serotonin

What does “can” mean, anyway?

PNRJ cognitive science, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , ,

Apr 7 JDN 2460409

I don’t remember where, but I believe I once heard a “philosopher” defined as someone who asks the sort of question everyone knows the answer to, and doesn’t know the answer.

By that definition, I’m feeling very much a philosopher today.

“can” is one of the most common words in the English language; the Oxford English Corpus lists it as the 53rd most common word. Similar words are found in essentially every language, and nearly always rank among their most common.

Yet when I try to precisely define what we mean by this word, it’s surprisingly hard.

Why, you might even say I can’t.

The very concept of “capability” is surprisingly slippery—just what is someone capable of?

My goal in this post is basically to make you as confused about the concept as I am.

I think that experiencing disabilities that include executive dysfunction has made me especially aware of just how complicated the concept of ability really is. This also relates back to my previous post questioning the idea of “doing your best”.

Here are some things that “can” might mean, or even sometimes seems to mean:

1. The laws of physics do not explicitly prevent it.

This seems far too broad. By this definition, you “can” do almost anything—as long as you don’t make free energy, reduce entropy, or exceed the speed of light.

2. The task is something that other human beings have performed in the past.

This is surely a lot better; it doesn’t say that I “can” fly to Mars or turn into a tree. But by this definition, I “can” sprint as fast as Usain Bolt and swim as long as Michael Phelps—which certainly doesn’t seem right. Indeed, not only would I say I can’t do that; I’d say I couldn’t do that, no matter how hard I tried.

3. The task is something that human beings in similar physical condition to my own have performed in the past.

Okay, we’re getting warmer. But just what do we mean, “similar condition”? No one else in the world is in exactly the same condition I am.

And even if those other people are in the same physical condition, their mental condition could be radically different. Maybe they’re smarter than I am, or more creative—or maybe they just speak Swahili. It doesn’t seem right to say that I can speak Swahili. Maybe I could speak Swahili, if I spent a lot of time and effort learning it. But at present, I can’t.

4. The task is something that human beings in similar physical and mental condition to my own have performed in the past.

Better still. This seems to solve the most obvious problems. It says that I can write blog posts (check), and I can’t speak Swahili (also check).

But it’s still not specific enough. For, even if we can clearly define what constitutes “people like me” (can we?), there are many different circumstances in which people like me have been in, and what they did has varied quite a bit, depending on those circumstances.

People in extreme emergencies have performed astonishingly feats of strength, such as lifting cars. Maybe I could do something like that, should the circumstance arise? But it certainly doesn’t seem right to say that I can lift cars.

5. The task is something that human beings in similar physical and mental condition to my own have performed in the past, in circumstances similar to my own.

That solves the above problems (provided we can sufficiently define “similar” for both people and circumstances). But it actually raises a different problem: If the circumstances were so similar, shouldn’t their behavior and mine be the same?

By that metric, it seems like the only way to know if I can do something is to actually do it. If I haven’t actually done it—in that mental state, in those circumstances—then I can’t really say I could have done it. At that point, “can” becomes a really funny way of saying “do”.

So it seems we may have narrowed down a little too much here.

And what about the idea that I could speak Swahili, if I studied hard? That seems to be something broader; maybe it’s this:

6. The task is something that human beings who are in physical or mental condition that is attainable from my own condition have performed in the past.

But now we have to ask, what do we mean by “attainable”? We come right back to asking about capability again: What kind of effort can I make in order to learn Swahili, train as a pilot, or learn to SCUBA dive?

Maybe I could lift a car, if I had to do it to save my life or the life of a loved one. But without the adrenaline rush of such emergency, I might be completely unable to do it, and even with that adrenaline rush, I’m sure the task would injure me severely. Thus, I don’t think it’s fair to say I can lift cars.

So how much can I lift? I have found that I can, as part of a normal workout, bench-press about 80 pounds. But I don’t think is the limit of what I can lift; it’s more like what I can lift safely and comfortably for multiple sets of multiple reps without causing myself undue pain. For a single rep, I could probably do considerably more—though how much more is quite hard to say. 100 pounds? 120? (There are online calculators that supposedly will convert your multi-rep weight to a single-rep max, but for some reason, they don’t seem to be able to account for multiple sets for some reason. If I do 4 sets of 10 reps, is that 10 reps, or 40 reps? This is the difference between my one-rep max being 106 and it being 186. The former seems closer to the truth, but is probably still too low.)

If I absolutely had to—say, something that heavy has fallen on me and lifting it is the only way to escape—could I bench-press my own weight of about 215 pounds? I think so. But I’m sure it would hurt like hell, and I’d probably be sore for days afterward.

Now, consider tasks that require figuring something out, something I don’t currently know but could conceivably learn or figure out. It doesn’t seem right to say that I can solve the P/NP problem or the Riemann Hypothesis. But it does seem right to say that I can at least work on those problems—I know enough about them that I can at least get started, if perhaps not make much real progress. Whereas most people, while they could theoretically read enough books about mathematics to one day know enough that they could do this, are not currently in a state where they could even begin to do that.

Here’s another question for you to ponder:

Can I write a bestselling novel?

Maybe that’s no fair. Making it a bestseller depends on all sorts of features of the market that aren’t entirely under my control. So let’s make it easier:

Can I write a novel?

I have written novels. So at first glance it seems obvious that I can write a novel.

But there are many days, especially lately, on which I procrastinate my writing and struggle to get any writing done. On such a day, can I write a novel? If someone held a gun to my head and demanded that I write the novel, could I get it done?

I honestly don’t know.

Maybe there’s some amount of pressure that would in fact compel me, even on the days of my very worst depression, to write the novel. Or maybe if you put that gun to my head, I’d just die. I don’t know.

But I do know one thing for sure: It would hurt.

Writing a novel on my worst days would require enormous effort and psychological pain—and honestly, I think it wouldn’t feel all that different from trying to lift 200 pounds.

Now we are coming to the real heart of the matter:

How much cost am I expected to pay, for it to still count as within my ability?

There are many things that I can do easily, that don’t really require much effort. But this varies too.

On most days, brushing my teeth is something I just can do—I remember to do it, I choose to do it, it happens; I don’t feel like I have exerted a great deal of effort or paid any substantial cost.

But there are days when even brushing my teeth is hard. Generally I do make it happen, so evidently I can do it—but it is no longer free and effortless the way it usually is.

There are other things which require effort, but are generally feasible, such as working out. Working out isn’t easy (essentially by design), but if I put in the effort, I can make it happen.

But again, some days are much harder than others.

Then there are things which require so much effort they feel impossible, even if they theoretically aren’t.

Right now, that’s where I’m at with trying to submit my work to journals or publishers. Each individual action is certainly something I should be physically able to take. I know the process of what to do—I’m not trying to solve the Riemann Hypothesis here. I have even done it before.

But right now, today, I don’t feel like I can do it. There may be some sense in which I “can”, but it doesn’t feel relevant.

And I felt the same way yesterday, and the day before, and pretty much every day for at least the past year.

I’m not even sure if there is an amount of pressure that could compel me to do it—e.g. if I had a gun to my head. Maybe there is. But I honestly don’t know for sure—and if it did work, once again, it would definitely hurt.

Others in the disability community have a way of describing this experience, which probably sounds strange if you haven’t heard it before:

“Do you have enough spoons?”

(For D&D fans, I’ve also heard others substitute “spell slots”.)

The idea is this: Suppose you are endowed with a certain number of spoons, which you can consume as a resource in order to achieve various tasks. The only way to replenish your spoons is rest.

Some tasks are cheap, requiring only 1 or 2 spoons. Others may be very costly, requiring 10, or 20, or perhaps even 50 or 100 spoons.

But the number of spoons you start with each morning may not always be the same. If you start with 200, then a task that requires 2 will seem trivial. But if you only started with 5, even those 2 will feel like a lot.

As you deplete your available spoons, you will find you need to ration which tasks you are able to complete; thus, on days when you wake up with fewer spoons, things that you would ordinarily do may end up not getting done.

I think submitting to a research journal is a 100-spoon task, and I simply haven’t woken up with more than 50 spoons in any given day within the last six months.

I don’t usually hear it formulated this way, but for me, I think the cost varies too.

I think that on a good day, brushing my teeth is a 0-spoon task (a “cantrip”, if you will); I could do it as many times as necessary without expending any detectable effort. But on a very bad day, it will cost me a couple of spoons just to do that. I’ll still get it done, but I’ll feel drained by it. I couldn’t keep doing it indefinitely. It will prevent me from being able to do something else, later in the day.

Writing is something that seems to vary a great deal in its spoon cost. On a really good day when I’m feeling especially inspired, I might get 5000 words written and feel like I’ve only spent 20 spoons; while on a really bad day, that same 20 spoons won’t even get me a single paragraph.

It may occur to you to ask:

What is the actual resource being depleted here?

Just what are the spoons, anyway?

That, I really can’t say.

I don’t think it’s as simple as brain glucose, though there were a few studies that seemed to support such a view. If it were, drinking something sugary ought to fix it, and generally that doesn’t work (and if you do that too often, it’s bad for your health). Even weirder is that, for some people, just tasting sugar seems to help with self-control. My own guess is that if your particular problem is hypoglycemia, drinking sugar works, and otherwise, not so much.

There could be literally some sort of neurotransmitter reserves that get depleted, or receptors that get overloaded; but I suspect it’s not even that simple either. These are the models we use because they’re the best we have—but the brain is in reality far more complicated than any of our models.

I’ve heard people say “I ran out of serotonin today”, but I’m fairly sure they didn’t actually get their cerebrospinal fluid tested first. (And since most of your serotonin is actually in your gut, if they really ran out they should be having severe gastrointestinal symptoms.) (I had my cerebrospinal fluid tested once; most agonizing pain of my life. To say that I don’t recommend the experience is such an understatement, it’s rather like saying Hell sounds like a bad vacation spot. Indeed, if I believed in Hell, I would have to imagine it feels like getting a spinal tap every day for eternity.)

So for now, the best I can say is, I really don’t know what spoons are. And I still don’t entirely know what “can” means. But at least maybe now you’re as confused as I am.

The Cognitive Science of Morality Part II: Molly Crockett

PNRJ cognitive science , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2457140 EDT 20:16.

This weekend has been very busy for me, so this post is going to be shorter than most—which is probably a good thing anyway, since my posts tend to run a bit long.

In an earlier post I discussed the Weinberg Cognitive Science Conference and my favorite speaker in the lineup, Joshua Greene. After a brief interlude from Capybara Day, it’s now time to talk about my second-favorite speaker, Molly Crockett. (Is it just me, or does the name “Molly” somehow seem incongruous with a person of such prestige?)

Molly Crockett is a neuroeconomist, though you’d never hear her say that. She doesn’t think of herself as an economist at all, but purely as a neuroscientist. I suspect this is because when she hears the word “economist” she thinks of only mainstream neoclassical economists, and she doesn’t want to be associated with such things.

Still, what she studies is clearly neuroeconomics—I in fact first learned of her work by reading the textbook Neuroeconomics, though I really got interested in her work after watching her TED Talk. It’s one of the better TED talks (they put out so many of them now that the quality is mixed at best); she talks about news reporting on neuroscience, how it is invariably ridiculous and sensationalist. This is particularly frustrating because of how amazing and important neuroscience actually is.

I could almost forgive the sensationalism if they were talking about something that’s actually fantastically boring, like, say, tax codes, or financial regulations. Of course, even then there is the Oliver Effect: You can hide a lot of evil by putting it in something boring. But Dodd-Frank is 2300 pages long; I read an earlier draft that was only (“only”) 600 pages, and it literally contained a three-page section explaining how to define the word “bank”. (Assuming direct proportionality, I would infer that there is now a twelve-page section defining the word “bank”. Hopefully not?) It doesn’t get a whole lot more snoozeworthy than that. So if you must be a bit sensationalist in order to get people to see why eliminating margin requirements and the swaps pushout rule are terrible, terrible ideas, so be it.

But neuroscience is not boring, and so sensationalism only means that news outlets are making up exciting things that aren’t true instead of saying the actually true things that are incredibly exciting.

Here, let me express without sensationalism what Molly Crockett does for a living: Molly Crockett experimentally determines how psychoactive drugs modulate moral judgments. The effects she observes are small, but they are real; and since these experiments are done using small doses for a short period of time, if these effects scale up they could be profound. This is the basic research component—when it comes to technological fruition it will be literally A Clockwork Orange. But it may be A Clockwork Orange in the best possible way: It could be, at last, a medical cure for psychopathy, a pill to make us not just happier or healthier, but better. We are not there yet by any means, but this is clearly the first step: Molly Crockett is to A Clockwork Orange roughly as Michael Faraday is to the Internet.

In one of the experiments she talked about at the conference, Crockett found that serotonin reuptake inhibitors enhance harm aversion. Serotonin reuptake inhibitors are very commonly used drugs—you are likely familiar with one called Prozac. So basically what this study means is that Prozac makes people more averse to causing pain in themselves or others. It doesn’t necessarily make them more altruistic, let alone more ethical; but it does make them more averse to causing pain. (To see the difference, imagine a 19th-century field surgeon dealing with a wounded soldier; there is no anesthetic, but an amputation must be made. Sometimes being ethical requires causing pain.)

The experiment is actually what Crockett calls “the honest Milgram Experiment“; under Milgram, the experimenters told their subjects they would be causing shocks, but no actual shocks were administered. Under Crockett, the shocks are absolutely 100% real (though they are restricted to a much lower voltage of course). People are given competing offers that contain an amount of money and a number of shocks to be delivered, either to you or to the other subject. They decide how much it’s worth to them to bear the shocks—or to make someone else bear them. It’s a classic willingness-to-pay paradigm, applied to the Milgram Experiment.

What Crockett found did not surprise me, nor do I expect it will surprise you if you imagine yourself in the same place; but it would totally knock the socks off of any neoclassical economist. People are much more willing to bear shocks for money than they are to give shocks for money. They are what Crockett terms hyper-altruistic; I would say that they are exhibiting an apparent solidarity coefficient greater than 1. They seem to be valuing others more than they value themselves.

Normally I’d say that this makes no sense at all—why would you value some random stranger more than yourself? Equally perhaps, and obviously only a psychopath would value them not at all; but more? And there’s no way you can actually live this way in your daily life; you’d give away all your possessions and perhaps even starve yourself to death. (I guess maybe Jesus lived that way.) But Crockett came up with a model that explains it pretty well: We are morally risk-averse. If we knew we were dealing with someone very strong who had no trouble dealing with shocks, we’d be willing to shock them a fairly large amount. But we might actually be dealing with someone very vulnerable who would suffer greatly; and we don’t want to take that chance.

I think there’s some truth to that. But her model leaves something else out that I think is quite important: We are also averse to unfairness. We don’t like the idea of raising one person while lowering another. (Obviously not so averse as to never do it—we do it all the time—but without a compelling reason we consider it morally unjustified.) So if the two subjects are in roughly the same condition (being two undergrads at Oxford, they probably are), then helping one while hurting the other is likely to create inequality where none previously existed. But if you hurt yourself in order to help yourself, no such inequality is created; all you do is raise yourself up, provided that you do believe that the money is good enough to be worth the shocks. It’s actually quite Rawslian; lifting one person up while not affecting the other is exactly the sort of inequality you’re allowed to create according to the Difference Principle.

There’s also the fact that the subjects can’t communicate; I think if I could make a deal to share the money afterward, I’d feel better about shocking someone more in order to get us both more money. So perhaps with communication people would actually be willing to shock others more. (And the sensation headline would of course be: “Talking makes people hurt each other.”)

But all of these ideas are things that could be tested in future experiments! And maybe I’ll do those experiments someday, or Crockett, or one of her students. And with clever experimental paradigms we might find out all sorts of things about how the human mind works, how moral intuitions are structured, and ultimately how chemical interventions can actually change human moral behavior. The potential for both good and evil is so huge, it’s both wondrous and terrifying—but can you deny that it is exciting?

And that’s not even getting into the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science, which undermines all concepts of afterlife and theistic religion. I already talked about it before—as the sort of thing that I sort of wish I could say when I introduce myself as a cognitive scientist—but I think it bears repeating.

As Patricia Churchland said on the Colbert Report: Colbert asked, “Are you saying I have no soul?” and she answered, “Yes.” I actually prefer Daniel Dennett’s formulation: “Yes, we have a soul, but it’s made of lots of tiny robots.”

We don’t have a magical, supernatural soul (whatever that means); we don’t have an immortal soul that will rise into Heaven or be reincarnated in someone else. But we do have something worth preserving: We have minds that are capable of consciousness. We love and hate, exalt and suffer, remember and imagine, understand and wonder. And yes, we are born and we die. Once the unique electrochemical pattern that defines your consciousness is sufficiently degraded, you are gone. Nothing remains of what you were—except perhaps the memories of others, or things you have created. But even this legacy is unlikely to last forever. One day it is likely that all of us—and everything we know, and everything we have built, from the Great Pyramids to Hamlet to Beethoven’s Ninth to Principia Mathematica to the US Interstate Highway System—will be gone. I don’t have any consolation to offer you on that point; I can’t promise you that anything will survive a thousand years, much less a million. There is a chance—even a chance that at some point in the distant future, whatever humanity has become will find a way to reverse the entropic decay of the universe itself—but nothing remotely like a guarantee. In all probability you, and I, and all of this will be gone someday, and that is absolutely terrifying.

But it is also undeniably true. The fundamental link between the mind and the brain is one of the basic facts of cognitive science; indeed I like to call it The Basic Fact of Cognitive Science. We know specifically which kinds of brain damage will make you unable to form memories, comprehend language, speak language (a totally different area), see, hear, smell, feel anger, integrate emotions with logic… do I need to go on? Everything that you are is done by your brain—because you are your brain.

Now why can’t the science journalists write about that? Instead we get “The Simple Trick That Can Boost Your Confidence Immediately” and “When it Comes to Picking Art, Men & Women Just Don’t See Eye to Eye.” HuffPo is particularly awful of course; the New York Times is better, but still hardly as good as one might like. They keep trying to find ways to make it exciting—but so rarely seem to grasp how exciting it already is.