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go-B
climber
Sozo
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Sep 15, 2011 - 05:51am PT
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"If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Sep 15, 2011 - 12:00pm PT
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What was really the case at K2?
Was Lacedelli dreaming?
Was Bonatti dreaming?
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Ed Hartouni
Trad climber
Livermore, CA
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Sep 15, 2011 - 12:08pm PT
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Karl's post is an interesting series of statements stringing together a lot of information from science...
"There's absolutely no way to prove we're not just dreaming this whole reality."
except, of course, we can define what the physiology of the "dream state" is, and we are not, physiologically, dreaming. This could be some illusion also, as a part of the plot of dreaming. But the fact that dreaming is a state, and has been the subject of scientific investigation, prepares us to accept some aspects of this statement.
"The only input and experience you've every had is with your own awareness...period"
which reinforces a model where experience is divided into two pieces, an interior piece, presumably the dream state which is referred to in the first statement, and the exterior state from which gather information by the "inputs" and we act upon, by implication, with "outputs."
"We assume the rest of reality is as it seems even as we know we can only perceive limited dimensions and a limited spectrum within those dimensions (such as a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum) "
Here the idea of limits to sensory input is based on our understanding and measurement of those limits, especially in the backdrop of detecting those same sensory stimuli beyond the limitation of our human capability. Our knowledge of the physical limits of those stimuli support this particular assertion... without that knowledge the statement seems merely a conjecture.
"Not to mention the whole earth is so diffuse it's whole mass could be squashed to the size of a baseball."
a sophisticated notion when you dig into it, though so often stated that it is accepted as true... it has to do with the idea of "the stability of matter" which invokes known properties of subatomic particles, in particular, spin-statistics and ideas like the "Pauli exclusion principle" not to mention our current understanding of the nuclear force, and all that... what Karl says is "true," but we believe it only because we live in the 21st century and these scientific notions are known to us and have credibility
"For those who believe the mechanistic electrical interplays within the brain are what generate consciousness, why wouldn't it be equally plausible to imagine the interplay of forces between planets and stars in the universe don't do the same?"
We measure the forces between planets in an incredibly precise and accurate way. The effect of a single electrical charge, unbalanced on the moon, has a profound enough effect that we use the lack of such a thing to measure the degree to which charge is neutral in the entire universe... it's neutral. The motion of stars around galaxies, and apparent anomalies lead, eventually, to an understanding that there are different types of matter in the universe, and the measurement of the expansion of the universe in time to the idea of a lot of stuff driving that expansion... these are all rather subtle measurements.
The problem with this last statement hasn't anything to do with our ability to make those measurements... it has everything to do with defining what "consciousness" is... and then going out and measuring and observing.
You could say that consciousness is something that cannot be defined, and there fore it is not something we could study using our scientific process.
If that is what you believe then there really is no argument, and this thread would rightly return to the thread it evolved from... the thread debating God, etc... as this concept of consciousness would fall into that category, the same one in which God falls into... an unknowable, incomprehensible, given fact which we connect with through belief and our personal experience, for which no objective fact or method can explain, nor any explanation possible or necessary.
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MH2
climber
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Sep 15, 2011 - 01:38pm PT
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Though the concept of consciousness may not be well defined, I think we recognize it when we encounter it. A little like that fuzzy letter "a" on Dingus' envelope. We make use of context to decide if it is an "a", and the same goes for many other partitioning problems in this well-connected world.
So, even if we don't know what consciousness IS, we might still create it and then recognize it in a Watson-like machine or a Google-like network. Then we could get that system, pretty please?, to design a smarter system, and so on as in the Stanislav Lem story, until the smartest conceivable system was produced (God?).
There are two broadly different approaches to designing smart machines. One is to write down and then implement a set of rules detailed enough to handle the problem to be solved. This is only likely to work if the problem itself is well understood. The other approach is to build a machine which can learn from trial and error. In this case you may have to give up ever knowing what the explicit rules are for solving the problem. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive and our minds implement both.
An approach to machine learning which has done well over the years, and which has a biological analog (lateral inhibition), is Teuvo Kohonen's self-organizing maps. When JL says, "The map is not the territory," he is, of course, correct in most cases. That doesn't reduce the importance of maps, even if YOU are the territory. And if YOU are the territory, you are largely made of maps.
"In the largest WEBSOM implemented so far, about seven million documents have been organized in a one-million neuron network"
http://users.ics.tkk.fi/teuvo/
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jstan
climber
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Sep 15, 2011 - 01:54pm PT
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Time for a new machine operating system.
This was why I thought interesting the neurology paper I posted suggesting neural processing is trinary not binary.
A -1 is possible that retransmits and cancels the initial impulse.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 15, 2011 - 02:48pm PT
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When JL says, "The map is not the territory," he is, of course, correct in most cases. That doesn't reduce the importance of maps, even if YOU are the territory. And if YOU are the territory, you are largely made of maps.
My view is slightly different. "YOU" as described above would not be provisional qual/content/feelings/thoughts/or even the hardware (evolved meat brain), but the agency, the faceless witness who observes and experiences. As Chalmers said, this is a slippery slope but direct experience thrusts us there perforce.
I think if you have a hard/or soft mechanistic view of things, the map mentioned above becomes the circuitry and processing that "produces" consciousness, and that's where your mind goes. Funny thing is that consciousness is itself not a concept or a digital/atomic/cellular "thing" but an experience. So when the mind goes to numerical models of consciousness, it does not somehow magically long jump the gulf between meat and experience, whereby the meat brain IS experience - awareness/;content, meatbrain/consciousness are the SAME THINGS - or the map is the territory. For example, consider my recent visit to the doctor.
Doc. Holiday: Sorry, Largo, yer upper murgatroyd is shot. We have to operate.
Largo: Hold on a sec, doctor. Let's have a look at that MRI.
Doc Holiday toggles up the MRI on his computer and Largo stares at the image.
Doc Hoiiday" That there's yer Murgatroyd, and that fuzzy area here is the degradation around the anterior bushing so we just go into the coupling here with the Sawzall cleave a Murg off said Troyd.
Largo: Errrr, Sawzall?
Doctor: Nothing but.
Largo: Sounds painful.
Doc: Woose... Ain't it fantastic how modern science allows us to see yer actual Murgatroyd like this.
Largo: Don't know who learned you yer anatomy but my actual Murgatroyd is right here, Doctor, just athwart my tripe. What yer eyeballing there is a very expensive e-lec-tronic representation of my Murgatroyd.
Doc: Same difference. They're one and the same things.
Largo: That's almost a relief, Doc. So you just go ahead and operate on that computer there and I'll let you know when the old Murgatroyd is feeling better.
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Karl Baba
Trad climber
Yosemite, Ca
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Sep 15, 2011 - 02:58pm PT
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Response to Karl/Ed dialog
Karl
"There's absolutely no way to prove we're not just dreaming this whole reality."
Ed
except, of course, we can define what the physiology of the "dream state" is, Come on Ed, I think you're probably aware that I'm using the word "Dream" loosely to indicate that our entire experience of reality (including our sleep and dreams) could be within consciousness alone without the objective seemingly solid reality that we seem to share. This has nothing to do with the physiology of sleep.
Concluding you write
If that is what you believe then there really is no argument, and this thread would rightly return to the thread it evolved from... the thread debating God, etc... as this concept of consciousness would fall into that category, the same one in which God falls into... an unknowable, incomprehensible, given fact which we connect with through belief and our personal experience, for which no objective fact or method can explain, nor any explanation possible or necessary.
Recognizing the limitations of our understanding and tools are important in not reaching conclusions we can't truly substantiate. It wasn't long ago that science wasn't aware of dark energy or dark matter which I'm told are now understood (barely) to comprise a great portion of our universe. String theory and other undertstandings of "the Big Picture" also seem to require the existence of other dimensions of which we have very little or no understanding.
So what I'm seeing is science having theories about "mind" which are limited by the gross level of tools (advanced by stone age standards but probably will look crude in 10,000 years if we survive) Sort of like what an 18th century scientist might conclude of transported to the 20th century and allowed to study a TV set with 18th century tools, Sure if you remove the tuner, the picture goes away but they wouldn't see that the signals are still present beaming from satellites or transmitters.
So we have very limited means of measuring consciousness. We base our ideas based on our anthropomorphic comparisons to ourselves and how our consciousness has manifested and evolved in conjuction with this earth body with some opposable thumbs. We used to think all life had to be carbon based even, although this presumption seems to be changing but it should be obvious to an open person that the limited environment and circumstances on this planet need not constrain what exists in other worlds or even other dimensions.
At least I hope people get this. It always seems so foolish that there is this huge SETI project that assumes alien civilizations from other planets use radio waves to communicate and devote their study to seeking alien radio waves.
At our level of technology and evolution, I submit that physical science has not developed subtle enough tools to measure the forces of consciousness we're talking about and that mysticism (using your own consciousness to experiment on) not blind "belief" is one of the few alternatives in exploring this important realm of life. (after all, happiness is clearly a subjective "within" state) Yes the potential for fooling oneself, delusion and misunderstanding is great, but not seeking answers through self-exploration virtually guarantees even less insight.
Peace
karl
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Sep 15, 2011 - 03:09pm PT
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DMT: Healyje says he doesn't think humans will be able to create a brain-like computer capable of consciousness any time soon, if ever. My patter recognition software suggests we see similar patterns of statements in the past... I distinctly recall in the early 90s the prediction it would take 100 years to decode human DNA strand, for example. It took less than 10 years.
You confuse things we now a great deal about and simply lack the technology to execute with things we know very little about and have very little current or near-term technology to apply to the problem. Genomics falls into the former; proteomics, epigenetics, and the whole field of cognitive neuroscience are very much examples of the latter.
In the case of cognitive neuroscience we know some about basic neuron / synapse electrical behavior, less about synaptic biochemical behavior, even less about cognitive genomics, and barely anything at all about neurogenomics and neuroproteomics. And that's just the basics of those topics let alone any of the [fine-grained / subtle] electro-chemical end behavior.
In short, we don't really have even a basic understanding of the various component neuro/cognitive lego blocks let alone how they are organized as a bio-machine. That's rough, but even rougher is that, while we have some faint inklings of a functional map of various brain tissues / structures / regions, we haven't the remotest notion of the functional 'architecture' of all that meat. And even if we had a rough physical / functional [self-organizing] architecture, we have just about zero concept of the brain's higher-level and clearly very dynamic 'operating system' architecture.
'Modeling' the brain will only get us so far and while we'll be able to cobble together crude machines that can do remarkable things within given specific domains, I wouldn't get my hope up for consciousness.
Think of it this way: nature is adept at developing systems which meld mechanism, energy, and behavior via evolution. We don't have access to either the time or the energy within the scope of the compressed timelines of human lives to do much more than mimic what we see in nature.
Take a house fly for instance - you could make infinite resources available to a group of the smartest humans on earth and task them with recreating the specifications, capabilities, and behavior of a fly by 2036 and they would fail. They would fail because you just can't compress 225 million years of evolutionary accomplishment into a 25 year window of human effort. The requisite breakthroughs in materials, energy, and systems to succeed in such an endeavor is staggering - going to Mars in the same time frame would be a trivial undertaking by comparison.
DMT: Twill be a combo of analog pattern recognition processing and digital processing power, in the end, don't you think?
I'd say the combination of what we know of today as digital and analog processing couldn't scratch the surface of what's required. Something more along the lines of what quantum computing may offer is more like it from a size and operations / watt perspective. But again, we don't have the faintest idea of the architecture, organization, and optimization (at any level) which would be required. Even in that you get back to the issue of it not mattering if you can do a trillion ops / second / milliwatt if it still takes ten times the watts to accomplish the same thing as meat because we don't know how to organize and optimize the raw resource.
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Sep 15, 2011 - 03:38pm PT
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Largo says: “Raw awareness is just that - the experiential faculty of being aware. In the sense that awareness is a net - metaphorically speaking - that "grasps" thoughts and sights and sounds and memories (content) as they arise, by what manner do you, unaided, in your direct, 1st person subject experience, "grasp" raw awareness.”
Raw awareness is the god of gaps in this case. And the awareness god of gaps is approached by introspection as the god of gaps of religions is approached by help of meditation, prayers and sacrifices.
When it comes to how we are once going to get nearer to truth about what awareness is I am certain healyje is very much closer to the way the truth about the puzzle of awareness will once be approximated.
And the words awareness and consciousness may or may not be part of the model or explanation.
Introspection is of limited value when approximating truth about what is, but of value when approximating truth about the way your thoughts and feelings function in shaping your life as shown in cognitive psychology.
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MH2
climber
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Sep 15, 2011 - 03:47pm PT
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How do you give a computer a mirror (ego)? Isn't that the root question in terms of computer consciousness?
How do you create "I", Robot.
If this were something that we could design, it would have been done. New things we learn might make it possible to design, or it might happen serendipitously when we we set our system to a task and it asks, "What's in it for me?" At that point you might consider pulling its plug.
If I recall, the most impressive thing about Watson is that it was able to make sense of human speech in real time. That is, it was able to convert human speech into a question in symbolic form that it could then, comparatively easily, supply the answer to.
Largo,
There may be a failure of imagination, here. In the future scenario you describe, the electronic gizmo looking at the murgatroyd might be similar to the old fashioned surgeon's saw on your bone. Operating on the computer would also be operating on your brain, so saying that they aren't the same is beside the point. They are closely connected.
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 15, 2011 - 03:57pm PT
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http://consc.net/online
Here is the biggest data base on all "mind" related articles. Unfortunately, you can rarely just click and read. There are shenanagas and money and passwords and all manner of jive. Too bad.
And this:
Operating on the computer would also be operating on your brain, so saying that they aren't the same is beside the point.
How is operation on the computer also operating on my very Murgatroyd? Kindly explain in practical terms, how this might play out once the "operation" begins.
JL
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Marlow
Sport climber
OSLO
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Sep 15, 2011 - 04:03pm PT
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I do not know the articles and wish I had the time to read some of them, but my speculation is that a lot of the thinking is high on the ladder of abstraction and of a speculative nature. I guess there are priests or gurus of awareness and consciousness as there are priests and monks within religions. Priests thrive in gaps.
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jstan
climber
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Sep 15, 2011 - 05:04pm PT
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One of the links Largo has provided is very interesting
Neuronal mechanisms of consciousness:
A Relational Global Workspace framework.
http://cogprints.org/946/1/Baars%2C_Newman_and_Taylor_Tucson_9x_html.htm
It further describes the phenomena I have mentioned earlier. Blindsight is apparently present for sensory systems beyond that of vision. Depending upon which portion of the V1 or V4 areas are damaged blindsight as to detection of motion, color, and form may all be prevented.
The article pictures activity in the brain using a theater model where consciousness is the part of the stage under the spotlight. The location of the spotlight is determined by inhibitory or suppressor nerve impulses whose function is to determine which neuronal activities are to be admitted to consciousness. Here the paper I mentioned suggesting the brain processes in trinary is directly relevant. The trinary output, -1, is this inhibitory response.
Very interestingly the paper states the time required for sensory integration, perhaps viewing of a scene plus at least some level of attentional analysis (colors, shapes, motion, spatial frequency in the scene) requires 100 milliseconds. 100ms is only twice the time I referenced from another paper as the basic time for synapse. It would seem these two citations are either not in agreement or our understanding of what we have read is incorrect. A tenth of a second to take in a scene is not far from realistic so I suspect the 50ms figure may need further attention.
This causes me to wonder if the electric fields involved in the synaptic process are not dipolar. Just the orientation of the vector field is what mediates synapse through polarization in the membrane wall. As long as cell temperature is near ambient small highly local ionic motion can be fast. If so I would expect synaptic times should degrade during hypothermia. People freezing to death would fall asleep. Mind you the body puts huge emphasis upon managing brain temperature very closely. That’s why scalp wounds bleed like mad.
An interesting excerpt. Enjoy!
. Layers of visual consciousness.
Blindsight is one of the empirical sources of any approach to visual consciousness. It seems to show that the first visual projection area of the cortex, the first place where the visual tract reaches cortex, is a necessary condition for conscious vision, but not for unconscious visual knowledge. Blindsight patients, who lack parts of this area (V1) have unconscious (implicit) visual knowledge about objects, such as location, color, motion and even object identity. But they passionately protest that they have no conscious visual experience in the damaged parts of the visual field.
Crick and Koch (1995) have pointed out a significant paradox in blindsight: Area V1 is known to represent points (center-surround), and spatial intervals (spatial frequencies), but it does not represent color, motion, or visual form. Yet these higher-level visual features drop from visual consciousness when damage occurs to V1, as shown by blindsight patients. In Crick and Koch’s language, V1 does not explicitly represent color and form, because it has no cells that are sensitive to color, etc.. Yet the conscious appreciation of color and form is destroyed by damage to V1. We will call this the paradox of area V1. An adequate theory of visual consciousness must account for this paradox.
In contrast to the puzzle of V1, damage to higher visual areas of cortex creates only selective loss of conscious features. Thus damage to area V4 destroys conscious perception of motion, but not of color, form, or retinal locus. Damage to area IT (the lower temporal cortex) may destroy conscious object recognition, but not color, retinal locus, and motion. And so on. From that point of view V1 is especially important because its absence serves to abolish all visual conscious features, including those not explicitly represented in V1.
It is important to take into account the remarkable interconnectivity of all parts of the brain. In the visual system there is top-down feedback from each higher visual area to lower areas, as well a bottom-up flow going the other way. Indeed, in the case of thalamocortical loops, the down-flowing neurons outnumber the up-going ones by a ratio of almost ten to one. This makes sense in terms of classical neural net approaches, in that multiple layers, when their patterns of activation are consistent, serve to enhance each other, while nonconsistent layers tend to compete and decrease activation patterns. This result has been called the rich get richer principle (McClelland and Rumelhart, 1986).
How does visual consciousness relate to other kinds of sensory and nonsensory consciousness? There is evidence for blindsight analogues in auditory and somatosensory cortex. These may work much like the early visual areas. One can think therefore of the early sensory projection areas as several theater stages, each with its own bright spot, alternating rapidly in such a way that at any given moment only spotlight is on. As the most active, coherently paced sensory cortex becomes conscious, its contents are broadcast widely throughout the brain, simultaneously suppressing the other sensory cortices for a cycle time of approximately 100 msec., the time needed for perceptual integration. The most highly amplified sensory projection area in any 100 msec. time cycle may send conscious information to spatial, self, and motor maps via massive fiber tracts, some going through thalamus, others via the corpus callosum, and yet others through massive cortico-cortical connections within each hemisphere. Thus rapid switching can take place between different sensory cortices, integrated by multimodal neurons in association cortex and elsewhere
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MH2
climber
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Sep 15, 2011 - 05:59pm PT
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One measurement of the Q10 for chemical synaptic delay:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9317490
Curiously, the Wikipedia entry for electrical synapses gives 2 msec as a typical delay for chemical synapses. I think 0.5 msec is closer for warm-blooded animals.
I respect healyje's point that not enough is known about the brain to simulate its operation. Even the lobster stomatogastric ganglion has its mysteries. There could be important processes below the size scale we currently have good information on. However, more likely it is the organization of the elements we already know that needs more work: the connections and processing of groups of neurons. A working hypothesis is that each group of 200, or 2,000, or 20,000 neurons in the brain has its own job to do. Even within the brain nuclei that are known anatomically, the functions of neighboring neurons can differ. It isn't easy to record activity at the scale of 200-20,000 neurons with good resolution in time and space, and more often than not each functional grouping of neurons is affected by and in turn affects other distant groups. Evolution has found an effective way to organize the nervous system but the genetics can't specify exactly what the neurons must do. For example, the genes can't tell each motoneuron just how much force its activation will produce in the muscle fiber it innervates. The ability to learn is needed.
I'd also go back to the point that to simulate a fly you would first need a good understanding of the world the fly lives in.
Before going to work on a problem, a scientist should ask:
Is this a good question? That is, is it well defined and is the answer going to count for something whether the answer is yes or no?
Is there a way to answer it?
Am I the person to do it?
How is operation on the computer also operating on my very Murgatroyd? Kindly explain in practical terms, how this might play out once the "operation" begins.
Along these lines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery
In other speculation, the CBC was talking to one of those people working on how to control machines with electrical activity recorded from the brain, like JL's EEGs. So I think the interesting question is what would happen if you let your murgatroyd operate on itself?
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jstan
climber
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Sep 15, 2011 - 07:34pm PT
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MH2:
Dammit you're good!
I think I don't know enough about the synaptic waveform to read properly the first reference. The whole thing remains very interesting.
And yes Joe is quite right. We can't possibly know how to model the brain. That's what makes it neat to try.
We'll get there.
My dipolar hypothesis may have some support. Molecules can't move great distances at speed but they can quickly orient so as to produce a dipolar field and change the polarization of the cell interface. That's where the average thermal velocity comes in. Cool!
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1367584/pdf/biophysj00700-0007.pdf
ABsrRAcT In this paper we propose that chemicals such as acetylcholine are electric dipoles which when oriented and arranged in a large array could produce an electric field strong enough to drive positive ions over the junction barrier of the post- synaptic membrane and thus initiate excitation or produce depolarization. This theory is able to explain a great number of facts such as cleft size, synaptic delay, nonregeneration, subthreshold integration, facilitation with repetition, and the calcium and magnesium effects. It also shows why and how acetylcholine could act as excitatory or inhibitory transmitters u-nder different circumstances. Our con- clusion is that the nature of synaptic transmission is essentially electrical, be it mediated by electrical or chemical transmitters.
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jstan
climber
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Sep 15, 2011 - 07:56pm PT
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Only one camp here, seems to me.
Feynman's dad's camp.
Trying to find out.
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Sep 15, 2011 - 08:02pm PT
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I still don't buy it within a time frame where organized human civilizations will still inhabit the Earth...
Edit: With regards to jstan's abstract reference above - it should be noted that most neurocognitive research has been around neurons and not neuroglia of which we have a more or less equal number. Neuroglia act in partnership with neurons in ways we don't really understand and you can probably think of this in more or less the same way as the relationship between DNA and chromatin (genomics and epigenomics).
The point being is we really don't know a ton about chemical and electrical synaptic activity of individual neurons let alone understand all the various forms of neurons (and neuroglia) and their inter-relationships and behaviors in their [embedded] environment.
Just developing a basic understanding and electro-chemical models of any and all the various individual forms of neurons and neuroglia is a huge problem let alone beginning to understand how any of it relates to a high-level concept like 'consciousness'...
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Largo
Sport climber
The Big Wide Open Face
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Topic Author's Reply - Sep 15, 2011 - 08:58pm PT
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Along these lines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_surgery
Come on, MH2, this is not remotely a case where the map IS the territory. If that was really true the remote doctor could operate on the digital model of the Murgatroyd and the Murgatroyd itself would feel the knife. In your example we have to have a surgical machine be the intermediary to long jump thee gap in time and space between the quack and the Murgatroyd.
Anyhow it does open up another interesting thought experiment that will led to discussions of "wholism" and the notion that the sum can be greater than the parts.
And Healjy I am not in a "CAMP" per se. I follow one line of inquiry till I get stuck. Right now I'm stuck on the gap between matter and self awareness and the more perplexing issues of 1st and 3rd person, subjective/objective POVs.
JL
JL
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MH2
climber
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Sep 15, 2011 - 11:55pm PT
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Come on, MH2, this is not remotely a case where the map IS the territory. If that was really true the remote doctor could operate on the digital model of the Murgatroyd and the Murgatroyd itself would feel the knife. In your example we have to have a surgical machine be the intermediary to long jump thee gap in time and space between the quack and the Murgatroyd.
Well, JL, you did specify "in practical terms", so it seems unfortunate you would object to having a surgical machine be the connection. Perhaps we could use lasers or magnetic field transients? Whatever the tool is, the point is that a jiggle in the electronic model could produce a corresponding jiggle in the exact same part of the brain, so what is the practical difference between the map and the territory? If you allow that the model is an accurate and complete representation of a part of the brain?
I do recognize the objection that as soon as you affect the "territory" with your "map" that the territory will change, but I am imagining a device that registers that change as soon as it happens, rather like EEGs being recorded during today's brain surgery, so that the map is continually updated. I recognize there are problems with that, too.
Largo, I do believe there is more than a trolling motivation behind what you are trying to say. The following exercise similar to your own (but from Raymond Smullyan) is another look at the subjective first person experience and how it can elude attempts to analyze it:
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/epistemologicalNightmare.html
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