spend all our efforts to make the planet better for them, not for us. What would we say to that? But ... all of our philosophers say that making the world better for humans is what it is all about. One can not imagine this being very persuasive. If the dophins could drop bombs on us, would we respect them then? Or perhaps if they showed us their ability to feel pain, would we accept them as equals, let alone as superiors?

Hopefully this helps to show that not only are morals descriptively subjective, expressing how we have always generated and used them. But any normative system telling us what we should be doing is likewise inescapably based on subjective criteria as well- what we think in our wisdom, is good for us. Whether "us" is individual or collective leads to the endless dramas of our lives, in art and reality- the tension that religion labors so hard to resolve, but which remains inescapable.

The historical struggle to extend collective moral behavior to ever larger groups does not depend on any objectivity in morals, either, other than the trivial objectivity they may gain from being written in the form of stones and books. We evolved to cleave to our own group and kill the other group. So how one defines the group is of monumental moral importance. The advent of agriculture and other technologies to support ever-denser populations generated enormous societies with fluid groupings. In our age, the nation has taken pre-eminent position as the group that stands ready to demonize others, take their land, and exterminate them. While it is laudable that groups of hundreds of millions have managed to become internally peaceful, it is, hopefully, clear that the basis of such "moral" behavior is no more objective than it ever was.

• And Robots? What do we owe them?
• Word on truthiness.
• 'Nother word on the truthiness of conservative austerity.
• Mythicized history, or historicized mythology? We don't have much to go on.
• Nor did Bill O'Reilly have more to go on. "I should estimate that reporting the historical truth about Jesus falls somewhere between documenting the facts about Robin Hood and Superman."
• A few notes on Wahabism. Think of the Christians!
• It is time for a right to work. Yes, a real right to work. A real job, real pay.
• Afghans are not very clear on the concept: "Qari Bilal, the IMU leader, was freed by the Afghan government at the direction of President Hamid Karzai, Afghan officials in Kunduz have told TOLONews, which identified Bilal as "a senior al-Qaeda leader who was released from prison on two separate occasions." He leads more than 300 fighters in Kunduz province and "has masterminded numerous suicide attacks and overseen the planting of roadside bombs throughout the province."
• On the general nature and ancient origin of the ATP synthase.
• What are, or were, unions for?
• Washington Post to compete with the Washington Times.
• Finance remains the enemy, and needs to be cut down to size. Specifically, we need accountability through less debt, less tax-deductibility, more equity exposure, and long-term clawbacks of ill-gotten gains.
• Merkel, Russia, and the coming winter.
• "Despite what you may think, Americans, on average, are driving more miles every day, not fewer, filling ever more fuel tanks with ever more gasoline. U.S. oil consumption is on an upward trajectory, climbing by 400,000 barrels per day in 2013 alone."
• This week in the WSJ: climate denialism still about. "The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began."