dechamplain - the material soul

A precious tool

Some of the most brilliant minds in the world have created a new wikipedia-esque site about computational neuroscience.

Unlike wikipedia, the articles are signed by specialists and (most of the time), peer-reviewed. Heck, they even have Brenda Milner (from McGill), famous for her work with HM patient, and Antonio Damasio, who gave a second life to the somatic theory of emotions (a.k.a. “James-Lange Theory”).

Check it out: http://www.scholarpedia.org

Tags: computational neuroscience, Damasio, HM, in english, Milner

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(Another) study debunks the immigration-focused view of accommodations

While my friends at SdeB Institute were busy applying their po-mo theories to a situation they seem to know little about, some people were actually checking the facts.  

Statscan just published another study that shows that reasonable accommodations have nothing to do with immigration. The trouble, if any, comes from a very small number of religious fundamentalists that are rarely immigrants. The thing just got blown out of proportions by the medias, and SdeB Inst, while condemning exactly that, are going after the same red herrings.

I was into x before x was in style! 

Before there was the Bouchard-Taylor circus and before the “reasonable accommodation” meme got its popularity, I attended a conference given by Quebec’s human rights commission. They showed us nice graphics with pretty much the same numbers you can read in the study that was published yesterday (see above).

I remember seeing how my colleges felt relieved. There was that huge feeling that everything was fine and that so-called “accommodations” pretty much concerned only a handful of Jehovah Witnesses. We also heard… some guy (?) doing a lecture about the French model of secularism and how we were wise to stay away from it (true: France was a colonialist country; we were a colony and later, as French Canadians, colonized.)* That was pretty much settled for me.

But then there started to be really ill-informed editorial pieces about immigration, how religion is the foundation of society, culture this, culture that and so forth. I even saw a store using the term “Reasonable accommodations” to advertise it’s junk. Accommodations were better before they sold out.

Then, more recently, there has been some name calling, including ”integrist“, and other not-so-friendly terms. This new meme (secularism=fascism) is getting huge and provides a new red herring for whoever wants to push his religious or relativistic agenda.

The solution, as always: going back to the basics of the problem, defining the terms properly, and avoiding easy conjectures.

* And I’m not the only one to think that, if you read the mémoire written by Présence Musulmane you’ll see that they also point this out. (PDF, it’s on page 4) This paper, by the way, has the actual feel and academic level of a memoir, unlike many other papers that were brought up before the B&T commission. (Don’t worry, I’ll tackle Présence Musulmane some other time.)

Tags: commission Bouchard-Taylor, fundies, in english, Simone de Beauvoir Institute

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Of time, being, and (not)Heidegger

Last night, someone dared me to name onephilosopher that wrote about being and time before Heidegger. It was, actually, a pretty easy question. I’m currently doing a seminar on Leibniz and we often talked about that exact subject. Time and being was, in fact, a pretty popular subject during the modern era.

Leibniz postulates a world composed of monads (even God is a monad). Time does not exist for Leibniz, it is a cognitive illusion produced when we consider the succession of phenomena. Same thing for space: it does a concept produced by analysing how objects are related to one another. So: relative time and space. A very interesting theory that’s opposed to the Newtonian model… just like Einstein’s, that uses relative time-space as well.

Leibniz pulled off a fascinating, coherent, brilliant and productive theory of being and time. On the other corner of the ring, mister H’s Time and Being is surely interesting, but, heck, it’s still po-mo rant.

Tags: Einstein, Heidegger, in english, Leibniz, time and space

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Quantum consciousness (part 1)

 There’s been a lot of attempts in the last few years to explain psychological phenomena using quantum mecanics:

• Consciousness;
• Perception;
• Free-will;
• Whatever is strange or hard to explain.

The quantum consciousness was launched by Penrose in The Emperor’s New Mind.Many neurology and cognitive science experts have criticized Penrose’s views, but they remain relatively popular to this day.

The fans of quantum consciousness say something that goes like this: the laws of classical mecanics can’t explain [insert a phenomenon mentioned earlier] and, after all, if [phenomenon] was only a by-product of our brain, it would really suck… so let’s include something mysterious in the equation, shall we?

Another way of defending quantum consciousness that you will sometimes find consists of saying that there’s sacred and mystical stuff everywhere, so there has to be something in there that could explain [the phenomenon]. Sometimes they’ll also pitch in Shrödinger’s equation, trying to argue that it’s actually consciousness that explans QM.

Of course it wouldn’t be complete without some reference to Gödel’s incompletude and Heisenberg’s uncertainty: we can’t explain everythingabout [phenomenon], since we are ourself based on what it represents globally; therefore we have to base our explanation on something that’s equally unexplainable. And since QM is the current poster boy for the limits of what we can explain with science, so it would be stupid notto use it.

Where will you find such thesis? 

• Penrose and his disciples, like Hameroff.
• In Chalmers, although he seems to make it a bit credible.  (vidéo here, yeah he does look like a hippie).
• In New Age books (The Secret, The Law of Attraction, some books about TM, etc)

So that’s it for this week, in the next episode we will study “quantum consciousness” a bit closer and meet a few of it’s opponents.

Tags: Chalmers, consciousness, in english, Penrose, quantum mecanics

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