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Human Brain

Mar 28, 2016 / terry / No comments

Over the past two months I presented a course on the Human Brain to students in the LIFE (‘Learning is Forever’) Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto. The course was designed for the senior layperson. It introduced the basic anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, and described the various disorders that can affect the elderly human brain.

The course was given at a second-year university level. Some of the material may have been more than the students needed to know, but most were able to follow the main points of the talks, and some were fascinated by the details.

The presentations were supplemented with extensive teaching materials – slides, notes, movies, etc. Many of the illustrations were adapted or created specifically for the course. I am now making these generally available through the page entitled Human Brain on my website.

Category: Ethics, History, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Poetry, Psychiatry / Tags: basal ganglia, cerebellum, coma, consciousness, emotion, language, memory, neuroanatomy, neuromuscular junction, neuron, sleep, synapse, thought

Progress

Oct 28, 2015 / terry / No comments

Loss of Paradise

The ancients did not believe in progress (Bury, 1932; Pollard, 1968; Meek Lange, 2011). They had two main ideas of how the world changes over time. One was that an initial state of peace and plenty – the Garden of Eden of Genesis, the Golden Age of Hesiod, or the Arcadia of Virgil – had degenerated over time to our present world of strife and suffering.

The decline from our golden beginnings to the present age of iron might have been simply caused by the passage of time, but more often than not it was attributed to human foolishness. The Jews told the story of original sin and the Greeks recounted the myth of Pandora’s box.

Category: Art, History, Painting, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Augustine, City of God, Enlightenment, evolution, Future, Great Chain of Being, Paul Klee, Theory of History, Turgot, Walter Benjamin

Euthanasia

Aug 12, 2015 / terry / 2 comments

We cannot choose the moment of our birth. And death usually comes in its own time, not ours. Sometimes, however, we can decide to end our life. The reasons for suicide are various. Most common is the desire to end intractable suffering. Faced with the prospect of a prolonged period of pain and suffering at the end of life, most rational people would prefer euthanasia – a “good death.” This term first came into English in Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (Book II, X.7). Bacon was encouraging physicians to assuage the pains and agonies of death: to practice what we now call palliative care.

Over the course of time “euthanasia” became differentiated from palliative care, and now generally means the inducement of death so as to prevent intolerable pain and suffering in patients with incurable disease (Young, 2012; Sumner 2011). Euthanasia may be voluntary or involuntary, based on whether the patient provides consent or not. Involuntary euthanasia, where the patient does not provide consent although capable of so doing, is sometimes distinguished from non-voluntary euthanasia (“mercy killing”), where the patient is unable to either object or consent. Some would consider both involuntary and non-voluntary euthanasia as equivalent to murder and limit the term euthanasia to cases wherein consent is explicit. Euthanasia may be active or passive, based on whether death is induced by the administration of a lethal medication or by the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, nutrition or hydration. Active euthanasia may be initiated by the patient, in which case it is essentially suicide, or by someone else (a physician or a nurse acting under the direction of a physician), in which case it can be described as assisted suicide or assisted dying. Sometimes voluntary euthanasia, where the lethal medication is administered to the patient, is distinguished from assisted suicide, where the patient takes the drug, but this distinction appears unnecessary. When the word is unmodified, euthanasia generally means physician-assisted suicide performed at the request of the patient.

Category: Ethics, History, Philosophy, Politics, Psychiatry, Religion / Tags: analgesia, assisted suicide, David Hume, end-of-life, eugenics, pain and suffering, slippery slope, suicide, Thomas More

Person and Memory

Jun 9, 2015 / terry / 2 comments

Although psychology has become an established science, it still has deep connections to philosophy. This is particularly true when we consider the concept of person that is at the foundation of all psychology. A person exists (and persists) through the processes of consciousness and memory. The following photograph (by Marie-Lan Nguyen) shows a Roman statue of Clio, the muse of history, from the Museo Pio Clementino of the Vatican. Clio records what is happening and recalls what has happened. History ensures that the past persists. The past helps us to understand the present.

Clio, Museo Pio Clementino

The statue derives from the 2^nd century CE. Its head and body were originally from different statues. Our knowledge of the person comes from both psychology and philosophy. This posting looks at memory and person from these two viewpoints. The photograph has been modified to provide more space on the statue’s right. There is much we do not know.

Category: Art, History, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Photography, psychology, Sculpture / Tags: autobiographical memory, Condillac, episodic vs diachronic, episodic vs semantic, Galen Strawson, Hume, Locke, remember vs know, Tulving

Language and Meaning

May 27, 2015 / terry / No comments

Language and meaning

I have just returned from a brief trip to Korea. I had learned the Hangul alphabet, but my vocabulary was limited to some rudimentary phrases. I could read but I could not understand. This led to some thoughts about language and meaning. My posting will take a roundabout course, beginning with a Korean scholar from the Silla dynasty. Be patient: I shall try to find some meaning before the day is done.

Choe Chi Won (857-925?)

At the age of 12, Choe Chi Won (Hangul 최치원; Chinese 崔致遠; literary name 孤雲, Go-un, “Lonely Cloud”) was sent from Korea to study in Xian (Chang’an), the capital of the Tang dynasty in China. There he learnt the practices of Confucianism and the arts of poetry and calligraphy. He passed the Imperial Examination at the young age of 22 years, and rose quickly through the ranks of the Chinese Civil Service.

However, the Tang dynasty (618-907) was slowly coming to its end. In 874, Huang Chao had initiated a rebellion against the Emperor. By 880 he had taken control of the capital and assumed the throne, calling himself the “Emperor of Qi.” Choe served as the secretary to the Tang general Gao Pien in his campaign against Huang Chao. By 884, the rebellion was finally defeated and the Tang emperor Xizong reinstated in Xian.

Category: History, Literature, Painting, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Bodhidharma, Calligraphy, Chan Buddhism, Chin'gam Hyeso, Choe Chi Won, Confuciansim, Hangul alphabet, Korea, Seon Buddhism, Silla dynasty, Tang dynasty, Zen

Determined to Be Free

Mar 13, 2015 / terry / No comments

Scenario

Imagine yourself 20 years from now. A brilliant cognitive neuroscientist claims to be able to read your brain and predict your future behavior. She studied with Sam Harris in Los Angeles and then completed her postdoctoral work with Chun Siong Soon and John-Dylan Haynes in Berlin. She knows her stuff and she uses the most advanced technology.

You will be able to press one of five buttons. Before you do so, the neuroscientist will take a scan of your brain, analyse it and predict which button you will choose. She will pay particular attention to the posterior cingulate gyrus and the rostral prefrontal cortex. She is willing to bet you that her prediction will be correct.

If you take the bet, you believe in free will. If you do not, you are a determinist – or in this context a “neuro-determinist.”

Faites vos jeux!

Category: Neuroscience, Philosophy, Poetry, psychology / Tags: Benjamin Libet, chaos, consciousness, Determinism, evolution, Free Will, illusions, Neuro-determinism, Uncertainty Principle

Winter Light

Dec 29, 2014 / terry / No comments

The coming of the winter twilight clarifies the mind. With the snow the light becomes more intense, the dark more evident, and the remaining colors more obvious. The heightened contrast forces us to think.

The 1871 painting Winter Twilight from Olana is by Frederic Edwin Church (1826-1900). He was a successful member of the Hudson River School, and at the time of the painting lived on the Olana estate overlooking the river. This small painting (10 by 13 inches) is a vivid representation of winter.

This posting considers the light of winter through four different poems. Read more

Category: Art, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, Sculpture / Tags: Emily Dickinson, Frederic Church, Myra Schneider, Thomas Hardy, Wallace Stevens

Cosmos Mariner

Nov 24, 2014 / terry / No comments

The poet Conrad Aiken was born in 1889 in Savannah, Georgia. When Aiken was 11 years old, his father, a respected surgeon, shot his wife and then committed suicide. Trying to distance himself from the experience in the third person, Conrad later recounted his discovery of the bodies:

[A]fter the desultory early morning quarrel, came the half stifled scream, and then the sound of his father’s voice counting three, and the two loud pistol-shots; and he had tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever. (Aiken, 1952, p 302).

Aiken was taken into the care of his aunt, Jane Delano Kempton, in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and later lived with an uncle, William Tillinghast, a college librarian at Harvard. After graduating from Middlesex Preparatory School in Concord, Aiken was admitted to Harvard University in 1907, where he became a friend of T. S. Eliot.

After leaving Harvard in 1912, Aiken decided to devote his life to poetry. Though much more prolific than Eliot, Aiken never achieved his colleague’s popularity. Many of Aiken’s poems are long and discursive. They might perhaps have benefited from an editor like Ezra Pound, who was so effective in separating out the gold in Eliot’s verse (Eliot, 1922/1971). Aiken published more than 30 volumes of poetry, several novels, many short stories and two autobiographical memoirs. Despite receiving the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and serving as the Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress, Aiken became “one of the country’s best-known and least-read poets and men of letters” (Butscher, 1988, p xvii).

Category: History, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Conrad Aiken, Li Po

Newcomb’s Problem

Sep 23, 2014 / terry / No comments

The concepts of determinism and freedom are nicely illustrated in a philosophical problem originally invented by William Newcomb, a California physicist. The philosopher Robert Nozick published an analysis of the problem in 1969, and since then it has been widely discussed (Nozick, 1969; Gardner, 1973, 1974, 2001; Drescher, 2005, Chapters 5 and 6; Mark in Malaysia, 2009, summarizes the issues on his webpage).

The basic problem is to decide how to act in the following situation. There are two boxes. The first contains $1000. You can see inside this box: the money is certainly there. The second contains either $1,000,000 or nothing. You cannot see inside this box. You can choose (i) to take both boxes or (ii) to refuse the first box and just take the second. A superior being predicts how you will choose and, before you do so, places in the second box either $1,000,000 if it predicts that you will refuse the first box, or nothing if it predicts that you will take both. The choice must be deliberate: it cannot be made on the basis of some random event such as a coin toss. How do you choose – one box or two?

Category: Philosophy, Poetry, Religion / Tags: Determinism, Free Will, Robert Nozick, William Newcomb

Here I stand

Sep 14, 2014 / terry / One comment

The Diet of Worms was an assembly of the lords of the Holy Roman Empire called together by Emperor Charles V in 1521. One of the duties of the Diet was to consider whether the writings of Martin Luther were heretical. The Diet marked the point-of-no-return for the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s ringing statement “Here I stand” reclaimed the spiritual freedom of the individual. Henceforth each person could choose to interpret scripture and to commune with God without the necessary intervention of the church. However, Luther’s actual concept of freedom was far more complicated than this.

Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk who studied, taught and preached at the University of Wittenberg in Saxony, one of the states of the Holy Roman Empire. The engraving on the right by Lucas Cranach the Elder shows Luther in his monk’s attire. Cranach was the court painter for the Elector of Saxony. He knew Luther well and made several portraits of him. This engraving was used as a frontispiece for several of Luther’s early books. The Latin beneath the portrait states that Luther’s depiction of his thinking was eternal but Cranach’s portrait of his features only transient. At the bottom is a device used by Cranach as his signature – a winged serpent with a crown upon his head and a ruby ring in his mouth.

Category: Art, History, Philosophy, Religion / Tags: Free Will, Lucas Cranach, Martin Luther, Predestination, Reformation

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