Fruit o’ the Loon
’07 Installment # 10
LOON MINI-BOOK REPORT
As advertised, here is the Loon’s take on “In Search of Memory: Emergence of a New Science of Mind”, by Eric R. Kandel.
For starters, Kandel won a 2000 Noble Prize for his work to learn just how a memory can be created, stored and recovered in a mind, and how a mind can be created in a brain which is, Voila! only the sum of its neurons (functional brain nerve cells) and their connections to one another, and how those connections allow neurons to talk to one another. However, Kandel fell short of completely understanding how a memory can be created, where it is stored and how it can be recovered, but he came closer than anyone else, and he has cast considerable illumination on the functions of mind as biological processes, and helped flip off the light switch on Freudianism and other semi-quacky Psy-hocus-pocuses. Kendel started out a psychiatrist, but when he saw that schizophrenics didn’t get better, he saw the science light, and the light was good, and so, he decided to start back at block A to study the functions of individual nerve cells as related to memory, and stopped listening to people lying on couches telling him about what they thought was going on in their minds—like HA! they even or ever knew. I use the analogy that psychiatrists trying to cure mentally ill people by talking to them, is like auto mechanics trying to fix a car engines by talking to the engines. Anyway, the book is essentially a compelling compilation of Kandel’s life-long studies on nerve cells in Aplysia californica a giant marine snail, because they have really big nerve cells, and not too many of them.
The book is also Kandel’s autobiography from the days when he and his family escaped Vienna before the Nazi’s could get them. It is a matter of record now, that Austrian Nazism was far more virulent than German Nazism. For Jews, Vienna lost its appeal as a city of culture, beauty and tasty pastries, and became a horror and a death camp. Kandel came to America and prospered as a scientist; our gain and Europe’s loss—the European legacy from Nazism has long legs indeed. Kandel was born in 1924 and this book was published in 2006 when he was 82 years old.
Chapter one contains the following:
“Although the size and structure of the human brain has not changed since Homo sapiens first appeared in East Africa some 150,000 years ago, the learning capability of individual human beings and their historical memory have grown over the centuries through shared learning—that is, through the transmission of culture. Cultural evolution, a nonbiological mode of adaptation, acts in parallel with biological evolution as the means of transmitting knowledge of the past and adaptive behavior across generations. All human accomplishments, from antiquity to modern times, are products of shared memory accumulations over centuries whether written records or through a carefully protected oral tradition. The new science of mind attempts to penetrate the mystery of consciousness, including the ultimate mystery: how each person’s brain creates the consciousness of a unique self and the sense of free will.”
One of the ultimate mysteries in neuroscience is “consciousness” and one of the ultimate fantasies is “free will”, so sayth the Loon. No one has come close to unraveling the mystery of “consciousness”, and, when you think about it, “free will” is more like “free wish”. It is rationally difficult but emotionally easy to aver that we can do whatever we want, when, in fact, almost always we are like machines following scrupulously the scripts written into our individual warm-ware, when prompted by the unforeseen rolling cascade of external events. Come on! Let the Loon hear denials from all you folks with inalienably endowed “free wills”.
On another level, the book tells the history of normal nerve cell function (physiology), and the Loon would be a big-time liar if he implied he understood all of it. However, the story is an intriguing one, one which puts another few bricks into what has come to be an unassailable wall of evidence that behavior is inextricably linked to biology.
Kandel confesses that science is now helpless to study consciousness. He writes, “Science as we currently practice it is a reductionist, analytic view of complicated events, while consciousness is reducibly subjective; such a theory lies beyond our reach for now.” “According to Nagel, science cannot take on consciousness without a significant change in methodology, a change that would enable scientists to identify and analyze the elements of subjective experience.” “What science lacks are rules for explaining how subjective properties (consciousness) arise from the properties of objects (inter-connected nerve cells).”
The book has abundant clarifying visual material; including gross and microscopic photographs, graphs, charts and drawings.
Does anyone with an un-scratched scientific itch want the book? First one who asks gets it.
NOTABLE QUOTES
“Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.”
(attributed to) Napoleon
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.”
Thomas Jefferson
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. They inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”
Winston Churchill
“Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
James Bovard (civil Libertarian)
SWAMI LOON FEARLESSLY PREDICTS THE OUTCOME OF THE ’08 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Newspapers have provided irrefutable early evidence of the electibility (read “popularity”) of the several candidates. It is a horse-race for cash*. Based on early campaign war chest returns, Swami Loon predicts the following…
Obama for Prez and Hillary for Veep for the Dems. The two early money favorites got out of the gate fast. Obama’s popularity now stands at $24.8M (mostly wee contributions) and Hillary’s popularity is not far behind at $19.4M (mostly gross contributions) for a combined whopping $44.2M.
Mitt for Prez and Rudy for Veep for the Repubs. Mitt’s is up with the front runners with a popularity standing at $20.7M (mostly hot Mormon money), while Rudy is stuck on the rail a with a measly $13.6M, but to be fair to Rudy, McCain is taking money away from him. Anyway, Mitt/Rudy’s combined popularity standing is now a respectable $34.3M, but they could overtake Obama/Hillary if only McClain would be gracious enough to either have or fake a thunderbolt stroke.
And so…. (Drum roll, please) Swami Loon predicts the popularity poll winners for the Presidency/Vice Presidency will be Obama/Hillary over Mitt/Rudy by $9.9M, (if you doubt me, check my arithmetic). This correlates to 56% of the popular vote for the Dems, and only 44% for the Repubs—how this relates to Electoral College votes, only God knows. And while Swami Loon is thinking about this, just where in the hell—anyway-- is this phantom Electoral College located? Look, the Loon wants to know where he has to go to wave protests placards and shout attention-getting slogans.
* Admittedly, campaign war-chest totals for TV ads are not exact one to one indicators of popularity, but it is the most reliable indicator we have right now. If anyone wants to suggest a superior criterion of predicting electability, Swami Loon would like to know what it is.
WHAT IS THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE?
It was $10,000 back in the Dark Ages when the Loon was in the military, but then, he didn’t have to pay the insurance premiums. It’s probably more now for the average GI, but likely not by much. A civilian life is often worth whatever a lawyer can get for it in court, but I’m guessing the going rate for civilians is between $85,000 and a $1M, depending, of course, on the civilian, the lawyer, the jury, and the circumstances. If the circumstance was the 9/11 attack, the average rate was around $1.2M per life. The lives of the 7 astronauts killed in the Columbia disintegration are worth an average of $3.7 million. From this can we establish a rough scale of the value of human life? Gis near the bottom, unless killed in combat which gives you a boost now (note: no boost in WW-II, and I know that for sure), average citizens are next highest (and it’s smart to get a Rottwieller for a lawyer), NYC office workers who died in a man-made catastrophe are up near the top (that’s so several airlines will not be sued out of existence, like what happened to the American small aircraft manufacturing business), and NASA astronauts are on top.
CRAZY AL’S NEWS DIGEST
John Edwards’s Haircuts
Would you vote for a man who comes from aw shucks North Carolina but gets two (not one) $200 haircuts in California? Methinks he be thinking way too much of his appearance. Hey! He already has extra-white straight teeth (I suspect he uses those tooth-whitener strip thingies); he’s got a killer salon-tan, and a bunchy of expensive suits (I’ll bet they are Hickey Freemans which start at the price of a week long cruise in the Caribbean). I wonder if you can buy a discrete halo in California. Anyway, John Edwards is nice—he even describes himself that way. “Nice” will get you far in politics, and nice hair don’t hurt.
But let’s concentrate on the cost of his haircuts. Crazy Al once had a neighbor in Columbia Missouri, by the name of, Russ Taylor. Russ valued any differential price in terms of ten cent draft beers (cuz he knew a bar where you could buy ‘em). So, if I said, “I’m not going to drive a mile across town just to save 80 cents”, he would remind me, “That’s eight draft beers.” Back then, eight draft beers was ample incentive to get Crazy Al to drive a mile across town. Now I know full well that a California haircut can be purt near perfect, but putting to work the emotionally irrefutable Russ Taylor economic logic, John Edwards blew 3,600 draft beers**by getting those two haircuts in for $400 when he could have got them for about 20 bucks each in North Carolina.***
** Assuming, idealistically, that somewhere in this great country of ours, there must be one joint where you can still buy a ten cent draft beer.
***In the interest of full disclosure, Rudy cuts what is left of Crazy Al’s hair, but if he got one on a military base, he’d have to fork over 9 bucks, plus tip, and then, he’d have to listen to Rudy bitch plenty about how bad it was. Gotta ask you this. If you had only as much hair as Crazy Al, could you really get a bad haircut?
Dog Tail Wagging as a Measure of Emotional State of Mind
If a dog is happy, it will wag its tail farther to the right. If a dog is not happy, it will wag its tail farther to the left. That it’s a fact. Would Crazy Al lie to you? He’s a veterinarian, and so, he knows more about dogs’ tails than you do, but if you read the New York Times Tuesday science section, you would know as much as Crazy Al. .
PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRACTIONS
A Loon mini-book report on “The Underground Economist: exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor---and why you can never buy a decent used car!” by Tim Hartford And, the Loon would add, why there are so damned many Starbucks coffee shops, and why it is hard to find a ten cent draft beer. Stay tuned for the answer to these vital “whys” and others. It will change your outlook, and add to the heft of your purse.
Allen Hall
April 24, 2007 Dayton Ohio, in gorgeous spring weather.
’07 Installment # 10
LOON MINI-BOOK REPORT
As advertised, here is the Loon’s take on “In Search of Memory: Emergence of a New Science of Mind”, by Eric R. Kandel.
For starters, Kandel won a 2000 Noble Prize for his work to learn just how a memory can be created, stored and recovered in a mind, and how a mind can be created in a brain which is, Voila! only the sum of its neurons (functional brain nerve cells) and their connections to one another, and how those connections allow neurons to talk to one another. However, Kandel fell short of completely understanding how a memory can be created, where it is stored and how it can be recovered, but he came closer than anyone else, and he has cast considerable illumination on the functions of mind as biological processes, and helped flip off the light switch on Freudianism and other semi-quacky Psy-hocus-pocuses. Kendel started out a psychiatrist, but when he saw that schizophrenics didn’t get better, he saw the science light, and the light was good, and so, he decided to start back at block A to study the functions of individual nerve cells as related to memory, and stopped listening to people lying on couches telling him about what they thought was going on in their minds—like HA! they even or ever knew. I use the analogy that psychiatrists trying to cure mentally ill people by talking to them, is like auto mechanics trying to fix a car engines by talking to the engines. Anyway, the book is essentially a compelling compilation of Kandel’s life-long studies on nerve cells in Aplysia californica a giant marine snail, because they have really big nerve cells, and not too many of them.
The book is also Kandel’s autobiography from the days when he and his family escaped Vienna before the Nazi’s could get them. It is a matter of record now, that Austrian Nazism was far more virulent than German Nazism. For Jews, Vienna lost its appeal as a city of culture, beauty and tasty pastries, and became a horror and a death camp. Kandel came to America and prospered as a scientist; our gain and Europe’s loss—the European legacy from Nazism has long legs indeed. Kandel was born in 1924 and this book was published in 2006 when he was 82 years old.
Chapter one contains the following:
“Although the size and structure of the human brain has not changed since Homo sapiens first appeared in East Africa some 150,000 years ago, the learning capability of individual human beings and their historical memory have grown over the centuries through shared learning—that is, through the transmission of culture. Cultural evolution, a nonbiological mode of adaptation, acts in parallel with biological evolution as the means of transmitting knowledge of the past and adaptive behavior across generations. All human accomplishments, from antiquity to modern times, are products of shared memory accumulations over centuries whether written records or through a carefully protected oral tradition. The new science of mind attempts to penetrate the mystery of consciousness, including the ultimate mystery: how each person’s brain creates the consciousness of a unique self and the sense of free will.”
One of the ultimate mysteries in neuroscience is “consciousness” and one of the ultimate fantasies is “free will”, so sayth the Loon. No one has come close to unraveling the mystery of “consciousness”, and, when you think about it, “free will” is more like “free wish”. It is rationally difficult but emotionally easy to aver that we can do whatever we want, when, in fact, almost always we are like machines following scrupulously the scripts written into our individual warm-ware, when prompted by the unforeseen rolling cascade of external events. Come on! Let the Loon hear denials from all you folks with inalienably endowed “free wills”.
On another level, the book tells the history of normal nerve cell function (physiology), and the Loon would be a big-time liar if he implied he understood all of it. However, the story is an intriguing one, one which puts another few bricks into what has come to be an unassailable wall of evidence that behavior is inextricably linked to biology.
Kandel confesses that science is now helpless to study consciousness. He writes, “Science as we currently practice it is a reductionist, analytic view of complicated events, while consciousness is reducibly subjective; such a theory lies beyond our reach for now.” “According to Nagel, science cannot take on consciousness without a significant change in methodology, a change that would enable scientists to identify and analyze the elements of subjective experience.” “What science lacks are rules for explaining how subjective properties (consciousness) arise from the properties of objects (inter-connected nerve cells).”
The book has abundant clarifying visual material; including gross and microscopic photographs, graphs, charts and drawings.
Does anyone with an un-scratched scientific itch want the book? First one who asks gets it.
NOTABLE QUOTES
“Never ascribe to conspiracy that which can be explained by incompetence.”
(attributed to) Napoleon
“A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.”
Thomas Jefferson
“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. They inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.”
Winston Churchill
“Democracy must be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
James Bovard (civil Libertarian)
SWAMI LOON FEARLESSLY PREDICTS THE OUTCOME OF THE ’08 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Newspapers have provided irrefutable early evidence of the electibility (read “popularity”) of the several candidates. It is a horse-race for cash*. Based on early campaign war chest returns, Swami Loon predicts the following…
Obama for Prez and Hillary for Veep for the Dems. The two early money favorites got out of the gate fast. Obama’s popularity now stands at $24.8M (mostly wee contributions) and Hillary’s popularity is not far behind at $19.4M (mostly gross contributions) for a combined whopping $44.2M.
Mitt for Prez and Rudy for Veep for the Repubs. Mitt’s is up with the front runners with a popularity standing at $20.7M (mostly hot Mormon money), while Rudy is stuck on the rail a with a measly $13.6M, but to be fair to Rudy, McCain is taking money away from him. Anyway, Mitt/Rudy’s combined popularity standing is now a respectable $34.3M, but they could overtake Obama/Hillary if only McClain would be gracious enough to either have or fake a thunderbolt stroke.
And so…. (Drum roll, please) Swami Loon predicts the popularity poll winners for the Presidency/Vice Presidency will be Obama/Hillary over Mitt/Rudy by $9.9M, (if you doubt me, check my arithmetic). This correlates to 56% of the popular vote for the Dems, and only 44% for the Repubs—how this relates to Electoral College votes, only God knows. And while Swami Loon is thinking about this, just where in the hell—anyway-- is this phantom Electoral College located? Look, the Loon wants to know where he has to go to wave protests placards and shout attention-getting slogans.
* Admittedly, campaign war-chest totals for TV ads are not exact one to one indicators of popularity, but it is the most reliable indicator we have right now. If anyone wants to suggest a superior criterion of predicting electability, Swami Loon would like to know what it is.
WHAT IS THE VALUE OF HUMAN LIFE?
It was $10,000 back in the Dark Ages when the Loon was in the military, but then, he didn’t have to pay the insurance premiums. It’s probably more now for the average GI, but likely not by much. A civilian life is often worth whatever a lawyer can get for it in court, but I’m guessing the going rate for civilians is between $85,000 and a $1M, depending, of course, on the civilian, the lawyer, the jury, and the circumstances. If the circumstance was the 9/11 attack, the average rate was around $1.2M per life. The lives of the 7 astronauts killed in the Columbia disintegration are worth an average of $3.7 million. From this can we establish a rough scale of the value of human life? Gis near the bottom, unless killed in combat which gives you a boost now (note: no boost in WW-II, and I know that for sure), average citizens are next highest (and it’s smart to get a Rottwieller for a lawyer), NYC office workers who died in a man-made catastrophe are up near the top (that’s so several airlines will not be sued out of existence, like what happened to the American small aircraft manufacturing business), and NASA astronauts are on top.
CRAZY AL’S NEWS DIGEST
John Edwards’s Haircuts
Would you vote for a man who comes from aw shucks North Carolina but gets two (not one) $200 haircuts in California? Methinks he be thinking way too much of his appearance. Hey! He already has extra-white straight teeth (I suspect he uses those tooth-whitener strip thingies); he’s got a killer salon-tan, and a bunchy of expensive suits (I’ll bet they are Hickey Freemans which start at the price of a week long cruise in the Caribbean). I wonder if you can buy a discrete halo in California. Anyway, John Edwards is nice—he even describes himself that way. “Nice” will get you far in politics, and nice hair don’t hurt.
But let’s concentrate on the cost of his haircuts. Crazy Al once had a neighbor in Columbia Missouri, by the name of, Russ Taylor. Russ valued any differential price in terms of ten cent draft beers (cuz he knew a bar where you could buy ‘em). So, if I said, “I’m not going to drive a mile across town just to save 80 cents”, he would remind me, “That’s eight draft beers.” Back then, eight draft beers was ample incentive to get Crazy Al to drive a mile across town. Now I know full well that a California haircut can be purt near perfect, but putting to work the emotionally irrefutable Russ Taylor economic logic, John Edwards blew 3,600 draft beers**by getting those two haircuts in for $400 when he could have got them for about 20 bucks each in North Carolina.***
** Assuming, idealistically, that somewhere in this great country of ours, there must be one joint where you can still buy a ten cent draft beer.
***In the interest of full disclosure, Rudy cuts what is left of Crazy Al’s hair, but if he got one on a military base, he’d have to fork over 9 bucks, plus tip, and then, he’d have to listen to Rudy bitch plenty about how bad it was. Gotta ask you this. If you had only as much hair as Crazy Al, could you really get a bad haircut?
Dog Tail Wagging as a Measure of Emotional State of Mind
If a dog is happy, it will wag its tail farther to the right. If a dog is not happy, it will wag its tail farther to the left. That it’s a fact. Would Crazy Al lie to you? He’s a veterinarian, and so, he knows more about dogs’ tails than you do, but if you read the New York Times Tuesday science section, you would know as much as Crazy Al. .
PREVIEWS OF COMING ATTRACTIONS
A Loon mini-book report on “The Underground Economist: exposing why the rich are rich, the poor are poor---and why you can never buy a decent used car!” by Tim Hartford And, the Loon would add, why there are so damned many Starbucks coffee shops, and why it is hard to find a ten cent draft beer. Stay tuned for the answer to these vital “whys” and others. It will change your outlook, and add to the heft of your purse.
Allen Hall
April 24, 2007 Dayton Ohio, in gorgeous spring weather.
posted by Allen Hall at 5:03 PM
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