The contemporary negation of subjectivity

[The Johnny]

Do you think that maybe, possibly, our predisposition towards right-handedness (left-brained ness) could be due to the fact we are a highly social species and the left side seems to cover the basics of communication?

Actually, intonation and accentuation seem to be more "basic communication skills", if you couldnt make intonation with a "primitive grunt" which was the basic form of language, then how would you, lacking a language that does rely on vocabulary and grammar?

That may be true, and perhaps millions of years ago more humans were left-handed, but in todays society for the majority of the populations' right brain communication skills are foremost and as we are talking about todays society I think my point is still relevant.

Well, going full circle, grammar and vocabulary play a big role on our communication nowadays... which are left hemisphere traits... left hemisphere which is more rational... rationality which is the bread and butter of today. 15,000 years ago there was a shift from intonation/accentuation based communications to vocabulary/grammar based communications... which makes sense with the shift of humanity to a more left hemisphere centric thought process...

coming up with a geneticist reductionism is what i think to be silly. Even do i go along with it as far as to say it might have SOME PART in the causes.And tell me, how often left handedness does occur? 5-30%, dont you find that to be at least a minority to what could even could be named "rare" occurrance?

well if its occurance is between 5-30% then is could simply be a recessive allele, mendels ratios would give 3:1 (right:left) which seems to fit with your rare occurence.  I'm not really a fan of genetic determinism normally, but the fact that you completely wrote it off at the beginning is something I found difficult to accept.

Could be, could be not... im not too hot on genetics, care to fetch up an article?

[The Johnny]

Just because im arguing that genes arent the only reason behind handedness, doesnt mean im arguing nurture is the full reason behind handedness.

Yes, i claim that left handed people primarily think with their right side of their brain.

Also that right handed people primarily think with their left side of their brain.

But theres issues:

a) Theres few studies about percentage of world population in regards of handedness.
b) I think theres no studies about nurture influence on handedness (i think theres a percentage of people that were originally left handed but were taught to be right handed and turned out to be so or became ambidextrous)

[Golden Applesauce]

I haven't forgotten about this thread, just trying to come up with an intelligent response.

Language is primarily handled by the left hemisphere in the majority of right-handed people.  It's also primarily handled by the left hemisphere in the majority of left-handed people - it's just not as strong a majority (70% instead of 95%, I believe.)  It's the motor cortex that really does physical movements anyway, that's the part (I think) that would determine whether you are right handed or left handed.  (I'm oversimplifying this quite a bit; the brain is so cross-linked that it's very hard to say that one task is done by one part.)

At some point in the near future I will look for studies attempting to compare brain usage in right vs. left handed people. but I'm pretty certain that for tasks not involving movement (or thinking about movement) handedness doesn't significantly affect hemisphere usage preference in general.

Suppose the International Prototype Kilogram (the one stored in France) were moving towards your solar plexus at 10^40 Planck lengths per second (which is defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom), relative to the inertial frame of reference of your solar plexus.

Tell me this will not result in a deformation of your body.

I can still imagine many kinds of "deformations", nothing you say will come thru at 100% what you originally meant. Its not just about the definitions you are using, its about language itself. Did you ever play "broken telephone" during elementary or middle school? Have you ever done translations from one language to another? Jacques Derrida goes into great detail about these issues.

Of course you can imagine many different kinds of deformations - I intentionally left that vagueish so as long as you could anticipate one or more types of deformation occurring you could make an affirmative answer.  Just trying to drag the barstool experiment into this, because it wasn't cluttered enough already.   

With regards to the "broken telephone" game (side note: isn't it weird how a game like that could have two nearly identical names on different continents?  Ironic, eh?) I always thought of that effect as more due to it being hard to distinguish words when they're whispered and no repeating is allowed.  Translations, yes, I've done some, and while I agree that a straight translation won't in general be able to reproduce the same meaning, a properly annotated translation, with lots of footnotes (like *in the original this word has this and that connotations, and is a homonym for this other word) can get you there, although in either case you can't really preserve style.

I agree that in general a single statement is very prone to alternative interpretations, but in a context where the speaker and listener are allowed a back-and-forth to clarify the statements, I hold that agreement in interpretation can occur, although not all the time.  So 100% understanding some of the time with some of the people, but not 100% understanding 100% of the time.

Quick question: for the purposes of meaning and clarity, would you consider programming languages to be mathematics?  In one sense they are, but in another sense (some of) them are full languages, only with all the verbs being imperatives.

[The Johnny]

The stuff im expressing here are like an important part of... a system (?) of ideas im coming up with... i dont expect to be done with it anytime soon... and yea, i think the crap we speak of requires longer "pings" because its not just opinions based on nothing...

Im assuming you speak of modern, complex, language - i think also its important to differentiate between what language is being used... modern language might be handled by the left hemisphere... but one can only wonder without the apporpiate information what side handles sign language... also i stand by that primitive language seems to be a right hemisphere deal...

Last trimester in school we just dealt with different notions of the "subject" through history, the different psychological schools and their "thought process" per se... the concept of subjectivity... tons of other crap too... and now were dealing within the family structure with the "fathers role" as well as gender role, etc... My point is that im not too sharp on biology/anatomy/neurology, but in the interest of dealing with something complex in a complex manner, it has led me to these fields.

Well, obviously "broken telephone" here is "telefono descompuesto", but yea, its pretty close - you from the Europes?

Programming languages = mathematics ?... well first of all, i do consider them as languages in the sense that they are symbols trying to convey something between "sender" and "receiver"... now, as mathematics... not in a direct sense... if you boil it down to essentials, its sequences of 0's and 1's, so in that sense it is "mathematic"... but in its functionality... im not too hot on programming either, but more than mathematical they seem to be logical rather.

[Golden Applesauce]

(shallow response, more later)

Sign language, among those fluent in it, is handled by the same regions that handle spoken language.  It's a pretty amazing example of brain plasticity - you'd expect a deaf infant's Broca's and Wernicke's areas to just rot, but if they are able to observe enough sign language during the span where most infants listen to regular speech, their speech centers just convert from dealing with audible language to dealing with visual language.  I'm not 100% sure this is true for people who learn signing as a second language, but my guess would be that for a sufficiently fluent signer it would be handled in the same fashion as regular speech.

Well, obviously "broken telephone" here is "telefono descompuesto", but yea, its pretty close - you from the Europes?

No, USA.  I remember being blown away when I moved from the state of North Carolina to Tennessee (adjacent states, even!) and discovered that the Tennessee schoolchildren called getting in front of someone in a line "skipping in line" as opposed to "cutting in line", which was the right and proper phrase (and the one in use in North Carolina.)  Tennessee had an entirely different set of playground rhymes, and most of the playground games were played with slightly different rules and totally different names.

Programming languages = mathematics ?... well first of all, i do consider them as languages in the sense that they are symbols trying to convey something between "sender" and "receiver"... now, as mathematics... not in a direct sense... if you boil it down to essentials, its sequences of 0's and 1's, so in that sense it is "mathematic"... but in its functionality... im not too hot on programming either, but more than mathematical they seem to be logical rather.

In terms of boiling things down things to numbers, remember that just about anything can be boiled down to numbers - our posts are right now, for instance, as they're transmitted through the internet and stored on a server - but I wouldn't call our conversation "mathematical" by any stretch of the term.

I just asked because computer science started out as a branch of mathematics, so I wasn't sure if you would consider computer science mathematics or not.  Anyway, the reason I brought it up is because computer languages are highly standardized - I can tell any x86 compliant computer processor to "copy the number in your first register to your second register" in the x86 language and it will understand me do what I tell it too.  Similarly, if you got a dozen programmers who knew x86 - one who speaks a Romance language, another Germanic, another a Dravidian or East Asian or what have you - and showed them a statement written in x86, all of them would agree 100% on what that statement means, since what it means is what it would an x86 processor would do when it encounters the statement.

[The Johnny]

From part of an article, ive found that "Roger Sperry at the California Institute of Technology" did research in the 50's and 60's by severing parts of the brain to control seizures...

http://psychology.jrank.org/pages/545/Right-Brain-Hemisphere.html (mid 2nd paragraph)...

Im hunting down specific studies.

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Michael S. Gazzaniga worked with Sperry and his sort of his succesor...

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http://www.rogersperry.info/

Its a bit of a monster-sized bibliography of Sperry....

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http://people.uncw.edu/puente/sperry/sperrypapers/80s-90s/230-1983.pdf

The numerated bibliography link for #230 "Hemispheric Specialization in Nonverbal Communication"

(there doesnt seem to be any text of importance after 230, its mostly about the cognitive revolution and ethics, and behaviourist id say are kind of retarded on those issues)

#224 "Some effects of disconecting the cerebral hemispheres"

[Golden Applesauce]

Review papers are nice (like the first one) are nice in that they summarize and condense a lot of information; if they didn't exist no scientist could keep up with his own field.  That one though... there's no citations.  The author just makes claims without evidence.  Citations to specific studies and experiments are important, because scientists are no less slaves to their own biases than we are (at least, in general.)  For instance, one guy involved in this field, Robert Ornstein, made blatant overgeneralizations in his work.  One example: he observed strong alpha waves in the left hemispheres of subjects that arranged forms in space, and concluded that "painting, sculpting, and dancing are right hemisphere activities."*  Obviously, the latter statement does not follow from the first.  But when a review simply says things like "studies have found that painting is a right hemisphere activity" the reader doesn't know if the author is referring to a quality study, or bull like Ornstein's.  

(*This was apparently published in Ornstiens 1977 book, "The Psychology of Consciousness," but I can't find it online for free.)

I found this review article to be helpful - do you have access to JSTOR?  If not I can send it to you.

The Hemispherality Wagon Leaves Laterality Station at 12:45 for Art Superiority Land
     Michael S. Youngblood
     Studies in Art Education, Vol. 21, No. 1 (1979), pp. 44-49
     http://www.jstor.org/stable/1319503?seq=1

Perry's paper - yes, there is lateralization for functions like facial recognition, and pattern recognition in general tends to be considered a "holistic" task.  This doesn't show that the left isn't holistic, just that it doesn't perform a certain function that is believed to be holistic.  Also note the subject who had damage to one hemisphere early in life, and was able to perform well on tasks normally localized to that hemisphere - the brain is highly plastic, especially during early stages of development.  The undamaged hemisphere simply learned the functions that were previously handled by the other hemisphere.  But more importantly, note that his subjects had hemispherical dominance either because they were split-brained (and input was only presented to one hemisphere) or had gross trauma to a hemisphere - it wasn't due to something like handedness.  (And I am not sure that neurotypical persons even have a dominant hemisphere in general, as opposed to merely lateralization of various faculties.)



Okay, on to linear though and holistic thought.  I am not convinced that humans naturally think in a linear fashion.  To illustrate, let me explain how simple word problems are solved in physics.  (This is essentially a universal method on any logical system, just using physics to keep this as concrete as possible lest we end up sailing away in our metaphors.)

• There are a (very large!) number of relations between different quantities.  (e.g., F = ma relates the net force on an object to its mass and acceleration)
• These can be used as transformations on the information that is known to produce "new" information. (e.g., if there is a 10 N net force on a 2 kg object, F = ma transforms this knowledge into the knowledge that the object is accelerating at 5 m/s/s.)
• Eventually, a new piece of information is the answer to the problem

At first glance, this looks like a linear problem - you apply one transformation after the other until you arrive at the knowledge which is the solution.  Some AI programs attempt to do this in a linear fashion - but the way they do it is very different from the way a human (or at least an expert human) solves the same problem.  The trick here is knowing which logical transformation to apply - if you apply all of them, one at a time, there is a decent chance that the universe will suffer a heat death before you finish.  The real task is determining which transformations in which order to apply in order to arrive at an answer - and I submit that humans naturally do this holistically.  (That is, they could force themselves to do it in a linear fashion by an act of will, but even then many would have difficulty not drifting into associative tangents.)

So, suppose I were to ask you for the acceleration of a 2 kg object which is being acted upon by a 10 N net force.  Newton's Second Law, which relates force, mass, and acceleration together, solves this problem in a single step.  (Two, if you count basic algebra.)  Imagine you were solving this problem linearly.  You would think of each possible transformation in turn and ask yourself if it solves the question.  "Does e = mc^2 do it?  No... Work = Force times Distance? No... Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation?  No... The Pythagorean Theorem?  Quadratic Formula?  Kepler's Third Law?  Binomial Theorem?  Euclid's Fifth Postulate? Hume's Fork? ... " and so forth.  It could take you quite some time to find the answer!  The holistic method would be to use the associative powers of the human brain to pick a transformation .... somehow.  Someone experienced with this type of physics problem never even considers any law besides F = ma.  They don't need to check that e=mc^2 will not help them solve the problem.  This is where my powers of introspection begin to fail, but I am certain that some sort of holistic thinking is occurring when I solve these problems.

Compare to playing board games - you can play Tic-Tac-Toe with linear thinking and never lose, but if you try that with Go you'll lose by hundreds of points - thinking 2 moves ahead requires contemplating roughly 130 000 board states if you do it linearly.  Pros think way more than 2 moves ahead.

I apologize if this post started losing coherence at some point - it's 2:30 am in my timezone and I have a take-home test on the Modernists due tommorrow today and if I ever get a time machine the I swear to god the first thing I'm doing is punching Descartes in the face.  Abandoning preconceptions my ass.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have nothing to say other than this is kind of a spectacular thread in terms of content, and I hope it is neither abandoned or overlooked.

[Kai]

Sign language, among those fluent in it, is handled by the same regions that handle spoken language.  It's a pretty amazing example of brain plasticity - you'd expect a deaf infant's Broca's and Wernicke's areas to just rot, but if they are able to observe enough sign language during the span where most infants listen to regular speech, their speech centers just convert from dealing with audible language to dealing with visual language.  I'm not 100% sure this is true for people who learn signing as a second language, but my guess would be that for a sufficiently fluent signer it would be handled in the same fashion as regular speech.

Which shows that language is just a communication transference signal, and that the brain has to decode the message into it's own format no matter what the signal type, and that it can, no matter what the signal type (as long as the code has its counterpart decoder). Morse code, sign language, it doesn't matter, all handled by the same region.

[The Johnny]

 I am unaware of any controlled, scientific study which supports the idea that slips of tongue and lapses of speech reflect unconscious desires, as opposed to swapping phonemes or trying to think about two things and once and saying the wrong word out loud.

Broaching this subject again... more than evidence, it would be an explanation:

there is no "randomness" within the psyche, its all deterministic, but in a very complicated manner. If there was enough time, commitment and interest, you could say any "random" 5 word sentence and it could be determined a big part of your "personality". Can be done with numbers, but its WAY harder.

your proposition about phonemes is partly true, in the sense that its the path of least resistance to have something surface.

mmmm, let me pick this retarded example: if i really dislike some person that its name is "Zack" and im speaking about say, his research work, the most likely insult-slip that is gonna come thru would be "Suck". Having a lapsus saying "asshole" is too far off, and even in the worst case of lack of concentration it wouldnt happen.

Theres also different kinds of "slips"... anticipations, perseverations, deletions, shifts and haplologies.

Do you think that random association doesnt express your unconscious either?

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And i swear by the 4th circle of hell, im gonna have to raid a neurology library. (I dont have JSTOR)

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The mathematics example you are using does seem coherent... but i can argue that perhaps a lot of activities and tasks requiere both kinds of thinking, but theres different degrees of involvement of each kind of thinking...

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research

That article is just speaking in general while i find some stuff on my notes and etc

Within the social sciences, theres basicly two main theorical perspectives... positivism (Comte / Durkheim) and phenomenological (Berger / Husserl / Schuts etc)...

One assumes that theres facts (?) and causes and that there are no subjective states... while the other engages the "actor's perspective" along with its internal ideas, feelings and motivations...

From what ive seen, sociology tends to take on positivist approaches, while psychology and anthropology tend to be ambiguous on which approach (mostly varies depending on its mmmm branch(?))

[Golden Applesauce]

The paper in question:

[Golden Applesauce]

The mathematics example you are using does seem coherent... but i can argue that perhaps a lot of activities and tasks requiere both kinds of thinking, but theres different degrees of involvement of each kind of thinking...

Actually, I'd agree with that (somewhat) - just about every normal task (i.e., not those artificially constructed such that they can only be done in one way or the other) I can think of seem to require a degree of both "modes" of thinking.

I think one of my issues was your earlier assertions that humans nowadays think "too rationally."  It seems, from observing the way I think that I think and generalizing to the thought processes of others (whom I've never met), that the human mind first does holistic processing on the input sensations and associations with and of already known things, and comes up with a response, the so-called "gut reaction."  From there, the person can later walk through a linear or perhaps branched chain of reasoning, perhaps until a conclusion is reached, or perhaps until an intermediate conclusion is reached that fills a missing node in the associative web of knowledge which allows the conclusion to be generated holistically.

If anything, it seems to me that people think holistically more often than not; and given that holistic reasoning tends to produce conclusions in a shorter amount of time with less effort and energy expended, this shouldn't be all that surprising.  My evidence isn't limited to my own biased attempts to catch myself in the act of thinking - consider advertising.  Modern advertising is predicated on the consumer responding in an associative, holistic way.  Nobody watches a commercial for shoes and thinks, "Ah, I see that there is a causal relationship between wearing these shoes and being chased by a dozen beautiful women.  I will weigh this against the economic cost the shoes and my valuation of beautiful women in my shopping decisions." and the advertisers don't expect them too.  All they want to see is an association formed in the consumer's mind between their brand of shoes and beautiful women, so that when the consumer later sees the shoes in the store, he thinks of beautiful women, and the positive attitude towards the idea of the beautiful women gets transferred to a positive attitude towards shoes.

[Golden Applesauce]

there is no "randomness" within the psyche, its all deterministic, but in a very complicated manner.

Quick definition/clarification of terms - "Deterministic" has two main definitions that could apply in the same context, which are subtly but significantly different:

The first definition is the more familiar philosophical one - if one state fully determines the next state, the system is said to be deterministic.  That is, if I knew exactly the state of the system at one moment, I could compute the exact state of the system at the next moment.

The second definition is the one used in math, biology, the physical sciences, and chaos theory.  Here, deterministic means "not sensitive to initial conditions."  This means just means that arbitrarily small changes in the initial state do not significantly affect the final state.  In math terms, f(x) is said to be deterministic if, as the uncertainty in x approaches zero, the uncertainty in f(x) approaches zero.  Equivalently, if f is deterministic, we can find f(x) to any arbitrary precision by simply by finding x to a high enough precision.

Where the second definition differs from the first is that the second does not assume that a state can be perfectly known; a system can be deterministic by the first definition but non-deterministic by the second.  For an example, the function f

Code Select Expand


      { x + 1 if x > 0
f(x) = { 0     if x = 0
      { x - 1 if x < 0


is deterministic by the philosophical definition.  It is non-deterministic by the mathematical definition - consider f(x) very close to x = 0.  If x is equal to zero, give or take an arbitrarily small amount, f(x) is either 1, in the case that x is just above 0, or -1, in the case that x is just below zero.  No matter how precisely we know x, the uncertainty in f(x) is always 2 - there is no way to get the uncertainty in f(x) below two just by making your measurement of x more precise.

Which sense of determinism are you using?

ETA: I have a response to the Zack thing, will post tomorrow.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

GA, I don't always agree with you, but your thoroughness and citations bring a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat. Can I just be a cheerleader for this thread? It's so beautiful.

[Golden Applesauce]

GA, I don't always agree with you, but your thoroughness and citations bring a tear to my eye and a lump to my throat. Can I just be a cheerleader for this thread? It's so beautiful.

Unless I'm miscounting, I only have one actual citation, plus a wikipedia reference for Korean Fan Deaths.

Also this thread has at least one other major author?