my mind on books

It is possible to verify the hypothesis that we are dreaming: we can verify it by waking up. The corollary of this assertion, or rather another way of putting the same fact, is the statement that it is possible to falsify the hypothesis that we are awake: we can falsify it by waking up. But the opposite is not true. It is not possible to falsify the hypothesis that we are dreaming or to verify the hypothesis that we are awake.

Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities by Wendy Doniger (O’Flaherty), p. 52

Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory by Roger C. Schank

Most of the public writing I’ve done up to now has been fairly academic – from college papers to abstracts of journal articles. This book by Roger Schank (who is forever associated in my mind with the “restaurant script”) has started to change the way I think about writing. Instead of thinking of the information I want to impart and how to organize it, Schank prompts me to think more in terms of “what story can I tell about this?”

Schank discusses the relationship between storytelling and intelligence, conversation as a process of responsive storytelling, and how stories are stored in memory:

Stories are a way of preserving the connectivity of events that would otherwise be disassociated over time. (p.124)

Near the end of the book (p. 221-237) Schank suggests that greater intelligence involves extending normal human abilities along seven dimensions. The dimensions are

• data finding (“the more that interests you the better memory you are likely to have,” p. 224)
• data manipulation (“the more successfully you adapt old stories, the more creative you are,” p. 226)
• comprehension (“intelligence means being interested in explaining as much as possible rather than explaining away as much as possible,” p. 229)
• explanation (“Failure is valuable because it encourages explanation,” p. 231)
• planning (“the more intelligent you are, the more you can create new plans,” p. 233)
• communication (“the more ideas are discussed, the more insights one will come to,” p. 235)
• integration (“the smartest of us becomes curious about certain aspects of what we encounter, and it is precisely those aspects that are worth focusing on,” p. 241)

Schank is also the author of The Connoisseur’s Guide to the Mind: How We Think, How We Learn, and What It Means to Be Intelligent and The Creative Attitude: Learning to Ask and Answer the Right Questions (among others).

The above image from Wikipedia is so perfect for “My Mind on Books” – the man has a stack of books next to him, easier to see if you click on the picture to follow the link back to the higher resolution image. This has inspired me to post some other mind-related Wikipedia entries, focusing on aspects that go beyond the traditional encyclopedia articles:

• Consciousness studies at Wikibooks, including this “Table of Theories.” (Wikibooks is a “sister project” of Wikipedia.)
• There are lots of lists at Wikipedia, such as the list of “unsolved problems in neuroscience” (which seems too short) or the list of “lists of psychology topics”
• There are also portals for broad topics, such as the Mind and Brain portal.

The Rapid Blip offers a nice collection of mind-related feeds, annotated bookmarks and books. I found the site because “My Mind on Books” is one of the feeds, along with Mind Hacks, PsyBlog, ScienceBlogs Channel: Brain & Behavior, Neuromarketing, Issues in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science and Mind, the Frontal Cortex and Dangerous Idea.

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The Best American Science Writing 2007 includes the article “Stereo Sue” by Oliver Sacks, originally published in the New Yorker, June 19, 2006. Sacks relates the case of a woman neurobiologist, born cross-eyed, who had surgery as a child but never developed binocular vision.

I had asked Sue if she could imagine what the world would look like if viewed stereoscopically. Sue said she thought she could–after all, she was a professor of neurobiology, and she had read plenty of papers on visual processing, binocular vision, and stereopsis. She felt this knowledge had given her some special insight into what she was missing–she knew what stereopsis must be like, even if she had never experienced it.

But now, nine years after our initial conversation, she felt compelled to write to me about this question:

You asked me if I could imagine what the world would look like when viewed with two eyes. I told you that I thought I could. . . . But I was wrong.

[After some vision therapy she gained the ability to see in depth]… Her new vision was “absolutely delightful,” Sue wrote. “I had no idea what I had been missing.”

This struck me as being amazingly similar to the famous philosophical thought experiment known as “Mary’s room” or “Mary the super-scientist” proposed by Frank Jackson (with its own Wikipedia entry that I quote from): “we are to imagine a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the science of color, but has never experienced color. The interesting question that Jackson raises is: Once she experiences color, does she learn anything new?”

Jackson’s thought experiment was an argument to support the existence of qualia and against physicalism, so it seems to me that the case of “Stereo Sue” lends support to the existence of “qualia.” Perhaps the case against physicalism is weaker since the thought experiment specified that Mary knew “everything” about the science of color. Sue, a neurobiologist who “had read plenty” on the subject of binocular vision, seems as close as a real-world example could get, however.

[Disclaimer: I’m not a philosopher, but I used to read and write abstracts for lots of philosophy articles.]

I’m not the first person to notice the similarity between “Stereo Sue” and Mary – it was discussed on the Brains forum, but nobody there commented on whether Sue’s experience would have any bearing on the thought experiment of Mary.