What Scientists Think《some words from the book》

philosophy is to science as ***ography is to sex it’s cheaper easier and some people prefer it.

although philosophy is largely useless I think there is some interesting philosophy of science I’ve always liked Karl Popper’s view that science is about disproving things. If we find Neanderthal man wearing a Rolex watch then I am going to give up the theory of evolution. but so far that evidence has not appeared or take the fact that the sun is at the center o the solar system if astronomers were suddenly to find that the sun went around the earth they might moan and groan but they would admit that they were wrong they’ve done this before in 1905 with Einstein’s theory of relativity they threw everything our of the window and effectively started again.

with the completion of the mapping of the human genome the media made much of the fact that it would lead to new medical techniques however it is probably fair to say that within the scientific community people are pretty pessimistic about the time scales involved. the psychiatrist Robin Murray for example points out that until very recently the search for genes associated with schizophrenia had always ended in failure. so when might we expect our knowledge of genetics and the human genome to bring us major benefits in terms of health and life expectancy?

“ well prediction is always difficult but it is clear that initial hopes were overstated” jones answers “ some of this was hype but some of it was simple optimism…. so whilst people are more sober than they were about the impact of genetics it would be wrong to think that it is unlikely to lead to dramatic changes. pretty much everybody nowadays dies of a genetic diseases if you were to abolish all deaths in the UK before the age of 50 mean life expectancy would only increase by 12 months in other words we’ve won the enemy without infectious diseases accidentsand so on certainly in the western world has been defeated it may only be temporary but for now the battle has been won. the enemy within is what kills us. heart disease cancer diabetes and so on nearly all have a genetic component. so it would be foolish not to study the genetic basis of these things because we’re not going to conquer them if we don’t understand them.

“ my view is that the mind is the personalization of the brain… I certainly don’t think that it is some kind of ephemeral alternative to the squalor of the biological brain. mind has a physical basis. we know that a person is born with all the brain cells that they will ever have but it is the growth of neuronal connections which accounts for the growth of the brain after birth. these connections are highly sensitive to events in the environment. we are born into buzzing and confusion but as we get older our experiences coalesce into faces and objects which acquire labels and which gain meaning as they feature in different events in our lives. it’s this personalization of neuronal connections which I would call the mind. and it’s equivalent to self-consciousness. when we are talking about “losing our mind” or being “ out of our mind” what we are really talking about is not being self-conscious. I think that this shows that it is absolutely wrong to conflate mind and consciousness. the two are separate is is quite possible to lose one’s mind but to remain conscious.

“I have this controversial view that drugs aren’t the answer as a short-term measure of someone is in great physical or mental pain it would be inhuman not to help them with drug therapy but then all you’re doing is giving people chemical oblivion you re not solving the underlying problems if you give someone prozac it’s not going to make any of the cognitive stuff go away if a person has been dumped or their father died these things are going to true after the prozac wear off…. and I think cognitive therapy is probably the best if you can help someone to see something in a different way and get them to absorb it accept it and live with it then whilst it won’t make their problems go away it will make them more manageable and I think that the way that it does this by reordering the connections of the brain which is much better than simply treating someone with Prozac…. also I think that if people see drugs as a solution to their problems then this diminishes their humanity. being human is about problem solving evaluating things seeing things as a challenge and overcoming them by simply reaching for drugs we do ourselves down we don’t do ourselves justice.”

…. Kevin Warwick’s version of this claim requires a the very least that machines should be capable of intelligence. however this is not an uncontroversial matter the philosopher John Searle for example has famously argues vis his Chinese room thought experiment that digital computational devices are not capable of meaningful thought which if he is right leaves the issue of intelligence moot at the very least….

“… some people needless to say want machines to exhibit human-like characteristics before they will consider them intelligent the Turing test would be an example of this as would Marvin Minsky;s treatment of the issue in his book “ the society of mind” but of course the whole argument turns on what we mean we use the word intelligent is intelligence equivalent to knowledge for example? in some ways we seems to think that it is and we know that a computer with its access to enormous knowledge bases would win them hands down so if intelligence has something to do with knowledge if it has something to do with numerical ability if it has something to do with communication and so on then machines are intelligent but the important point is that they are intelligent in a different way from humans. indeed every creature is intelligent in slightly different ways.”

there’re certainly reasons even if they are not conclusive to think that Warwick might be right that machine intelligence will one day match human intelligence one thought here has do to with Moore’s Law which roughly speaking describes how the power of computer processing increases over time if Moore’s law hold true over the next few decades thought there’re doubts here to do with the limits of miniaturisation -- then in terms of raw processing ability computer brains will be more powerful than human brains by about 2050….

The three law of robotics: 1 a robot may not injure a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. 2 a robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first law. 3 a robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the first and the second law.

“It’s the cyborg idea the idea that humans should aim to enhance themselves by means of integral technology… as cyborgs we can give ourselves extra senses the ability to think in different ways the ability to communicate by means of thoughts alone and so on….”… That Warwick is serious about this idea is evidenced by two implant experiments which he had performed on himself in the first in 1998 he had a silicon chip transponder implanted in his arm by means of which he was able to interact with a computer -- and thereby lights door and heaters -- situated at the Cyberetics Department. In the second experiment conducted in 202 a micro-electrode array was surgically implanted into the median nerve fibres of his left arm. Using the array Warwick was able to control an electric wheelchair control and receive feedback from an artificial hand and transmit signals to his wife via a single electrode implanted in her median nerve.

… Warwick is clearly driven by a deep curiosity about what it would be like to be a cyborg. He admits to being an old style give-it-a-try experimenter when we were injecting current onto my nervous system we had no idea what was going to happen it was just tremendously exciting. when I was a kid I was excited by things like Scott going to the Antarctic and JFK saying that people are going to the Moon and there’s still this aspect to me. there’s so much unknown about the world. and science is potentially tremendously exciting. I don’t really understand how some scientists are content with a kind of plodding routine are they really excited when they get up in the morning? I have a challenge to myself if any morning I don’t run up the stairs to my office because I am no longer desperately keen to get on with things then that’s the time to quit and every morning I bound up my stairs!

… Murray mentions here that genetic factors are involved in the development of schizophrenia the evidence for this is long established for example the first twin studies showing an inherited component to schizophrenia were completed more than 70 years ago so what about the advances in molecular genetics of the last 20 years have they led to a greater understanding of genetics risk factors?… “I think it’s fairly to say that until very recently the molecular genetics of schizophrenia was a disaster area… I used to say that there was no area of human endeavors apart from the search for alien spacecraft which had produced more false positive results than the molecular genetics of schizophrenia! whenever some research group claim that they had found a gene for schizophrenia another group immediately contradicted them.

we’ve known for 100 years in general terms at least that cancer is linked to abnormalities in genes but with the advent of recombinant DNA technology it became possible to identify some of the key genes which when abnormal drive cells to cancer cells however to find these genes we always required a prior clue so that we could determine whereabouts in the genome we should look however the problem is that there’s no reason why every cancer gene should provide us with a a positional clue. it could be buried somewhere deep within the genome where it might never be found…. it was this which motivated the Cancer Genome Project when we set it up we envisaged that rather than waiting for positional clues we could go through the genome gene by gene and ask the question: is this gene abnormal in any of the variety of human cancers? if the answer is no then it isn’t a cancer gene in this general way it should be possible to interrogate every gene for every kind of cancer although we can’t do it straightforwardly this is the conceptual underpinning of the Cancer Genome Project. …. there has already been some success in the treatment of cancer which has resulted from increased understanding of the functioning of genes perhaps the most startling example is the case of drug Glivec. … it was felt like that if it was possible to find the genes which drive cancer then there was the potential for developing drugs to switch them off thereby switching the cancer off. this is very simple but powerful notion. however it was greeted with some scepticism by the clinicians who treat cancer they probably thought that cancers were a lot more complicated than these rather brash young molecular biologists appreciated I suppose to some extent prior to Glivec their scepticism would have seemed to have been justified yet this had not led to clear therapies to combat cancer indeed there might even have been some loss of faith amongst the molecular biologists themselves but Glivec is a story of how this strategy worked extremely well.

- “however there are many things we can’t really predict the cautious optimism is probably the best outlook…. we don’t know as we have mentioned how resistance to drugs to play out maybe Glivec may cease to work in another 4 or 5 years… the other point of course is that we are not going to get proper outputs from the human genome for something like another 10 or 20 years I have frequently said that I would be surprised that if cancer treatment were very different in 20 years from now… but I always add the rider that it will be interesting to examine this statement 20 years from now to see how things play out how much hasn’t been fulfilled and to see the reason for this…. presumably the chances are that there won’t ever be a single magic pill cure for all cancers.