For some reason the subject of diaries has come up several times in my life lately. Actually the subject of unexpected death has been on my mind, for a variety of reasons, and that led me to think of diaries. The thought of unexpected death is no doubt what led me to finally draw up a list for my sons of my retirement accounts and so forth, so that if, as I euphemistically put it, anything happens to me, they’ll be able to find all the accounts for which they are the beneficiaries. While I was at it, I made some notes about disposing of my things, and noted in particular that I would like my sons to destroy my diaries after I am gone, except for a couple of journals I once kept for the sole purpose of recording the notable events in their early lives. (It’s safe to assume they would have gotten rid of my private papers unread anyway, but still I figured it wouldn’t hurt to write it down.)

This reminded me of my mother’s diaries, which my father threw away after she died. I’ve never asked him about this but I’m guessing he was honoring a request from her that no one else ever read those diaries after she was gone. I can understand that entirely, of course, having just made a similar request myself, and I’m glad my father protected my mother’s privacy. But I can also understand why it could be upsetting when someone’s diaries are destroyed after they’re gone: It’s like a last part of themselves that they left behind has been removed. I don’t believe in an immortal soul, but I do believe that my mother left parts of her self or her identity behind when she died, not just the diaries she wrote for herself but letters she wrote to others, and the memories that each of us have of her. Douglas Hofstadter, in I Am a Strange Loop, writes about a concept of the self that remains behind even after death, not in any supernatural sense but in the sense that mental states or patterns peculiar to a person can be recreated in other brains.

This article from Philosophy Now gives a nice overview of various concepts of personal identity, beginning with Locke’s idea that we are who we remember ourselves being (which I find useful as a starting point, but not the whole story). Philosopher Bob Harrison discusses some of the legal and psychological meanings of identity, and then wonders whether selves are not conventions, useful conventions (like speed limits or legal drinking ages) that nonetheless are not related to a real entity that exists in the outside world. In closing he writes about the idea of the extended mind, in which the tools we use to support our cognitive processes (e.g., a notebook kept by a hypothetical Alzheimer’s sufferer as an aid to memory) can be considered to be part of those processes, and so a part of ourselves.

To the degree that I kept a journal to help me remember past events and feelings, a believer in the extended mind could argue that destroying the journals after I’m gone is akin to destroying a part of my self. (I guess if it’s my self I have the right to ask that it be destroyed after the more substantial parts of my self are gone.) I’m not sure I would agree that mental tools are really part of anyone’s identity, but thoughts committed to writing (both personal diaries and published books, which are not merely attempts to communicate but also mental edifices built to house part of the contents of a unique mind) can allow an unusually direct access to the thoughts of another person. Maybe they’re best described as a peculiarly powerful adjunct to identity.

In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins started out by describing what he called Einsteinian religion—the metaphorical use of religious terms to refer to the sum total of the universe or the natural laws that drive it. Einstein, and other scientists, have used the term “God” to mean things quite different from what many fundamentalist Christians mean, and as far as Dawkins is concerned, deliberately confusing the two concepts by using the same words for them is “intellectual high treason”. This gave me something of a jolt because I have committed such high treason myself from time to time, although I can certainly appreciate the point Dawkins is making.

Science writer Dennis Overbye has recently written an essay for the New York Times defending the right of scientists and science writers to use the word “God” metaphorically. (He wasn’t reacting to Dawkins, but to those who give science writers a hard time for using phrases like “the God particle”.) He says that scientists should not so readily cede the use of “God” to fundamentalists and creationists. I applaud his spirit, but I think anyone who uses religious terms metaphorically in science writing is obliged to explain quite clearly what is meant. And I know from years of producing technical documentation that even well-meaning people do not always read all that carefully (“Any text you put on the page is a waste of time”, a co-worker once memorably said) so the most careful explanations are likely to be ignored, carelessly or willfully, and so Dawkins makes a very good point about not using terminology that could be at all confusing.

To follow up on yesterday’s post about all the processing that goes on in the brain outside of conscious awareness, here’s a story from EurekAlert about the role of the unconscious in reading facial expressions. In a recent study, people were given the merest glimpse of a happy or fearful face, a 30-millisecond look too brief to be consciously perceived. Then they were shown a surprised face and asked to rate whether the expression was a reaction to a pleasant or an unpleasant surprise. Their interpretation of the surprised faces was colored by whether they’d been “primed” with a happy or a scared face. A brief exposure to a fearful face made the surprise seem more negative, whereas a brief exposure to a happy face made the surprise seem positive. Brain activity as measured by EEG also changed in response to the fearful or happy faces, even though the people in the experiment didn’t consciously register them. The fearful faces kicked off the strongest reaction in those prone to social anxiety.

So maybe sometimes when you get a creepy feeling about something, for example, there’s a good reason for it, but it’s not a reason that you’re consciously aware of. Your subconscious is picking up on useful information and processing it without telling you about the process, just the end result.

The New York Times recently published an article about subconscious mental processing. It describes a number of unexpected findings (e.g., people who are unobtrusively exposed to the scent of a cleaning product are more likely to clean up after themselves when they eat a crumbly snack) that reveal the things our brains get up to behind our backs. The article explains how subcortical areas of the brain, which evolved earlier than the prefrontal cortex, often make quick decisions for us and act as “automatic survival systems”. There’s a line in there about how the prefrontal cortex, with a major role in conscious processing, is often the last to hear the news after a decision is made. This reminds me of a quote I ran across years ago, from Timothy Ferris’s book The Mind’s Sky:

“The mind may rule the self, but it is a constitutional monarch; presented with decisions already made elsewhere in the brain, it must try somehow to put on a good show of their adding up to some coordinated, sensible pattern. Functionally it resembles Ronald Reagan’s presidency: It acts as if it were in control, and thinks it is in control, and believe it has good reasons for what it does, when in actuality it is often just mouthing soothing rationalizations while obeying the orders of unseen agencies hidden offstage.”

The saying about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes does not, of course, have anything to do with pedestrian activities, but with the need to understand how the world looks to another person. According to the results of a new study from the University of Chicago, Americans may be less adept at this kind of understanding than Chinese people.

The study looked at the behavior of 40 students from the university, 20 from China who were native Mandarin speakers and 20 non-Asian students from the US who were native English speakers. The students were paired up, both students in each pair from the same cultural group, and given a task to complete that involved moving pieces around in a grid of squares. One student in each pair directed the other how to proceed; the worker could see all the pieces but the director could not, and the worker could tell what the director could and couldn’t see.

The Chinese students were much better at quickly making the correct moves, taking into account the fact that the director couldn’t see all the pieces. This may indicate that the individualist and independent mindset of the US doesn’t prepare us as well for seeing things from another person’s perspective as the more interdependent and collectivist tendencies of Chinese culture. This article from Science Daily has more details.

The Science Daily article mentions that due to the ambiguity involved in interpreting words and actions, communication can be difficult unless all parties understand each other’s frame of reference. I can certainly agree with that. Sometimes when I see how people, myself included, so easily misinterpret another’s motivation or intentions, I’m amazed that people can communicate with each other at all. This is an interesting look at cultural influences on the problem, but it would be even more interesting to see followup work that looks at cases where neither person has a clear view of the other person’s gaps in knowledge, which is quite often the situation in real life.

I realize I’m stretching the Thinking Meat theme with this post, but the story touches on so many of my favorite things that I’ve just got to write about it. It demonstrates the wonderful things we hominids are capable of when we set our minds to it, and is also an interesting take on the difficulties of storing and accessing the riches of scientific data that our forebears have laid up for us.

Harvard College Observatory is a venerable institution that plays a large role in many of the exciting astronomy stories of the second half of the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth. From the first photograph of a star, taken at the observatory in 1850, through the 1980s, the HCO accumulated glass photographic plates from several observing sites in both hemispheres. This article from the New York Times describes efforts to digitize this huge trove of historical information about the night sky, our window into the universe. It’s a challenging endeavor any way you look at it, but letting all this painstakingly gathered information go to waste for lack of easy access would be a shame. (If you love observatories, check out the “More photos” link under the two photos at the top.)

The article mentions in passing a couple of the stories about how research at HCO played a pivotal role in creating contemporary astrophysics. For example, the tireless Annie Jump Cannon cataloged nearly 400,000 stars according to their spectral type. She examined the spectra of these stars as captured on glass photographic plates, hundreds of tiny smears of light to a plate, each with a characteristic pattern of dark lines that reveal a surprising amount of information about the star’s physical characteristics. She improved upon the classification schemes of two predecessors and tagged each star as belonging to a particular type (her scheme is the one still in use today). Her work was essential for later discoveries about why there are different types of stars and how stars evolve.

Another great story is that of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who made a discovery about a particular kind of variable star that unlocked the distance scale of the cosmos. Cepheid variable stars periodically brighten and then dim in a regular cycle, and she found that the length of time between two episodes of maximum brightness is related to the intrinsic brightness of the star. This is important because without some such relationship to guide us, we can’t tell the intrinsically dim nearby stars from the intrinsically bright stars at a great distance: we don’t know cosmic distances. Ejnar Hertzsprung calibrated the yardstick that Leavitt had found, and Edwin Hubble used it to measure how far away the Andromeda Galaxy was, resolving one of the great astronomical debates of the early twentieth century: the spiral nebulae are not part of our galaxy but are separate “island universes” like our own.

The digitization project at Harvard (Dasch: Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard) also involves some heroic hominids who found a way to scan the plates, within the constraints of time and space imposed by the volume of data and the physical setup of the archive. The project is underway but needs more cash to continue, so the organizers are hoping for generous donors who might like the chance to associate their names with the resulting digital archive. The catalog that Cannon worked on is called the Henry Draper Catalog, and was funded by the widow of Henry Draper, a doctor, astronomer, and early astrophotographer. To this day stars are identified by their HD catalog numbers; I hope some rich Harvard alum is captured by the idea of leaving a similar legacy and donates money to keep the project going.

[Postscript, December 28, 2023: If you’re interested in the stellar classification work done at Harvard College Observatory, I highly recommend Dava Sobel’s wonderful book, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.]

Knowledge is power, right? I usually assume that learning more about science or technology is helpful when it comes time to form an opinion or determine a correct course of action, and I also assume that as more and more people learn about scientific or technical topics, the more they will tend to agree with each other about what should be done. But it doesn’t always work like that; in fact, in a recent study, the more people learned, the more they disagreed.

This article from Reason Online describes some research into people’s attitudes toward nanotechnology, published by the Yale Law School’s Cultural Cognition Project. After 1,850 people, most of whom knew little or nothing about nanotech, were given a scanty amount of information on the subject, most of them were willing to venture an opinion on its risk-benefit ratio. The authors of the study say the primary motivator for the opinion was how people felt about the issue: they were going with their gut, basically. And when a subset of the group was given a couple more paragraphs of information, they believed even more strongly in their original positions (e.g., if they thought nanotechnology was risky before getting the additional info, they thought it was even riskier afterward).

This looks like a striking and discouraging example of confirmation bias, the propensity for noting new information that confirms our existing beliefs and discarding new information that doesn’t. The Reason Online article also discusses some of the implications for science and technology policy. I’m curious about how we arrive at our gut reactions in the first place, and if there’s any way to learn to make more informed initial judgments.

This article from American Scientist describes a recent project that surveyed the religious beliefs of 149 prominent evolutionary scientists. Three previous polls, in 1914, 1933, and 1998, showed a decline in belief in a personal God and belief in immortality among scientists, with biologists consistently being the least likely to say they believed in either. The 2003 Cornell Evolution Project, a dissertation project, was the first to look only at evolutionary scientists’ attitudes toward religion. It included 17 questions and gave respondents the option to comment; in addition, 12 evolutionists were interviewed.

The biologists were given a more fine-grained range of choices to describe their religious beliefs, and the results by and large agreed with those of the earlier polls. When they were given four options for describing their thoughts on the relationship between religion and evolution, only 8% agreed with the idea put forth most notably by Stephen Jay Gould, that religion and science are not in conflict because they cover separate non-overlapping spheres. (I’m not surprised; as much as I respect Gould, I think he was way off base with that idea.) And only 3% found religion and evolution to be “totally harmonious”.

The other two options were that religion and science are in conflict because they provide contradictory answers to our questions about life, or “religion is a social phenomenon that has developed with the biological evolution of Homo sapiens—therefore religion should be considered as a part of our biological heritage, and its tenets should be seen as a labile social adaptation, subject to change and reinterpretation.” Judging from all the heated discussion on the subject lately, you’d expect that maybe most of the scientists would have chosen the former, but in fact 72% chose the latter: they don’t see a conflict because they see religion as a manifestation of evolution.

The article explains how this attitude is the opposite of one held in the 1860s which saw no conflict because evolution was seen as evidence of God’s activities. It’s easy to see that today’s attitude, which assumes that religion arose as part of our evolutionary history and is not based on eternal revealed truths, is likely to make some religious people unhappy. Since biologists have consistently been the least likely of all scientists to believe in a personal God or in immortality, would giving kids a better education in biology lead to a reduced belief in religion across the rest of the population?