Playing for truth

I have been reading and thinking about mathematical philosophy lately. There are many schools of thought that try to address the question of whether mathematics is a more accurate reflection of truth than the reflections arrived at through other sciences.

For historical reasons, in the West we are raised in the Rationalist tradition that tells us that math is King (masculine oligarchical noun selected on purpose here). If an observed or empirical piece of data defies a piece of information that has been proven mathematically, there is supposed to be a problem with the empirical data, not math. Interestingly, this is what is taught and is the water in which we swim, but it is not representative of how science/math actually works. 

What actually happens is that whenever possible, mathematicians are guided by intuition. Like most of us, they use their learned experiences (their sense perceptions) to inform their intuitions. In a world in which any three points (instead of two) defined a straight line but straight lines also had every other characteristic that they have in our world, the intuitions of mathematicians would be very different than they are here. 

To add insult to injury for those hoping that mathematics could help find truth, physicists compare their mathematical results with physical data whenever they can. If there is not a match between the math and the data, they start over on their equations. Chemists, biologists, and neuroscientists follow this same rule. When in doubt, the empirical data win.

What fascinates me is that the agreed-upon story, at least culturally, is that math wins. Yet in reality, experience wins. This situation is so human, it's touching. We realize that our senses are flawed, so we strive for truth elsewhere, and we think that math offers a place beyond our senses. But we have such faith in our senses and/or we are so trapped by them that we have difficulty believing any truth unless our senses support and defend it. I think this paradoxical position is nonetheless the correct one.

One way to leave this paradox in the dust is to admit that our work cannot really find truth. Instead, we can only play with truth using every game we can dream up. It seems to me that if there is any truth to be found by mathematicians and scientists, it is in play. 

We follow our curiosity and see where it goes. Sometimes it goes somewhere beautiful and elegant, and we are inspired. Sometimes it goes somewhere dark, clunky and awkward, and we are driven away. Sometimes the beautiful and the ugly conspire to produce elegant and damaging results, sometimes they conspire to produce awkward and healing results.

Regardless of the results, what drives most of us is that we delight in playing these games with the universe. The act of this play is where we find the closest thing to truth. Not in our results or our methods, but in the act of this relationship with the universe; the simultaneous and mutual, loving and awe-struck interaction with what is within and beyond us.

The feeling of communion and delight we get from this relationship is what keeps us playing. I wonder if that same feeling is what keeps the rest of the universe playing as well.

Peer Pressure from Scientific Fundamentalists?

I was impressed to read this morning that Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist who predicted the existence of the Higgs boson, had publicly criticized Richard Dawkins for his anti-religious "fundamentalism" ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/dec/26/peter-higgs-richard-dawkins-fundamentalism ).

One of his points is that fundamentalism -- belief in anything that cannot be changed by data -- is an anti-scientific position, even if the belief held so strongly is belief in the superiority of science and the inferiority of faith.

Dr. Higgs is on the "short list" at Stockholm, given the recent discovery that his predicted particle exists, so right now he has a lot of power in the world of science. I am impressed that he chose to spend some of that power defending scientists who have spiritual beliefs, even though he himself is not among them.

At least in the U.S., there is astounding peer pressure among scientists to keep secret any spiritual beliefs or experiences we have. The underlying concern, I think, is that we fear that our colleagues (and maybe we ourselves) believe that rational/rigorous scientific thought cannot exist in the same brain as irrational/unfiltered spiritual belief. Either you're a rational scientist or an irrational spiritualist, but you can't be both. Choose one, and that position invalidates the other.

I have a suspicion that this false dichotomy is related to a similar one that is prevalent throughout professions beyond science -- the care-taking/productivity dichotomy. One can either be a care-taker who kindly and compassionately helps people with their problems regardless of whether the solution is productive (aka, mom), or one can be a problem solver who incisively and resolutely solves problems productively regardless of whether the solution is kind (aka, dad). However, it's apparent to anyone who knows someone simultaneously incisive, productive, and compassionate that this is a false dichotomy as well. The soft can co-exist in the same mind with the hard, and the outcome is best when it does.

Our minds have so many modes, and while sometimes a single mode is clearly the one that is controlling the show at the present moment, at other times it is apparent that multiple modes are sharing the load. Our fears about multiple mind-sets co-existing are based on a false assumption that a single mode must win each day or else chaos will ensue. Of course, such an arrangement would be exhausting for whatever mode wins the day. Not only would it be exhausting, it wouldn't match with the empirical evidence that multiple neural modules co-exist and co-lead our sense of self and our behaviors (see, for instance, Richard Thaler's economics theories, or Paul Bloom's review in The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/first-person-plural/307055/ ).

It's one of my greatest daily pleasures to wake up, consciously connect myself to God/the Universe/Spirit/Whatever you want to call it, and then try to figure out the most rigorous way to analyze my data and the most accurate way to interpret it. Sometimes I even ask the Universe for help in this process. So I guess I just want to say I'm grateful to Peter Higgs for bringing the idea of a spiritualist scientist into the mainstream.

What works and what doesn't, and why?

There's been a bit of a media frenzy about our recent meta-analysis (see a summary article on the paper that I wrote for the International Human Press: http://ithp.org/articles/canwepredictthefuture.html ). After all the excitement died down, however, I found myself wanting more. Like a drug that I'd unwittingly learned to love, I wanted more of the satisfaction that is admittedly very rare in a scientific career -- for one's ideas to be seen by many other scientists and to be considered seriously.

Fortunately, I was weaned relatively quickly. I received two harsh reviews on two different papers, and one of my favorite results about a gender difference in perception looks like it is not replicating.

There have been some things that worked over the past few weeks: another gender difference looks like it is replicating, I had a blast giving two talks up at King's College University in London, Ontario, and a call with an intellectual property expert made me realize one of my ideas may be marketable.

This "best of times, worst of times" mix has made me start thinking about what tends to work, what tends to not work, and why. Here are my musings.

What works: It seems to me that whatever ends up working is a "sleeper" project. Projects that I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, that I've consciously ignored for awhile and then finally did the work -- these are the ones that end up working. It's like my subconscious chews on them for long enough to spit out a useful approach that makes the project work.

What doesn't work: Projects that I concentrate a lot of conscious mental energy on tend to fall through eventually. Really, it seems that the harder I concentrate on something, the more likely it is to fall through. The meta-analysis, for example, took a few years of hard work, but it was a background project that barely grazed the surface of my work life. Meanwhile, my gender difference that isn't replicating was the star of my conscious repertoire of cool things I've done.

Why? Of course, asking my conscious mind to answer this one will give some answers, none of which should be taken seriously, because they won't be correct (see observations above). My best guess is that the subconscious mind is more efficient when it gets more material to chew on, and is left alone and not nagged for answers so that it can provide answers when it is ready. When my conscious mind gets over-invested and over-involved, it makes decisions that are not based on all the data that is being processed by my subconscious. In general, it appears my subconscious knows best.

Does yours?

The Questions Themselves

I published a paper last week with two co-authors, Patrizio Tressoldi at University of Padova in Italy and Jessica Utts at University of California at Irvine. It's gained a lot of media attention because the results suggest that our bodies can anticipate upcoming emotional events without any external clues. Of course there must be an explanation for this phenomenon, but my co-authors and I don't know what it is; it's possible that there is a rather un-interesting explanation, but we rule out those explanations in the analysis, at least as far as we can tell. I go into details about the possible un-interesting explanations in my paper (visit this page to download it), so I don't want to discuss them here. The remaining explanations are all fairly interesting -- such as quantum biological processes and retrocausal effects. However, the upshot is that we found a highly significant effect that is very mysterious, given the everyday assumption that causes precede their effects.

As a scientist, it's pretty rare to get media attention. It feels good that ABC 20/20 and the Wall Street Journal seem to care about my work, or at least the results of my work. But this morning, as I watched the paper climb to the top of the heap in terms of media mentions for the particular journal in which it is published (Frontiers in Perception Science), I realized that I feel a completeness I've never felt before in my work, and it is only partly the short-term high of media attention.

I feel like if I die now, I know I have changed the world for the better. It's not that my research is so amazing that it changes the world for the better in itself. It is that in this paper we present a mysterious finding that seems very robust, yet it is still mysterious. We don't have a good handle on how to explain it. It's remarkable to see such acclaim and publicity around a question, not an answer. That momentary celebration of not knowing is a big gift to myself and others, and a good reminder of all we don't know.

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves," Rilke wrote. Loving the questions is the secret beauty in the scientific process. It's secret because the way science is taught suggests that scientists love answers, not questions. But anyone who actually becomes a scientist does so because that person is driven by a question that they love. The feeling is mutual; it seems that the question clings tenaciously as well, throughout your life. For me, the question is, "what is the nature of time?"

I want to freeze this moment, before answers are given to address this particular mystery. I want to appreciate this public celebration of wonder and strangeness, without answers. My completeness comes from knowing I made the point that I most enjoy making -- mystery is real, it is awesome, and when questions are loved well, they will eventually, if they like, yield answers.

The Four Corners Meditation

"All things have one root."
--Rabbi Nachman of Breslov

Just before I left for Yom Kippur services at Mishkan this morning, I sat down in front of my computer to submit an application for yet another faculty position. Even though I knew it was Yom Kippur, I told myself that I had to do it today -- yesterday a friend had already contacted her friends on the search committee at that university to tell them nice things about me. I was afraid that her words would be forgotten by the time the committee received my application, unless I submitted the application online today. There was also a big part of me that thought with no accompanying irony, "They're scientists. They won't understand if I wait until after Yom Kippur."

They're scientists; they won't understand.

Like in all other Yom Kippur services, we said the Shema prayer, in which we affirm God's unity. But we prepared for the affirmation by doing a brief meditation that brought to light exactly how my thought process this morning had failed both me and the school to which I'd sent my application. The Rabbi asked us to take the four corners of our prayer shawls and bring them together to hold in one hand. She said this was meant to remind us of the disparate parts of ourselves, the parts that seem to be opposing one another but nonetheless co-exist. Her point was that each of these parts are a facet of the gem of ourselves, reflecting God. These parts are not struggling to be resolved, the "best" ones eventually overtaking their opposites. Instead, they are meant to to form a messy unity inside of us.

I am a scientist. Do I understand?

Do I understand how I can feel so open-hearted toward God and also enjoy working in a field that reduces God to seizures in the temporal lobe? Do I understand how I can be skeptical about post-hoc analyses and not blink an eye when the Rabbi discusses with us what God "wants?" Do I understand how I can be annoyed with other scientists who have faith in outdated methods and at the same time, sure, let's read Torah?

Nope. I don't understand any of that, and the meditation didn't help.

What I did understand during my four-corners-of-ourselves meditation is that I have been dreaming of being a research scientist, a tenured professor, since I was ten years old. When I was ten, I imagined myself in a lab coat, walking around lab benches, checking my work. Everything was in its place, including my identity as a talented and insightful scientist. Of course, in those fantasies I was male. What else? I did say research scientist, right?

That image came back to me during my meditation -- the image of myself as a research scientist, and my assumption, even present at ten years old, that if I wanted this dream to come true, I'd have to be a radically different person. There was something not quite right about a female kind of person being a scientist. So I tweaked the image a bit and it fit. Sort of.

But of course it didn't, and it still doesn't. It's not that being a research scientist doesn't fit, that's perfect for me. I love the interplay with the mysteries of the universe, faith and non-stop empiricism all in one. What doesn't fit is the need to hide all the stuff I thought I had to hide in order to get a job. It's the other three corners of my prayer shawl.

I'm a woman, I'm open-hearted with God, and I'm so so flawed. By hiding those parts -- actually some of the best parts of me -- I've fallen into the trap set by my 10-year old self. That 10-year old didn't know any better, but I do now. It's terrifying, but it's finally clear to me that the job I end up getting by presenting my whole self to some fortunate search committee is the job that I'll keep, love, and excel at for a very long time.

Lessons taught by science and absorbed oh so slowly...

I was 24 and in my third year of the Neuroscience graduate program at U. California, San Francisco. Attending my first international conference, I was staying in a hotel on an island in the Netherlands. My roommate was an experienced psychology researcher. She was in her 60s or 70s, but I just knew I was better than she was. In so many ways.

First, she moved slowly. She didn't make decisions quickly, wasn't quick to speak or quick to judge. It took her some lounging time in the room to decide which talks to attend. Hah! I already knew the answer. All of them!

Second, she was soft. I could see the lack of muscle tone in her face and body. She moved gracefully, like a dancer, and she didn't necessarily seem to want to get where she was going any faster than she wanted to leave her original spot. She smiled a lot, laughed easily. She deeply underestimated, it seemed to me, the seriousness of it all. The Importance of Science. What a waste!

Third and most damning, she believed in observational research. The one thing I remember her saying to me with any seriousness was her response to my statement that so many of the talks seemed to lack hypotheses and were merely "fishing expeditions" -- a derogatory phrase I'd copied from my mentors at UCSF. She looked at me patiently and said in what must have been a well-measured tone, "My dear, exploratory research is under-rated. You will discover that for yourself someday." At that moment, one part of me looked at her in disgust and dismissed her entirely. Another part, much less stupid, held onto the wisdom and wondered if she was right.

Of course, she was right. Not only about exploratory research, but about all three flaws my earlier self spotted in her. Taking her time, being vulnerable, and observing. Of course. All three traits describe many Nobel laureates in science as well as many un-sung heroes in the academic world. They are traits that allow you to see what is before you and to choose a useful experiment that can help you discover something new.

This post is dedicated to my wise and very patient roommate, may she rest in peace.

What are we afraid of?

I just returned from having lunch with a wonderful friend of mine, Rebecca Armstrong. She's a minister and a counselor, and she's teaching a class at a local university about how our thoughts and feelings affect our bodies. Because I'm giving a guest lecture for her class, we thought we'd better meet to discuss the details of the course.

She told me a hilarious story about how a high-level administrator at this university didn't want the class to go forward, because he said, "This idea that feelings affect our bodies is ridiculous." I practically peed my pants when she told me this. It's as if he had said, "I put no stock into this idea that we breathe air." He didn't want students learning the heretical theory that feelings matter physiologically, even though of course it's empirically the case that they do, and there's nothing really controversial about those results.

After recovering from the giggling fit, I started to wonder...what's going on for this guy? What's his fear about? It had to be fear, right? Otherwise, he'd just shrug his shoulders and say, "I don't believe that's real, but there's a lot of things out there I don't believe." No, he couldn't do that. He was clearly threatened by the class -- therefore afraid of something.

What was he afraid of?

I started to think about how for me, my conscious/verbal mind is the one that decides most of what I do. It lays claim to my day: these are my plans, these are my goals, these are my backup plans. It does a lot of work, and it deserves to get a lot of credit. I give it a lot of credit, but it also wants more -- it wants me to say this to it: "You are all of me; or at least the most important part of me. There's nothing else here that matters. You are what drives this body and mind, friend. Go for it -- be the King of Me!"

Why does it want that that? If it were really confident -- for that matter, if my conscious/verbal brain were actually "all of me" and "the most important part" -- why would it need such reassurance?

What is it afraid of?

I think the university administrator and my verbal/conscious mind share the same fear. It's a fear of a stronger, more powerful, greater force that they both know is there: the subconscious.

I often feel that the conscious mind is not just lesser in size compared to the subconscious but also lesser in quality. There's plenty of evidence that the parts of the brain producing the subconscious dominate in size and operate more efficiently than the conscious mind. But I am also starting to believe that the subconscious is actually on the correct track more than the conscious mind. Not necessarily the rationally correct track but the evolutionarily adaptive track.

For instance, as Rebecca pointed out, in Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast & Slow, he is very discouraged about the results of an experiment in which participants want to keep their hands in cold ice water for 30 seconds longer if their previous experience showed them for that last 30 seconds the water would get a tiny bit warmer. Their conscious/verbal minds aren't aware of this -- they say there's no difference over time in the temperature of the water. But when asked to repeat an experiment, they choose to repeat a 90-second ice-water experiment (in which they subconsciously experienced an increase in water temperature) rather than a 60-second ice-water experiment (in which the water didn't change temperature).

Why should this bother Kahneman so much? He doesn't like it because the subconscious seems to want to do the incorrect thing -- it wants to keep the body in danger longer -- but it is in control of us! It seems as if an ill-intentioned yet very powerful force is controlling our lives and endangering our bodies. This would be something to fear, indeed, but it's not true.

Of course keeping the hand in ice cold water for 30 seconds longer would seem like the incorrect decision to anyone's conscious mind. But the conscious and subconscious don't play by the same rules. The subconscious knows that even our subconscious feelings and stories about what happened -- "First the water was cold, then it got warmer, so it wasn't that bad" are more influential in our lives than what actually happened -- "I left my hand in the cold water for 30 seconds longer." Instead of the subconscious being a threat, it actually saves us, every day. It lets us have a good feeling about a situation (it got better) rather than a bad one (it was really cold the whole time), even when we don't know it's doing this for us.

I'm starting to think that the conscious mind is kind of like a kid standing beside a beautiful mountain and saying, "Everyone's looking at my pet ant! Come look at the ant with me! There is only the ant, right? I am angry you think there is anything else to look at! There's just me and the ant!"

Meanwhile, the mountain of the subconscious stands majestically soaring, quietly pointing out the obvious. There's a mountain here. It's pretty much the main point. It controls our attention and actions for a reason -- it's a frigging mountain, and it's going to help us survive. Of course it doesn't play by the rules made up by a child. Those are the rules of a child, after all.

So what are we afraid of? The subconscious is uncontrollable, mysterious, and beautiful. It doesn't give a whit about our egoic machinations to feel like there's an "us" in control. The subconscious is a radically feminist woman who is seen as very traditional. She runs her own business and never mentions it. She controls whatever commodity she sells by letting everyone else think they control it. She pulls the strings for an entire world of marionettes, but she's brilliantly woven the strings from spider thread. They're so thin, we think we control ourselves.