The Terrors of Sleep Paralysis

Imagine living in medieval times, when weird and unexplained phenomena, especially those related to strange subjective experiences (such as feeling that you're being suffocated by demons in your sleep), were seen as indications and evidence of malevolent spiritual forces at work. In the famous Bull of 1484, for instance, Pope Innocent VIII (don't you love the irony of these names?) declared that:

members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women [among many other evil things].

As Carl Sagan recounts in his book, The Demon Haunted World, "with this Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture, and execution of countless 'witches' all over Europe." This would lead to the publication of the infamous Malleus Maleficarum (the "Hammer of Witches"), one of the most vile, irrational, fearsome and cruel documents in all of human history. There's a chance even Hitler might have shuddered at it... Yay religion!?

Fortunately, and as usual, science has helped to shed some light on this otherwise dark and obscure phenomenon, saving people from medieval persecution and from forced mental institutionalization by discovering some of the underlying mechanisms at work, as well as their ubiquity because, believe it or not, it happens to most of us...

If you know someone whose life has been affected by the fear that they are being visited by probing aliens or haunted by evil spirits in the middle of the night, you might want to show them this video and assuage those feelings of fear and anguish...

And in case you are not aware of the distinction between an incubus and a succubus, and assuming these demons were not gay, incubi were 'seducers' of women, while succubi were 'seducers' of men, although if they're having their way with you while you're paralyzed, I'm not sure that would really count as 'seduction'...

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John Searle - Our Shared Condition: Consciousness

Studying consciousness is notoriously difficult, and until only the last couple of decades, very few intellectuals (apart from philosophers and psychologists) dared to even think about how to try to understand it. But with the rise of new disciplines and technologies, consciousness is starting to become the hot topic among academics. One of the problems, however, is that we don't yet quite have a theory about what consciousness is, and without an answer to that question, it's not always clear what disciplines and methods are most appropriate to use to study it.

In the following TEDTalk presentation, philosopher of mind John Searle (famous among other things for his Chinese room thought experiment) makes the case for studying consciousness, and for his own understanding, not so much of what consciousness is, but of how to approach the question. In the process, he shoots down some of the most popular objections to try to study consciousness scientifically, arguing that regardless of its ultimate ontological status, it's a biological process with multiple levels of description.

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Viktor Frankl on Those Who Survived The Holocaust and Those Who Did Not

I just finished reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. I'm not sure anyone can read that book without getting knots in one's throat and/or getting teary-eyed...

The book isn't so much an account of events that took place during the Holocaust, but of the individual, subjective experiences of those who were sent to concentration camps, what they had to endure, what happened to their minds and bodies, and the life-or-death dilemmas they had to confront on a daily basis. This is an account written by a particularly thoughtful, honest and courageous psychologist who was able to interpret such experiences in light of larger issues about humanity in general.

The following is just one chilling example of the kind of insight and epiphany that makes this book one everyone ought to read:

On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.

That quote just sends cold chills down my spine...

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Ken Jennings - Watson, Jeopardy and Me

During the industrial revolution, much of the manual labor that had hitherto been done by people was suddenly taken over by machines, who were faster, more accurate, cheaper, and didn't complain about safe working conditions, fair wages, paid sick days, maternity leave, holiday pay and so on, so they replaced people, who ended up losing their jobs.

Well, that's physical labor, we laughed, and thought that machines could never replace our raw brain power: we know how to think, how to reason, how to solve problems, how to calculate and compute, etc. Well, guess what? As Watson, the powerful IBM supercomputer proved a couple of years ago, you might not want to feel so confident that you have job security just because your job requires mental power... the machines are coming, and unlike the terminator who was shooting for John and Sarah Connor, these machines are shooting for your job!

In the following TEDTalks presentation, Ken Jennings, all-star Jeopardy champion, tells the story of his experience of being the best Jeopardy player of all time and getting beaten by a computer, and reflects on what this might mean for the future of humanity.

How long until your job is taken over by a computer?

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Dan Ariely - The Truth about Dishonesty

If I were to ask you if you are an honest person, chances are that you'd say yes. Yet, if we look at the details of your everyday behavior with a magnifying glass, we'd most likely discover all sorts of ways in which you lie, cheat and steal, on a regular basis! Notice the irony? In answering a question about your own honesty, you behave dishonestly! Well, it's not quite that straightforward. It's not so much that you'd be lying to me; it's more that you'd be lying to yourself, and then to the rest of us as a consequence.

Our minds have an incredible capacity for compartmentalization: we separate into distinct groups instances of what ought to be logically identical situations, such as when you create the double standard that it's okay for you to take home some office supplies from work, but that it's not okay to steal an equivalent amount of money from the petty cash box. The other thing we're really good at in this context is rationalization: when confronted with our dishonesty, we are masters at justifying our behavior and turning it around to sound heroic: "it's okay for me to illegally download music because that means I'm standing up for freedom and fighting the corruption of multi-billion dollar music label companies, so if you think about it, I'm kind of a moral hero."

Well, in the following RSA animated presentation, Dan Ariely shares some of the fascinating findings of how everyday people like you and me cheat all the time, and what might be some useful mechanisms we can use to decrease our own corruption.

If you liked that, you might also like to check our our selection of TED Talk presentations.

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Substance Dualism

Although most philosophers of mind are probably physicalists, there is still a live debate about the ontological status of mind: is it physical or immaterial?

On one side of the debate are those who argue that thoughts are not physical, and therefore cannot be generated by something physical. Apart from obvious religious and soteriological reasons, one of the more popular lines of argument goes roughly as follows: when we have a complete physical description of the brain (and of that which is perceived by the brain), there is still something about the qualitative nature of first-person subjective experiences (or qualia) that is not accounted for, so there must be something non-physical to explain this. In other words, the physicalist account leaves something rather important out of the picture, namely subjectivity and intentionality (or the 'aboutness' of mental experience), and that needs to be explained.

On the other side, the idea of an immaterial soul seems perhaps even more mysterious than the problems with physicalism: how can a non-physical substance interact causally with the physical body? What is it about this non-physical stuff that allows it to think and have first-person subjective experiences in the first place, without just being defined into having it? How can we possibly verify its existence (without arguing in a circle)? In fact, the evidence that we do have when we study the brain, especially when it suffers damage that affects very specific cognitive capacities, seems to indicate that even though we may not know the exact mechanism through which brain processes produce consciousness, that's nevertheless what happens.

But why listen to me when we have a beautiful and nicely organized animation that will take you through the steps to analyze this debate?

Did I say a beautiful animation? I meant two :)

Isn't it amazing how many problems fade away when you organize your thoughts? :)

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Steven Pinker on Taboos, Political Correctness and Dissent

It's Steven Pinker... he's got things to say, and you already know that whether you agree with his views or not, he's always interesting to listen to, and he always manages to stimulate you to think about those interesting things yourself, so why not have a listen to a few things he has to say?

And if you want a longer (and hilarious) treatment of these and other related questions, don't forget you can find his lecture on cursing, veiled threats and other fascinating ways in which our use of language sometimes betrays certain aspects of how our minds work, in this fascinating lecture.

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Abusive Obsessive-Compulsive Has to Punch Wife Exactly 20 Times

You're probably already aware that having a mental disorder is a nightmare in its own right, but have you ever wondered what it would be like to have multiple mental disorders at once? The folks at The Onion have:

In that case, if she's not making mistakes in sets of 20 all at once, the beatings are kind of her fault, right? :)

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Jane Goodall on Chimpanzees and Human Emotions

Jane Goodall's story of scientific discovery is an amazing one, but even more amazing are the stories that she shares with the world, the way she tells these stories, and the optimism with which she confronts pressing global issues such as conservation, poverty, education, deforestation, etc.

If you want a basic introduction to the wonders and mysteries of our closest evolutionary cousins, you could probably not do better than to listen to Jane Goodall recount some fascinating incidents that have shed so much light into our understanding of these adorable creatures.

But she also carries a powerful ethical message about the need for more humane, sustainable practices, and for the moral obligation we have to those around us and to future generations at whose expense we get to lead lavish and profligate lifestyles. And because rhetoric can inspire but not necessarily guide, she also offers some very practical examples of programs, big and small, already in place and from which we could learn how to make the world a better place for everyone.

I could listen to her speak all day long :)

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Sean Carroll - The Case for Naturalism

If you follow current events in the world of public intellectualism, you probably know that over the past few decades, and increasingly over the past couple of years, some prominent physicists (Richard Feynman, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, and Lawrence Krauss, for instance) have been taking jabs at philosophy. The usual charge is that philosophy doesn't help us make scientific progress, which, for the most part, is kind of true. But, of course, who ever said that the job of philosophy is to make scientific progress? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that what science is supposed to do?

You probably wouldn't criticize a sculptor for not hitting a home run, for not breaking a 100-meter dash world record, for not building the LHC, or for not discovering the Higgs Boson, etc. Why? Because that's not what sculpture is about! So for those physicists, all of whom I love but who don't know what the hell philosophy is or even what it's supposed to do, please stop talking about things over which you have no expertise. You kind of sound as ignorant as religious fundamentalists when they talk about science...

One of the physicists who does understand the ways in which philosophy and science can make great allies and help each other in their respective disciplines, however, is Sean Carroll. He's a great thinker, with a gift for precision, clarity and profundity. The following video has nothing to do with the physics/philosophy stuff I mentioned above, but it is a nice example of just how great he is at breaking down complex ideas into an accessible and nicely organized format without sounding the least bit condescending:

I'll check out the rest of this apparent debate later on, and if it's good, I'll post it in its entirety in the weeks to follow.

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Search Crews Continue To Look For Obviously Dead Hikers

Because of all their awkwardness and social ineptitude, and due to their literalist interpretation of things, autistic people may often seem to be blind to a reality that's obvious to the rest of us. But sometimes that's a two-way street because they can often see as obvious what the rest of us may be blissfully unaware of or willfully blind to...

And almost no one can strike that perfect balance between making you feel uncomfortable about your own views and making you laugh hysterically the way The Onion can:

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Test Your Awareness : Whodunnit? And Look Out for Bikers!

Summer is here, and those of us who are sick of driving and public transportation, or just environmentally or health conscious, are ditching conventional means of commuting and resorting to biking instead.

And as the number of bikers is increasing, tension between drivers, pedestrians and bikers seems to be on the rise, so the first thing I would recommend is that we all chill down a little and become more considerate of all our fellow commuters, no matter how they commute.

And especially for those who drive cars (aka, metal death machines), please be aware that, as human beings, you have physical and cognitive blind spots, and that no matter how good a driver you are, any sudden maneuver may result in a collision that may seriously hurt (or possibly even kill) those of us who are trying to reduce our CO2 footprint by riding bikes.

Don't believe that you might miss something that's right in front of your eyes? Well, you could always check out the invisible gorilla test to see how fallible human attention is, or you could try to solve the crime below, and see how your own observational skills stack up:

Did you pass with flying colors? I didn't think so. So, please, drive with caution, respect traffic rules, be courteous and remember that getting to your destination a minute later is totally worth not living with the guilt of having killed someone because you got impatient and rushed into a thoughtless decision.

In other words, I'm concerned for my life. Don't run me over!!! :)

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Breaking the Code - The Biography of Alan Turing

Computers don't grow on trees, and even though they are ubiquitous today, that wasn't always the case. In fact, they've only been around for less than a hundred years, and although there are certain folks to whom we owe a huge debt of gratitude for laying down the conceptual foundations (the philosopher Leibniz for inventing the binary language system upon which programming depends, for instance, or the enchantress of numbers Ada Lovelace's brilliant insight into the power of computation rather than mere calculation), the individual most directly responsible for modern computation is Alan Turing.

His was a remarkable life, full of genius, insight, inspiration, courage and intellectual creativity. His contributions during World War II (like the fact he broke the Nazi code and was privy to the information sent in secret messages to Hitler and his thugs even before they received it) may be directly responsible for saving hundreds of thousands of lives, and of accelerating the end of the war.

For all of his importance, however, his life was also very tragic. Because of the top-secret nature of his mathematical work during the war, he was never officially recognized. And to add insult to injury, his homosexuality was used to ban him from his own work, to treat him worse than a common criminal, and eventually it led to his suicide. This is his life:

For more on Turing's mathematical and philosophical importance, check out two of my favorite documentaries in this whole blog: Dangerous Knowledge with David Malone, and The Secret Life of Chaos with Jim Al-Khalili.

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Daniel Dennett - How to Tell If You're an Atheist

The human mind is both beautiful and frustrating. We have minds that can contemplate the meaning of infinity and consciousness, on the one hand, and we can be blind to what's right in front of us, we can lie to ourselves, we can simultaneously embrace mutually exclusive beliefs, and we can be in complete denial about the most obvious of things, especially when those things have something challenging to say about our identity.

There's a clinical condition called anosognosia. Patients with this condition have suffered some sort of disability, but are completely unaware of it (you can watch V.S. Ramachandran to learn more). But it doesn't have to be only a medical condition. Anosognosia, or some variation thereof, affects us all in various ways and to varying degrees. At bottom, it's a question of self-knowledge and whether our beliefs about ourselves are consistent with the available evidence.

So, philosopher Daniel Dennett started to wonder about a possibly related condition: atheism-denial :)  Are you one? If you're not sure, here's how you can tell (and learn some philosophy along the way, like the use-mention fallacy, thanks to the funny examples he uses to make various conceptual points). And before you dismiss the idea, just consider that if there's a good chance your own pastor (rabbi, mula, swami, take your pick) might be an atheist, maybe you are too...

You know what I would be surprised to find? A redneck atheist :)

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What Is the Self?

If you're not used to thinking philosophically, here's a bit of a conceptual conundrum for you: you have certain personal and professional goals, projects and desires that you'd like to accomplish and satisfy. And presumably, much of what you do is, to varying degrees, something that you do for your the sake of your future self. You are used to thinking that you have a self, that you will continue to have an enduring self through time, and that there are boundaries that separate your self from others and the rest of the world.

So what is this self thing that makes you you? Is it bodily identity? Psychological continuity? Some immaterial soul? A bunch of neurons that are not themselves conscious and which are bundled together in ever-changing patterns without centralized control? There are no answers in the following short clip, just questions that may be interesting to think about and whose conclusions may imply we ought to change certain attitudes toward self and others.

Of course, if Hume was right, there is no self... it's just an illusion... and maybe our moral attitudes may have to radically change to correspond to that fact.

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David Eagleman - The Brain and the Law

There is almost universal agreement among philosophers, neuroscientists, cognitive psychologists, and other mind researchers that the mind has a physical basis in the brain. Sure, we don't yet understand the particular mechanism through which the brain produces conscious experience, but most serious researchers into the field no longer buy the antiquated notion of an immaterial soul.

But as philosophers have recognized for thousands of years, if the basis of consciousness is physical, then our minds are the result of physical laws of causality, and that creates all sorts of problems for the notion of free will. Whether we have any free will at all is debatable, but there is no doubt that, at the very least, there is a lot less of it than we normally imagine.

This is an interesting intellectual question, but it's also an important practical question everyone should care about because free will is directly tied to the question of moral responsibility: are people responsible for their actions? Suppose we have no free will; what do we do about the 'justice' system? Should we let criminals go free because they're not really culpable for what they've done? That's exactly the kind of question that David Eagleman tries to explore in the following fascinating presentation

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Sam Harris on Free Will

The religious instinct is not merely limited to belief in God and supernatural agents. And to varying degrees, even hard-core atheists tend to be religious in this sense, since they still adopt beliefs that may be religious in origin. It's a little too convenient that when one denies the existence of God, most other beliefs are not similarly rejected, but why should this be the case?

If we reject God, we can't simply assume the reality of the continued identity of the self (or even its very existence), an objective basis for morality, a rational basis for science, the existence of free will, the reality of the external world, the very idea of objective truth, etc. We need to mount arguments and evidence in support of these ideas if we want to be able to have a right to such beliefs.

And Sam Harris thinks we're lying to ourselves if we believe that our wills are free. His arguments are not particularly interesting or new here (and to many not even convincing). Harris may have just written a concise little book on the subject, but he's no Nietzsche, who clinched the case against free will and the self even more concisely, in less than a paragraph:

A thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, and not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think’. It thinks: but that this ‘it’ is precisely the famous old ‘ego’ is, to put it mildly, only a superstition, an assertion, and assuredly not an ‘immediate certainty’. . . . Even the ‘it’ contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: ‘thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently —’.

But where Harris is interesting (and I've subscribed to this line of thinking for at least a decade now) is in what he has to say about the implications of the denial of free will: it doesn't de-humanize us. This recognition humanizes us because it helps us to understand that instead of jumping to conclusions and throwing blame around, as we're wont to do, maybe we need to be more compassionate and understand that people are not fully free, and that their actions are at least partly to blame on circumstances and other causal antecedents...

While I agree with a good number of points made by Harris, there is at least one fundamental point on which he seems to be utterly confused: his denial of free will cannot be a scientific conclusion when he argues that there is no possible world in which free will could, even in principle, exist. If this is not a testable claim that could be decided by empirical evidence but simply by conceptual analysis (as I would be perfectly happy to do), then this is a philosophical conclusion... and people say philosophy doesn't make progress :)

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The Secret You

What does it mean to be you? How is it that the physical matter making up the many neurons in your brain somehow produce your subjective, conscious experience? Are your neurons themselves conscious? While we're at it, what exactly is consciousness? Where does your sense of self come from? Do you actually have a self? Can you be made to experience your self from outside your body? Can your consciousness be transferred to an inanimate object, or to someone else's body? If you are your consciousness somehow, do you get to consciously make your own choices, or are these determined by factors over which you have no conscious awareness and control?

Those are just some of the fascinating questions that Marcus du Sautoy explores in the following mind-bending documentary that gets right to the intersection of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience:

For more, check out the Brainspotting tag.

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Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Body & Soul

It took Darwin about twenty years to publish the theory that made him feel like he was confessing to a murder (God's perhaps?), but how did he come to articulate the theory in his own mind? His voyage in the HMS Beagle had a lot to do with it, certainly, but it's not all confined to the Galapagos Islands only, nor was it confined to his observations of non-human animals...

Part of it started with his politically and philosophically liberal views concerning the equality of all human beings, and the logical consequences of such equality: if we're all equal, then slavery, and the exploitation of blacks and other foreigners must be wrong.

In the first part of this truly fascinating documentary, Andrew Marr explores the scientific idea of natural selection as formulated by Darwin, as well as some of the ways in which this description of the living world has taken on a life of its own, with implications that go far beyond the world of science, revolutionizing the way we think about ourselves, challenging the need for a creator, undermining dogma, tradition and authority, and making us question the origin and nature of human morality.

Happy birthday, Chuck!

He's an enthusiastic fellow, isn't he? :)

And yes, I may have failed to mention there would be some remarks about thinkers as wide-ranging as Marx, Nietzsche, Malthus, J.B.S. Haldane, William Hamilton and George Price, but now you know :)

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The Chinese Room Thought Experiment

The rise of computers in the 20th century, and especially their exponentially increasing computational capacity and speed, has gotten many curious minds to speculate as to whether it is possible at some point to create computers that can think. Those who believe in things like the computational singularity, such as David Chalmers, think it's just a matter of time before we have to bow down to our new mechanized overlords.

Here is a Philosophy Bites interview with Chalmers on just such a question:

Others, like philosopher John Searle, however, think that, given everything we know about computation, it is impossible, even in principle, for computers ever to think, no matter their computational capacity. To prove this point, Searle came up with what has come to be regarded, by supporters and detractors alike, as a classic thought experiment: the Chinese room, which you get to learn about in the following 60 seconds.

For more on questions of mind, consciousness, personal identity, etc., visit the Brainspotting tag.

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