A Haiku for Kent State University Students on the Eve of Finals December 11, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Kent State.Tags: haiku, postaday2011
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Brains in library
Turned pages safe from cold night
All students: Good Luck!
Fellow Kent State English Department Bloggers December 1, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Kent State, Personal.Tags: blogging, english, kentstate, postaday2011, workshop
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This semester, I led two workshops on Blogging in the Classroom and Blogging in the Profession.
Two of the workshop attendees, who also happen to be my friends at Kent State, forwarded me their blogs to share here:
Courtney Werner’s Land of Nod and Twitter @lilithladiosa2k
Lindsay B Steiner’s Twitter @lbsteiner
Courntey and Lindsay write about their work in rhetoric and composition among other things.
PS: This is my 1,200th post!
Kent State University’s Neuroscience and the Humanities Workgroup Blog Launch November 29, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Kent State, The Brain.Tags: humanities, kentstate, neurosciences, postaday2011, workgroup
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The Kent State University’s Neuroscience and the Humanities Workgroup Blog is now live here!
Following our last meeting of the semester yesterday, I created the blog and its first entries. Other workgroup members can contribute to the blog’s content, and anyone can contribute in the comments on each post.
If you are an interdisciplinary researcher or teacher, or simply someone interested in the relationship between the brain, brain science, and culture, please take part in the discussion and contribute your thoughts to the conversation on the blog.
The Kent State University Neuroscience and the Humanities Workgroup is an interdisciplinary gathering that regularly meets to discuss the intersection of brain science with research and teaching in the humanities. The group’s vision and purpose continues to evolve, so if you teach or learn at Kent State, stay tuned to the blog for updates on our first meeting of the spring semester in early 2012.
Notes from 11/28/2011 Meeting of The Neurosciences and the Humanities Working Group at Kent State November 29, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Kent State, The Brain.Tags: humanities, kentstate, neurosciences, postaday2011, workgroup
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At the Neuroscience and the Humanities Workgroup meeting on November 28, 2011, we discussed:
Casebeer, William D. and Patricia S. Churchland. “The Neural Mechanisms of Moral Cognition: A Multiple-Aspect Approach to Moral Judgment and Decision-Making.” Biology and Philosophy 18 (2003): 169–194.
My sketch of notes prior to the meeting:
neural mechanisms of moral cognition (NMMC)
norms vs facts
virtue theory
theory of mind (TOM) and mirror neurons > Asimov’s robots, imagination and reasoning, he created a theory of mind, potentials, but he did much more in TOM
memory (184) > important
moral state space > c.f., Damien Broderick’s science fiction mega-text and narrative phase space
My notes from the discussion:
both authors in philosophy departments
decision making
non-chauvanistic: moral judgement > debate in meta-ethics, do they constitute a belief and can they be true or false, non-cognitivists vs cognitivists
chauvanistic > ethical judgement > presupposes the cognitive side
most neuroscientific article yet read in the group
mirror neurons > where we can think about empathy, however consider the monkey experiment where theory of mind allows one monkey to steal from another > evolution and survival
what are the evolutionary precursors to moral judgement in humans?
neural correlates in human and monkey brains, each reflecting the same behavior
virtue ethics > best empirical direction for ethics
Kantians > empiricism irrelevant to ethics
(178) Children’s ability to lie > how far along that they had a theory of mind > Aristotle – Nicomachean Ethics – youths/feeling > end of ethics is action not knowledge > children > immediate pleasures and pain > develop habit of not stealing > then when they have theory of mind > if not established habit before TOM, they may turn out devious
pointing to the virtue ethics model
shortcomings of brain imaging
Utilitarianism (faculty of calculation) or Kantian (will) > each is one-dimensional
neuroscience > interaction between all parts of the brain > more complex
ethical theories are too flat to account for all of these feedback/empirical reality of brain’s complexity
suspicion of neuroscientific imaging > limitations of what it can “see” and how what it “sees” is interpreted by theory, mathematics, and computer technology
question: what are you guys held up on brain imaging?
people associate brain science with brain imaging
other experiments including lesion studies and brain trauma observation, dissection after the fact, etc.
brain imaging > the real thing > we can see and know the brain (in a sense)
brain imaging is highly theorized
they are not photographing the brain, however
fMRI 101 [on youtube: how MRI works, another explanation, and how fMRI works]
fMRI is a translation, a rhetorical act, a deliberative act
how are these things reified in public discourse and legal discourse
recent discoveries > mirror neurons > discovered by fMRI
discomfort reading this article, also an issue of translation from one discourse to another, one understanding to another
refreshing and illuminating
localizing functions within the brain
V.S. Ramachandran’s The Tell-Tale Brain
limbic system > interwoven into many other areas of the brain including motor control, facial control
systems > use multiple structures/areas within the brain > common function > defined by function rather than by organ
fMRI confirms that there is no moral center within the brain
dispersal, distribution > gives new meaning to Greg Egan’s SF novel Diaspora > metaphor for our understanding of the functions of the brain
Utilitarian vs virtue ethics debate? first part of 20th century > Kantians vs Utilitarians > small skirmishes > after all of this conceptual work, possible to make progress in conceptual debates through empirical evidence
some philosophers say that science cannot tell us anything about ethics: descriptive/science vs normative/philosophy
Stanley Cavell and Jacques Derrida argument > ethical comportment in people
fact-value distinction > science can tell us facts but nothing else
Aristotle > facts and values are different, but they are interrelated in many ways
metaphysical distinction between facts and values > hold this and science will not help you at all
Aristotle and Newton > Newton was a physicist who creates the calculus (along with Leibnitz) to do his science > Aristotle was a biologist > created philosophy to do his biology > Aristotle never forgot that humans are animals > ethics and political science are influenced by this
Phineas Gage > localized view of the brain originates here
Gabriel Giffords – 20/20 program . shows her progress over time, shows where her brain was damaged and what other effects might have been if the wound was different > plasticity issue > the brain rewiring itself > reprogram in a sense
plasticity > to understand the capacity of the brain to heal itself > where a humanities person might get excited
where does the excitement for the humanities mean the failure of science?
do scientists care about what poetry means? some do.
V.S. Ramachandran’s Phantoms in the Brain
Seneca > woman not acknowledging her disability > chiding her for her behavior > might have had a stroke or other brain issue
science and the humanities > hypothetical questions for each
childhood studies > developing a physics > not mediated by language
going back to Aristotle > he was a collector of animal specimens > categorize > one of, if not the, first libraries, too
writes on poetics, politics, etc. but he wasn’t a writer on religion or the afterlife, he was interested in this life
“human beings desire to know.”
Aristotle’s categories > his shortest work, all encompassing > his logic was invented so that he could relate things in the way that he needed
this seems like the moment for the turn from language (20th century) to the study of the brain
I talked about technical limitations of current imaging technology, but it is amazing what we can do.
also, I mentioned the work of Roger Penrose in relation to quantum mechanics and other conjectures about how the laws of nature will likely prohibit our real-time investigation of the human brain while it is in a living person. issues of resolution and function and organic matter
Henri Bergson’s “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic” > the mechanical encrusted on the living
The Symposium (in Greek it means a wine party for talking and drinking)
irony in Aristotle and Plato?
situational irony > Plato’s Gorgias
rhetorical irony > controlling all questions himself > cannot step outside of himself
We will plan our next meeting at the beginning of spring semester 2012.
Notes from 10/24/2011 Meeting of The Neurosciences and the Humanities Working Group at Kent State November 27, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Kent State, The Brain.Tags: humanities, kentstate, neurosciences2, postaday2011, workgroup
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At the meeting on October 24 ,2011 of the Neurosciences and the Humanities Workgroup at Kent State University, we discussed Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2009). These are my notes from the meeting and the ensuing discussion.
“ego machines” (207) “arose from evolution on this planet” “world simulation built around a center” [this material might be useful for my chapter on Philip K. Dick]
ego machines without self
self as process > self stabilization > Asimov’s robots? [more notes on Asimov chapter]
“selfing organisms”
“dynamical self-organization”
limitation of metaphors > other ways of thinking about self, but cannot ignore the “illusion” that is not an illusion
no one and a self simultaneously
“it is what it is” > is there no way to conceptualize this emergent self-that-is-not-a-self?
“embodied simulation” [connects to the first point above]
this is not strictly a scientific book > ethics and philosophy
argues we should not create an ego machine [this would be useful for my chapter on Richard Powers and Galatea 2.2]
his position is that we should not create suffering. therefore, we should not create an ego machine.
neuroethics
chemical alterations to the brain > effect on society and individual > each consciousness is unique
analytic philosopher, not perspective on neuroscience
Out of body experience, OBE > not much money for research into this, not popular in the sciences as a field of study
humanities to Metzinger serves a middle ground, neutral, not vying for the same funding as other neurosciences
cognitive science > from the molecule on up, think about more fundamental sciences and forces: physics, etc.
is the Ego Tunnel too simple a metaphor for the brain
the brain is a galaxy of machines, more than a single machine [more metaphors]
how does Metzinger account for Freud?
are Metzinger’s models too computer-like or computer metaphor oriented?
does this build on the beginning of the modern era of cognitive science?
a dynamical system does not mean that it is computationalist in origin
are the ways that Metzinger aligns his view with robots and AI?
how does he argue that we should not build AI/ego machines to reduce suffering? Should we not have children any longer? Should we kill everyone to end all suffering?
what about absence of consciousness like going under anesthesia?
David Chalmers > “the hard problem”
the ego is an illusion, not consciousness
the ego is quite an achievement, evolutionarily
separate noise from signal
create unity
evolutionary advantage > if you knew that the ego is an illusion, then it doesn’t work > the advantage is based on sustaining the illusion
implications for education
self in process, absence of the self
Stanley Fish > sacrosanct soul that we dare not mess with
the self as entity does not exist, but as a process it does exist
phenomenon that arises from complex processes
every little thing has/can have effect on the self
constantly changing the self > ethical and practical considerations as educators
NYT’s article this past weekend > Israeli psychologist > difficulty changing people’s minds, opinions, paradigms > create enough experiences to transform a person’s opinion or approach
Stanley Fish’s attack on Professor Bracher > “character transplants” > Bracher teaching empathy through literary studies > taboo in the humanities to change opinions, improve character, etc. > Metzinger’s evidence seems to support Bracher’s position
Ego tunnel > narrowing and dark > superstitions on limitations on the self > sinfulness and darkness > resonate with the simple metaphor
suggestive as a metaphor > not the limitation of what it actually is
predictability > patterns and pattern recognition > eyes closed/blinking > blind spot in the center of vision > focus blindspot > compensating for what we do and do not see
prefontal cortex and the visual system > temperature, orientation, etc. > we cannot control our experience of these
computing process model > memory based model, active memory based model, top-down vs. bottom-up
causal reasoning, needed to explain a looped memory that is missing, ego seems to be involved in this
highly skilled readers > do they read words or images/pictures?
cognitive neuroscience, cognitive neuropsychology, etc. > neuroscience
neuroscience and cognitive science are not the same thing, many hard and fast divisions
neuropsychology > broader
cognitive psychology > focused on meaning > is this where the humanities can best engage the neurosciences?
overlap of philosophy and literary modernism
Jonah Lehrer – Proust was a Neuroscientist
consider Woolf’s To the Lighthouse
discovery of a consciousness
self is not a soul, essential component that predates everything
Woolf also uses metaphor of “tunneling,” but in a different way
tunneled through consciousness to where all the other consciousnesses meet up > opposite kind of solipsism
humanities education > how can anyone say what is good and what is not good? how can any of this lead us to a good kind of consciousness to promote?
proposing states of consciousness > read this and think about that
what is it about humanities departments that we debate/think about ethics? musicians don’t debate ethics of what they do–or do they? they do want to get it “right”
humanities > not do we do philosophy or not, but whether we do it good or badly
produce practical results without scattershot method
how do you get in the tunnel and work within it?
Woolf and the neurosciences > what is it that enabled her to come to her insights? she didn’t read “brain books.” system or genre of the novel > Woolf refelecting back the very system of the novel > the novel itself has something to do with this reflection, introspection
do we want out of the tunnel? doesn’t this predispose that the tunnel is a bad thing? is the tunnel sustainable? should we get out of the tunnel?
reasoning with heuristics > bad probabilistic reasoners
David Chalmers > consciousness is irreducible entity, stop reducing it and figure out what we are going to do with it
ego and consciousness
scientists teaching literature > encroaching on other domains or interdisciplinarity?
issues of criticism, bad neuroscience, neuroscience writing, neuroscientific approaches for next time
Second Blogging in the Classroom and Profession Workshop Success November 10, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Computers, Kent State, Technology.Tags: blogging, digitalcomposition, kentstate, postaday2011, workshop
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This afternoon, I facilitated a second “Blogging in the Classroom and Profession” Workshop as part of my work in the Kent State English Department’s Office of Digital Composition.
Unlike my previous workshop, I switched the content around to talk about professional blogging first and classroom blogging second, because I wanted to accommodate the schedules of some workshop participants. Also, I wanted this workshop to be more of a conversation rather than a lecture, as my previous workshop had been.
I was very happy with our discussion. Some folks brought great questions and others shared their own experiences with blogging. All around, I am pleased with the dialog that we generated during this workshop.
Today’s Multimodal Assignments and Assessment Workshop, Notes and Resources October 26, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Kent State, New Media, Pedagogy.Tags: digitalcomposition, multimodalassessment, postaday2011, workshop
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Today’s workshop has a reading component: Cynthia L. Selfe’s “Toward New Media Texts,” which is available here for a limited time, and my notes for this discussion are available here. Also, Derek Van Ittersum and I have a set of notes on Assessing Multimodal Student Work available here. Please print out Selfe’s article and bring it to the workshop today in Satterfield Hall 104 at 1:00PM. I will have copies of my notes and
Below, I have included a number of resources that you can use to teach yourself and your students the basics of creating multimodal compositions. There are links to tutorials on the basics of using different media effectively and how to use those media’s composition technologies.
General Resources
Student Multimedia Studio Tutorials for English Composition Courses [KSU Library]
Student Multimedia Studio Tutorials–first class resource for getting started and teaching students how to use technology [KSU Library]
Online Writing
What Makes for Good Web Design [youtube]
How to Upload Web Pages to Kent State Student Personal Webspace [KSU Library]
HTML Tutorial 1 – Building a Website in Notepad [youtube]
How to Make/Design a Website with Dreamweaver [youtube]
How to Use WordPress.com [youtube]
How to Create a Blog on Blogger [youtube]
Presentations
Don McMillan: Life After Death by Powerpoint [youtube]
Powerpoint 2010 Basic Tutorial [youtube]
Pecha Kucha: Get to the Powerpoint in 20 Slides [youtube]
Audio
Katie Couric on How to Conduct a Good Interview [youtube]
How to Record an Oral History Interview [youtube]
Audacity Tutorial: Part 1 [youtube]
Movies
Film School: Basic Framing Types [youtube]
Shoot Your Friends – Filming Basics [youtube]
Learn iMovie 11 by Ken [youtube]
Getting Started Tutorial – Windows Live Movie Maker [youtube]
The PhD Movie–Coming to Kent State in November October 16, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Comics, Kent State, Movies.Tags: gss, kentstate, movie, phdcomics, postaday2011, webcomics
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First, it was superhero comics being turned into movies. Now, it’s webcomics about graduate students making their way to the big screen.
Did you know that the famous PhD Comics has spawned a movie? The PhD Movie is showing at college campuses all over right now, and it will be at Kent State in November! Hooray!
The Graduate Student Senate is sponsoring showings in the Kiva on Wed, Nov 2 at 3:30 (Kiva), Fri, Nov 4 at 5:00 (Cunningham Hall 101), and Tues, Nov 8 at 3:30 (Governance Chambers, 2nd Floor Kent Student Center).
Anyone in Kent interested in going?
Notes from 10/14/2011 Meeting of The Neurosciences and the Humanities Working Group at Kent State October 14, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Kent State, Personal, The Brain.Tags: humanities, kentstate, neurosciences2, postaday2011, workgroup
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Today, the Kent State University working group on the neurosciences and the humanities held its second meeting of Fall 2011 semester to discuss, among other things, Neil Levy’s “Neuroethics and the Extended Mind” from The Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics edited by Judy Illes and Barbara J. Sahakian (Oxford UP, 2011).
These are my stream-of-consciousness notes on the conversation from the meeting:
Empathy and mirror neurons
Marco Iacoboni’s Mirroring People book
Thomas Metzinger
Martha Nussbaum’s article “Not for Profit”, cursory account of empathy, her argument won’t fly in modernist circles, making it fully linguistic–can we do this?
language puts us right in there with these issues
Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, neuroscience and reading
Keats talked about seeing a bird pecking the ground–being there, as if experiencing as the bird
(what about Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”)
Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry,” similar argument to Nussbaum
Me: Evolutionary questions around empathy, altruism and conserving resources–why did we evolve this resource wasting/non-gene passing along adaptation?
Some others: Lots of sentimentalism about what it means to be human, but I don’t think that we are getting to the core of where this came from. Simply saying that we are different from animals (not something that I buy anyways)
Philosophers debate two aspects of empathy: 1) imagining what someone else feels or projected empathy, and 2) motivating someone to do something as a result of emapthy
Hardwired empathy–it would seem so.
Levy article:
narrow view of what the mind does–propositional knowledge
Why is it important that he is only focused on propositional knowledge? Is he favoring language as the medium of thought?
Godel’s theorem = undefinable propositions
Language always leaves something out (Lacan)
How do we think? in language? natural language?
Ganlan–mental activity that language rests on
Gotsky–the dialectical
Indeterminacy, thinking of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle applied to language
Speech act theory, language does something that only language can perform
Chatbot
Machines that count as humans
Selfobject–can be a literal object, a person, an environment or setting, need that relationship to otherness
Damasio–core self consists of feedback loops, don’t really change over the whole life, those core states don’t changes, other things self
Science of consciousness and emotion, tree of emotion, drives > basic emotions > complex emotions
Clumping emotion and feelings together
Does consciousness begin in the body?
Community integrity–deaf persons and their children, for example
Functional intervention–someone needing a drug to enhance mental performance, memory, alertness, etc., then taking that drug away, what then?
Me: not troubled by extended mind, all for a posthuman future and the rapture of the nerds, related my own experience with identity transformation through medical interventions, that is not any different than non-intervention changes, though it is mediated by technology–cyborg? yes! (on the way home, I was thinking that I should have suggested steering the conversation towards haves-and-haves-nots for pharmacological and other technological interventions).
Identity–changeable and transformative over time | interventions in identity, drugs, plugging things into our brains, cyberpunk
Consider adding things to mind, but also the possibility of taking things away from mind
PTSD and Mrs. Dalloway–story of a woman who commits suicide and story of a woman hearing the story of the woman who commits suicide
Neuroscientists > PTSD is for past traumas more than the trauma that triggered PTSD, maybe forgetting the trigger event won’t help, this is why out of a group of people who experience the same trauma only some develop PTSD while others do not
extended mind–countering externalized soul?
Interventions > “you are playing god” > not consistent, hyperreligiosity
Milton > Blake, Milton lives on in him but not in the sense of reincarnation
Damasio–all about the self, the protoself is purely brain, core self built upon the brain
Denett–qualia and mind
Thomas Metzinger–The Ego Tunnel, he argues that there is no self, for next meeting
Blogging in the Classroom and the Profession Workshop Notes October 12, 2011
Posted by Jason W Ellis in Computers, Kent State, Personal, Technology.Tags: blogging, digitalcomposition, kentstate, postaday2011
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Download a PDF copy of my Blogging in the Classroom and the Profession workshop notes here. Remember, the workshop is today from 1:00-2:00pm in Satterfield Hall room 104. See you there!
