Consciousness...

One of the biggest philosophical critiques of cognitive science is cognitive science cannot (so far at least) answer the hard problem of consciousness, that is, the problem of how subjectivity (such as redness of red and blueness of blue) emerges out of the objective physical basis of the brain. One of the standard methodologies of neuroscientific research of consciousness (as long as I understand) is to take correlation between consciousness and their neural basis (NCC, or neural correlates of consciousness). So, for example, using fMRI and so, you can determine what part of the brain is active when a subject is conscious. However, although a particular neural basis, such as visual cortex, may be necessary condition for consciousness, it is not sufficient condition for consciousness. It is easy to see this idea. If, say, visual cortex is cut off from the brain and if it is put on the table, it does not produce any consciousness. Visual cortex alone is not sufficient, although it is necessary. An analogy might help. Eyes are necessary for visual perception, but not sufficient. If eyes are separated from any other organs, eyes cannot generate visual perception. Then, a question is what is the sufficient condition for consciousness? The next is how the sufficient condition generates subjectivity?

The prosperous must decline

Some industries are structurally on the verge of extinction. After the advent of the internet, newspaper suffers structural inferiority. Google blew library science (what a funny discipline!). Few buys CDs any more (at least compared to the past, less). Just as TV replaced radio and CD took over the position of record, the internet weeds out so many industries. I do not think newspapers die out; they do not go extinct but will lose influence.

The sound of the Gion Shoja bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the Sala flowers reveals the truth that the prosperous must decline. The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring night; the mighty fall at last, they are as dust before the wind (The Tale of the Heike).

Live longer?

Average life expectancy in Japan is longest in the world, and what is more surprising is it has been extending more and more. Sociologically speaking, that is the case. And it seems great. Everybody wants to live long. But is it really a good thing? Two problems here, I think. 1) statistics is based on record. 2) what is the point of living so long unnaturally?

1) More and more people live to 100 and beyond in Japan. However, the statistics comes from some legal document (family registration system, they call). Officials do not check if they are really alive. If you are old, you can get pension. And younger generations get less as a matter of fact. So, there is a possibility that they may hide the death of parents and get money. Officials think many of those who are over 100 are not actually alive. Statistics is crooked.

2) Thanks to the advancement of technology, you can live (in many cases, contrary to your will) with so many pipes and tubes connected to your body. You cannot breath, you cannot eat, and you cannot move on your own. Is it worth living like that? Personally, I do not think so.

Also, there is another demographic/sociological/economic issue. Because the birth rate in Japan is low, there are not so many young people as elderly people (that is why, pension system is screwed). That means, younger generations have to support so many elderly people. This is structurally very difficult.

education

Should we instill knowledge onto the child or shall we leave them as they are? The main assumption of the former pedagogy is the postulate that the child's mind is a blank slate. The main assumption of the latter is that the child is good and as left alone they will grow good; Romantic poet William Wordsworth said "the child is father of the man" in his poem My heart leaps up when I behold. Which is a right practice of education? A reconciliation may take the following form. OK, the child innately has intellectual curiosity. So, left alone, they would ultimately learn what human culture has learned, if sufficient time is given (Of course, we cannot leave them completely isolated from the human culture, because as wolf child shows human can be human only in the social). However, not all of kids are Newton or Einstein so that we should supervise them. Essentially kids' intellectual curiosity and science, or the culmination of human culture, are one and the same thing, because, if sufficient time is given, kids will follow the same path as cultural evolution. But the thing is no kids have sufficient time. Precisely that is why we have to supervise kids. There is no conflict between kids' interests and supervisors' interests; education here is child centered education. What is essential here is that supervision is not the same concept as imposition of knowledge. By imposition, I mean to teach truth without kids' really appreciating it. By imposition, truth cannot be lived experience. Even if a truth is universally accepted, it is important to think about it critically; otherwise, it is just a memorization. If kids just memorize, they cannot appreciate the truth and they are emotionally detached from it. In a world, where knowledge is so specialized, kids cannot see the whole picture. By supervision, I mean instructors help kids re-experience the development of science. It is kind of like simulation.

As a matter of fact, we know our mind is not a blank slate. Once-popular computational theory of mind was put into demise and now neural network theory enjoys popularity (I believe). Neural network theory is a model of the brain and cognition. Neural network suggests that supervision is of essence for learning.

Game and Segregation

Thomas Schelling, who got a Nobel prize for his application of game theory to economics, talked about segregation from the game theoretic aspect. To understand that, it is important to note that science is an algorithm; that is, there is no teleology. Natural selection, Newtonian mechanics, and neo-classical economics are all algorithm. An algorithm is characterized by local rule (instead of teleology) and emergent global phenomenon. For example, (neo-)classical economics claims that if each agent follows his own desire and behaves selfish (local rule), as a whole equilibrium emerges (global phenomenon) by way of supply and demand. There is no teleology, or global intention. Drop of teleology characterized most important phases of science. Newton dropped teleology from physics, and only then physics became a real science. Darwin dropped teleology from biology and replaced it with adaptation, and only then biology acquired theory (before that, biology was merely natural history; history is not science). Adam Smith's geneus is he explained social phenomenon without teleology; thus, he came up with an algorithm that can explain the social order.

Thomas Schelling modeled segregation with game theory; he made an algorithm of segregation. The local rule is very simple. Eacg agent prefers racially mixed environment but prefers that at least 25% of the people around him are of the same race. The result is that, regardless of the fact that everybody prefers racially mixed environment, ultimately racial segregation emerges.

Emergent global pattern by way of local rule (efficient cause in Aristotle's language) rather than global rule (teleology, or final cause, in Aristotle's lanauge) characterizes science and algorithm. Although it is a matter of empirical investigation whether racial segregation occurred intentionally or not, Schelling's model captures a dimension of truth about our world.

Building of Modern Nation States

It is generally agreed that modern nation states, such as France, Italy, U.S., Japan, and so are modern inventions. According to the received view, they are late 19th century and early 20th century creations. Nation states are institutions so that they can exist only if majority of people accept them as legitimate. It is true that leaders of those countries, for example, George Washington, had a clear vision of what their nation-state was, but it is a totally different thing if that kind of view were shared by majority of people in a given territory (or, state).

Coercive power does not last long so that legitimation of power is necessary; legitimated power is called authority. Only for last 200 years or so, modern nation states have had large scale legitimacy. If something is legitimate, people accept that or take it for granted. Acceptance requires commitment to the past. Only when we have memory, we can commit to the past (John Locke said something similar; Nietzsche also said something like that). Modern nation building was essentially construction of collective memory. Some would call it invention of traditions. OK, they are the same thing; no memory or history is fixed. In many countries, language was unified by eliminating dialects. In France, for example, a novelist Alphonse Daudet wrote a whole (made) story about universality of French language. Japan, when it annexed Korea, tried to educate Koreans in Japanese language, or what they call the national language, which itself is a modern invention. Indian case is an unique case in terms of language policy. Local languages there are too diverse to be unified so that they used English as an official language to unify the nation-state. By unifying the language, the function of radio, newspaper, and TV (or so called public sphere) cannot be ignored. It is not just language. They wrote a national history to ensure collective memory. History is a third person narrative of what happened, while collective memory is a first person narrative of what they feel. Only creating differences, we can have identity. Collective memory clearly is a source of identity. To ascertain collective memory, nation states have built monuments and so. They all have function. Thus created imagined communities named nation states. We are completely indoctrinated in this tradition, although nothing wrong with that, I believe. More or less, indoctrination is going on everywhere, which we call education.

Identity is created by difference
Native Americans, for example, did not have the identity as Native American, before Europeans came to America. Only by difference, we can construct our identity. Hispanic, white, Asians, black, and so are only available identity against each other. If there are only Hispanics, they start talking about differences within themselves. Chinese and Japanese are both eastern Asians in the U.S., but not in Japan or China. Back when Europeans first came to America, there were different "native American" groups fighting with each other and they surely did not have such identity "Native American". Difference in vision makes division of people.

Two dogmas of social science

In Social science (my exemplars are sociology and cultural anthropology), there are two (in)famous isms; functionalism and Marxism (conflict theory, neo-Marxism). These are paradigms in the sense Kuhn used the term. They are shared view of things and practice in the community and, in normal situations, findings (observations) are interpreted according to those paradigms.

According to functionalism, the society is organized in such a way that functionally important people are rewarded more, and according to functional importance people are assigned to social positions. Thus, society as a whole shows a well coordinated harmony, much like biological organism. According to Marxism, society is nothing like that. What is in society is inherent inequality rather than functional differences. In a simple form, there are two classes; dominant class and subordinate one. Although (or perhaps, precisely because) those two classes of people are functionally the same (approximately, to be more precise), dominant class tries to impose dominating ideology onto the subordinate class to perpetuate inequality. By imposing ideology, dominant class tries to legitimate their own superiority. Inequality is maintained by power only, but if power is just a brute force it does not last long. Thus, power has to be legitimated to become authority. Ideology is the mechanism that legitimate power.

One interpretation of Kuhn's paradigm is that it is introduced to prevent underdetermination of theories by evidence. Underdetermination of theories by evidence is the idea that, given noise and expected value, any theory is actually compatible with any data. The same data can be interpreted in any ways, and they can fit into any theoretical edifices. For a simple case, imagine a coin toss of ten times. If the result is 5 heads and 5 tails, what is the possible theory of the coin? It can be a true coin. Or it can be biased; perhaps just by change it ended up in 50/50. If the result is 6 heads and 4 tails, still the coin can be either true or biased. Because of small sample size (10 coin toss), sampling error, a form of noise, enters into the process and because of that we cannot be sure if coin is true or biased, and if biased, how. This structure of underdetermination can be "logically" extended to a large sample size or any other forms of data. This is problematic. At the foundation of science is this ambiguity. To prevent this underdetermination, Kuhn's paradigm in introduced. A given data are compatible with, say, both Newtonian mechanics and relativity. However, since paradigm, or accepted norm in the community, is relativity, the data are interpreted in the paradigm of relativity. Similarly, social scientific data can be interpreted according to a norm of the community.

However, paradigm is not scientific. It is just a rule of thumb. Science should reduce the degree of arbitrariness to minimum. Also science should be empirical. If paradigm is true, any empirical data are determined a priori in one way or another even before we observe them. This is too strange. This point echoes to Quine. Although underdetermination in principle cannot be solved empirically, at least we should be more empirical and reduce arbitrariness to minimum. Then, we have to give up on such paradigms as functionalism or Marxism, and embody incremental confirmation, such as Bayesian confirmation, whereby degree of belief is updated as you get new data.