Things have gotten unusually busy this summer. With no paid teaching to keep me tied to a single location, I’ve said yes to more random one-off presentations.
A short introduction to the concept of permaculture and our local Guild at Kathleen Clay Edwards Library a couple Fridays ago.
Today’s talk on states of consciousness and mind-body medicine at Crescent Rotary.
Still trying to work out a date for a talk at the federal prison in Butner for UNCG’s Prison Education Program.
I’ve also been taking an online class with Lisa Lerner through the Writer’s Grotto, thanks to the Rin Kelly Scholarship I won last year,
which hopefully I’ll have something interesting to say about after I complete it.
Not coincidentally, I met some educational publishers at this little homeschool conference yesterday, where I had set up a vendor table. Got a lot more interest from parents around permaculture than I did around science fiction as a way to teach science, though to be fair I have so far mostly targeted older audiences.
For now, I want to point out a recent podcast where they use some gaming tropes in a guided meditation.
I do similar meditations with my neuro students, and some of them do involve turning the lights out, but I’ve never put a flashlight under my face so I will look spoooooooky, like Richard Moll in the poster below. The point is never to scare them.
What does often happen is that they drift enough to slightly engage their dream imagery networks, and they have these visual experiences that they are not prepared for. Being generally pretty sleep-deprived, they mostly don’t remember their nightly dreams, and so they don’t realize how vivid unconscious visual imagery can be.
I had a dream the other night where my arm was broken. I remember feeling the injury with my other hand, and getting some level of tactile sensation as I ran my fingers over the bumps where the broken bones were, under the skin, which is unusual for me. No pain, though.
If you’re interested, Erik Hoel has a nice essay on why we dream, individually, and why we insist on making up fictional stories, collectively.
It links to a theoretical academic paper.
Dreaming remains a mystery to neuroscience. While various hypotheses of why brains evolved nightly dreaming have been put forward, many of these are contradicted by the sparse, hallucinatory, and narrative nature of dreams, a nature that seems to lack any particular function. Recently, research on artificial neural networks has shown that during learning, such networks face a ubiquitous problem: that of overfitting to a particular dataset, which leads to failures in generalization and therefore performance on novel datasets. Notably, the techniques that researchers employ to rescue overfitted artificial neural networks generally involve sampling from an out-of-distribution or randomized dataset. The overfitted brain hypothesis is that the brains of organisms similarly face the challenge of fitting too well to their daily distribution of stimuli, causing overfitting and poor generalization. By hallucinating out-of-distribution sensory stimulation every night, the brain is able to rescue the generalizability of its perceptual and cognitive abilities and increase task performance.
Questions?
Worth digging into more?
Finally, a preview of today’s talk
From another academic paper called The Cognitive Cell.
If single cells can perform every one of these tasks, then they have little bitty minds, don’t they? Biologists define life in more or less the same way, as a list of tasks that living things have to do (see literally any bio textbook).
To be classified as a living thing, an object must have all six of the following characteristics:
It responds to the environment.
It grows and develops.
It produces offspring.
It maintains homeostasis.
It has complex chemistry.
It consists of cells.
Viruses only do some of those things, so viruses are not technically alive, according to biologists. They are an edge case. Philosophers love edge cases, because they can argue about them. Every other westerner hates them, because they are messy. Eastern philosophies like Buddhism recognize that all of our categories are artificial tools meant to help our own larger but still tiny minds simplify and make sense of the big old universe, and that “a finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.”
Thanks for reading!
On ML Clark's recommendation
https://substack.com/home/post/p-146862679
I've been watching EVIL, with Mike Colter from LUKE CAGE and Aasif Mandvi from THE DAILY SHOW.
They clearly know how to play the game, balancing "wins" for science and religion alternately from episode to episode, juggling the balls to keep the debate going. Even between threads within a single episode, as in s1e5:"Halloween Night." But what I'm haunted by is the fact that today at the B&N, I saw an albino woman who might be killed as a witch in some parts of Africa
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_people_with_albinism
and a documentary I saw a year or more ago about a psychotic woman waterboarded to death by her own family in New Zealand.
https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the-real-story-behind-the-exorcism-of-janet-moses/news-story/02b55149f2c5573cf0b111680c68af07
People take these metaphors seriously.
I removed the temporary Zoom link.