Ramachandran presents very reasonable and concise criteria for recognizing qualia, the internal experience at the center of what we consider consciousness. 1) qualia are irrevocable representations. The input is direct and unchangeable by the subject. 2) qualia have flexible implication. The representation of a qualia is not directly tied to a reflexive response, for then we would have no need for the intermediary. Qualia are representations to be operated on in a complex fashion, to allow a choice. 3) Qualia exist in intermediate memory. They must exist long enough to be operated on. While I don’t feel the necessity of being able to define consciousness, these criteria will provide me some dielectical ammunition.

Another salient point I got out of the last chapter: truth is limbic. This is a phenomenon you can’t miss: certainty is no guarantee of correctness. But it is ironic that the linguistic system, capable of such sophisticated propositional manipulations, in the end has very little so say about the experience of truth.

I’ve been reading Phantoms in the Brain. It has given me some leads into my thinking on mathematics and language, and even my questions about the innateness of skepticism. Delusional disorders can be pretty revealing about how people integrate information into a unified world perception, especially when this involves contradictory data. I think this process of integration makes some level of “delusion” necessary, but people have different thresholds.

The latest report on student engagement in higher ed. The most important statement to me:

When faculty members expect students to study more and arrange class work toward this end, students do so.

I’ve met countless faculty members who have lowered expectations out of laziness, with the excuse that students can’t keep up. Experience (and, apparently research) demonstrate that students will rise to the challenge, if you challenge them. Also from the study: 81% of students receive mostly B’s or A’s. I’m not one to harp on grading, but I think this again reflects pure laziness: giving higher grades results in less challenge (and better course evaluations).

My experiment with a self-grading system seems to be going well. I discussed this with the students a few weeks ago. It is definitely achieving its main goal: to shift focus away from grades and to the subject matter. I had only one (of five) students express some dismay at not knowing, with mathematical certainty, what their grade was at any instant. This is understandable, considering the weight placed on grades by society, but ultimately, that undermines learning, especially at the higher cognitive levels (synthesis & creativity). I am honing this technique for future courses.

Reading: Che Guevara: a Revolutionary Life. Just because.

The lines of the culture war.

It looks like I wrote something early this morning. I have no recollection of that. Ambien is a wierd thing.

Ambien blogging: Ambien blog surfing. Still, I am, intrigued by an ordinary page of text, tastefully bordered and gushing with a wonderful light serif font, impelling me to follow: motion, do, continue, down the page, this page, which is not satisfied to remain a two-dimensional depiction of pixellated graphimes. It has depth, and motion, and plays me a little game.

A few nice fall days. This morning I let the cat onto the porch, only to see him go after a bird, trapped on the porch and unfortunately trapped between the outer screen and a sun shade. The efficiency of the feline, snagging a single claw somewhere into the avian’s flesh and retracting the flapping package to his tuna-breathed maws was a slight downer. I felt an unwitting accomplice, for having an enclosed-porch bird trap, and not being on the ball enough to prevent this initial tussle.

I felt even worse when my belated protests left a perky but clearly disabled bird in my jurisdiction. It regrouped on the floor (making an attempt to fly) and left a few spots of blood as it headed for whatever shelter it could find. Had I not intervened it would have been over fast. Now I get to choose how it ends.

I picked it up with an oven mitt and brouhgt it just outside the porch. It was a handsome bird, with an impressive vocabulary. Thankfully, I didn’t understand any of it, as I was to execute what remained of a clumsy death sentence. I held him in the sun for a minute, and he gave the mitt a few pokes. And I let him down. I believe he was a Tufted Titmouse.

Later, the bird was precisely where I left him, and the cat, nearby, was distracted by what must have been a gargantuan mole, tunneling his way under the moist turf. Later yet, the bird was gone, the cat was elsewhere, and the mole was unaccounted for.

In other news: I received a light scratch across my left eyelid in a rather careless attempt to glimpse some small swimming creatures. I’ve got a few books coming that have been on my wish list for a while: An African in Greenland and Phantoms in the Brain. I’m still making my way through some of Boltzmann’s writings. I find Gentle Ludwig the most intellectually familiar of the great physicists. Writing in 1892:

… if you ask me for my innermost conviction whether it will one day be called the century of iron, or steam, or electricity, I answer without qualms that it will be named the century of the mechanical view of nature, of Darwin.

The twentieth century was most certainly the century of physics, though even the very forward looking Ludwig didn’t imagine to what extent his faithful atomism would take us.

In this, of course, many problems are like the question once put to a painter, what picture he was hiding behind the curtain, to which he replied “the curtain is the picture. Is not perhaps the veil that conceals the nature of things from us just like that painted curtain?

When caught in a gale of dispair and loathing, seek shelter: Furuya sensei

In addition to skill, there is something called, “virtue.” This refers to the “invisible” benefits and demands of the art. Attending class regularly, listening to the teacher obediently, trying to work with the other students well, paying respect to the dojo and O’Sensei at each practice, cleaning the dojo and on and on. Of course, these all seem like small matters by themselves, perhaps remnants of the older Aikido and an outdated feudal society, but all of these put together form what we call the “art,” through which one develops courage, patience, wisdom, and an order and harmony in one’s life which is so hard to grasp in our normal life style. This is the art which takes us to a different plain of daily life and creates within us, “the art of living.”

Simply to think that one can grasp the art of Aikido by only practicing the techniques themselves has an incomplete view of Aikido. This is how we must understand the difference between a method or learning a technique or skill, and “Do” or the “inner Path of life.”

Piss off a republican: read a book.

As Oppie might say, “We’re all sons’a bitches now.” It’s the blind electing the blind. And in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is heretic. Back to physics, philosophy, & discipline.