Neuroscience cannot read your mind
April 3, 2010
I’ve written about Newtonian science and the simple cause and effect interpretation of the physical universe that it embodies, and how the mathematics of complexity and statistical interpretations of the physical universe, such as quantum mechanics, have superseded that mechanistic view. What I would like to suggest is that neuroscience is treading the same path in its interpretation of the mind as a mechanistic system demonstrable by a physical understanding of brain function. This is not a new idea as far as I know, but I need to ‘say it out loud’ to show myself that I know where the limits lie.
I’ve been thinking about whether I believe that the mind could be replaced by the internet, and I think ‘no, but there could be functions that could be farmed out such as memory‘. Here I’m going to explore that idea with specific reference to the blossoming fields of neuroscience, neuromarketing, neuroethics and neuro-anything-else-they-can-think-of.
The mathematics of complexity and uncertainty, chaos theory, complex systems, or however else we wish to express the concept, all share the same fundamental tenet; that simple mathematical relationships can give in unpredictable results. This is shown by the Lorentz’s Butterfly Effect, but it it is also embodied in Godel’s incompleteness theorem and the Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment. To me these are all similar aspects of the same idea; that we can never measure all variables sufficiently well to be able to have a 100% reliable model.
If we transpose this notion to the pursuit of neuroscience, where claims are being made almost to the point of being able to read the minds of experimental subjects, we should at least consider the nature of the systems involved before we accept the validity or even applicability these kind of claims.
Brain structure is primarily a function of the expression of DNA of the individual and DNA as a replicator a very mechanistic and ultimately predictable system. I say this because genes are quite simple. Their complexity is in their size, not their building blocks. That the Human Genome Project was able to sequence our genes using automated techniques suggests that a mechanistic approach to reading that material is appropriate. However once the brain has started to develop neuronal connectivity in response to stimuli (memories start to be formed in response to experience), that mechanistic interpretation is no longer applicable without having a set of meta-data that shows the context under which those connections are made.
What neuroscientists are doing using fMRI is establishing a work-book of that contextual meta-data under experimental conditions, and its very impressive that they are managing to exclude enough of the outside world to be able to see human responses such as lying and trust and jealousy in the data that they collect. I’m sure that, on average, they are seeing some functions of mind being expressed physically. BUT, what cannot, and indeed must not, be inferred from this work is that the responses from one individual’s brain can be directly equated to the responses of another individual’s brain.
We could go though a significant proportion of the human race, taking subjects from all walks of life and every corner of the globe and find average response curves for each chunk of the brain, but we would never be able to replicate the contextual meta-data to a fine enough resolution to be able to counter Godel’s incompleteness theorem as it applies to basic information or the individual’s brain development in response to experiences from its own unique viewpoint. The mechanistic interpretation of mind, that equates brain activity to mind function, breaks down under existing mathematical interpretations of the physical universe. We would need a whole new mathematics to be able to do what is currently being claimed for neuroscience. To be fair to the neuroscientists, many of them shy away from the grand claims, but enough are not that we see fMRI being cited in legal cases. Far from free will being dead and neuroscience proving a deterministic worldview, it is showing just how poor our quantitative understanding of mind really is.
This is not a new experience. Psychoanalysis promised an understanding of mind and motivation at the beginning and middle of the 20th century and arguably was the basis for the construction of the consumerist global economy. I wonder how far neuroscience will be pushed outside the lab.
Proponents see recent fMRI science as analogous to genetic fingerprinting; as a quantitative diagnostic tool. I would argue that it is more analogous to a form of psychoanalysis where interpretation is automated. In many of the new institutes and companies working with fMRI we see the objections to the wider application of fMRI-centered neuroscience being characterised as philosophical and relating to ideas of free will and determinism. I don’t see that as a valid or even relevant conflation. My counter-claim is that what is being claimed for neuroscience is not mathematically possible and that in ignoring the role of mathematical complexity scientists, lawmakers, economists and others are acting unethically. What is being seen is the brain and not the mind. That the brains responses are linked to the mind shouldn’t be a surprise but the simple Newtonian idea of cause and effect is not applicable where 100 billion neurons each have around 7,000 synapses many of which have been influenced by memory formation or physical conditions since, or even before, birth. Simply put, just because a specific cubic centimeter of grey matter demands extra blood flow in response to the same stimuli, it doesn’t mean its for the same reason.
If it is possible to mathematically model the mind, then it should be considered as a complex system inhabiting another complex system (the brain) and informed by a set of contextual meta-data (memories and experiences) as well as environmental stimuli. Divining motivation from brain activity is a step too far mathematically, but an approximation could be possible with a sufficiently large database to populate response curves with experimental data. Whether those response curves could provide useful predictive data can’t be known at this point, but what we can say with a good degree of certainty is that you’d need a large n-value to compensate for the free variables in two complex systems and the contextual meta-data.
The Virtual Revolution – Part Four
February 21, 2010
Part Four – Homo Interneticus sees the good Doctor approaching some of the more interesting questions regarding the internet, though she still doesn’t really do any digging into the whole shared cognition/nature of reality connundrum which is one of my current favorites.
So just to go through some of the points raised;
Has Facebook change the nature of friendship ? It turns out that no, its just re-branded it.
Your friends and social group are still the same number and mostly the same people that they would have been without the software.
Which begs the question; why is it so successful if it offers no new reach to your social circle ?
Prof Robin Dunbar casually dropped the bomb that apart from the 150-ish people that you can claim as your clan/social circle/address book everyone else on your friends list is probably just a voyeur. So has Facebook replaced the soap opera as the acceptable face of curtain twitching ? Find your own surrogate family to watch out of interest, only now its not the Duckworths or the Fowlers. In the UK we’ve seen soap opera viewing figures decline by 50% over the last 10 years or so, it’d be interesting to know how much is direct replacement activity.
Update – No, not soap operas, reality TV shows. Those surplus friends are our own personalised Big Brothers.
We had Sherry Turkle (great name !) talking about the consumption of the private person as a result of the action of ubiquitous sharing of thought and activity, and about feeling obliged to openness in the networked society.
I’m not sure what to think about that comment. I’m not sure if that is simply a misunderstanding of the type of openness that the net engenders or an attempt to big up the profession of the psychologist (of which she is one) as professional listeners, or am I confusing them with psychiatrists ?
For myself I’m only open to the degree that I want to be. I feel no compunction about not answering personal questions if asked on the web. I don’t volunteer my deepest and darkest secrets. I treat this form of mediated interaction as I would a conversation in a pub, and assume that the interested will continue to read and the rest will slope off to the bar and find a more apposite conversation.
Information overload and associative vs linear data storage/retrieval was the next big topic. One that is close to my heart. Here the programme missed a big opportunity in not addressing one of the fastest moving sectors of quantitative neuroscience and its philosophical implications for fields as diverse as democracy & law and the nature of the mind. I’m not going to delve into all that right here right now, that’s for a later date. Suffice it to say that the Obama web campaign is small fry if a mathematical model of mind can be shared.
I’m going to follow up with a bit of reading around Vannevar Bush and Prof David Nichols because I don’t know their work.
In her summary the doctor passed two comments that I’ll paraphrase as;
At its best the internet may be an equivalent to the serendipity of the city – meaning that the melting pot of ideas and beliefs that has produced most of modern world’s innovation in science, technology, art and commerce is there to be had in a free and open web. I agree utterly and completely, its just a shame that in its efforts for global reach it has become fragmented and balkanised, as subsumed by commercial and political interests as any piece of prime real estate.
And second; the the web has the power to liberate humanity. I’m not sure what from though, presumably the commercial and political interests, but it might be more interesting if it were to free us from the constraints of our own inhibitions and provide an opportunity to evolve our thoughts past division and towards unity. The global mind as it was suggested.
The Virtual Revolution – Part Three, finally we’re getting there
February 14, 2010
At last the BBC’c Virtual Revolution Series series is starting to deliver with Part Three – The Price of Free.
I get the feeling that this is ground that the presenter is much more confident on. Away from that pesky technical detail which for some reason she still characterises as West Coast techno-utopian and on to the developing sociology of the world wide web. I’m sorry but you can’t say that the body of the web is independent of its internet bones. But I’ll stop flogging that particular horse as I’ve dealt with in in parts one and two of this four parter.
The first half of the programme is a pretty decent historical analysis of the development of the commercial internet, from the faltering steps of the Dot.com boom/bust (enter Martha Lane Fox of lastminute.com) and Amazon’s winning model, through Google’s idealistic beginnings and on to the global trade in personal information.
The central position of this episode is that we don’t actually know what the current winning commercial model of ‘targeted advertising using mass surveillance of web activity in order to support free at the point of delivery services’ will cost in socialogical terms in the long term. Its a good and relevant question given the relative youth, the relatively-unregulated nature of and global pervasiveness of the web, but one that you can pose about any commercial or even institutional activity.
Lets have a look at that statement; The other big ‘free at the point of delivery’ services that we get are more often supplied by government (in the UK). A few examples being the police, the health service, the armed forces & the legal system. We pay generalised taxes to support those services and the government decides how to apportion that money to those services. We don’t currently pay an Army tax which goes up every time the UK fights a war and down when peace comes (that could really change the political dynamic of war fighting, no ?), nor do we pay an explicit police tax (though much of the UK’s policing is supported by locally raised taxation rather than generalised taxation), we definitely don’t pay an NHS tax.
No, we pay income tax and VAT (purchase tax) that is raised by the government knowing about financial transactions that we as individuals choose to make. We accept that the services provided cost us money, and are willing to forgo some privacy in order that the money may be collected by an authority that is not partial or commercially oriented.
And that is the answer that this program seems to come up with; the bargain that we make with the commercial entity that is today’s web is ‘information for service and we, the service providers, will use the information however we want’. If internet users don’t know that this is the bargain that they are making they should, but at the end of the day targeted advertising is a form of taxation. The big issue with that transaction is that since the entities collecting the information are not governments accountable to electorates, they cannot be relied upon to treat the information with the respect that it deserves. Indeed as commercial organisations they cannot be relied upon to exist from one year to the next, so any regulation of data collection has a built-in trans-generational issue to get over as companies ‘inherit’ on another’s databases.
Its perhaps interesting to note that direct the parallel of this argument, the mass surveillance of web traffic by governments, is one that is massively contentious. It is challenged by legislators and civil society alike and portrayed as the end of responsible government by many and the beginning of it by some.
Next week’s program is going all psyche major and looking at a global shift in the ethics and understanding of privacy could mean. I’m going to set some homework – please read the PEW centre’s report on Teenagers use of social networks.
The Virtual Revolution – Part Two, better
February 7, 2010
The second of the BBC’s Virtual Revolution season was much better than Part One.
This episode directly contradicted the first episode on several occasions, which is a good thing for reasons that I spelt out in my previous post on this subject.
One of my continuing gripes though is this strange meme that the internet is unregulated. Communications traffic is regulated in almost every nation state in the world. The reporter managed to tear herself away from West Coast USA for a few moments, so could easily have asked around to discover this for herself.
Provision of the physical means of communication is regulated in most states and the routing infrastructure is certainly subject to regulatory oversight. Just because you don’t sign a specific ‘internet traffic’ contract with your telecoms service provider doesn’t mean that this traffic is not covered under the contract that you have with them and hence the regulations that they come under.
One of the strangest comments was that ICANN wasn’t subject to national control !? OK, there is no longer a direct chain of command eminanting from the US government, but so long as ICANN is an incorporated entity under US law it is subject to US government oversight. Its only 3 years since they actually let that chain of command slip somewhat, so don’t fool yourself that its gone entirely.
As a former mobile telecoms professional I used to install new national scale mobile phone systems around Europe. Each country had its own stance on control of telecoms; from the former Russian states that only had one provider and which required all handsets and phone lines to be registered to named individuals, to the liberalised markets where only the handset identifier was required to enable pay-as-you-go users to log on. The traffic through both models were equally subject to regulation, only the degree of specificity to a individual’s comms traffic is different.
So again the techno-utopian view was put forward again, that the net subverts and opens, only this time some more realistic downsides were addressed. Don’t misunderstand I like that tech can be used to pry open closed networks, but the thing is that every sub-network has a gateway that can be shut, so to say that what we have now is anything but a learning period for govts is (agreeing with the programme here) premature. That you can get round Iran’s IP filters is no great trick, all that means is that you know more than the Iranians about the technology that is in place. You have to remember that every nation still has access to the big off switch, they can still turn the routers off. So I’ll repeat what I said in my last review – until there is an entirely new infrastructure that is not regulated or government controlled the idea that the WWW is a free space is simply not true. A combination of satellites and dynamic mesh networks would do the job. Anyone fancy clubbing together to buy a constellation of broadband satellites ? I reckon 20 or so would probably do.
I wish that folks who talk about science & tech in the media would sometimes actually try and seek out people really involved with the deep and dirty bits, not just the headline acts and talking heads. Just because you started a fight 10 years ago it doesn’t mean that you are still up to date on the weapons being employed. Just as the net can become Balkanised, the self-reinforcing argument of automatic internet freedom has also become an unrealistic meme.
The Ethics of Data Mining – Mediated Memory
January 9, 2010
I’m going to pose myself questions questions here rather than answer them. Self-indulgent I know, but hell its my party and I’ll cry if I want to 
Digital data has some properties that could or should impact on ethics. I’m going to take a look at three of them this time;
It is non-corporeal, so possibly not as susceptible to the ravages of time as paper would be
It is transmissible, so probably not subject to physical location
It is a record of events that may be edited or erased leaving little or no evidence of those actions
The first two points are similar, in that they relate to inadvertent data loss, but relate to ethics in very different ways. The third is a very different quality.
Non-corporeality – The onwards march of time and technology makes specific media obsolete. That is as true for spoken language as it is for other media formats, but the loss of spoken languages is a large enough topic for a post on its own, so I’ll stick to physical media.
Ask yourself – ‘When did I last buy a 35mm photographic film or a 90 minute audio cassette ?”
For myself, it’d have to a decade or more, and I owned a 35mm SLR camera until 3 years ago ! I just kept a stock of old film in a box in the fridge up to its use by date, and past in some cases. Now as I climb the technology ladder I have my music CDs as reference, but don’t need to touch them as my music is transferred from device to device with no apparent loss of quality. So long as I make those steps up the ladder while technology exists to bridge the gaps no data is lost. So here comes the first question.
Do we have an obligation to keep data in its original form and format, respecting the media that it was originally hosted in, do we have an obligation to retain the information contained in the data, or is the data disposable and only the effect of the data relevant ?
In many ways the existence of the institutions of ‘the museum’ and ‘the library’ answer this question from our ancestor’s point of view. Certainly in the UK, philanthropists saw the advancement of science and the education of the masses as a moral obligation, but what about the curation of data for historical rather than scientific purposes ?
I think that we can say that retained samples are a valuable weapon in the arsenal of scientific endeavour, without much doubt. Whether it be new species of animal in today’s world, samples of pathogens lost to science or the ability to re-examine old specimens with new techniques, a library of original, physical sample material is an essential part of science, but what about non-corporeal data ?
Audiophiles still see the crackle and hiss embodied in vinyl recordings as adding character and being more authentic than ‘clean’ digital renditions, but to me this would imply that the recording artist, as the author of their own material, would want a degraded recording. I really don’t think that’s true. If I were a musician I would want my recordings to be heard as played, not as recorded. But then the experience of listening to music is not the same as the experience of playing it, so a direct equivalence between the data as recorded and the data as experienced is going to be a tricky one and probably something to consider another day.
Can you imagine the curator of a museum in 1,000 years time carefully handling the mix tape that you made for wassername in ’88 ? But why not ? Its an excellent piece of social history communicating universal feelings and allowing later generations to connect with past generations on an emotional level. No different from a birthday party invitation sent 2,000 years ago or love letter written 4,000 years ago. But that assumes that the data can be read in hundreds of years time.
The non-corporeality of digital data does hide degradation introduced by copying and by natural stochastic processes, such as cosmic rays hitting storage media or radiometric decay. We should not consider data stored on digital media such as magnetic tapes, CDROMs or laserdisks as immune to degradation, indeed they are more prone to damage than paper in many circumstances. That’s not as surprising as it may at first seem since we have 4,000 years of paper technology under our collective belts, but less than 100 of electronic recording and experience using plastics. In my own lifetime I have seen data storage formats become obsolete (and so have you), but that’s not even considering MIME types.
Every new start-up seems to define their files in a new way. This is 100% understandable in the context of intellectual property rights and the advance of technology, but it also means that the failure of each of these companies will consign their file type to the rubbish bin. Effectively we are spawning and killing a new ‘language’ each time this happens and any data recorded in this language will need either translation into more common languages or the preservation of a Rosetta Stone for as long as that data might be preserved. In this context the decadal lifespan of CDROM and magnetic tapes starts to seem like a long-term issue and the churn of data formats the overwhealming problem. Since we cannot ethically restrict the proliferation of new languages, the best that we can hope for is that file types are translatable. Unfortunately translations almost always result in loss of data fidelity.
So the physical nature of storage media for digital data is less of a defining factor than we might at first believe, but before we reject its potential impacts there is the question of whether the original physical items need to be curated in the same way as any museum piece. Should we collect one of everything just so that the next generation has access to it in something close to context ? This question I will leave for the historians.
The non-corporeality of data may impact more through the potential for high-fidelity copying to multiple locations and this feeds neatly into out next topic;
Transmissibility – Not a new feature of data, after all the telegraph was transmitting non-corporeal data around the world in the 19th century, but perhaps I mean the ability to provide photo-realistic reproduction to anywhere almost instantly.
If we assume that we are not going to get significant data degradation through each copy (i.e. that the fidelity is retained) or that the original reference copy is still available, data becomes a commodity available on-demand. Our data networks make that possibility a reality, whether it be via broadcast media, sharing or sale through websites or via ‘direct’ network connections such as FTP or PPTP.
Generally we do not even think about whether we are receiving what is being sent, unless there is some obvious fault. Our technologies are reliable enough that, at the point of consumption, we consider the data as a good representation of the original. That is not to say that checks on data fidelity don’t happen in the background with most transmission mechanisms, they do, and a significant portion of bandwidth used on the internet is devoted to comparing sent to received.
The question then becomes why are we happy to have copies of original data many times removed from the original when the original (or a much closer removal) is available ?
It is often said that we live in a media age, but most would consider that to refer to the number and availability of media channels, when in fact the most pervasive mediated experiences that we have is with the data that makes everyday life possible.
Just to give an example; even 10 years ago I wouldn’t have dreamed of money as a mediated experience, yet in most senses it is just that. Very little cash actually flows through my wallet these days. I rarely visit a bank. I trust all those data transmissions that are running in the background to provide a very real outcome like food on the table. But why should I ? Well the honest truth in this case is that I don’t trust digital money any more than I trust hard cash. Both are copyable, both are stealable. Both are mediated experiences of wealth. To me they are no different, so I have no philosophical problem in a cashless economy. But that’s not the same as the ethics of error checking.
Engineers strive for high fidelity data transmission. It is a matter of honour and professional pride. Depending on the application it can be a matter of life an death.
Bankers (should) strive for high fidelity transactions. It should be a matter of honour and professional pride. Depending on the customer it can be a matter of life an death.
Journalists should strive for high fidelity transactions. It should be a matter of honour and professional pride. Depending on the story it could be a matter of life an death.
But past those three professions, high fidelity data transmission is mostly an aesthetic choice but not universally an ethical one. That’s why we have security certificates, passwords, ID checks and all that apparatus that at first sight looks Orwellian but, when you understand what it is compensating for, is much more depressing. Its plugging the ethics gap between personal and professional.
Is it right that we load our communications technologies sending multiple copies of data rather than consigning a single authoritative item of data to a secure store and simply reference it from there ? Computer programmers working in groups do this already using applications collectively known as Version Control Software. Could we create a Version Controlled repository for all human knowledge ?
This brings us to digital memories as editable and erasable records;
In the Version Controlled world nothing is ever deleted without consensus. Edits are recorded so that if some piece of data was to be found to lead to a dead-end you can back-track to the last useful data and try a different approach.
But what happens if a particular thread of knowledge leads to disaster/evil/daytime TV or whatever, what then ?
Without infinitely reproducible data a society can choose to forget. If data is infinitely reproducible we have to assume that a copy exists somewhere, even if it is only in a router cache that is not immediately accessible. If the potential exists for a copy to resurface, then ethically we have to consider that it will. Forgetting is not a choice that is practically open to us in the massively networked digital world.
Forget is the wrong word in some of these cases, ‘consign to the past and move on whilst retaining full knowledge’ could be a better way of putting it. For example the Truth and Reconciliation commissions in Rwanda and SA, are a way of accommodating of unpalatable facts until they fade a little before merging with the background of history. Anti-Nazi laws in Germany are there to provide several generations space from the shared horror of WW2 and they will not be seen to be successful until at least 2050, when the children of Nazis have died, so providing a removal from the first person experience.
But there are problems with the version controlled world where threads of knowledge are prioritised and the flow of history consciously re-routed.
At a personal level we loose our sense of ourselves and our innate ability to put things behind us, and even the essential personal liberty of simply growing up. Lets take a few examples to illustrate what I’m getting at;
Criminal offenses committed by persons under a certain age are usually dealt with differently to those committed by adults. The dividing line between child and adult is different under different legal systems, but it is present in the vast majority of cases. What is also present in most cases is a statute of limitations which means that offenses are deemed to have no relevance under law after a certain amount of time. The convergence of these two legal principles usually means that offenses committed as a child will be wiped ‘off the record’ after a relatively short period and the child allowed to go on with life as a reformed character having learned its lesson.
I see no reason why data should be treated any differently, yet if a copy of an old web page surfaces that contains embarrassing, or even harmful, personal information any person can act on it. The trope about ‘nothing to hide’ is idiotic. Everyone has something that they would rather wasn’t repeated ad nauseum in public whether it be bad fashion choices, awkward breakups, financial embarrassment or even a physical blemish. There is no small amount of debate on this, but one of the most interesting recent stories is this on from BBC News. How can Facebook ban you from deleting yourself from their platform ? To me this is a great piece of social commentary art.
Anyway. Too long. Move on.
