Mathematical Coping Strategies for Schizophrenia

Back in September I went to a pre-exam review held in a room other than our normal classroom. At one point when the instructor filled up one markerboard with chemical pathways, and rolled back the next one only to discover this:



This third one is blurrier than the other two but I've included it for scale.


In unison the class said "What?..." but the instructor was unfazed. "That's our local homeless guy," he explained. "He often comes into these rooms and covers the board with figures." I made sure to get these shots before they were erased, wondering if we had another John Nash.

Of course it's more likely that the man is just sick and these numbers are gibberish. (For the record, there's no way to tell just from finding numbers whether the person is schizophrenic.) I actually emailed the pictures to a cosmologist friend* to see if they meant anything (they reminded me of quantum numbers) but my friend said there was no order to them that he could see. Still, it's tempting to look for patterns on the principle that, if there is indeed any method to this madness, we could get to the concepts inductively. Once at a party, as a game I decided to play what appeared to be a single-player solitaire-like game. I moved the cards around randomly but with great apparent concentration (I don't even know the rules for real solitaire) and soon enough, someone started watching. "I think I have the rules figured out," he offered after a few minutes. (Given the limited input, he may well have.)

Beyond problems of induction, there remains the question of why someone with mental health issues would develop a habit like this in the first place. My best guess is that, since he's homeless on a university campus where social status accords with intelligence (or at least proxy indicators of it), by writing opaque patterns of numbers he can maintain the delusion that he's a misunderstood genius, at least as long as he's writing his number-patterns in empty rooms where they aren't critiqued by people with real math abilities. (A similar strategy would be to write a cognitive philosophy blog with few readers.)

A more interesting possibility is that by finding a way to occupy his attention with a task requiring high concentration and that uses non-diseased parts of his brain, this person has found a way to quell the other constant disturbances to his thinking and can gain himself a moment of peace. Of course this is speculation, but if it hasn't already been asked, this might point the way to novel therapeutic approaches.

*Speaking of status, please note the casual way I refer to my cosmologist friend, which means that I'm cool.

Existence and Consciousness

To ask why there is something rather than nothing seems to assume on some level that it's less natural for the universe to exist than to not exist. It also assumes that some kind of existential inertia means that there will continue to be something rather than nothing.

This second assumption at least is not universal to humans, and is covered by Robert Nozick in the most effective treatment of this question yet. The Inuit believe that if hunting ceases, even for an instant, the universe will end. Several religious traditions hold that if at any given moment, at least one person somewhere is not copying their holy text, reality will sink back into chaos. These examples are interesting but are probably better explained as cultural technologies to keep people motivated in performing important activities, than as insightful cosmogonies.

Another question is whether it is clearly meaningful to ask counterfactuals about the fact of existence itself - whether existence had to exist - versus finite entities within existence. It is clearer that the pine tree outside my window, or you, might not have existed. In this way existence as a whole, the capacity for things to exist, is qualitatively different than a pine tree.

Changing gears to the ever-popular deep mystery, is it meaningful to talk about a universe that has no consciousness? Is self-awareness, a part of the universe experientially looping back on itself, necessary for existence? There is an intuition (which I share) that questions about necessity of existence and of subjective experience are getting at the same things.

James Cameron and the Problem of Reference

Artificial languages are interesting, though I always find myself longing for some index of strangeness relative to the creator's language (pick a Native American language at random; is the conlang ever going to be more different than the creator's native language than the natural language is? I doubt it.) That said, James Cameron did it right for the Na'vi language in Avatar, reportedly claiming to have out-Klingon'ed Klingon. The linguist Cameron chose to create Na'vi summarizes its structure and during the preamble of the article, his interviewer states this gem:

"...since there is already tremendous interest in the [Na'vi] language, and some less-than-accurate information about it is currently floating around online, I asked Paul [the creator] if he could write up a formal description of Na’vi as a Language Log guest post."

The problem of reference is really a set of problems in different situations. The answer to this one is I think implicit and relatively obvious. Maybe we don't know if the current king of France is bald, but we do know whether Romeo is gay or Na'vi is agglutinating.

Flatland and Free Will

In my previous post I asked why, if we do not have free will and the path of the universe is set in stone, we should have a seemingly privileged timepoint called "now". With no free will, there are no more degrees of freedom as you're reading this "now" "in the present" then there are degrees of freedom for something that happened ten minutes ago, or in 1588. In this setting "now" seems especially arbitrary and one wonders why nervous systems of this sort, i.e. that are constrained to one gradually changing temporal perspective, would ever appear - since events are all settled anyway. If we live in four-dimensional block of frozen space-time, why can't we see the whole thing? Why do we seem limited to one slowly shifting level within it?

Another way of looking at it (and responding to TGP's statement that "now" is a given) is to imagine a visit to Flatland. In Abbott's original conception, Flatland appears to three-dimensional beings as a plane in which the 2-dimensional creatures like squares and circles are going about their lives, unaware (and unable to be aware) that above or below them, they were being observed by extra-dimensional beings. Abbott used Flatland as a way of arguing by analogy how fourth-dimensional objects would interact with and appear in our own three-dimensional universe (see the link for the full treatment).

If you look at our universe as four-dimensional space-time, then you can consider Flatland to not be two-dimensional, but three-dimensional plane-time. In a no-free-will Flatland, their universe would look to us like a tall box, with time-tracks - set-in-stone of every square and circle twisting through it like tunnels in an ant colony. If you wanted to be a three-dimensional sadist, you could climb up on a ladder and look at Mr. Square at the moment of his death in a two-dimensional hospital. Then you climb back down and again insert yourself into Flatland to find him enjoying lunch in a park the day after his twenty-third birthday. "You will die on the following date and time; I know, because I already saw it." Do you see why this is strange? From your three-dimensional standpoint, no-free-will Flatland is a giant, static sculpture. Why would the awareness of any entity in that block be constrained to any one plane within it?

By the same argument, in no-free-will space-land (where we live, if you don't believe in free-will anyway), we're stuck in a block of four-dimensional space-time. Fourth dimensional sadists are free to go scrambling up and down this block like you just did on Mr. Square's universe, except the fourth-dimensional sadists are looking for nasty tidbits to relay to unfortunate three-dimensional suckers like you. A fourth-dimensional sadist could pop in ninety seconds from now and tell you that you getting smooshed by a rabid slime mold on 19 July, 2025, and it knows because it already saw it happen. And in a very real sense, in a non-free-will universe, it already has happened. The disconnect is that you haven't experienced it yet, and in a no-free-will universe, that's what seems strange. If the events happening now are just as certain as the events happening then, why isn't seeing the future the same as turning your head to look at the other side of the room your in? It's all already there.

An implication is that if we again assume a literal interpretation of multidimensional models of the universe, if the universe has a finite set of dimensions, it would necessarily be deterministic. The highest dimension would be a static one, and Mr. Square can't have free will if we don't.

Two Questions I Was Apparently Predestined to Ask

To those who think free will is an illusion: why does it seem like we have free will? More to the point, why do we perceive a special point in time we call "now"?

Panpsychist Accounts of Consciousness Are Still Testable

One challenge to David Chalmers' account of panpsychist consciousness is that it is untestable. If you argue that consciousness is everywhere (so goes the objection) then no observation can disprove your theory; therefore, it is not a sound theory.

Is this a valid objection? Chalmers is arguing that consciousness is a primitive feature of existence like charge or mass, that dimensional analysis by the four received basic units (charge, mass, distance and time) cannot in any combination "get us to" experience. One manifestation of mass is gravity. It is continuous throughout the universe; it is everywhere. Can gravity not be tested? The laws surrounding gravitation certainly can be, even though there is nowhere that gravity is truly zero.

If consciousness is (at least partly) epiphenomenal and supervenes lawfully on observable patterns in the material world, then these lawful relationships can and should be tested. The powerlessness of consciousness in epiphenomenal accounts (i.e. that our consciousness is caused, but does not cause anything, and we are in effect just along for the ride) is a problem that we've been wrestling with since Descartes and before, but it is a separate one. To argue the universality of consciousness does not make it any more untestable than gravity.

Hot Pics!

Let me just be the first to say: that's one good-looking brain. In
particular, what a big hippocampus it has (all the better to remember you with):


In fairness, perhaps I am - it is - a biased observer of myitself. Perhaps the
study of the mind requires new pronouns.

I didn't just trip and fall into an MRI, I participated as a subject
in a memory task imaging fMRI study at my alma mater-to-be UCSD, by
the same group that wrote the voodoo correlations paper.

The worst thing about the experience? Tring to stay awake for the whole hour without being able to control any stimuli. I hope I gave them good data.