Aloha Friday: a stroll in the garden, with camera.

Taken during a 10 walk on the property's front and back yards today, while packing at home for a trip to the mainland.

Fodor on emergence in consciousness

Maybe the hard problem shows that not all basic laws are laws of physics. Maybe it shows that some of them are laws of emergence. If that’s so, then it’s not true after all that if Y emerges from X there must be something about X in virtue of which Y emerges from it. Rather, in some cases, there wouldn’t be any way of accounting for what emerges from what. Consciousness might emerge from matter because matter is the sort of stuff from which consciousness emerges. Full stop.

It would then have turned out that the hard problem is literally intractable, and that would be pretty shocking. The idea that the basic laws are the laws about the smallest things has been central to the ‘scientific world-view’ ever since there started to be one. On the other hand, as far as I can see, it’s not any sort of a priori truth. I suppose one can imagine a world where all the big things are made out of small things, and there are laws about the small things and there are laws about the big things, but some laws of the second kind don’t derive from any laws of the first kind. In that world, it might be a basic law that when you put the right sorts of neurons together in the right sorts of way, you get a subject of consciousness. There would be no explaining why you get a subject of consciousness when you put those neurons together that way; you just do and there’s the end of it. Perhaps Strawson would say that in such a world, emergence would be a miracle; but if it would, why isn’t every basic law a miracle by definition? I have my pride. I would prefer that the hard problem should turn out to be unsolvable if the alternative is that we’re all too dumb to solve it.

--Jerry Fodor, "Headaches Have Themselves," London Review of Books, Vol. 29 No. 10 · 24 May 2007

On determinism and the variances of scientific data.

Here's Mark Balaguer (philosopher at California State University) writing in Methode's (methodejournal.org) sublime free will issue (Vol 2, Number 3, 2013) this past year, summarizing the argument against compatibility of free will and determinism:

Let P0 be a complete description of the world at some time in the distant past, before any humans were born;

Let L be a conjunction of the laws of nature; let P be a complete description of the
world at some moment when someone made an ordinary decision that we would
ordinarily think of as free (e.g., for specificity, let’s suppose that at the relevant moment,
Jay decided to order chocolate ice cream rather than vanilla); and let N be
an operator such that ‘N(X)’ means something like ‘X is true and no one has ever
had any choice about it being true’. 

Given all of this, the consequence argument
can be formulated as follows:

(1) N(P0^L).
(2) If N(P0^L), and if determinism is true so that P0^L entails P, then N(P).
Therefore,
(3) If determinism is true, then N(P).
This argument is obviously valid, and the conclusion seems to entail incompatibilism,
so the only real question here is whether (1) and (2) are true.

Of course, in the most accepted version of quantum mechanics, (2) is not an appropriate assertion, because P0^L does NOT in reality entail any exact later description P.  For example, consider the indeterministic decay of the nuclei of radioactive isotopes.  Carbon-14 is a radioactive isotope of carbon which makes up about 1 in a trillion of carbon's atoms on earth. According to scopenvironment.org, there are about 10^20 kg of carbon in the earth's crust, so that there are about 10^11 kg of radioactive carbon in the crust, of which perhaps 10^7, or 10 billion kg, is liable to decay per year. Thus, if at P0 the world contains a certain number of carbon-14 atoms, then it is not determined and cannot by humans ever be predicted exactly how many kg of carbon-14 atoms there will be in the earth a year from now.

The world is thus microscopically indeterminate. And the microscopic thus underdetermines the macroscopic. Whether or not there is provably free will, there is certainly plenty of room for it.

Laws of averages, with the resultant bell curve, often apply here. But true determinism seems false by most interpretations of current physics.

Let's therefore rewrite the above argument:

(1) N( P0^L ).
(2) If N( P0^L ), and if determinism plus a stochastic indeterministic factor,
 then N( P +/- a factor which has a sigma > 0 ).
(3) So we do not have determinism, but continual variation somewhere near a deterministic mean.

The above seems to fit real experience and actual scientific data far better than determinism ever could.

Aspirin for Schwannomas?

Otology & Neurotology:

February 2014 - Volume 35 - Issue 2 - p 353-357

doi: 10.1097/MAO.0000000000000189

Aspirin Intake Correlates With Halted Growth of Sporadic Vestibular Schwannoma In Vivo
Kandathil, Cherian K.*†; Dilwali, Sonam*‡; Wu, Chen-Chi*†; Ibrahimov, Metin*†; McKenna, Michael J.*†; Lee, Hang§; Stankovic, Konstantina M.*†‡

Study Design:  Retrospective case review.

Setting: Tertiary care hospital.

Patients: People diagnosed with sVS and followed at a tertiary referral center by serial magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for at least 4 months within the period of January 1980 through April 2012.

Main Outcome Measures: Patient use of aspirin and sVS growth rate measured by changes in the largest tumor dimension as noted on serial MRIs

Results: Within a set of 689 cases, 347 were followed by serial MRI scans (50.3%); of the latter, 81 took aspirin, of which, 33 demonstrated sVS growth, and 48 did not. Of the 266 nonaspirin users, 154 demonstrated sVS growth, and 112 did not. A significant inverse association was found among aspirin users and sVS growth (odds ratio [OR]: 0.50, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.29–0.85), which was not confounded by age or sex.

Conclusion:
Our results suggest a potential therapeutic role of aspirin in inhibiting sVS growth.

(Note:  sVS in the above abstract = sporadic, ie non-neurofibomatosis related, vestibular schwannoma, which is a a benign tumor of the brain stem region near the inner ear.)

Turtles of Puhi Bay.

Last weekend Maryruth and I dove the shallow reef at Puhi Bay, to the northwest of our usual Hilo Bay diving spot. Puhi Bay has the distinction of being next to the Hilo sewage treatment outflow. Fortunately for the reef, the freshwater outflow from the mauka rains constantly flushes any pollution. There is so much freshwater entering Puhi Bay this time of year that the halocline extends from 5 feet to 10 feet depth at entry-- millions of gallons! The coral reef looks healthy and very diverse from about 12 to 28 feet depth, with large varieties of fish, many varieties of coral, and even the rare black brittle stars. There was red-brown silt beyond about 30 feet, then sand.

One of the nine sea turtles we saw on the 50 minute dive had fibropapillomatosis, a benign tumor skin condition caused by herpesvirus in turtles. Though there's always some virus in the water around where green sea turtles live, some marine biologists feel that sewer runoff promotes these warty growths by activating the latent virus in the turtle's skin. Who knows? I will say that fibropapillomatosis around this island is rare even in Puhi Bay thus far this decade, though it's my non-expert opinion that it is seen more near the local sewage treatment plant than elsewhere.

Suckling Mice and the Brain.

So, breast feeding improves spatial memory in mice? Who would have thought? Here.

Winning the Battle, Losing the War: Patent Roses, Agribusiness and the Rise of GMO Bans.

The New York Times ran an article today discussing the Big Island's ban, effective this year, on GMO crops (Rainbow papaya, developed here, will be allowed with a $100 per year license). The article is critical of the fear and doubt spread by GMO crop opponents on the island, correctly pointing out that much of the evidence for GMO's negative effects does not stand up to skeptical inquiry.

About a third of the American population grows some of their own food, according to the National Gardening Association. In my experience, most home gardeners have a liking for good varieties of their vegetables, and will buy specific varieties of seed for planting. Yet these same gardeners are often firmly opposed to GMO varieties of their favorite crops, and "organic" style farming seems to exclude GMO seed from the start, even if those varieties are grown organically.

As long as people have lived on Earth, viral vectors have moved genes between species, and mutations have made new DNA sequences in abundance. Since both spontaneous and deliberate changes have occurred in our crop plants for thousands of years, one might feel reassured about any disastrous consequences to our planet from GMO tech, but instead there is much fear.

Unfortunately, the stance that GMO seed companies have taken has aggravated the issue. If someone creates a better colored rose by hybridization, and patents the rose, seedlings from the rose's flowers are salable without royalties, even if they carry the genes which give the better coloration from their parent. The patent stays with that particular variety, not with parts of its genome. But not with the GMO blue rose. The Supreme Court has made sure of this, for now.

Here, I believe that agribusiness made a strategic error. If they had made their new genes utilizable by others via seed pollination, as a free (in the offspring) contribution to the horticultural gene pool for improvement by others, as is the case with a patent tomato or rose variety, there might have emerged a trend toward incorporation of the best GMO into home use, and all but the most fearful would accept GMO varieties as just another variety. But instead, we have a segmentation of GMO planting into an isolated segment of agricultural practice, isolated from most voters. So, the bans will spread.