“We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our success to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We feel responsible for the good stuff, but not for the bad. This causes us to think that we are better than others at whatever we do for a living. Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers; 84 percent of Frenchmen feel that their lovemaking abilities put them in the top half of French lovers.” (p. 152)

From Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “The Black Swan.”

“Alex’s advanced language and recognition skills revolutionized the understanding of the avian brain.”

That’s Alex, the parrot.

“After Pepperberg bought Alex from an animal shop in 1973, the parrot learned enough English to identify 50 different objects, seven colors, and five shapes.

He could count up to six, including zero, was able to express desires, including his frustration with the repetitive research.

He also occasionally instructed two other parrots at the lab to “talk better” if they mumbled, though it wasn’t clear if he was simply mimicking researchers.

Pepperberg said Alex hadn’t reached his full cognitive potential and was demonstrating the ability to take distinct sounds from words he knew and combine them to form new words. Just last month he pronounced the word “seven” for the first time.

The cause of Alex’s death was unknown. The African Grey parrot’s average life span is 50 years, Pepperberg said.

She said Alex was discovered dead in his cage Friday morning. Pepperberg said she waited to release the news until Monday so grieving researchers could get over the shock and talk about it.

Pepperberg said the last time she saw Alex on Thursday, they went through their goodnight routine, in which she told him it was time to go in the cage and said: “You be good, I love you. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Alex responded, “You’ll be in tomorrow.”

From MSNBC.

We could be spending money and time wasted on senseless wars to prod around in the mysteries in our own heads and the heads of other creatures.

Believe it or not, we might learn things that would do more to preserve peace and security in the world than a nuclear arsenal. More on Alex’s contributions to research on language and cognition here

Reviewing Shaun Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford University Press:

What’s the ugliest
Part of your body?
What’s the ugliest
Part of your body?
Some say your nose
Some say your toes
But I think it’s your MIND…
I think it’s your mind

Leslie Marsh at manwithoutqualities.com, with some ruminations on the nature of embodiment (that is, consciousness as rooted in your body and not a free floating ghost in your head):

“Embodiment, a well entrenched paradigm within computer science and artificial intelligence circles, challenges the notion of the body as merely an antenna-like device, a receptacle for somatosensory and sensorimotor input..”

and again,

“One’s sense of location is not simply a function of our beliefs about the location of our body: it is the two-way cybernetic looping between brain, body, and world that matters. Knowledge includes knowledge of the constraints and possibilities of the human body’s interaction with the world, a notion that chimes very nicely with Arthur Glenberg’s research (not cited by Gallagher) at the Laboratory for Embodied Cognition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a nutshell, Glenberg suggests that an ability to understand sentences seems to incorporate an agent’s knowledge about how its body might interact with objects in its environment. Gallagher does pose some profoundly intriguing questions concerning the relationship between embodiment and language. Returning to the case of “IW” Gallagher observes that “the self-organizing intentionality of language, including gesture, remains intact” because gesticulatory language is not dependent upon body schemas (p. 126).”

Comment:

Will be back to cud-chew this as much as it deserves…..but meanwhile,

Beheaded rattlesnake sends man to hospital, according to AP:

“Anderson and his 27-year-old son, Benjamin, pinned the snake with an irrigation pipe and cut off its head with a shovel. A few more strikes to the head left it sitting under a pickup truck.
“When I reached down to pick up the head, it raised around and did a backflip almost, and bit my finger,” Anderson said. “I had to shake my hand real hard to get it to let loose.”

The same danger probably attends any kind of head severed from its body…..

Thus this blog and this post…
Comment:

Getting back to Marsh and Gallagher. ‘IW” in the post is the name of a patient with a pathology of the sensory nerves. Those are the afferent nerves – the incoming ones that give you sensations of your limbs. IW’s problem is the damage this pathology has done to the feedback mechanisms needed for him to control his muscles and posture (functions included in the technical terms, proprioception and kinaesthesia).

What Gallagher found (if I have understood this right) was that IW had – as a compensation – developed a certain conscious monitoring of his skills. In normal people, that monitoring would simply have been in the background, not conscious, not part of his image of his body (not BI, body image). Instead, the monitoring would have been part of the pre-conscious “skill” or “capacity” of the body.

IW’s case suggests that people’s normal monitoring of their limbs is shaped by such pre-existing skills or capacities (what Gallagher called BS, or body scheme). BS is thus (at least, partly) innate. It’s prior to a person’s conscious idea of his body (BI) and doesn’t need BI to exist.

To explain that a bit more, Gallagher takes the example of people without limbs who still display persistent sensations of having those limbs in their brain activity – a phenomenon called aplasic phantoms. Where do these patients get these sensations from? Obviously not from the nerves in their limbs – since they don’t have any. So the sensation (of the limbs) must exist not in the physical appendage but in the nerve activity – as an embodied thought. That means that the sensations of the limbs are not simply stuck in the cranium like something tucked away in an attic but are distributed all over the whole body in the network of nerves.

There are interesting conclusions to be drawn from that. Once this limbless patient got a prosthetic, for instance, he or she would only have acquired a physical, tangible mechanism which would have to catch up with and fit into the awaiting body scheme (BS) which already had the necessary skills and sensations contained in it. In other words, the Body Scheme, with its pre-existing, taken-for-granted skills, exists apart from the actual limb.

So, what do these fascinating but arcane matters mean for practical politics? A lot.

One implication is that when you use sentences, for example, the likelihood is those sentences take the shape and structure they do because of the way you are situated in the world, the way you interact with it and see it. So the ideas that come out of your sentences are likewise “situated.” They can’t be uprooted and taken out of their human context.

(Update: Rereading the review, though, I see this sentence, which seems to contradict my assertion:

“the self-organizing intentionality of language, including gesture, remains intact” because gesticulatory language is not dependent upon body schemas.”
— so I await correction on this)

That should make us very suspicious of understanding concepts outside the exact historical and practical place in which they arise, for one thing. It should make us hostile toward using logic or theory in some kind of ahistoric, untextured, abstract way…..

Another inference. We might be wise to approach libertarianism not as an ideology about liberty – as people generally do — but as a pragmatic employment in particular historical situations of a libertarian way of “going on.” Which would be defined more as a how of things….more than a what. This attention to the process rather than ends would be what is generally called liberalism.

But liberalism is usually associated with a greater degree of state involvement than what is usually associated with libertarianism. Which is why I part company with it. It seems to me that liberals — so-called in politics today — are actually aligned with politics that are socialist and no where near liberal or libertarian positions. On the other hand, I would say that Paul’s constitutionalism, while not strictly libertarian, would be close it. I would suggest that democratic politics in a large state cannot by its nature be libertarian – or even liberal in the common usage. More on that in another post).

What more can we draw out from this research?
Attention to procedure, rather than to substantive ends…

Making the process fairer — rather than reaching for a predetermined fair goal.

Making things less political and more ethical, maybe…

Not sure if I am clear here or simply babbling….. But it’s 9 pM and I am beginning to lose touch with my embodied existence…

The massive disruption of the monsoons brought the tsunami of 2004 to mind. What faculties have we lost touch with that would help us in crisis?

When the mind and the body are in tune….

A piece by Gary Leupp in Counterpunch. at the time raised the question:

“I think of the words of the occasionally interesting Soviet-era poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko: “Not people die but worlds die in them.” It is one thing to lose tens of thousands from cultures that will endure, another to lose an entire culture that has endured tens of thousands of years. Even if it is one whose speech, god and government are unknown to us. Indeed, should the waters kill a small isolated tribe, they kill a world, denying us forever knowledge of it. What greater tragedy can nature inflict? And should human neglect and incompetence contribute to the extinction, what greater outrage could we (or those who govern us) visit upon ourselves?

But the happy news, from Press Trust of India, is this. A team from the Anthropological Survey of India reports Jan. 3 that the “five aboriginal tribes inhabiting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, our last missing link with early civilisation [sic], have emerged unscathed from the tsunamis because of their age old ‘warning systems.'” ASI director V. R. Rao informs us that the “tribals get wind of impending danger from biological warning signals like the cry of birds and change in the behavioural patterns of marine animals. They must have run to the forests for safety. No casualties have been reported among these five tribes [Jarwas, Onges, Shompens, Sentinelese and Great Andamanese].” If this is true, as one hopes, it suggests that the diminishing number of humans enjoying what Marx called “primitive communism” require not officials, anthropologists, missionaries or alien humanitarians for their happiness or survival so much as the right to be left alone in their Stone Age classless societies.

“No better than wild beasts,” wrote Marco Polo, reflecting his civilized and Christian biases. Perhaps that’s not so much of an insult. Stone Age humans in touch with nature, able to read its signs in birds and fish, may have much to teach those of us out of touch, and to abet the preservation of the whole species. But how to acquire their wisdom, without deluging them under ours…”