First off, for those of you looking me up, here're my slides:

http://s3.amazonaws.com/saizai-public/toor_tcpa.pdf
http://s3.amazonaws.com/saizai-public/toor_meditation.pdf
http://conlang.org/toorcamp.pdf

In sum:
* awesomeness was had
* dust devil almost maimed me
* talks went well
* lots of cool people (if you're one of said people, please IM/email me so we can continue our conversation)
* excellent atmosphere
* way too hot and dry for my taste
* nuclear silos are 'holy fuck' cool
* should've brought sandals
* very ad-hoc planning &c
* Levitate pissing off a whole bunch of hackers and hacker friends is probably going to cause some problems for them

Currently on the road on the way out - another 12h or so to go before getting home, writing this off laptop on a tethered G1. And I'm tired and hungry, so the details will have to wait for later.

Video demonstration of TRs (training routines)

TV interview w/ ex-CoSers, including demo of "Tone 40 on object" (i.e. ordering an ashtray to sit down and stand up) and TR-0 Confrontation (sitting with someone without moving)

Official TR instructions (see p 115)

OT (Operating Thetan) documents (see p 236 for the Xenu story in Hubbard's handwriting, and preceeding pages for the requisite secrecy paranoia)

Personality test with "correct" answers

Jargon dictionary (abridged) - will be necessary if you want to read the above docs

Tons of other docs (yay Wikileaks)

(For those of you who have google, scientologist / freezone, or 'chan fu: I'd like to see, but haven't, videos like the ones above of all the numbered word clearing techs, clay demo, sec checks, OT rundowns, and various preclear rundowns. If you know of one, please let me know.)


I'll be including some of this info in my Toorcamp presentation on meditation - from the perspective of comparative technique analysis, not about the Church per se (though I find its activities disgusting). With comparisons to other similar techniques (hypnosis, military training, some Buddhist / Hindu training, etc).

Dissociation is without doubt a pretty powerful tool, and CoS gets it down quite well. Which is why it's scary shit.

I'll also be doing it this Sunday at Noisebridge, for those of you in the bay area who want to hear it but won't be at Toorcamp.


EDIT: Steven Fishman deposition - talks about Scientology's beliefs regarding past lives, "exteriorization" (aka dissociation / out-of-body experience), etc. Very nice as a view with someone speaking in Scientologist terms.

What's more disturbing is the stuff in part 5 where he talks about how he was asked to "EOC" / "end of cycle" (i.e. commit suicide) because he was an embarassment to the Church, and how they would ensure that he was reborn into a Scientology family with his Scientology classes paid for. The only reason he didn't do it is because they wouldn't tell him how they were going to do so (y'see, it was tech above his level), and he had 'conflicting data' about being normally reborn in another time and place. And how he's Jesus Christ's reborn real father, which is why he was staying true to his mission for Hubbard (by publishing a book about how he was that, thereby freeing Christians of their 'brainwashing' about Jesus being God's son, and getting all of 'em to join Scientology). And how he has very little ability to distinguish imagination (sorry, 'exteriorization') from reality (aka the mere 'MEST'). Etc, etc. Seriously fucked up shit right there.

So, I just watched the movie series (1-5 at least).

Some questions for those of you who've actually read it; does this make more sense somehow world-internally or are these as crazy as they seem to me?

( Cut for geekery and spoilers )

I would be an alchemist,
make diamond of sand –
squeeze each handful like a rag
leaving only gems.
Yet I find, grasping so tight,
the grains that fall out
seem each transformed into gold –
success, or failure?

I would create my bodhi,
be brilliant yet calm;
hold zest like a candle flame
to light my long road.
Ahead I see but glimmers,
and conclude it snuffed;
yet others' eyes see a guide –
are blind leading blind?


( Inspired by... )

Take a bunch of people and give them a physiological test for empathy.

For example, take the ratio of their motor evoked potentials when viewing vs performing moderately complex action (like grabbing and drinking from a cup); if there are measurement issues with MEPs during performance (I honestly don't know if one can), then when viewing full human performance vs tool performance or robot performance or the like, à la Rizolatti etc.

Then train these people in some complex motor task that requires a significant amount of body mimicry - for example, kneeling front rolls in aikido. (Ensure that they are total novices, of course, and that they all get the same amount of teaching and practice.)

Tape them demonstrating their rolls at the end of the session, and have their skill level evaluated based on the tape by competent teachers of that task who weren't involved in teaching those particular students. (So there's no favoritism or the like.)

Take the same MEP measurements again immediately after the taping.

See whether:
a) empathic MEP ratio correlates with achieved skill
b) eMr changes before vs after having to use motor-mimicry skill

Implications of positive result: real-world correlates of empathy; possible impact on determining who will be good at sports; possible implications for skill vs talent in learning.

ę̧̣̑̂̌̆̈̊̄

In OSX TextEdit, this works. Evidently not so well in Firefox, though...

(For the geeks: that's, bytewise: c887cc82cca8cca3cca7cc8ccc86cc88cc8acc84 - lowercase e with ogonek, underdot, cedilla and rounded circumflex, circumflex, hachek, breve, umlaut, ring, and macron.)

I'd like to see a list of common goods (e.g. everything you'd find in a typical US supermarket, clothes, etc) by percentage markup between total cost to produce (including manufacturing, materials, shipping, actual amortized r&d, etc but not general overhead, marketing, profit, etc) and the retail price.

It'd be neat to have something available so that this was saliently available to consumers at time of purchase, so they could factor it into their buying decisions. (For example, marketing-heavy products would have a high markup; so would things like soda, which have a few cents' actual cost of product sold for a couple dollars.)

I wonder how hard it'd be to get this included in standard labelling requirements without leaving major loopholes. ("R&D" above is, potentially; I mean it to only include r&d that has actually gone into the product itself, not including marketing or the like but including functional package design, with the cost distributed over the approximate total # units sold to date.)

I suspect that very little of this information is currently readily available.

I'd like to start a podcast of interviews with various people I find interesting. I don't know whether I could handle the audio editing part of it though.

Would any of you be interested in joining in such a project?

See my existing work here at http://podcast.conlang.org to see my style (though that's focused on conlanging; this would be more general).

Can any of you who know Chinese tell me what this is?

http://alison0sai0.blog.163.com/blog/

(E.g.: does it look like some legit blog, or a spam / ripoff?)

Do I really have to elaborate?

Unfortunately, Rails lacks a Prototype tie-in for Element.observe; it only knows about Form.Element.observer. So we have to add the JS a bit more directly.

Double unfortunately, W3C failed at setting a standard:
DOMSubtreeModified
This is a general event for notification of all changes to the document. It can be used instead of the more specific events listed below. It may be fired after a single modification to the document or, at the implementation's discretion, after multiple changes have occurred. The latter use should generally be used to accomodate multiple changes which occur either simultaneously or in rapid succession. The target of this event is the lowest common parent of the changes which have taken place. This event is dispatched after any other events caused by the mutation have fired.

(Bolding added.)

Guess what that means? Safari sends one event, Firefox sends multiple. Safari also sends DOMCharacterDataModified if a div's innerHTML gets changed, Firefox doesn't. I haven't tested with IE, so I don't know what it does, but I bet it's broken too. :-P

The result? In the code below, if you don't use the locking, Firefox - but not Safari - will fire an infinitely recursive series of events that crashes the browser.

The benefit? See the controller & view code below.

Basically, you get to do dead simple flashes without a lot of JS rendering on each event. Just replace the div's HTML and it flashes.

View partial (stick this in your layout w/ the rest of your flashes):

	<% [:info, :error, :warning].each do |type| 
		id = "js_flash_#{type}" -%>
		

		
		<%= javascript_tag <<-END
				var #{id}_lock = false;
				$('#{id}').observe('DOMSubtreeModified', function(event) { 
					// This lock is necessary because Firefox (but not Safari; dunno IE) will throw a SubtreeModified event when the following code is executed.
					// Which in turn invokes this observer. Which recurses and causes stack overflow, i.e. Firefox hang/crash. Boo.
					if(!#{id}_lock) {
						#{id}_lock = true;
						#{ update_page do |page|
						  page[id].appear
					      page.delay(5) do
					        page[id].fade
							# CRITICALLY IMPORTANT - The assignment MUST occur AFTER everything else is done.
							# NOTE: Prototype/Scriptaculous will execute all these statements in sequence, but NOT wait for them to finish (including delays)!
							# This means it must be done within the updater; if it's at the end of the observer, then it'll get hit before Scriptaculous is done.
							page.delay(2) do
								page.assign "#{id}_lock", false
							end
					      end
						end }
					} });
			END
		%>
	<% end -%>

Controller:

  def do_thingy
    render :partial => 'the_thingy'
  rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
    render :inline => "thingy not found", :status => 404
  end

Calling function:

<%= check_box_tag 'thingy?' %>

<%= observe_field 'thingy?', :url => thingy_url, :update => {:success => 'thingy_container', :failure => 'js_flash_error'} %>

teh_munchkin is looking for a new place in the mid-peninsula, preferably splitting a 2-3 bedroom.

Ping him if you know of something suitable (or me if you want to know what he's like, I lived with him for over a year).

Evan Thompson Between Ourselves: Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness (BF311 .B484 2001); aka Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No. 5-7, 2001, pp 1-309

The first article is by Thompson himself, titled 'Empathy and Consciousness'. It's labelled as the "Editor's Introduction" in the table of contents, but at almost 2x longer than everything else in the book (32 pp), it's more like a full review article.

The first thing I have to say is a bit nitpicky: it needed more editing.

Thompson seems to have a mannerism of overusing repetition, like "X or X'" (where X' is just X reworded). One example (p 19):

Stein elaborates this important point in terms of 'reiterated empathy'. In reiterated empathy, I see myself from your perspective. Stated more precisely, I empathetically grasp your empathic experience of me. As a result, I acquire a view of myself not simply as a physical thing, but as a physical-thing-empathetically-grasped-by-you-as-a-living-being. In other words, I do not merely experience myself as a sentient being 'from within', nor grasp myself as also a physical thing in the world; I experience myself as recognizably sentient 'from without', that is, from your perspective, the perspective of another. ...

There are a lot of other, smaller examples of this. I suspect that it has something to do with philosophical academic style, but I find it annoying and somewhat pretentious, and it weakens his points. Yes, I can understand "succorant behavior" just fine, but does it really contrast with "care-giving", used immediately before?

Otherwise, his writing is quite good, aside from the usual unnecessarily abstruse academese. I just found this quirk to be distracting enough to bear notice.


Moving on to substance...

Thompson posits a "core dyad", which is a fancy way to say that he tries to make two main points. First, that empathy is (by phenomenological philosophy of consciousness, which he buys into) a precondition for consciousness. Second, that it's "an evolved, biological capacity of the human species, and probably of other mammalian species, such as apes".

Since most of his argument in support of this is limited to summaries of others' work (which I'm not yet familiar with), I'll only comment on the parts that he appears to agree with (rather than merely summarize) and that I think are clear enough from reading this.

On the critical side:

1. He cites a controversy between Merleau-Ponty and Gallagher & Meltzoff about whether infants are born with an ability for empathy, or first have to learn it by seeing their own faces (thus associating their proprioception to their face, and then making the analogy of their face to others'). Gallagher & Meltzoff are cited as showing that the former is true, because infants will mirror caretakers' faces before any experience of their own reflected.

However, it seems to me that in normal situations, caretakers are reflecting the baby's face from the very beginning, which undermines this argument. I don't know the conditions of their experiment, but I suspect that they did not ensure that the baby had no access to reflecting adult faces (would this even be ethical?).

Practically speaking, I think it's not very important except perhaps in very unusual circumstances (parents who are severely autistic / repressed / uncaring perhaps?), but evidently it's an important point for the philosophers whether babies possess an "intracorporeal schema ... from the start".

2. He claims that Broca's area is the human analogue of macaques' motor cortex F5 (which is very involved in mirror neuron activity), but cites no evidence for this. The sentence is followed by what looks like speculation from Rizolatti & Arbib, 1998 p 190; I've yet to read that, so I'll just add it to my queue.

However, TTBOMK Broca's area lesions cause Broca's aphasia (a deficit in speech production but not comprehension), and is wholly unrelated to propopagnosia (where one loses the ability to recognize faces, caused mainly by fusiform gyrus lesions) or autism (some forms of which are speculatively caused by systemic mirror neuron problems). So I'm skeptical that Broca's area is involved in mirrorring or empathy. But perhaps this is something I just haven't read the evidence for yet.

3. He discusses "appresentation", a term by philosopher Husserl, and IMO a good example of philosophical muddying language.

In plain English, the argument is that if one sees an apple, one only perceives the front half of it, yet has some notion of "perceiving" (or "appresenting", as Husserl would have it) the whole. This, then, is claimed to be "open intersubjectivity" (hoy), i.e. you are necessarily having an empathic view of other people who are looking from the apple from other viewpoints (and this is how you stitch it together as a whole).

To me this is absolute nonsense. I suppose I come under his footnote - "although the co-intended absent profiles cannot be correlated with the correlates of my fictious co-present perceptions, they can nevertheless be correlated with the correlates of my perceptions were I to walk around the thing and look at it from over there". And of course, doing so "involves the open intersubjectivity of consciousness, in the form of the alterityor otherness built into consciousness, for it requires that one imagine or otherwise mentally grasp oneself as altered or othered with respect to one's current self".

Even this counterargument seems to me to be significantly misconstruing things to support a preëxisting philosophical position.

While indeed, one can picture the other side of an apple by picturing what it'd be like to stand on the other side and look at it (or yet more removed, for someone else to do so), there's no reason I know of to believe that this is happening, and it certainly isn't the simplest view. Much simpler is to simply chalk it up to precognitive visual processing - the same kind as gives us the illusions of size and color constancy. Even very young children - too young to even pass the mirror test or be able to cogently answer questions involving hypothetical worlds - will clearly have a wholisitc concept of what an apple looks like.

In any case, this is relatively easy to test empirically. Give someone a doctored apple (such that the other side is deformed somehow to be not as expected), and see if they show surprise when turning it around. If they do, and you have other evidence that they are capable neither of viewing things from others' perspectives (e.g. the 'make the doll hide a toy' test) nor even posit their own perspective in hypothetical situations (e.g. 'if you were standing over there, would you see the thing in this box?'), then this theory of "apperception" through modelling of "othered" states is disproven.


On the other side:

1. He claims that "premotor areas are activated when an individual is about to perform an action ... the premotor system sometimes will allow a brief prefix of the movement to be exhibited, and this prefix will be recognizable by [someone seeing them]", citing Rizzolatti & Arbib (ibid) again. I can't tell from the quote whether this is speculation on their part of actual research result; if the latter, it'd certainly be quite interesting. Another point in favor of reading it.

2. There's a big debate amongst philosophers about "theory theory" (TT, the idea that we understand others by forming an active, quasi-scientific theory of how their behaviors correlate to inner states) and "simulation theory" (ST, where we do so using an unconsciously embodied physical model of the other person, from which we then infer states automatically).

Clearly Thompson favors ST (probably correlated with his favoring of phenomenology, for which ST is much better). I think that it has to be a combination of the two.

ST is not capable of easily explaining empathy or modelling of people whom we can't see - e.g. the mental state of someone met and conversed with only over IM / IRC. It'd posit (AFAICT) that we'd have to create an entire physical model of the person, map words to a voice with intonation and so forth, model the muscle movements involved in that production, and thence get their emotional state. This seems implausibly complex to me.

TT is not capable of explaining 'emote-then-think' phenomena (e.g. the weird visual-amygdala pathway that seems to literally preëmpt conscious processing of a fear-inducing stimulus), and is needlessly complex for situations where we *do* have ready access to someone's facial expressions (which are richly expressive of their mental state in ways that relatively few people are consciously able to point out the workings of).

So both have their place. Why is this even still an issue to be argued over as if they were dualistic? It seems to me that a more useful question is how (and in what situations) each works, not which one exists better than the other. :-P

(And of course I, as someone interested in the neural side of empathy and thus unconscious modelling à la mirror neurons, would primarily be dealing with ST based approaches. Hopefully I'm not shooting myself in the foot here by lambasting a theory I might someday be espousing...)

3. He quotes (and apparently agrees with) Edith Stein's 1916 dissertation: "Should I perhaps consider a dog's paw in comparison with my hand, I do not have a mere physical body, either, but a sensitive limb of a living body... I may sense-in pain when the animal is injured. ... [Nevertheless,] the further I deviate from the type 'man', the the smaller does the number of possibilities of fulfillment become."

I've argued before for essentially this position, and considering it as a descriptive (if not prescriptive) source of "morality" behaviors.

Clearly, our empathy for others (including other species) is tied to how similar they are to us - or rather, how similar we perceive them to be. (This perception can be altered e.g. by hallucinogens or cultural indoctrination; the latter being an important component of making killing easier. See Lt.Col. Dave Grossman, On Killing for elaboration on the latter.)

This also seems to me to be a viable venue for experimentation:

a) does vegetarianism correlate to how much someone physically reacts (e.g. under TMS probing) to seeing animal vs human hand injury?
b) does pet ownership (and thus increased exposure to form a good map)?
c) do people mirror differently when seeing a human's hand injury depending on whether they are of ingroup, outgroup (e.g. same nation, different race), or hated group (e.g. ethnically identifiable group with whom one is at war [a war one supports, that is])?
d) how do people empathize with physically unmodellable things - e.g. if I told you "a forgle was making food, when suddenly it cut its platch with a knife", do you still have hand TMS activation as you would for hearing "a [anthropomorphic] dog was making food, when suddenly it cut its paw with a knife"? Do you have to visualize florgles as mammalian? (If yes, we could probably break that by further description beforehand making clearl that florgles are very alien physiologically.) Could we even tell in a substantive way?


I'll not reiterate all the rest of his article - most of it was a fairly straightforward summary of various philosophical and neurological issues, primarily the former. This is just the parts that I had a reaction to.

I'm restarting inhalation of a whole bunch of publications about empathy and mirror neurons (and related subjects).

I'll be posting reviews of them under the tag 'cogsci', one post per paper plus one post per collection (e.g. a book or researcher). My hope is that by mid October I'll be ready to write a cogent research review essay (similar but larger in scope than my last one).

First up: Evan Thompson Between Ourselves: Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness (BF311 .B484 2001).

(And thanks to Alex for helping me get the books!)

In the Land of Invented Languages has been getting a lot of press lately.

(Another interview will be up later today, and my own will be up on the LCS Podcast shortly as well.)

I'm glad to see that. It's a great book.

My SuperDeploy Capistrano library got picked up by A Fresh Cup.

I learned about this when the Capistrano maintainer pinged me on GitHub; seems he has some ideas for how to make it even better.

Yay collaboration. :-)

Get out of the opinion and search businesses.

Those battles are already lost. Blogs fill all need for opinion; search engines and recommendation sites fill all need for cultural recommendations.

Journalism should focus on the two things it does uniquely.

First and foremost: original investigation. Actually going to all those boring government meetings, digging up news of corruption, etc etc. and coming up with real news is a valuable service.

Second: platforming. It is useful to have the best content filtered and elevated, so that one can subscribe to a certain source and know that one will consistently get high quality stuff (for whatever definition of 'high quality' applies to that niche).

All the rest is simply not something that traditional journalism can compete on any more.

I want to go out this weekend and ask people questions from the "New Naturalization Test" (the official citizenship entrance exam).

This would involve:
1. answering 10 random questions out of 100 from http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/100q.pdf
2. reading and showing comprehension of 3 sentences made from vocab on http://www.uscis.gov/files/nativedocuments/reading_vocab.pdf

I'll leave out the writing portion.

So: what's your prediction of the average %age correct on those two tests?

(The requirement to be a citizen is 6/10 on #1 and 1/3 on #2.)

ETA: I found a mistake. #48, one of the answers claims "any citizen can vote". That's not true; minors and felons cannot vote.

July 2-5 @ Moses Lake, WA's Titan-1 missile silo. http://toorcamp.org

Looks like two of my four proposals got accepted: a 50 min talk on 'suing telemarketers for fun & profit', and a workshop (time unspecified?, but probably 1-2h) on meditation for hackers (covering several major techniques, depending on time availability and situation being good).

Whee and such.

Any of the rest of you going?

teh_munchkin is organizing some sort of carpool from SF Bay Area, let one of us know if you want to come along.