Archive for category consciousness

Summer Reading List

Posted by jasonwong in consciousness, decision making, robots on June 3rd, 2009

It has been an insane few weeks with moving from Virginia to Rhode Island, and then travel to the Midwest for family events, which is why there have been no new posts. However, I have been doing a lot of reading since I have not had much Internet access recently either.

Wired for War

Wired for War by P.W. Singer is a book about the coming robotic revolution in warfare. The author is a young analyst at the Brookings Institute, which is a political think tank. I was pleasantly surprised that the author was not a gung-ho military man nor was he an anti-military hippie. He is, however, a geek. The first part of the book details all the current and up and coming robots used by the military, and there is a sense of awe as he describes these military machines that, for a science fiction geek like myself, are really cool.

The second part of the book is also a fascinating read, but not in the same way as the first. Here, Singer discusses the implications of the robotic revolution, and there are many. A section of the book is dedicated to traditional human factors, discussing usability issues and the like. The discussion of who should be held responsible if a flying drone fired a missle on the wrong target is especially chilling. If the pilot entered the right coordinates and the machine messed up, should the programmers and engineers be held responsible? In a military trial?

wiredforwar

There are also discussions of how drone pilots live in Nevada, work a shift where they kill enemy combatants, then make it home in time for family dinner and a PTA meeting. It is a totally different experience from a Marine actually on the ground, but they are both soldiers, right?

All in all, the book is a great read. From whiz-bang technology to psychological and societal implications, this book is well-researched and considers all facets of the issues. The second half of the book could have used a more thorough editor, in my opinion, as I felt that the author repeated points across chapters and lost a natural flow of ideas because ideas where not contained in their own chapters.

If you can get past a mildly sloppy second half, however, the entire book is worth reading for anyone in the military (like myself as a civilian Human Factors Scientist) or anyone who has interests in military technology or even technologically-oriented science fiction buffs.

Blink

Blink by Malcom Gladwell has been out for a while, so I will keep my review short. The book is fantastic. Gladwell focuses on the idea of rapid cognition. He is careful to not call this intuition, which he feels is more emotional. Rapid cognition is more about near-instant unconscious thought. That split second decision that something is not quite right bit you are not sure what. Or what love at first sight is. Or how unconscious prejudices can affect our social interactions despite our conscious attitudes on race.

The topic itself is interesting, and so is Gladwell’s writing style. He weaves in appropriate and engaging stories that introduce his point and then often goes into psychological research the further illustrates his points. Finally, he talks about how these ideas have real-world implications for how to better live our lives.

In short, the book argues that our rapid cognition is a useful tool as long as we know where it can go wrong. Blink is the perfect example of an engaging pedagogy, and I definitely plan to incorporate this book the next time I teach my Cognitive Psychology class.

blink

Books Still on the List

I also plan on reading the human factors design classic The Design of Everyday Things. Donald Norman, the author, is a giant in the field (especially with regards to design) and this book is one of his earlier writings but remains one of the best. Considering I have my PhD in human factors, it is one of those books that I should read.

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The Magic of Consciousness

Posted by jasonwong in consciousness, perception on August 20th, 2007

So there’s a great article in the New York Times (again) about consciousness and ties to magic, recently discussed at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness in Las Vegas. This is especially relevant to me because I was just in Las Vegas, and I saw a show featuring one of the speakers at this conference – Teller, of Penn & Teller.

Neural networks learn by receiving input, generating output, and comparing that output to an expectation – this, by analogy, is how our brain works. Whether our brains produce the correct answer will reinforce the neural network or force change. When something happens that we don’t expect, we are surprised. This is how magic operates, as George Johnson of the New York Times writes:

As [Teller] ran through the trick a second time, annotating each step, we saw how we had been led to mismatch cause and effect, to form one false hypothesis after another. Sometimes the coins were coming from his right hand, and sometimes from his left, hidden beneath the fingers holding the bucket.

He left us with his definition of magic: “The theatrical linking of a cause with an effect that has no basis in physical reality, but that — in our hearts — ought to.”

Perception is not perfect; the world we see is incomplete, but our brains are smart enough to fill in what is missing. And when we’re focused on something that takes a lot of our attention, we can easily miss something that would seem obvious otherwise (like a gorilla walking through a scene we’re processing, Simons & Levin, 1999).

However, perception does make due with what it is given – it tries to make sense out of what it is presented with and, in Las Vegas, it can be difficult to reconcile how the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and an Egyptian pyramid can all be right next to each other.

The left brain, as Dr. Gazzaniga put it, is the confabulator, constantly concocting stories. But mine was momentarily dumbstruck when, after his talk, I passed through a doorway inside the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino and entered an air-conditioned simulation of the Grand Canal. My eyes were drawn upward to the stunning illusion of a trompe l’oeil sky and what I decided must be ravens flying high overhead. Looking closer, my brain discarded that theory, and I saw that the black curved wings were the edges of discs — giant thumbtacks holding up the sky. Later I was told they were automatic sprinklers, in case the clouds catch fire.

The article is fantastic and really sheds light on the role of perception in consciousness – with a little Las Vegas flair.

Article on NYTimes website
Article in PDF form

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