Consciousness

Consciousness is pretty interesting, no? I decided to study neuroscience at least in part so I could understand how a person could arise from chemical interactions. Four years later, I learned a lot of interesting things and just managed to retain enough that at parties I can look up from my excuse to not interact with strangers (books, pets, medicine cabinets) and excitedly interject in conversations “Oh, we learned about that in neuroscience!” before realizing I don’t remember the names of any of the structures or reactions. I then mumble something about the weather, and return to checking out the host’s medicine cabinet in shame. But I have not come very far with understanding consciousness.

Some people, such as Douglas Hofstadter (most famous for Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, but I only got through I am a Strange Loop. It’s very, very meta http://xkcd.com/917/) believe that a neuroscience-based explanation of consciousness isn’t satisfactory, because consciousness operates at a completely different level than neurons. He understands consciousness as a strange loop, an entry that can twist around to see itself like two mirrors reflecting each other to infinity (read the subtext of http://xkcd.com/555/). As Hofstader illustrates, this strange loop cannot be explained by the firing of neurons any more than then World War II can be explained with physics, although physics, of course, is the ultimate cause of everything that happened.

Other people, such as Steven Pinker (psychologist at Harvard, famous author, my favorite book by him being Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature) believe that consciousness is beyond human comprehension. The idea is that brains are products of evolution, so they are fit to study all kinds of things that aid in survival (physics, chemistry, social relations, to name a few) but they are not capable of comprehending consciousness. The brain is ultimately a survival tool, and so it wasn't made to twist around and study itself studying itself etc.

Maybe that’s the easiest answer, but I think that Steven Pinker’s theory makes the most sense. Though I understand that the brain does refer to itself in a loop, I fail to see how this would lead to consciousness. This is most likely due to my failure to understand as opposed to Hofstader’s failure to explain, but still. Instead, I believe that understanding consciousness is just beyond a human brain’s ability, like say communicating via hypersonic waves (elephants are amazing).

How much do parents matter?

The Newsweek  and Time magazine online archive is probably one of the greatest drains of my time. You can read more or less every article ever written since I don’t know when, and it’s intoxicating having all that knowledge at your fingertips. I often think how history-shattering it would be if you could just send one computer with all the current internet information back in time. It has the making of a bad science fiction novel. Anyway, it’s funny how certain social issues keep coming back again and again on the front cover over the decades, and parenting seems like the biggest issue of all. I recently read an article from about a decade ago on how parents don't matter. It was surprisingly convincing, so I also read the book the article was based on, and, after this rambling intro, that book is what this post is about. 

Harris’s book, The Nurture Assumption, is centered on the idea that instead of parents socializing children, peers socialize children. She noticed three things that caused her to question the the influence of parents: immigrant children speak with the accent of their peers, not of their parents; upper class British males were raised by their governess or teachers (both lower class) yet behaved in an upper class manner; and finally children are encouraged to act like their slightly older peers as opposed to encouraged to acting like their parents.

Of course, children do end up like their parents, but not due to parenting. Harris believes any connection between parenting and the way the children turn out could be accounted for by the shared genetics. For example, a happy mom has a happy child because they are both genetically predisposed to happiness, not because the mother raises her child to be happy. When studies are controlled for genetics, they find that growing up in the same home does not make children more alike, and that birth order (something that is purely nurture, not nature) makes no difference on the way the child acts outside the house. Instead, the main influence on children is their peers. It’s the peers that influence everything from what language the children are most fluent in to what are their values and goals in life are.

The parent’s lack influence outside of the home is because children know what works in one context doesn’t necessarily work in another context. It might be useful to be obedient with authoritarian parents at home, but not with your less-capable teammate on your soccer team, for example. Therefore, children don’t carry what they learn at home to the outside world, but instead reevaluate every new environment and act accordingly.

It's impossible to read the book without constantly revising your own opinions. I ended up agreeing with a lot of what she wrote, but I wish she had more proof that the environment- influenced aspect of personality is purely situational. I do agree that personality is partly situational. For example, a recovering alcoholic will be much more likely to relapse in a setting where he abused alcohol (in a bar, for example) than at a rehab center. But at the same time, he’s still going to crave alcohol no matter where he goes - all the environment does is strengthen or attenuate that craving. Maybe I’m ignoring the data in favor for what feels right, but it does seem right that we would carry things we learned at home with us to school, even if we don’t carry enough for it to be detected in personality tests. 


In addition, even if we assume that parents only have influence on their children in their own home, that’s still important. Children spend an awful lot of time at home. Also, if the parents effect the way their children care for their own children (which is also a "at home" environment), they will have a multi-generational influence. That's got to be important, even if it does turn out that parents have no influence on how children act at school or work.

In any case, it was a very thought-provoking book. While I’m not convinced that parents don’t matter, I am convinced the power of parents can be over-emphasized. Kids aren’t silly-putty. However, it’s important to note (as the author does) that extreme abuse is well-proven to have life-long ramifications. And even if poor parenting isn’t necessarily going to mess up a child for life, that’s still no excuse for poor parenting. The kids may be alright, but they won’t have a happy childhood. What are your thoughts on the influential power of parents? This is definitively something that I don't have any real-life experience in myself.

International Aid

Recently I read Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity for a book club with some friends. The writer, Katherine Boo, lived in an Indian slum for years, and wrote about her experience. I had to keep reminding myself that the book was nonfiction. At about the time I was getting ready to go to college in 2008, far away in India, a woman set herself on fire, a boy was murdered and his eyes gorged out, a baby was drowned in a bucket of water. After finishing the book, I felt like the .0001% and it was not the best feeling. And I was left with the question: what can privileged, spoiled Americans like myself do that would truly help? The book was no help in answering that question: every well-intentioned charity institution mentioned in the book was corrupted, not even remotely reaching the people they were supposed to help. Here are some examples:

1. A man desperately tries to obtain a grant for a life-saving operation on his heart. He knows that only a small percentage of the grant will trickle down to him after all the officials take their cuts. He can't obtain even this small percentage of what he deserves without a bride. The man cannot afford this bride and dies.

2. The schools are taught by unqualified teachers who don’t bother to teach. Hiring decisions are based solely on bribes. Schools only stay open long enough for the photo ops of the “learning” students.

3. The orphanage only provides enough food when the donors come to visit and otherwise sells the food (expired individual jam containers and the like) for profit.

4. A microloan program is supposed to reward women helping women. Instead it rewards poor women charging usury rates to even poorer women.

It was all very depressing. All we saw were good intentions paving roads in a non-heavenly direction. My best guess for why these charities don't work work is that a person can’t fix problems just by blundering into a foreign culture and throwing money at things. I don’t know how exactly one does fix problems (surprising, I know), but all the successful reforms that come quickly to my mind - civil rights in American, independence in India, end of apartheid in South Afica- were lead by and supported by the very people the reform affected. I hope that foreigners can help, but, ultimately, the best people to change a system are people who completely understand the system and any consequences of change.

The events of the books also forced me to take a harder look at why I volunteer. Am I volunteering to feel good or to do good? If I'm being honest, I know that being able to believe that I’m a good person is at least part of the motivation. I also believe/hope that’s fine, so long as I don’t get too blinded by the glow of my self-imagined halo to check if I’m actually helping. I also need to accept good intentions sometimes don’t lead to much of anything. Sometimes they’re even harmful. That’s just true of life in general. 

I still think good intentions are more likely to do more good than sitting around feeling bitter and cynical. It's just that the odds become higher when there is a respect and understanding of the foreign culture.