How not to write a programming book

From Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd edition) by Aaron Hillegass. Chapter 6: Helper Objects:

Once upon a time (before Baywatch), there was a man with no name. Knight Industries decided that if this man were given guns and wheels and booster rockets, he would be the perfect crime-fighting tool. First, they thought, “Let’s subclass him and override everything we need to add the guns and wheels and booster rockets.” The problem was that to subclass Michael Knight, you would need to know an awful lot about this guts so you could wire them to guns and booster rockets. So instead, they created a helper object, the Knight Industries 2000, or “KITT the super car.”

This is the first paragraph. You don’t want to read the second paragraph, which is a meditation on RobotCop.

My goodness, the quality of programming books certainly hasn’t improved much. Are gratuitous references to pop culture and quirky metaphors some kind of a requirement for programming books? How could any editor at Addition-Wesley allow an author to waste a full page on this antic? And most importantly, how can a man with no name be called Michael Knight in the next sentence?

I am quite amused by the anecdote about the doomed Taligent operating system (page 79) but it should left out too. Yeah, I love the good old days when OPENSTEP programmers could laugh at Taligent and BeOS but it is almost 2010. Let it go.

L’Archéologie du Savoir (9)

From the wikipedia entry about the movie Blue Lagoon:

As it turned out, the iguanas filmed on Fiji were a species hitherto unknown to science; this was noted by the herpetologist John Gibbons when he watched the movie, and after traveling to the island where the iguanas were filmed, he described the Fiji Crested Iguana (Brachylophus vitiensis) in 1981.

I just returned from a short vacation in Fiji. The Blue Lagoon Beach on the Nanuya Levu island is unbelievably beautiful, even without Brooke Shields.

Qualia WTF (2)

I really have no idea how serious philosophers are about qualia. The PhiPapers survey shows that 12.2% professional philosophers that were polled “Accept or lean toward qualia theory”. In other branches of intellectual inquiries, 12.2% almost can be considered a fringe theory that deserves to be dismissed. But if that were true, why do I encounter the q word so often? Some additional thoughts:

1. The number of color qualia: Why is it that some people have less color qualia than other people? Why is it that those who do not have a proper red qualia (ie. red green color deficiency) are more likely to be male than female? Why is it that the goldfish has more color qualia than we do?

2. The dimensionality of color qualia: If you systematically mix three colors of light in different ratios, you can produce all color qualia in a subject with normal vision. But if restrict yourself to only two colors of light, you can’t. Why? Where does the magic number 3 come from?

3. Different types of qualia: auditory qualia are very different from color qualia. Color qualia form fuzzy categories (red, blue, yellow…etc.) but pitch qualia go from low to high. Why is that? As a matter of fact, it is a little devious that philosophers like to talk about colors and pain, but not about sound. Is a 440 hertz tone a quale? What about a 441 hertz tone? What about 440.1 Hz? What about chords? Are they summations of qualia? What about timbre?

Any undergrade student with a little knowledge of neurophysiology can answer these very fundamental questions about perception. What do philosophers say about them? Probably exactly the same thing. This just goes to show that there is no substance to qualia. It’s just a fancy word for “experience”.

Qualia WTF?

One of the frustrating things about the qualia mumble jumble is that philosophers love to talk about colors. “The redness of red”, for example, supposedly explains the meaning of the word. But philosophers only want to talk about colors in a superficial way and don’t go into any detail. By superficial I mean an undergrade student (who took my friend David’s Introduction to Neuroscience class anyway) can easily do better. For example, Daniel Dennett said that one of the four qualities commonly scribed to qualia is that “[they are] directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.” But the fact is that most people don’t know much about their qualia. A simple demonstration is the afterimage effect. My friend David loves to do it in his class. All you do is ask the students to stare at a red patch for a little while and then replace the patch with a blank screen. The students always go wild when they see a ghostly cyan patch. This trick never gets old. I’ve seen it a couple of times but it feels amazing every time. This experience is part of the red quale, but judging from the students ohhs and ahhs it’s very clear that they’ve never seen this before.

The complementary color afterimage effect is a direct consequence of neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. It wouldn’t be there if the brain weren’t wired the way it is. Some aspects of qualia are subjective and cannot easily be communicated to another person (or species), but some only make sense in light of biology. Philosophers love to talk about inverted colors. Although we can’t measure everything about the subjective experience of color, we can say with high confidence that no matter how you invert the colors, complementary pairs will always be complementary, as long as the brain organization is the same. We can also examine the physiology and anatomy of any species, and deduce with high confidence the relationship among the colors qualia. All this is possible because the mind is physical and follows physical laws.

As a matter of fact, the “inverted color” argument doesn’t make much sense. Colors are related to each other in a very specific way, which is the consequence of neuroanatomy and physiology. If you randomly switch colors around (for example, everything that used to look red now looks yellow), the subject will know something is different! At least other people will notice. In fact I challenge you to design a system for substituting color qualia such that the subject’s performance in all color-related tasks, starting from color mixing, remains the same. The solution space is limited and it is limited by physiology.

Now let’s talk about Mary who knows everything about physics and physiology, but has never seen a single color. It is argued that she doesn’t have the “knowledge” that the rest of us have – the experience of colors. That may be true, but she would know a lot about the subjective experience of color, such as afterimage effects, that most people are not aware of. I would argue that Mary has more knowledge about the color qualia than most people have. How does that make qualia non-physical?

The 50 million dollar qualia

I wanted to post a longish entry about some thoughts on qualia, but there are more important things to attend to. I just want to quickly mention one thing that’s been on my mind recently.

The Australian Research Council (ARC) just awarded a $50 million dollar grant to two Australian universities to create a bionic eye (or two). Before you get too excited, let me first make it clear that we are very far away from creating artificial vision. Doctors won’t be putting Borg-like devices into patents’ eye sockets anytime soon. But some patients will no doubt benefit from some form of visual experience and I look forward to some very exciting things coming from this scientific and engineering adventure. Lots of important issues are relevant, but I want to concentrate on one thing. We are talking about the creation of qualia.

Qualia is nothing more than a fancy word for “subjective experience”, or as Pat Churchland puts it, “the painfulness of pain”. Do we have qualia? Yes we do. I don’t object to the word other than its pretentiousness. Our visual experience does not reproduce the physical world. It is merely a simulation. The mapping between the physical world and our mental representation of the physical world is qualia. The problem is that philosophers sometimes get carried away with this very simple observation and start to “philosophize” it, to a point that qualia is supposed to show us how the mind is not physical. Sometimes it is claimed that qualia is the reason why the mind is beyond the limit of science and therefore is conveniently in the jurisdiction of philosophy.

It is true that you can give the concept enough spin to make it seem mysterious. For example, some patients have only one type of cone in their retinas, making their visual experience monochromatic. But do they perceive the world black and white, like a old TV set, or in shades of greens, like old computer monitors? The truth is that we don’t know. We can test their behavior with various psychophysical tests and we can (and we do) learn a lot about their experience, but we don’t have an easy access to their subjective experience. Language doesn’t help too much. You can’t ask a monochromatic person (or a dolphin, for the matter. All marine mammals are monochromatic) “does the world look black and white to you” because he or she or it doesn’t have access to your visual experience and therefore does not understand the word.

I don’t see why this is such a big deal. If the brain is wired differently, the experience will be different. It is a consequence of physicalism, not a argument for non-physicalism. But while philosophers are sitting on their asses classifying zombies, scientists are hard at work. Bionic implant is one of the ways of creating new subjective experience (the other being genetic engineering), and this time, the subject will be able to compare their experiences and will be able to report them. We will begin to understand the relationship between qualia and physiology.

How do bionic eyes create new qualia? One approach to bionic eye is to create an artificial retina by replacing photoreceptors with electronic components. The image properties of CCD components are very different from those of photoreceptors, so the experience will be different, but the difference might be too subtle to be called a new qualia. The Australian bionic eye project also funds the creation of a cortical implant. It is entirely possible to send highly processed information about the visual world (instead of raw images) to the cortex, and it is entirely possible that the cortex will reorganize itself to take advantage of this new source of information. New dimensionality of colors. New perspective of vision (cameras mounted on the back of the head). New forms of multimodel information (eg. radar). Imagine sending infrared information to the visual cortex. The recipient of the implant most likely won’t experience it as if she is using an infrared goggle. It will be a new form of experience. The infrared information may be experienced as a new color, but maybe not. It is entirely likely that a new infrared qualia will be created, and qualia will become part of science.

Qualia can be created and destroyed. Perception is a dynamic process because our brain is capable of reorganizing itself and because our brain is shaped by evolution, and evolution has changed the design of the brain of our species a few times. The heart of the issue is learning and neural plasticity, and those require mechanistic explanations. Philosophers need to take this very seriously and stop wasting time on riddles and thought experiments. Riddles and thought experiments have never been all that relevant but very soon they will look silly. Ok, let me rephrase that. VERY silly.

Note 1: The Australian Government obviously isn’t investing $50 million to study qualia or to create super vision. I am only saying that advances in biocompatible materials and microfabrication technology that this investment will bring will eventually make it possible to study the emergence of new qualia.

Note 2: My opinion is that some experiences will remain subjective and we might never be able to say for sure how a dichromat experience the visual world. The bionic eye project won’t change that. But there is nothing mysterious about subjective experience. It is simply a consequence of the physiology of the brain. Despite his best effort, my friend was not able to convey to me what he felt on a LSD trip. My stereo vision is also impaired. I can’t see many things that other people see, and I can’t imagine what a “magic eye” stereogram looks like in 3D. That, however, doesn’t prove that the mind is not physical. It only says that my sensory experience is impoverished.

Note 3: Yes I know that the singular form of qualia is quale, but it’s just too awkward a word to use.

Property dualism?

I realized that I did not mention property dualism in my previous post. That’s another bullshit term invented by philosophers. There is no such thing as “mental property”. This nebulous term is rejected (or ignored) by all scientists. Otherwise we would be measuring mental properties instead of physiological properties. Neurons are just like other cells. They don’t have any magical property that liver cells don’t have.

I realize that you can say that mental properties are nothing more than the emergent behavior of networks of neurons. That’s fine but that is not dualism. If you insist that the meaning of non-physicalism is just emergent behavior, remember 56.4% philosophers surveyed selected physicalism. What do they believe then?

Non-physicalism is the creationism of cognitive science

I am bothered recently by two things: 1. 27% professional philosophers call themselves non-physicalist and only 15% said that zombies are inconceivable. 2. Massimo Pigliucci’s epistemological boundaries. I am also bothered by my “peer” who happened to be my reviewer but that’s another story.

Why are philosophers asking themselves if zombies are conceivable? Isn’t that stepping outside the epistemological boundaries of philosophy? You may say it’s not because conceivability is not empirical. So as long as philosophers are day-dreaming and not digging up corpses in the graveyards, they are still philosophers. Ok granted but that is a very weak position. Why aren’t philosophers asking themselves if 100GHz microprocessors are conceivable? Or a 10000GeV synchrotron conceivable? Or a anti-anti-anti matter conceivable? Or a solution to riemann hypothesis conceivable? Or a singularity within a blackhole conceivable? If you are not an expert you are not qualified to make those judgements. Likewise, if you don’t know enough about neuroanatomy, it doesn’t matter if you find zombies conceivable. I know that some philosophers know a lot about neurobiology (Pat Churchland comes to mind) but that’s not the point. The correct answer is: we’ll let biologists decide. It is the only acceptable answer.

Furthermore, the zombie talk is dangerously close to theology. Asking me to imagine “a being that is indistinguishable from a normal human being except that it lacks conscious experience”* is like asking me to imagine a person who is 100% man but also 100% divine. I am sure that philosophers have tons and tons of papers arguing that lacking a conscious experience doesn’t necessarily preclude you from being a normal human, just like theologists have tons and tons of papers arguing for trinity, but most sane people laugh at them and move on. I refuse to read those aforementioned papers because I think I know enough about the world to say that this is bullshit. That is contradictory to everything we know about the world. I will change my mind only if some initial progress is made in a lab showing that you can make some kind of zombie creature. Or if a robot is made that is close to a zombie.

The heart of the debate really is, is mind just the brain? It is absolutely frustrating that it is considered a legitimate question among some philosophers. It is like asking “do we really evolve from other primates?” The answer is yes. There is no controversy about that in science. The case is closed. It’s time to move on to work on the real questions. But professors of philosophy are still teaching their students as if this question needed to be asked. We know that physicalism is true for the same reason we know that evolution is true. Because the evidence is compelling. No matter what method you use, from molecular biology to anatomy to physiology, from comparative behavior research to developmental biology, you get the same answer: our experience is generated by the brain, which is no more mysterious than the liver. Insisting that the mind is not the brain is like saying digestion is not the stomach. It’s nitpicking. It has no substance. Again, are scientists stepping outside the epistemological boundary of science when we say that the mind is just the brain? No. I think we are perfectly justified. Physicists don’t ask philosophers’ approval for a conclusion about the big bang. Biologists don’t ask philosophers’ approval for evolution. Why should the brain/mind be any different? Philosophers are considered relevant to the game only because they claim that they are. So far they haven’t made a contribution.

I was trying to explain to my girlfriend (a mathematician) non-physicalism. I said “This branch of philosophy believes that the mind is not generated by the brain…” She interrupted me and said “What? What generates the mind then?” I suddenly found myself at loss of words. I said “… they have this zombie argument… it goes like…wait, it is supposed to be clever but I can’t remember why it makes any sense now…”. You see the problem? Non-physicalism says that the world is composed of two kinds of substance: matter and mind. What does that mean? Does it mean that there are mind-particles that haven’t been found? Shouldn’t non-physicalists be rushing to a high energy collider to find those particles? But wait, mind particles are not matter. They cannot be found using any physical instruments. That is magical thinking. That is anti-science. That is dangerously close to theology. Why don’t we also talk about “the force” or the holy spirit? That profound claim, which is against everything we know about the world, is only supported by “thought experiments” (an euphemism for bullshitting) about zombies and inverted colors and little girls locked up in dark rooms. Any sane person should conclude that something’s wrong with those thought experiments. A typical defense is “You think disproving dualism easy? You try answer the zombie argument.” I am absolutely not interested in the zombie argument. This is the same answer theists give when they are asked about god. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Philosophers need to look for extraordinary evidence. Thought experiments haven’t been useful in any other branch of inquiry, why should I take thought experiments seriously?

The other frustrating thing about the zombie argument (as well as other thought experiments) is that all that it does is showing “physicalism is problematic”. Why stop there? If you think there’s something more than neurons and neurotransmitters, shouldn’t you start to spend some time looking for those mechanisms, instead of sitting on yo’ ass classifying zombies? This is exactly the kind of thing that the intelligent design crowd does. They claim that they are only interested in showing that an intelligent designer exists, but refuse to say anything specific about the designer.

Non-physicalism is the counterpart of creationism in cognitive science. It just wouldn’t die. Despite all the evidence philosophers still want to “teach the controversy”. And the sad thing is that the manufactured controversy is still being taught in colleges, sometimes in the name of cognitive science.

PS: I know I know. I am terribly naive about the philosophy of mind and a real philosopher can no doubt find mistakes in every sentence I wrote. But that is precisely the point. I am a working cognitive scientist/neuroscientist, not successful one but a working one nonetheless, but nobody I know in the field care at all about zombies. Being philosophically sophisticated hasn’t helped anyone at all in advancing our knowledge of the mind. That’s why it’s safe to ignore all the zombie literature.

* From the wikipedia

Tarsiers are so cute

Click on this link immediately. I promise you this is the most beautiful thing you’ll see this week, if not this month.

Headline: 16% professional philosophers find zombies inconceivable

Doesn’t it bother anyone that philosophers “do philosophy” by talking about zombies? I mean, some of us have to learn enough physics and electronics and programming to hand-assemble a MRI, but the tools of those guys are zombies? Something just doesn’t feel right here. The other day I accused my labmates of being not respectful enough towards philosophy (I pride myself in having a degree from the School of Humanities, you see). The anatomist in the room said: look, I have no problems with philosophers talking about zombies. I really don’t. I just don’t see why they should get paid for that. Most of us do that kind of things in a bar.

I’m still pissed about Massimo Pigliucci and his epistemology boundaries. So, if a scientist talks about God, he is stepping outside the epistemology boundary of science. But it is ok for philosophers to talk about zombies? Shouldn’t they, I don’t know, consult a biologist? But what Pigliucci said is not that scientists can’t talk about God. What he said is essentially that if a scientist want to talk about God, he or she should at least learn some jargons of philosophy and talk like a philosopher. Ok, I’m not saying that philosophers can’t talk about zombies. I am only saying that they should at least learn some biology and talk like biologists. No?

But wait, who said that biologists know anything about zombies that philosophers don’t? Why indeed. Who said that philosophers know anything about God that scientists don’t? The problem I see with Pigliucci’s piece is that he wants to limit science within a boundary (which I think is dangerously close to some theists), but at the same time he sets no boundary for philosophy. Pigliucci probably would agree that philosophers have nothing uniquely special to say about cosmology. Cosmology is now at the hands of physicists and they certainly don’t care for philosophy. But why do philosophers claim expertise in the mind? Shouldn’t they leave that to the specialists? Just because you can ask silly questions about zombies doesn’t mean you are part of the game.

The PhilPapers surveys

[via phiphicake] This philosophy survey thing by David Bourge and David Chalmers is terrific. They polled a really large number of philosophers on their positions on a really large number of philosophical issues. I am obviously not interested in ethics or zombies, but some results are quite interesting to non-philosophers. For example, about God:

61.8% accepts atheism
10.9% lean toward atheism
10.6%6 accepts theism (I think that is unacceptably high)
5.4% is agnostic/undecided

It’s been argued again and again by armchair philosophers (who like to use bullshit terms like “epistemology”) that agnosticism is somewhat philosophically more sophisticated than atheism, but look! Only 5.4% professional philosophers selected “agnostic/undecided”*. The majority has no problem with the “atheism” label. If you restrict yourself to professional philosophers who specialize in epistemology, you get essentially the same number.

The result about Mind I find quite disturbing: 26% aligned themselves with “non-physicalism”! If you ask me, this is almost as bad as accepting creationism.

As expected, opinions are quite divided on many issues. The only issues that reached 70% consensus are:

* A priori knowledge: 71% yes
* External world: 81.6% non-skeptical realism
* God: 72.8% atheism
* Science: 75% scientific realism

Oh great! At least most philosophers can agree that the external world exists. But wait! 4.8% are skeptical?? Are they crazy?

Philosophy undergrade students are notoriously wishy-washy. This is more or less confirmed from the survey too. Not a single issue reaches 70% consensus among undergrades.

* Note that the word “agnostic” in this survey does not refer to agnosticism. Every question in the survey has a agnostic/undecided option.

All about the O’Neills

I was walking pass the corridor of the Genetics department, and I saw an interesting paper posted at the door of a professor’s office (who is, apparently, Irish):

O’Neill, E. B. & McLaughlin, J. D. (2006) Insights into the O’Neills of Ireland from DNA testing. Jorunel of Genetic Genealogy 2:18-26.

Abstract:

The O’Neills of Ireland are one of the best known and important families in Irish history, descended from a long dynastic line that for centuries were Kings of Ulster and High Kings of Ireland. By traditional pedigree they are patrilineal descendants of Niall “of the Nine Hostages” who was the semi-historical High King of Ireland who died in 405 and who was the founder of the famous Ui Neill dynasty. But an examination of DNA data on males with the O’Neill, McLaughlin, O Cathain, McShane and other related surnames has led to a theory that the Royal Tyrone O’Neills of Ireland, from some point forward, were not, as history records, patrilineal descendents from the line of the Ui Neill. An analysis of available Y-DNA data on 102 males with the O’Neill surname reveals the existence of two different O’Neill Y-STR clusters, both primarily located in the region of Ireland associated with the Ui Neill line and the Royal O’Neills. Results of testing the Y-SNP M222 indicate that the two groups of O’Neills are distinctly separate. Documented Irish history, coupled with Y-DNA data on surnames linked to the Ui Neill line at different time periods (McLaughlin, O Cathain and McShane) suggest the approximate time frame of a non-paternal event (NPE) in the Royal O’Neill line occurred between the 900s and 1500s.

I think it is very exciting that DNA testing can be used to provide insights into history.

Bad Joke Attack

A: Knock knock..
B: Who’s there?
A: Cthulhu
B: Cthulhu who?
A: Cthulhu’s calling. This is the call of Cthulhu.

The Relativity of Wrong

[via pharyngula] Everybody read this article by Isaac Asimov. Money quote:

Naturally, the theories we now have might be considered wrong in the simplistic sense of my English Lit correspondent, but in a much truer and subtler sense, they need only be considered incomplete.

It is absolutely true that students of humanities often claim to have a more sophisticated understanding of epistemology, but in reality their understanding of truth is simplistic.

and I thought I was the geek…

One day I’ll have to write about this in detail. I was talking to my friend Adrian about peripheral vision. He then started to show me a few pinhole cameras he built. Those were designed such that films were mounted on spherical surfaces, and the chambers were sometimes filled with water. What does anyone want to do such a thing? To understand the pinhole optics of the nautilus eye, of course!

A relevant paper:
Muntz, W.R.A. & Raj, U. (1984) On the visual system of Nautilus pompilius. J. exp. biol., 109, 253-263.

Although the project was primarily a scientific one, the results were also artistic. You can capture some really stunning ultra wide angle panoramas with nothing more than films attached to an old candy canister.

Adrian even attempted to build a full spherical camera from a fishbowl. I’m fascinated by the fact that true spherical imagers are becoming possible. Here’s an example [link].

Honorificabilitudinitatibus

Honorificabilitudinitatibus, a word found in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, deserves a mention in this blog because:

1. I love dropping Shakespeare here and there, even though I know nothing about his work. It’s like a hobby. Every time I notice anything related to Shakespeare (which is very rare for a scientist), I write a note.

2. I love the Dr. Who episode The Shakespeare Code, which is about the creation of Love’s Labour’s Lost. The same episode also made a reference to the Sycorax, my favorite Dr. Who alien (precisely because it is a reference to The Tempest). The word is also somewhat similar to Raxacoricofallapatorius (another alien race). Is that an homage to Shakespeare?

3. Love’s Labour’s Lost in Space is a very good Futurama episode.

4. Honorificabilitudinitatibus is an anagram of hi ludi, F. Baconis nati, tuiti orbi (these plays, F. Bacon’s offspring, are preserved for the world). This oddity is cited by conspiracy nuts as an evidence of Roger Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. The authorship conspiracy is, of course, one of the subplots of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.

5. It is totally bizarre that Georg Cantor (the mathematician who invented transfinite numbers) published two pamphlets identifying Roger Bacon as the author of Shakespeare’s plays.

6. OS X’s built in dictionary doesn’t have a definition of honorificabilitudinitatibus, but the spellchecker knows this word! Cool, eh?

7. Where did I encounter this word? Of course, Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue. I also learned that Shakespeare coined the phrase “salad days”. I thought it was only the title of an Adrian Belew album.

PS: I don’t know about you, but I think this is my best blog entry so far. Where else can you read about The Bard of Avon, two sci-fi TV series, OS X, conspiracy, mathematics, and Adrian Belew all in one place? You are welcome.

By cock

Cock was for a long time not only a slang term for penis but also a euphemism for God. Thus in Hamlet Ophelia could pun: ‘Young men will do’t, if they come to’t; By cock, they are to blame.’

- Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson

Radio days – the Taiwanese version

A recent discussion inspired me to write this little piece. Apologies to Woody Allen for the title. I was trying to invoke the fellinian nostalgia of the movie but probably didn’t make it.

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My good friend from highs school just shared a hilarious story about the western pop music “scene” in Taiwan some 20 years ago. Those were the days when classical music was much more mainstream than Debbie Gibson (my dad had a full LP set of Beethoven’s symphonies, for crying out loud). Everything was semi-legal because copyright laws were primitive and the whole scene was supported by a small group of passionate fans who actually knew very little about western culture, and very often very little English. I used to listen to a radio program called “Dream Garden”, which was hosted by two female aerobic instructors. They bought equipments to broadcast AM using funds pooled from friends. The “station” was just a small room in their dance studio. All songs broadcasted on Dream Garden were pirated by taping Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 from ICRT, a radio station in Taipei started by the U.S. military.

Publicity photos of rock groups and singers were hot items that we collected passionately, because there was no other way of knowing how the singers looked like. They were traded in the form of small laminated photos. Posters were sometimes available but very expensive. Buying those memorabilia was an adventure in itself. The main trading point was called the Kuan-Hua Market, which was a catacomb carved out of the concrete base of a major highway. If you observed carefully you could have spotted Deckard asking questions about escaped androids among the crowds. Except that he would be wearings shorts and not a trench coat. On the upper floor you’ve got pirated software (or firmware) and electronic components. On the bottom floor, everything else. Many semi-legal transactions were conducted there so you’ve got to watch out for Japanese porn stashed beneath old magazines and the occasional police raid. Fortunately, it didn’t take too long for the geeks on the top floor to figure to out how to decode TV signals from Japanese satellites and I was able to actually watch some music videos, as well as ALF reruns. Information was so scarce that I asked my dad to steal Rolling Stone Magazines from airport lounges when he traveled abroad.

The de-facto leader of the Taiwanese rock and roll scene was a guy called Yu-Kwan who later on became a fanatical Christian. I read a recent interview during which he had to kneel down to say prayers a few times. But 20 years ago he was cool. Under great political and economical pressure he managed to produce a few radio and TV shows, publish a magazine, and eventually host a Michael Jackson concert in Taipei. The irony is that the guy who was the source of all information about western pop music actually knew very little about music and had bad taste. To him, insightful commentary about musicians was all about summarizing statistics from the Top 40 charts and he famously called Tracy Chapman a “great american white, male singer”. Those were the days when people didn’t know that Tracy was an unlikely name for a guy, and the most important things you wanted to know about an artist were the nationality, race, and gender.

Cassettes were typically lavishly packaged and came with lyrics sheets and long introductions. I used to devour them without realizing that they were not written by professional critics (a concept that did not exist at the time) but by fanboys and fangirls. An introduction to “Hey Jude” (a very simple love song) asserted that its lyrics was deep with message about love and spirituality, and made profound commentary on the society, the human condition, and modern science. Modern science? Sometimes I wonder if my skepticism (some calls cynicism) about everything was inspired not by Carl Sagan but by trying to understand the international music market.

The last thing I want to say is about an encounter I had. Around the time I attended high school, some small, independent publishers and music stores started to appear around the National Taiwan University to cater to the more sophisticated taste of the elite college students. Lennon Records, for example, started to sell cassettes of musicians that nobody ever heard of. Jurassic 5, My Bloody Valentine and Felt. Of course those were famous bands everywhere else in the world but I was completely baffled by this new deluge of unknown bands. In confusion I bought two albums by “ant-folk” singer Cindy Lee Berryhill, who was called by Lennon Record staffs “the next Patti Smith”. But alas, Cindy Lee did not become the next Patti Smith. She disappeared completely. The last time I checked she didn’t even have a wikipedia entry. But a night of my second year in San Diego, I was trolling the gaslamp quarter with some friends and went by a small performance venue (Dizzy’s) and I thought I heard the quirky vocal style of Cindy Lee Berryhill. And it was Cindy Lee Berryhill! As it turned out she moved to California from New York shortly after I bought her albums and eventually became a resident of San Diego. She lives in Encinitas with her husband and a kid. I spotted her a few times at the UTC AppleStore. The music career of Cindy Lee was suspended after her husband’s devastating car accident. She stills performs in San Diego and Los Angeles once in a long while. Her more recent song “When Did Jesus Become a Republican?” was a minor local hit. It was popular enough that it was played at an anti-bush rally.

L’Archéologie du Savoir (8)

We are all familiar with the “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” expression. Supposedly medieval scholars were quite serious about this issue. I never gave the expression any thought but if you think about it, this boggles the mind. Exactly what was the debate? Are angles supposed to be very small? Did someone make a calculation and claimed that the correct number was 39? Was this debate about the size of angels? the weight of angels? the dancing skills of angels?

Wikipedia to the rescue. According to this entry, most likely there never was such a debate. It was made up just to mock the scholastic scholars. Ok, I didn’t know that.

為什麼要相信達爾文

Jerry Coyne 寫的 “Why Evolution is True” 毫無疑問是有關演化論最好的科普書籍, 我認為比 Dawkins 的 Greatest Show on Earth 要好得太多了. 我大力推薦給大家.

我今天才知道這本書已經有簡體中文的翻譯了. 書名叫做 “為什麼要相信達爾文”. 有興趣的人可以找來讀.

Massimo Pigliucci vs. science

Philosopher Massimo Pigliucc posted another entry about science and philosophy. Again, he insists that scientists don’t know how to think properly. He also said that scientists are arrogant and love money. Keep it classy, professor. Maybe we scientists don’t know how to do “analysis and questioning that include dialectics and logical argumentation” (which he claims only philosophers know how to do), but at least we don’t play dirty.

Here he argues that philosophy, like science, makes progress:

Another common misconception is that philosophy, unlike science, doesn’t make progress. This is simply not true, unless one measures progress by the (scientific) standard of empirical discovery. [...] Philosophy makes progress because dialectical analysis generates compelling objections to a given position, which lead to either an improvement or the abandonment of said position, which is followed by more critical analysis of either the revised position or of the new one, and so on. For instance, ethical theories (moral philosophy), or theories about consciousness (philosophy of mind), or about the nature of science (philosophy of science), have steadily progressed so that no contemporary professional philosopher would consider herself a utilitarian in the original sense intended by Jeremy Bentham, or a Cartesian dualist, or a Popperian falsificationist — just in the same way in which no scientist today would defend Newtonian mechanics, or the original version of Darwin’s theory.

That isn’t very convincing. Imagine an alchemist making the same argument about alchemy: “Of course alchemy makes progress. A year ago everybody thought that slowly heating up silver in a pile of horse shit according to the principles of kabala would turn it into gold. After Dr. Dee published his new interpretation of the Sefer Yetzirah, nobody believes that anymore. Now we use mercury and bat shit. That’s progress.” No that isn’t. Replacing a theory with something else is not progress. That something else has to be, at least occasionally, so insightful that its significance is not simply justified by answering questions in its own problem domain.

I agree with Pigliucci that progress does not need to be evaluated by empirical discovers. The accomplishment of mathematics, for example, is not evaluated by an empirical metric but nobody doubts that its progress is significant. However, it must be measurable in some way otherwise it deserves no respect. Pigliucci offers none. It’s interesting that he mentioned consciousness. According to him, philosophy of mind makes some progress because nobody considers himself a Cartesian dualist anymore. Say what? Descartes lived in the 1600s. It took philosophers 400 years to figure that one out? Some progress.

Furthermore, if philosophy makes progress and replaces Bentham, Descartes and Popper with something else, why are students of philosophy still reading them* in their original form? I studied newtonian mechanics and evolution in college but I didn’t read any Newton nor Darwin. I did not even read a quote by Newton or Darwin. Their theories are reformulated to reflect … the progress.

* And why are science students forced to read them in general education classes?