Countering a primitivist attack on the soul
May 1, 2013, 11:51a - Consciousness
I probably spend more time thinking about consciousness than any other topic or person (shh, don't tell Becca or my worms :). Previously, I described a simple argument for the existence of the soul, which formed the rational basis for my belief in the soul. My argument was that the existence of consciousness requires a non-physical explanation, so I ... more »
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C. Elegans XIV
- May 1, 2013, 11:34a
I implore you, stop the genocide against my kind! In your quest to unravel consciousness, your methods have been crude and, ironically, quite primitive in nature. These supposed "experiments" have led to a widespread belief among my brethren: that sacrificial offerings to the Blue Eyed Sky God will end the peroxide plague. We both know this is untrue. This is your final warning.
rosa
- May 1, 2013, 12:29p
lol
Josh
- May 3, 2013, 8:03a
I assume I am not the "Josh" referenced in this post, because I do not hold those views. Instead, I like your previous argument, but only steps 1 and 2. Step 3 seems to ignore the possibility that a Theory can exist for "how consciousness can arise from the physical" but we are currently too stupid to conceive it. Thoughts?
nikhil
- May 3, 2013, 9:07a
Give me your last name or initial and I'll tell you if you're the Josh I'm thinking of :)
Right, we may be too stupid, and we may wise up some day and come up with a plausible physical theory for consciousness. Of all the counter-arguments to my original argument for the soul, that is what I would hold out for. But I'm not betting on it. My disinclination with this counter is that unlike other kinds of theories, there are basically no potential consciousness-arising-from-the-physical theories that people have come up with. It's not like we've had a bunch of theories, ruled them out one by one, and are waiting for more (which is the case for most conventional science - think of advances in our understanding of the causes of disease). Instead, we have exactly 0 theories, and so have nothing to test. This distinguishes the consciousness problem from other scientific problems.
The current common philosophical position with regard to nature is that all of nature could be understand as a very complicated series of physical events, none of which call for either the existence of consciousness or some functional consequence of consciousness. So the idea is that all of nature can be explained purely on the basis of observable causes and effects. Why aren't we all robots/zombies without consciousness? Yet we know we have consciousness (in fact it's the one most basic truth that we know, and all other knowledge resides on top), so clearly the standard objective science view is missing out on a natural phenomenon, something not objectively observable. So science is not as comprehensive as we might think/hope. Maybe what's wrong is that it can't even observe a non-physical natural object, consciousness.
CAN
- May 7, 2013, 9:09a
a (flawed) theory that leaves us waiting for more:
http://www.amazon.com/Phi-A-Voyage-Brain-Soul/dp/030790721X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1367051074&sr=8-1&keywords=giulio+tononi+phi
Jason
- May 10, 2013, 1:47p
This is some fascinating stuff. I think about these things a lot as well. If you have not yet had a chance, check out the book "Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife." On the whole, it's not the greatest book in the world but the meat of it is stellar. It provides some great questions and dots to connect.
Jason
- May 10, 2013, 3:17p
Also, as examples of primitive properties in your argument, I would use the forces (electromagnetic, strong and weak nuclear forces, and gravity) since they truly are fundamental while particles can seemingly always be broken down - far beyond quarks to our current understanding. Despite this discrepancy, your point is clearly stated and understood.
rosa
- May 13, 2013, 1:13p
- I think some people use the word "fundamental" where you use primitive.
- On your argument for the soul: This is the argument that i thought was Chalmers-y: the transition from an epistemological claim about what we know right now (2) to an ontological claim about what the world is like (3). It's shady when he does it and it's shady when you do it! shady for reasons that josh mentioned in the comment - the absence of a current theory might be because we don't know enough or we're too stupid - it's not obvious that it means that there IS no such theory possible.
- On your primitivist counter-argument (PCA): this one goes the other way - from an ontological claim (2) - consciousness is a primitive property of the world to (3,4,5) which are basically about our explanatory practices. you could interpret this as basically throwing our hands up - fundamental facts don't admit of explanation because explanation bottoms out - but that's not very satisfying.
- I don't think your argument and this so-called counter-argument are opposed to each other. PCA (2) basically assumes your conclusion (3 in the original argument). (2), by saying consciousness is a primitive "like mass or charge" already assumes that consciousness is a distinct (non-physical) property.
- I don't find PCA (5) useful... what's the difference between appealing to an (unexplained, unexplainable) non-physical soul, and appealing to consciousness as its own primitive property? Appealing to the soul just pushes the mystery back a step, whereas primitivism embraces it. I don't see a meaningful difference between these two strategies... difference seems verbal - call it a soul or call it consciousness - who cares?
- "Each primitive property is associated with the most simple pieces of matter" - yeah... not sure the physicists would agree with you on this one... or the philosophers. there are lots of primitive properties that we can't really reduce to other properties. not all of them are small. some people think that the property of "being true" is primitive. what about the property of "being big"?
- "if you assume consciousness is a primitive property, than all matter, down to the quark, must have a small bit of consciousness to assemble into the whole seen in brains (akin to mass or charge)" - i don't see why we have to say this. consciousness is primitive, it is associated with something big instead of something small. something can be big without all of its constituents having some property of "bigness" that then adds up...
- On conclusion (A) - again, chalmers basically thinks this (he calls it pan-proto-psychism) BECAUSE of an argument very similar to your original argument. so i don't think these are opposed to each other. Although pan-proto-psychism can be interpreted as a form of physicalism/materialism, if we just suppose that proto-psychism is just another physical property ... and when it's put together with other things with physical properties in the right way, we get people and animals and consciousness.
- "... all other phenomenon which are reducible to particle-scale components." wtf really? this is like .. cowboy reductionism at its worst! i'm not convinced anyone really believes this. want to ask you to read Dennett's "real patterns".
- "Emergence as a philosophical position seems implausible to me given the ridiculous explanatory success of reductionism." - yeah, I don't buy this. interpreted weakly, emergence and reductionism are not incompatible, and lots of things are emergent - complex biological properties, wetness, chemical properties.
- Response to your comment: wow - this part sounds kind of like Nagel's newest - mind and cosmos. science is dramatically inadequate, etc. not just for explaining consciousness but to explaining LIFE (living things in nature, conscious or otherwise). i think i've said this before, but i think that if you're not bothered by our inability to reduce LIFE to physics, then you shouldn't be bothered about consciousness either - they are fundamentally the same kind of problem. The people who think that there must be some non-physical basis to consciousness are just like the vitalists from the turn of the century who thought that there had to be some non-physical basis for life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reduction-biology/
[this comment was copied from an email between Rosa and Nikhil]
nikhil
- May 13, 2013, 1:16p
Cool. Thanks for the detailed response.
I think I've heard several of your comments before, and I think I have reasonable counters. Let's see how convincing you find them:
* I use the word "primitive"because this is the word a computer scientist would use. In computer languages, there are things called "primitives", which are objects that are irreducible. For example, integers and characters are considered primitives in C, whereas a word (string of characters) is not, because it is simply built from the character primitive.
* I agree that the transition from what we don't understand to making a claim about the world is very, very shady. It's the same as "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." But I think consciousness is special here. It's special because no theory has ever been able to really explain it. Usually in science we have lots of plausible theories that we rule out until we find the best (most true) one. The earth being the center of the universe was reasonable: when we looked up it looked like the stars rotated around us. But then we got new evidence (or looked at existing evidence with greater analytical skill) and we generated a new theory for our planet's place in the universe, where we rotate around the sun. Both explanations are plausible, even if only one is true (or more true). The problem with physical theories of consciousness is that none of them really explain why consciousness exists. Tonini's phi theory is a current example: interesting analysis, but nothing he suggests necessitates the existence of consciousness from pure objective stuff. And no theory ever has, as far as I know. So I'm inclined to be a bit shady, because our situation with consciousness is different than any situation we've had with explaining other objective phenomena, including life (more on that below).
* I agree that having consciousness be a fundamental property is very unsatisfying. I'm open to better ideas.
* I'm confused when you write "PCA (2) basically assumes your conclusion (3 in the original argument). (2), by saying that consciousness is a primitive "like mass or charge", already assumes that consciousness is a distinct (non-physical) property." I guess I don't think of mass or charge as non-physical properties, do you? I think of them as fundamental physical properties that must be accepted (though I'm not up-to-date on my particle physics). So I guess I'm not understanding what you're trying to say here.
My difficulty with accepting consciousness as a fundamental property is that it seems to happen on a more macroscopic scale than other fundamental properties. So consciousness is somehow different.
* On "call it soul or call it consciousness - who cares?" I think this is a good point - what do we get by saying that there's something non-physical underlying consciousness? Since this is so mysterious as well, does it buy us anything by pushing the mystery of consciousness to a new, mysterious domain? I'm not sure, but I feel that it somehow does. Let me try an analogy: Let's say you're trying to build a treehouse, but all you have are sugarcubes of all imaginable shapes and sizes. So you build it, and it rains and dissappears. So then you think, I just need a roof to keep my treehouse from dissolving. So you build a roof of sugarcubes, but then it rains, and though it takes a little longer to dissolve, it all dissapears anyway. You really need to build your treehouse/theory out of some different material, even if you know nothing about that material. Lumber shows up one day on your front porch, and you use it, and now your treehouse survives the storm. You've never seen lumber before, have no idea what it's made of or how it works.
This is a bit of an overly creative analogy. But I guess my point is this: if your current system of thinking is unsatisfactory, it's worthwhile to devise a new plan that relies on something outside the current system. I'm not sure what this buys us, except for one small step in (perhaps) the right direction.
I think this might be the weakest part of my argument.
* I think all physical properties can be reduced and explained in terms of smaller properties, until you get to the fundamental properties. This is super-reductionism. I struggle to think of an example (outside of consciousness) where this is not true. "Being true" is a conceptual property that is a purely the product of the mind which can think untrue things - it's not a fundamental property like mass or charge. "Being big" is again a conceptual property, solely the product of the mind and without existence in its absence.
* Again, "bigness" is a conceptual property - it's not a property of the physical world in the absence of a mind. At the very core, I believe all matter interacts first at the lowest level, and that bubbles up to higher levels of analysis that our minds have greater ease thinking about or observing.
* I've alway had some affinity to Chalmers and Nagel, though I have difficulty with this pan-psychism position, which to me just seems intuitively absurd.
* I guess I'm a "cowboy reductionist". I always wanted to be a cowboy :) I do believe this. I will look at Dennett's paper you cite, which I haven't seen before.
* I agree that if you take a weak interpretation of emergence, it is compatible with reductionism. But that's not the interesting interpretation, as emergence doesn't really buy us anything except for some psychological ease (of not trying to think of all the many lower-level interactions that are occurring). It buys us abstraction, but especially in the world of biology abstraction can be very misleading, so I prefer to avoid it when I think it's going to impede truth-finding. With the examples of emergent properties you cite (complex biological properties, wetnness, chemical properties), are you taking the strong anti-reductionist view of emergence, or the weak one?
If you can tell me one truly emergent phenomena that is anti-reductionist, I'm all ears. If not, either consciousness is special in this regard, or you have to believe that it's a fundamental microscopic property, or that it can be generated from other fundamental properties like mass and charge. Maybe I just have to accept that the latter is the truth and forget about the immaterial "soul". But even that remains mysterious.
* I didn't know about Nagel's new book - I'll check it out. Does he really argue that science has not explained life? That's ridiculous if he does. If he does, I wonder how he defines life, as I guess you could make an argument against science's success if you confused life with consciousness.
The argument you make is very common, but I disagree. Life can be defined in a functionalist way: a thing that grows, metabolizes and reproduces is considered alive. There are some edge cases that are confusing (e.g. viruses), but we'll ignore that. With this objective measure of life, it became clear with advances in reductionism techniques (molecular biology and biochemistry) that all of these functions could be implemented by proteins, lipids, sugars and nucleic acids. So life has been solved. I'm very familiar with vitalism and I agree it's hogwash. But I disagree in saying that the problem of consciousness and the problem of life are the same. Life can be objectively defined, but what makes consciousness special is that it seems to elude objective definition because it is fundamentally about internal experience. Life is just like any other objective phenomenon that science has tackled or will tackle. Consciousness is special because it isn't obviously an objective phenomenon, so parallels are not easily drawn from past successes.
I'm hopeful that we will we find the properties of neural circuits that underly consciousness. But the hard problem of explaining why they produce this whole new domain of phenomenon at all will remain.
Alright, I feel like I've addressed all you wrote. If you have it in you I'd enjoy reading a response.
Gap-free neural circuits
Dec 8, 2012, 11:38a - Science
As I mentioned in a previous post, Tots and I are teaching a class on neural circuits this January during IAP at MIT. IAP is a time where anyone can teach anything they want - I think it's a cool testing ground for classes, and we didn't have anything like it that I remember at Stanford.
I'm excited about ... more »
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neha
- Dec 8, 2012, 11:38a
this is awesome nikhil. i might stop by the first class!
Poem
Dec 6, 2012, 1:40a - Poetry
I'm forced to believe the things I say,
Where is the will, in this way?
Confabulation abounds, disbeliefs sway,
Truth in memory, trust you say.
Trying to be aware the moment I no longer am,
Trying to catch myself, watch myself fall asleep,
Impossible.
(Written April 14, 2007)
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Adam Sanchez
- Dec 7, 2012, 11:50a
Richard Feynman performed many similar experiments on himself. This poem reminds me of him. Thanks.
Neural circuits
Nov 21, 2012, 11:33a - Science
Neuroscience, the study of the brain, is absolutely fascinating.
But why choose neuroscience over any other pursuit?
We can try to understand an infinite set of things in our world, from the economic effects of rape to the forces that keep atoms together. But only biology takes a stab at trying to understand the very first thing, *us*. Without us ... more »
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Coming home
Nov 12, 2012, 8:13p - Fiction
What to do, what to do...
Bill waited, tasting the smell of the cold metal. The taste rang in his teeth. What was he supposed to do now, he wondered. His wife had just died.
He went home. He drove the 30 miles in a bit of a fog, on the cruise control of his mind. Every day of the ... more »
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Adam Sanchez
- Nov 13, 2012, 12:46p
That feeling when coming home and the lights not being on symbolizes the extinguished flame of life.
Let's start with a definition
Aug 10, 2012, 10:05p - Consciousness
My main intellectual interest is to understand how the brain creates consciousness. When I tell this to people, they usually respond with "What do you mean by 'consciousness'? How do you define it?"
Human consciousness is certainly complex, but I think of it as being composed of 3 smaller parts, arranged in a hierarchy. The most primitive part of human ... more »
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TomN
- Aug 12, 2012, 12:03a
If you haven't read "Second Person, Present Tense" by Daryl Gregory, I highly recommend this SF short story.
You can find a copy via the Internet Archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100114004527/http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0702/Secondperson.shtml
The author's notes are an interesting post-read:
http://www.darylgregory.com/stories/SecondPersonPresentTense.aspx
It is just Science Fiction and it's a few years old now, but you might enjoy it.
nikhil
- Aug 12, 2012, 10:49a
That's a neat story Tom. Thanks for that.
Another way to think of the 3 facets of consciousness is:
* Step 1 = Perception : "Stuff is happening."
* Step 2 = Self : "Some of the stuff that is happening is happening to me."
* Step 3 = Free will : "I have control over the some of the stuff that is happening to me."
Raja
- Aug 13, 2012, 12:14p
"If we seek to understand ourselves, we must first understand the physical basis of consciousness."
Is this true? Might it be enough to have a working, descriptive understanding of how consciousness manifests itself, i.e. how we humans tend to interpret and relate to our notion of consciousness? Is it necessary to get answers to its physical underpinnings in order to live a meaningful life?
Put another way, how would having answers to the questions you are posing change the way you live or interpret your existence? It's fine if you just happen to be interested in thinking about and trying to find answers to those questions, but it's a much stronger claim to say that getting answers to these questions is somehow "important."
Somewhat related question (via the late philosopher Richard Rorty): Can you hypothesize a potential answer to the questions you've posed that would be satisfying and coherent? For most questions we ask about the world, it's usually pretty easy to give an example of a coherent answer even before doing any investigation. It's then possible to do research and test hypotheses that are based on our a priori "guesses".
It's not entirely clear what those testable hypotheses would even look like with respect to the most difficult questions surrounding consciousness (e.g. free will), but I am curious to hear what you think and what the current take on that problem is within the neuroscience community.
nikhil
- Aug 14, 2012, 6:56a
Good to hear from you Raja!
Alright, let's start at the beginning. In general, I think either I haven't been clear or you've misunderstood me. My quote:
"If we seek to understand ourselves, we must first understand the physical basis of consciousness."
I am definitely no trying to imply that it is necessary to answer the question of consciousness to live a meaningful life. Clearly no one has a satisfactory answer to this question but clearly loads of people live meaningful lives (or have meaningful aspects to the lives they live). I think we're debating 2 kinds of "understanding" - the first one (which I think you're talking about) is at the descriptive level. Take another phenomenon, let's say flying. When humans wanted to understand flying, it was totally reasonable to begin by surveying birds and floaters in the wind and other things that naturally flew. Describe them, describe their body plan and anatomy, their colors, and any other descriptive attribute - when they flew, for how long, from where to where, etc. With this compendium of knowledge, it's possible to predict whether new objects would fly or not (inference), and also to build something that flew (perhaps some of those fast-flapping lightweight bird-looking toys fall into this category). But I would say that this level of understanding remained superficial, even though the total bulk of knowledge was huge. To really understand flight more generally, I think you had to understand certain concepts, such as lift and how differential air pressure supports flight in the shape of wings. This second kind of understanding follows from the first, but the first alone is not satisfactory in my opinion, though necessary for getting to the second. This analogy can also be applied to the field of medicine and how a molecular understanding of diseases is a much less superficial understanding than a symptom-level kind of understanding. This is the epistemology of reductionism.
This quote is definitely not meant to have much existential power - think of it more as "if I want to get past the superficial and really get a better flavor of consciousness, I've got to start thinking about the mechanisms that underly it. I have to physically dissect it." As far as we can tell consciousness should have a physical basis, so other kinds of dissections (e.g. psychological, metaphysical, behavioral) may be interesting and helpful, but they won't get at the heart of the matter, so to speak.
This is not meant to be depressing or have any emotional content. It's just meant to be a statement of fact.
I only think the basis of consciousness is "important" if you care about consciousness - most people I talk to don't think about it at all. So for them it isn't important. But if you happen to be one of the few who are interested, I think it's important in the sense that if you want to be a good doctor, understanding the molecular basis of your patients' ailments is important. It's not the whole story and many other pieces also need to be there, but without it there's a huge gap in the work.
On to your "what would a potential answer even look like?" question. Again I guess I wasn't clear enough in my writing. For the question, "How does certain parts of the brain create consciousness", I don't think there is a possible answer, and I agree with you. I likened that to asking "How do positive and negative charges attract?" or "How does mass generate gravity?" These are questions about the properties of objects, properties which ultimately form a sort of ground truth. Even if I answer those questions I could always ask how the answers exist and just move the question one level down, forever. At some point I just have to accept that there are objects with specific properties, and go from there.
So the motivating question is clearly "How does the brain create consciousness?" but I'm willing to accept that consciousness is just a property of the brain. It's like saying that objects which have the properties X, Y and Z will also have the property of consciousness. What I'm now interested in, and what I think is scientifically tractable, is to figure out what the properties X, Y and Z are. Ideally, these properties would be both necessary and sufficient for consciousness. We know that some parts of the brain clearly play more important roles in consciousness than other parts, and I will write about one example in a later post. Why does part A of the brain have a role in consciousness while part does not? What makes these 2 parts, though sitting right next to each other, different in relation to consciousness? Is it what other parts they're functionally connected to? The way in which they're connected? Posed this way, the question becomes one of comparison, and comparing things is what science is all about (experiment vs. control).
I hope this long-ish comment clarifies. I'm also primarily focused on the question of perception, not of self or free will, so my comments above are directed at that aspect of consciousness.
The goal now is to find those neural differences that make the difference between conscious experiences and unconscious ones.
Andy L
- Aug 30, 2012, 11:45a
Great post! Looking forward to see where you are taking this!
Gokul
- Oct 14, 2012, 11:05a
Another wonderful post! Looking forward for the rest in the consciousness series!
Annual car inspection (aka state-mandated consumption)
Apr 17, 2012, 4:54p - Law
The way I like to think about taxes is that it's goverment-mandated homework. Just when you think you're done with school and you'll never have to do homework ever again, haha, think again. At least that's how it feels to me.
If you're lucky enough to own a car and live in the only state I know that likes to ... more »
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Sachin
- Apr 17, 2012, 5:26p
Wow, that's super lame.
How much is the inspection itself?
When are you moving??
Dan P
- Apr 17, 2012, 6:22p
Hey dude -- interesting post. Don't forget about our lovely Smog Check system out here in CA
Glad to hear you're heading back out to CA. Bay area or otherwise?
Marlon
- Apr 18, 2012, 8:41p
Great read, thanks for sharing the gory details. Sounds like Mass is a fascist communistwealth. Come back to California soon, we love cracked tail lights!
nikhil
- Apr 19, 2012, 10:53a
The inspection itself is set by the state at $29, and almost every gas station or mechanic is licensed to do it.
Moving to Bay Area, but not for 1-2 more years... Gotta keep the worms happy until then!
John
- Jun 19, 2012, 12:47p
Fascinating post. On a similar note: what if I don't want to not slap people in the face when best suits me? When will government do the right thing and give me my independence back?
nikhil
- Jun 20, 2012, 6:41a
Independence is never given. It must be taken.
Making DNA look simple (again)
Apr 10, 2012, 6:30p - Science
I recently got sick of doing science. After observing my own productivity and passion for science ebb and flow over the past few years, I've found that I live a roughly 6-month cycle: 6 months of scientific experiments, 6 months of something else (usually programming, often blogging, sometimes installing hardware floors and doing experiments on myself). It seems that when ... more »
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Tron
- Jul 25, 2009, 10:27p
Thank you very much for making this available.
belle
- Aug 5, 2009, 7:16a
this is the best thing since sliced bread!! thank you just saved me thousands of hrs
dude,
- Nov 3, 2009, 6:33p
awesome.
jasonII
- Nov 12, 2009, 8:59a
Thanks, this works great. A few things though. Some of us work on large (18kb) genes. Is there any way to change the scale bar? Also, being able to indicate alternative spice events would be nice.
nikhil
- Nov 18, 2009, 9:29p
Thanks for the request jasonll. I've updated the graphic maker so you can now change the size of the scale bar, to be something more appropriate for your 18kb genes. Not sure what the convention is for indicating alternative splice sites - why not just make 2 separate gene models? I guess if there are several it would be nice to consolidate them into one image. If you have any ideas about what this would look like, lemme know.
nikhil
- Nov 19, 2009, 11:54p
Alan Marnett over at Benchfly.com asked me to write a blog post for them about the Exon-Intron Graphic Maker. It's just like this post, slightly revised. Storing the link here for safekeeping.
http://www.benchfly.com/blog/making-dna-look-simple/
omar
- Nov 29, 2009, 11:07p
dude this has advanced my research significantly
jasonII
- Feb 21, 2010, 8:40a
thanks for the scale bar modification. about the alternative splicing, i suppose it would be helpful if you could color them in. this would also be helpful to mark out certain functional domains easily. three or four colors would be wonderful and spice things up a bit!
siavash
- Apr 4, 2010, 6:10p
hi nikhil,
i also wanted to thank you for making this available. saved me so much time. also wanted to second jasonII's comment about other colors, for marking protein domains, etc.
but its wonderful, thanks a million.
Nick
- Nov 15, 2010, 7:09a
Thank you very much for this. I am an undergraduate doing a genetics research project and this has given me the ability to graphically show exon and intron positions the way I wanted to!
Pascal
- Feb 27, 2012, 7:34a
Great tool. What you also might want to consider is that UTRs can be across more than one exon. I think with the current options it is not possible to do that.
nikhil
- Mar 10, 2012, 7:36a
Pascal, actually I think you can do what you want.
Just like with the protein-coding field, separate exons and introns in the UTR fields with commas, and you'll be all set. That way you can display a single UTR containing multiple exons and introns.
jsto
- May 18, 2012, 1:24a
Thanks a mil nikhil
I wonder if its possible to extend the image to show up and downstream regions?
Pakpour
- May 31, 2012, 12:40p
Thank you thank you thank you so much for sharing this program. You have saved me huge amounts of time and it is such an easy and intuitive program to use!
BMD
- Dec 27, 2012, 12:29a
Hi Nikhil,
Thank you for this awesome tool! I used it to make a figure for my PhD thesis. I couldn't find any other tool that would draw high-res gene structures for me. At first, I was skeptical, because your tool required manual input of the sequences and boundaries, when this information is already available for my genes in GenBank. Also I was worried that the spaces and numbers that were contained in the sequences I pasted would mess things up. But it worked fine and only took a few minutes to copy-paste the sequences and put the commas. The genes I'm working with are monster genes with tons of exons each, and some very long introns, so I'm glad it worked so well. The only thing I would have liked is to have an option to have the exons numbered.
Goodbye Facebook
Mar 9, 2012, 8:52p - Blog Update
While deactivating my account, it asks why.
I choose "I don't find Facebook useful."
It suggests "You may find Facebook more useful by connecting to more of your friends."
But I already have 716 "friends". The fact is, the more friends I have, the *less* useful I find Facebook, because there's more crap from random people sitting on my wall. ... more »
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Josh
- Mar 10, 2012, 6:17a
Josh Meisel likes this
nikhil
- Mar 10, 2012, 6:51a
Now I feel fulfilled.
Sachin
- Mar 10, 2012, 11:20a
Completely agree about Facebook.
Can't agree about LinkedIn though. If you are in the job market or just generally need to be connected to professional networks, it's great.
omar
- Mar 10, 2012, 3:30p
I too wanted to like tgis post. I deactivated my accoubt for a month a year or so ago. Was fulfilling. I didnt tell many ppl though and so someppl thought i had shunned them. I may give this a go again.
I agree on timeline. Inpossible to read.
For somw reason i dont get spelling correctiob in this textbox.
What is the photo app u refer to?
nikhil
- Mar 10, 2012, 6:38p
Omar,
The photo app is called WallMe Lite. It's a wallpaper app that can loop through a set of photos and set them as your wallpaper. Best part is that you can login with Facebook and then it can show you all the photos where you or one of your friends is tagged. So I set it to show me photos of myself or Becca. You should check it out, it's great. I wanted an app like that for a while. Best part of Facebook for me was the photos, and this app puts them right in my face everyday, so I don't have to even go to Facebook. It's great (though of course it too can be improved).
Sachin,
Yeah, I understand that people on the job circuit get some value out of LinkedIn. I just find it a bit too job-focused for it to interest me. It has also bugged me in several ways:
1) It was one of the top results for me on Google, and I didn't like the impression that gave. I'm not looking for a job.
2) It has bugged me to write 'reviews' for people I've worked with, and then later I learned that these reviews weren't even requested by the person - the requests were auto-generated because *LinkedIn* wanted me to write a review. I'm not too interested in doing free work for companies.
3) I don't like that even though I want data about me to be free, LinkedIn will only give others access to this data if people pay (under certain circumstances). I don't think anyone needs to pay for my data, so I don't like that LinkedIn directly profits from data about me. I realize Facebook also makes money off my data, but it's indirect through advertising rather than charging the user. So access to my data remains free, as I want it to be.
Marlon
- Apr 18, 2012, 8:34p
"Also, the new Facebook Timeline sucks. 2 columns to view something that's linear (time)? Am I the only one who feels like my eyes are watching a ping-pong game? The big photo at the top is nice though."
Yes! Yes! No! I hate the photo at the top. I think Facebook is quickly going away, it used to be a place of hyperactivity, all kinds of relevant discussions from politics to whatever. Now it's all a ruined mush. The photo quality is total crap for sharing photos, there's pretty much no point to FB.
LinkedIn OTOH hasn't helped me get a job in years, but, the groups and discussions there are actually pretty helpful.
Btw, good luck deleting that Facebook account, they don't actually ever delete it, it remains alive indefinitely. Periodically you may get a request to activate it again.
Ashvin
- Oct 24, 2012, 5:13p
Make sure you delete your account, not simply deactivate. The link in here definitely seems like the real deal.
https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account
The end of visual deprivation
Aug 2, 2011, 7:34a - Consciousness
It's the first day, morning, after opening my eyes after 7 days of visual deprivation. I opened my eyes last night, first in a dark room right after midnight, and then we lit a candle.
The first thing that's very striking, even in the morning now, is that everything that's blue looks extremely BLUE. Either I forgot what blue looked ... more »
Read comments (2) - Comment
Mike
- Feb 29, 2012, 10:53p
Wow, congrats on finishing the week! I have been considering doing the same thing and came across your page. How long did it take for your focus to go back to normal and the dizzy feeling to go away? Same day? Did you ever go back to that library to see if you could recognize anything?
nikhil
- Mar 10, 2012, 10:53a
Hi Mike,
Glad to hear you're also interested in doing something like this. If you do it, I'd love to hear about your experience.
My eye focusing was pretty bad right when I opened my eyes that night, but in the morning when I walked around my neighborhood it was pretty fine. The dizzy feeling also subsided by the middle of the next day or so.
One thing I didn't write about is that I got into a pretty serious bike accident when I biked into the lab that morning. I tried jumping a small curb which is normally no problem, but my timing was way off, I jumped too early, landed, and then my bike hit the curb. I flew over the handlebars and landed on my face and hands. I felt concrete scrape under my 2 front teeth. All in all, I was pretty banged up and chipped a bone in my wrist (first broken bone of my life). Everything healed up fine, but the point is that the hand-eye timing may take a while longer to get synchronized again.
I haven't gone back to the library yet. I should.
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