🚀 go-pugleaf

raych@sirius.com (Raymond A. Chamberlin) wrote:

>
...................
>
>From what you say and a quick glance at Cytowic's Web site, it looks
>like I was wrong to intimate flakiness, or mere metaphoric status, to
>the concept of synesthesia, as centered in some rather unique "wiring"
>of the limbic system.  (However, I immediately see some statements one
>could argue over for some time.)
>
>It's been said that you can't believe everything you read on the Net,
>but that if something wrong is printed there, it sure doesn't take
>long for the correct substitute information to get printed alongside
>the mistaken stuff.  (. . .only my third mistake. . .mumble mumble
>. . .)  I may be back after thoroughly reading Cytowic.

I'm back. . .and I recant most of what I said here.  Cytowic's
document drifts about as far away from science as you can get.  It is
*science*, you recall,  to which you referenced your complaint as to
the attitude of my post.  He claims to have authored an earlier book
which contained significant neurobiology, without reading it, based on
his paper that I read, it becomes highly suspect.

Anything written on the senses, of course, can't limit itself to an
objective science alone, but has to relate to a subjective world in
some way, in a psychophysic (a half-science).  Well, psychophysics can
be useful where subjective reports can be shown to have good
statistics over many subjects, in closing the loop back through the
mind/brain to objectivity, enduring varied amounts and sorts of
neuroprocessing.  This process relies on statistics around a human
normal centralized processor / brain.  By definition, however (despite
some of Cytowic's efforts to claim synethesia is a "normal" function),
the subject here is a centralized-processor abnormality, not an
abnormality of a sensory organ peripheral to the centralized processor
/  brain, and therefore, nobody knows what to do with the subjective
reports of it coming out of that processor.  You can do anything you
want with them, as psychologists regularly do with subjective reports
supposed to provide information on the brain.  Their explanations are
not science and seldom agree with each other.

Well, Cytowic's paper on the Net is philosophy, not science, and goes
way beyond just couching some science in related philosophy.  It even
proceeds to argue his emotional sentiments about how thinking on the
subject, however you categorize it, should justify his own emotional
desires.  It is not clear whether he himself is synesthetic, as he
defines it in the narrow sense, as an abnormality.  I believe you, who
are riding on his emotional choo-choo train, have commented that *you*
are so.  His last sentence even establishes the overall unspecificity
of his Web document:  "If this is correct, then we are all unknowingly
synesthetic."  The more I read of his work, the more it smells.  Hey,
wait a minute. . .

C tries to correlate synesthesia to a whole slew of unusual
non-learned behaviors and other innate uncommon attributes of humans.
He sure doesn't provide much to convince anyone such associations are
valid in any scientific sense.  I was about to accept his word that he
was speaking science, after he came up with the female abductee of
aliens, who, after a little pleasuring by them, was never thereafter
able to be sexually satisfied by human males ( ;-b ), but. . .when he
pushed Kandinsky's recommendation to "stop thinking", I stopped
thinking he was scientifically oriented at all.  His finding that
seizures can produce many of the symptoms he claims for synethesia he
somehow takes imply that seizures produce synethesia.  How's that for
scientific thinking?

His section on "Neural Basis" wanders around, but never really gets
into, neurobiology, while tripping out on a claim that altered
consciousness from LSD is similar to synesthesia, because they both
involve the hippocampus.  So it's science to dump everything that
involves the hippocampus into the same bag?  I think it's halucinating
without any acid.

I can't figure out what the heck he sticks under his term 'form
constant' and during the many times I've watched fireworks, it has
never occurred to me to describe any feeling I've gotten (you mean
like a mild 'wow'?) as "salience" or experience "recognition" (of
what?).  The only salience and recognition here are ones of complete
lack of science.  He marvels over some guy named Ommaya who describes
consciousness as a type of emotion and emotion as acting as a
"cognitive homeostat".  Well, my cognition stopped dead on that note.

As an example of how weirdly far from scientific thought patterns C's
reasoning is, dig this:  He first says humans are the only mammals
that have both well-developed limbic and neocortical brain suborgans.
He then claims that this situation alone establishes in humans
nonhierarchical interaction between the cortical and "sub"cortical
parts of the brain, while other mammals have pretty much a straight
hierarchy of the cortex down to the subcortical regions.  I'm sure
such structure prevails in humans, but just making two things big or
complex doesn't necessarily make them interact more.  (English and
Russian are arguably the two largest and most complex languages, but
they don't interact much.)

C's writing is basically political:  "Our insistence on a
third-person, "objective" understanding of the world has just about
swept aside all other forms of knowledge."  Well, that type of
"understanding" is inherent in the notion of science and scientific
objectivity.  What's C wants is inherently *un*scientific.  C also
states that the predominance of women synesthetics in the UK is much
greater than in the US, and then follows this with, "It is doubtful
that transatlantic genetic differences contribute to this disparity."
Why should he find this potential cause doubtful?  I don't about the
truth of the data, but surely the racial / varietal complement of the
US is considerably different from that of the UK.

C ties in a correlation of synesthesia to abnormalities in visual
fields, particularly as sampled manually, as opposed to the use the
results of automated perimetry.  That discussion sounds pretty
unscientific also.  He next claims 10% of synetsthetes are gay.  So?
Isn't that approximately the percentage of the general population that
is gay?

C makes the strange statement, "If such an unfounded worry [that of
dying during a seizure] preoccupies [as he claims it does] their
[epileptics] thoughts, it is not hard to suppose that synesthetic
experience might make them think that they are losing their mind."
Why should that worry be considered "unfounded" in the first place?
Someone with the potential of losing control of his behavior during
any activity certainly is more apt to lose same in circumstances with
a fairly high probability of death resulting, where one's behavior is
inadequate to survival under the given circumstances -- than is
someone who does not have such potential.  C claims this "unfounded"
worry would correlate to worrying about losing one's mind upon
experiencing syesthesia.

C now considers that synesthesia may be more common in children than
in adults, in contrast to what he previously thought in this vein --
merely as a result of having heard adults say that they "haven't
thought of synesthesis "since [they were] a child or "since [their]
bar mitzvah[s]."  So, many Western Jews are higher strung than the
average American and apparently have more complex emotional goings-on
in their minds as children than do other children.  So why shouldn't
this evidence support the conclusion that such patterns in children's
minds are not built into the framework as a synesthetic structure, but
rather are developmental stages toward a certain type of adult
mentality?

C states:  "Linguists no doubt could pose more sohisticated and
probing experiments."  Linguistics is not science and linguists are
all that sophisticated.  Then C prefers the hermeneutic over the
scientific and says, "If you think that the mind is some disembodied,
abstract program that can be instantiated on any hardware capable of
running it, then you can ignore the biological complexities of neural
tissue," and then claims such a tactic is "convenient and lazy".
Well, instantiating *anything* on "hardware capable of running it", by
definition, requires only a means of tranferring it to such hardware
in order to run it.  Well, a mind, as experienced by another mind
usually has quite a high degree of complexity resultant from all
possible permutations of behavior from a highly complex organ already
of high complexity, but some useful theory can result, by ignoring
much specifics of neural tissue.

C repeatedly complains about associating computationality with the
brain and relates it to behaviorism.  He then uses a term
'microgenesis'.  What is that word supposed to mean?  It's not in my
dictionary.

Lastly, C gets very poetic and metaphoric in pushing holism in the
description of perception -- off into the sculpting of statues, even
-- where "synesthesia is the conscious awareness of a normally
holistic process prematurely displayed."  Is he just declaring it
unanalyzable?  Some scientist!

Yep!  Now I get it in full first person, experiencially:  Words that
conger nonscience trigger my olfactory cells negatively, so that
Cytowic's literary work transforms me into a damn synesthete.  Wow,
his "science" stinks!  :-[  

Ray