Although I somehow completely missed this latest Four Stone Hearth in that I didn’t even remember it was happening this week, the 80th edition is nevertheless now online at Middle Savagery, so be sure to check it out.

The first few entries look at tool use, Ardipithecus ramidus and of course, Neanderthals, without whom no occasion such as this would be complete, and there’s also a slew of posts delving into matters archaeological. Elsewhere are other items that between them consider such issues as swine flu and digital authority – I’m a little pushed for time and haven’t as yet had time to read through the various submissions, hence the lack of any meaningful commentary from me.

Thanks go out to Colleen Morgan for hosting this edition, and the 81st will be held at Spider Monkey Tales on Wednesday, December 2nd. There is still a vacant hosting slot for the last carnival of 2009, whilst 2010 is a vast and open window of opportunity for around 25 hosts who might wish to consider hosting 4SH at their own sites. For details of how to embark on such an enterprise, just head to the main carnival page and take it from there.

This via Mind Hacks – Seed Magazine have published a piece by Joe Kloc, in which he looks at the relationship between humans and life-like robots, with regard to the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ effect, described here at Wikipedia:

(Masahiro) Mori’s hypothesis states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion, the emotional response from a human being to the robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached beyond which the response quickly becomes that of strong repulsion. However, as the appearance and motion continue to become less distinguishable from a human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-to-human empathy levels.^[5]

This area of repulsive response aroused by a robot with appearance and motion between a “barely human” and “fully human” entity is called the uncanny valley. The name captures the idea that a robot which is “almost human” will seem overly “strange” to a human being and thus will fail to evoke the empathic response required for productive human-robot interaction

Readers will doubtless be familiar with such films as Blade Runner and AI – Artificial Intelligence, both of which address the hypothesized relationships between organic humans and their android equivalents in a technological future as yet only imagined – in both cases, the lines of identity become blurred; in Blade Runner, we have two androids, Deckard and Rachael who at first don’t even realise they aren’t human (although this isn’t clear in the narrated version as far as Deckard is concerned), in part due to the sophistication of the memories inserted into their circuitry, whilst AI , in a rework of Pinocchio, examines whether a human can emotionally bond with a robot that has been programmed to bond with them.

Here’s a brief excerpt from the linked article, which explains that it isn’t just humans who can spot a fake:

New findings published in PNAS this September are putting some long-overdue experimental rigor behind the uncanny valley. Last spring at Princeton’s Neuroscience Institute, Asif Ghazanfar developed a computer model of a macaque monkey designed to interact with real macaques. But the monkeys weren’t fooled. Further testing revealed that, much to Ghazanfar’s surprise, his model was eliciting an uncanny valley response from the monkeys. It was the first time scientists had ever observed such a response in a non-human species.

“By showing that monkeys can do it, several things become plausible,” Ghazanfar says. “One is that there is an evolutionary explanation for the uncanny valley and the other is that it is not something specific to our human, cultural experience.” These findings may for the first time allow scientists to go back through a century’s worth of peculiar ideas about the origins of the uncanny valley and begin putting them to the test.

Which begs the question as to whether a human would intuitively know that a robotic macaque wasn’t real, or a macaque that an android wasn’t really a human either, or whether one species is better at spotting  the fake than the other, and why that would be the case.

Reference is made to an essay, ‘The Uncanny’ by Sigmund Freud, with this commentary from the linked essay:

According to Freud, the phenomenon that would later be called the uncanny valley stems from a primitive attempt of humans to skirt death and secure our own immortality by creating copies of ourselves—such as wax figures and, later, life-like robots. He quotes his colleague Otto Rank in saying that this “doubling” behavior is “an energetic denial of the power of death” and suggests the idea of the immortal soul was the first double of the body.

Our uncanny response follows from the fact that most of us no longer believe we can secure our own immortality by making copies of ourselves, but we haven’t yet shaken the primitive habit of trying to do so. The sad consequence of this is that, in Freud’s words, “The double reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” The copies we feel compelled to make only serve to remind us why we began making them in the first place: We are, inevitably, going to die.

About the earliest example of large size models of humans which evoke (in me) a sense of the uncanny in this regard would be the strange lime-plaster anthropomorphic statues from the Neolithic site of ‘Ain Ghazal, near Amman in modern-day Jordan, dated to around 8,500 years ago, whose exact function and meaning have been lost to us. An odd aspect of these is the way in which some statues are of two beings emerging from the same base, whilst others merely represent a lone individual. Although they were found cached in specifically prepared pits, they had been made with the intention of standing them up, though whether they were on public or private display is unknown, as is whether they were used on special ceremonial occasions or rituals, with regard for instance to mortuary practice, or merely formed a backdrop to daily life, is again, an open question.Obviously there’s a huge difference between the Neolithic statues and the human-like robots that technology allows to be made in the present,

Back to the linked article:

In the West, there is often a Frankensteinian stigma attached to artificial intelligence, but Mori offered Japan a much different perspective. In The Buddha in the Robot: A Robot Engineer’s Thoughts on Science and Religion, published in 1974, he wrote, “I believe robots have the Buddha-nature within them—that is, the potential for attaining Buddhahood.”

His ideas about religion and the uncanny valley have had a substantial influence on the development of Japanese robotics. “In Japan, there is a great sensitivity in the government for having people who are accepting of robotics and robots in general. Mori’s interpretation of the uncanny valley became a kind of dogma,” says Karl MacDorman, a roboticist at Indiana University. As a result, Japan spent the next few decades avoiding human-like robot designs.

It looks like being a good few decades or even centuries before technological advances allow humans to create robots that are sentient, and there are persistent doubts as to whether an analogue brain and consciousness can ever be replicated into binary code, or whether this is even a desirable or prudent goal to pursue.

The Uncanny Valley Masahiro Mori, 1970

Alun Salt will doubtless be known to many readers here, not least for his interest in archaeo-astronomy, research which looks into the ways in which ancient peoples regarded the sky from the perspective of its solar, lunar and planetary components. I just got word that he has published the linked paper, for which this is the abstract:

Despite its appearing to be a simple question to answer, there has been no consensus as to whether or not the alignments of ancient Greek temples reflect astronomical intentions. Here I present the results of a survey of archaic and classical Greek temples in Sicily and compare them with temples in Greece. Using a binomial test I show strong evidence that there is a preference for solar orientations. I then speculate that differences in alignment patterns between Sicily and Greece reflect differing pressures in the expression of ethnic identity.

By way of further clarification, a few words from the author himself, via electronic correspondence:

It’s the first in what I hope is a series of papers. This one puts forward a basic argument that Greek temples are astronomically aligned and that it acts as an ethnic marker of religious activity. From my point of view the reason it’s in PLoS rather than an archaeology journal is that I wanted to be sure the statistical technique was sound, so it seemed best to stick it in front of statisticians. There might also be a story in the Times about it, but I’m not sure if it’s appearing as news, in the weblog or not at all.

If you’re interested in blogging about it I’ve uploaded new scans of my Sicily photos with added notes on most of the photos at http://www.flickr.com/photos/alun/sets/72157622666021209/ . The most astronomically interesting one Temple B at Naxos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alun/4114051783/in/set-72157622666021209/) which is aligned to sunrise in Early / Late Summer. You can see the remains of a wall for Temple A which was built only a few years earlier, but built over for ‘B’ shortly after. ‘ A’ faced too far north to ever face a sunrise, but I don’t know if that’s why ‘B’ was built. ‘A’ looked like enough effort as it was.

And from the paper itself, a suggestion as to why temples in Sicily and Greece may have differed in the ways in which they were aligned:

One reason for the difference in results might be the context of their construction. Temples in Greece were frequently built upon sites that had been sacred for generations, reaching back into the Bronze Age at places like Thermon, where the later classical temples were built over the remains of Mycenaean era megaron. [21] There was the matter of historical tradition which meant that temples built in the archaic and classical periods might be built not only according to the cosmology of the time of construction, but also within the restraints of prior religious thought. The temples in Sicily were built in cities that, at the time of building, saw themselves as immigrants in a distant land. [22] Therefore there was no historical precedent to shape the construction of the temples. They were much more likely to be purely the products of seventh-, sixth- and fifth-century cosmology. The lack of prior foundations gave the Sicilian Greeks more freedom to express current thought in religious practice through their temples.

For the statistical analysis you’ll need to check the rest of the paper, which of course is freely accessible.

see also: ‘People and the Sky’ by Anthony Aveni, (commentary by A. Salt)

image: The Wall of Temple B, Naxos, by author

Reference: Salt AM (2009) The Astronomical Orientation of Ancient Greek Temples. PLoS ONE 4(11): e7903. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007903

Here’s a link to a brief article by Edmund Blair Bolles regarding the current research into FOXP2, from which this is the introduction:

A letter to the current issue of Nature has caused a stir among those interested in the evolution of language. It looks at the FOXP2 gene in more detail than any paper has ever done before. It also inspires at least as many questions as it answers, but now at least we have better questions. Also it has dealt yet another blow to the theory that language depends on distinct cognitive modules that permit internal thought and that later interface with motor modules (vocalizing or signing) for “externalizing” what you are thinking. If anything is becoming apparent from FOXP2, it is that language and motor activities are deeply entangled. It also provides more reason to doubt the original recent date ascribed to the gene’s mutations.

Be sure to check Babel’s Dawn at least once a week – it’s usually updated on a Monday if past experience is anything to go by.

I’m still mostly offline, hence the brevity of posting in recent weeks, but nevertheless I still have time today to point readers in the direction of this week’s podcast from ‘All in the Mind’, from ABC Radio National, in which cognitive neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga’s chat on left-brain/right brain research is reprised. I’d recommend this to everyone with an interest in not only how the conscious mind arises from the brain, how the two different brains operate and govern our actions and perceptions of the world around us, but in the increasingly controversial and at times acrimonious debate as to what degree people have criminal responsibility for their misdeeds with regards to the legal system. Here’s a word of introduction from Natasha Mitchell:

How does your brain give rise to your mind, are there really left-brained people and right-brained people, and do brain scans have a legitimate role in the legal arena? Michael Gazzaniga is one of the big names of 21st century neuroscience, professor of psychology and director of the Sage Centre for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He’s well known for his many popular science books including The Ethical Brain, the Mind’s Past, and The Social Brain, among others. He sits on the US president’s bioethics council and heads up a major new law and neuroscience project too. But it’s his work with so-called split brain patients that many folk know him for, it really changed our understanding of how our brain’s two hemispheres, left and right, work differently.

Michael Gazzaniga takes up the story:

An argument was born between Sperry and Popper and Eccles, I think Popper and Eccles were more correct, as we look back on it. What was shocking at the time was that there were these two systems that could respond independently—one not knowing what the other was doing. That is as true today as it was then; an extremely dramatic finding, as can be witnessed by the following of these patients. But the question was were they really co-equal. We knew from the start that there were differences, obviously: the left hemisphere spoke, the right hemisphere did not, and then over the years differences began to emerge that one side was really quite different from the other.

Whilst on the legal side of things, we have this from later in the interview, in response to a question about culpability and how it is currently addressed in the court-room with regard to ongoing research:

Right now I would say it’s low, that it should be even less. The neuroscientists are very cautious about this because they know what a brain scan means and what it doesn’t mean, and we don’t want it to be overplayed in the courtroom. The general public takes maybe too seriously a brain scan and what it means, and they say, oh well if it’s on a brain scan then we can reason one way or the other. I did want to come back to the one point on the free will thing because I just think it’s a kind of a red herring. People talk about free will, you should return the question and say free from what, what are you talking about?

I mean what we all are, are information gathering organisms that have learned through a life’s experience what to do, what not to do, what’s good, what’s bad, does this payoff versus that payoff? And when a new situation presents itself we call upon our knowledge of the world from past experience to decide what to do. And that decision goes on through mechanisms of the brain, and once the brain decides, based on all your past experience, to do something, you want it to do it right. It’s not clear to me what free will means in that way of knowing that we have all these automatic processes that are going on in the brain that we’ve trained through time.

I think how you think about it is that personal responsibility, which is a key concept in our culture, is alive and well because it really isn’t in your brain, it’s in the social rules of a group. So think of it this way, if you’re the only person in the world, the concept of personal responsibility means nothing. Who are you responsible to? If there are two people to six billion, all of a sudden the rules develop. If we are going to socially interact, which is crucial for the human condition, we are going to have these rules. Almost everybody—you’d have to be extremely neurologically compromised—almost everybody can follow a rule.

Fascinating stuff, and with the prospect of more research and data being made available in the near and long-term future, the implications for this and related fields of research will fuel many an argument as to exactly what degree each human being is ultimately responsible for his or her actions, whether free will exists or is merely a societal construct, as well of course, the true nature of consciousness itself, if indeed that can ever be truly understood.

Michael Gazzaniga’s web-page can be found here.

The Times Higher Education supplement, as mentioned by PLoS, has an interesting and informative article on the current state of play regarding open access, peer review, copyright and  funding, amongst other items for consideration. As will be apparent, there are deep divides between the publishing companies, universities, academics and libraries as to what degree of open accessibility to peer reviewed work can be offered, with two main models, green access and gold access being the most prominent in ongoing discussions. As we see:

There are two main open-access routes – the “gold” and the “green” (names invented by an open-access advocate purely to aid differentiation). In the “gold” or “author-pays” route – as used by Rainger – authors (supported by their funders) pay the costs of publishing in an open-access journal so that peer-reviewed articles then appear online and can be accessed immediately by users for free.

The “green” route – as used by Hicks – sees researchers “self-archive” the final peer-reviewed versions of their articles in institutional or subject repositories, where they are available for anyone to view. The versions deposited are generally not the final PDFs produced by the publishers (which own the copyright on this “version of record”), but rather the “post-print” or final versions that scholars send to journals after the work has gone through the refereeing process and the authors have made any corrections (the “pre-print” is the article before it has been peer reviewed). They are not formatted in the journals’ style and do not have the in-house edits, but having been peer reviewed they have a stamp of quality and will do the job for those who need to access them.

Much to the chagrin of the subscription journals (see box, right), since open-access advocacy began in about 2001 on the back of the web’s growing reach, it has come a long way. Although an evangelical group of academics may have led the charge, the movement has rapidly gained converts, including enlightened funders and cash-strapped libraries.

Interesting to note that there is much greater availability of academic research papers in fields such as physics, where new discoveries are said to overwrite previous research quite rapidly, whereas the humanities journals tend to keep much more material behind paywalls as the research is more often to be held as valid years after publication as when the authors submitted their research.

Thanks to Carl at A Hot Cup of Joe for passing this along – if you navigate to the CV page of Milford H. Wolpoff, you’ll find a number of freely accessible (PDF) papers, many or indeed all of which should be of interest to readers here.  They span a time frame of more than three decades, 1968-2004, and I’ll attempt to address at least some of them in due course – topics cover pretty much the entire gamut of human evolution, and include some discussion on multi-regionalism as opposed to multiple origins.

Following on from a recent post which linked to the Neuroanthropology website, I want to give brief mention to a neuroscientist by the name of David Eagleman, his research into synaesthesia and an excellent book he published earlier this year, ‘Sum – Forty Tales from the Afterlives’, a pocket-sized tome bristling with a glittering array of thoughts, ideas and speculations about what gods, afterlives and ourselves might or could never be, how we know we even exist or are merely re-living a seamlessly reconstructed version of one or more past life-times.

I first came across Eagleman on this podcast from ABC Radio’s ‘All in the Mind’, hosted by Natasha Mitchell, and which is available, complete with transcript here, and from which this is the introduction:

Imagine if I gave you a glass of milk and it tasted blue to you, or if your partner’s voice just felt like a wonderful golden brown, the colour of buttery toast? What if the number two and letter J conjured up the shade of letterbox red, or the name Derek tasted like earwax? Or whenever you heard music, a kaleidoscope of colours exploded inside your head; different tones and textures for different notes. Vladimir Nabokov was one, so is artist David Hockney, in fact one in a hundred of us could be a person with synesthesia, the surprising cross-wiring of the senses in the brain.

My guest today heads up one of the top centres in synesthesia research based at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. By day he’s a leading neuroscientist but by night he writes novels, and he’s just been in Australia to perform with Brian Eno at the Sydney Opera House a piece based on his totally intriguing new novel called Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. So meet the energetic David Eagleman.

From later in the show, we hear a few more words on the extraordinary phenomena known as synaesthesia, which we learn is surprisingly prevalent in modern human populations:

…synesthesia is a condition that about one per cent of the population has, and some researchers have estimated that there are maybe 152 reported forms of synesthesia. They have a mixture of the senses, so for example if you have synesthesia you might hear music and it causes you to physically see colours, or more common versions are things like the numbers and letters of the alphabet having colours, or textures or shapes, or genders or personalities. You might taste something and it makes you feel like you’re feeling something on your fingertips, or you might hear something and that puts a taste in your mouth.

For one synesthete, for example, whenever he hears the name Derek it tastes like earwax to him, it puts the taste of that in his mouth. And for other people, you know for different words, it puts the taste of cinnamon in their mouth, or some metallic taste in their mouth and so on. It’s not just that they’re being silly or metaphorical or artistic, it’s actually that there’s cross-wiring in their brains so that from the parts of their brain that care about hearing, and the parts or their brain that care about taste, there’s a little bit of cross-talk going on, so particular auditory experiences will trigger gustatory experiences.

There are many different forms of synesthesia but what they all have in common is that they represent a blending of the senses. And it used to be thought that this was very rare but we now know that it’s really quite common, it’s at least one per cent of the population. So to come back around to your question, because of this increased cross-talk in the brain it has been suggested that maybe synesthesia is related to creativity and metaphor, because essentially that’s what it is for somebody to be very creative or to speak in metaphor, is to find parallels across different domains in the brain.

I’m not sure to what extent this a trait that applies only to our modern selves, or whether synaesthesia is something we’ve inherited from our archaic past – did Neanderthals or H. heidelbergensis or even H. erectus experience these weird fluctuations in their neural circuitry, and if so, to what extent if any has this impacted on speech, language, numeracy or even seemingly irrational belief systems which incorporate divine and omniscient beings living in abstract realms to which our souls are said to migrate shortly after our mortal demise? Do other primates share this with us, or are our own brains unique in that only our particular neural configurations are capable of fusing disparate functions into unexpected reconstructions of what seems real to us?

On that subject, here’s a quick look at some of the content in the book ‘Sum‘, which receives a fair amount of coverage elsewhere in the show – for example, this on consciousness, and by default, the concept of creation:

Questions like how consciousness comes about, how do you ever string together tens of billions of pieces and parts and get something out of it that has private subjective experience.  So if I were to hand you billions of Tinkertoys, you know those little toys you put together, and you start hooking them up so that when you touched this, that happens and so on. At what point would you add one more Tinkertoy and say ah, now this is having conscious experience?

We don’t even know what the theory would look like on that. I mean here’s another way of looking at it. When I was a child I absolutely expected that by the time I was this age we would have robots, that we would have C3PO serving our dinner and cleaning my room and so on. The best we have is the Roomba vacuum cleaner, and it turns out that things like intelligence is really, really hard to figure out. and even things like computer vision is very, very difficult.

Without our specific brand of consciousness it seems improbable that any complex living creature like our selves would be able to even conceive of a grand Creator, Architect, Programmer or Technician, but there is no doubt that such ideas are by now almost indelibly imprinted on our mind-set. However when it comes to describing the type of god or afterlife that many people believe in, their depictions tend to be somewhat workaday, and to a great extent moulded by models that have been portrayed by our families, religious educators and the clergy:

So when I sit next to people on aeroplanes and I ask them what their opinion is on whether there’s a God, or what they would look like, or what an afterlife would look like, it turns out there’s such a lack of creativity, everybody just says whatever their parents have told them. So this book is all about really mentally stretching on spatial scales and ideas of gender and number and all sorts of things.

And mentally stretching such ideas is exactly what this book does – whether you’re a confirmed atheist, a devout agnostic or fully subscribed believer, all the short stories in this book should give you pause for thought and more than a moment or two of inner reflection – indeed we’re told that the book has been equally well received from many quarters of the religious divide, no mean feat for such a book, especially in these days of entrenched fundamentalism that everywhere abound. Here’s a quick look at some of the ideas Eagleman offers up for consideration:

If you stopped someone on the street and said, ‘Hey, what do you think the afterlife is about?’ Of course everybody just has in their mind whatever their parents or their community has told them, and when you really start putting those ideas under the spotlight, what you discover is they’re ridiculous. So for example the one where God is getting frustrated in having to do this binary categorisation into good and evil. it’s a perfect example of how goofy the story is because people are much more multi-dimensional than that, they are much more complex than that.

And so in that story God decides to sort of revolt against that structure that she had set up and she instead invites everybody to come into Heaven and to be a part of Heaven. And what ends up happening actually if I can just read the last line here: ‘So she brings everyone to Heaven and everyone’s achieved true equality and the communists are baffled and irritated because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only with the help of a God in whom they didn’t want to believe.

The meritocats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage, the liberals have no downtrodden to promote, so God sits on the edge of her bed and weeps at night because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they are all in Hell.

Eagleman is also featured in a May 2009 edition of another podcast, ‘Little Atoms’, hosted by Neil Denny, and if you want to grab a copy of the book, for yourself or deserving other(s), there are two main options – you can for example order it online from places like Amazon and numerous other digital outlets.

If however, to paraphrase Matt Haynes, editor of, and writing in the latest print edition of ‘Smoke – A London Peculiar’ you believe “electricity is nothing but a demented cavalcade of charged particles over which no human could ever hold dominion”, just visit your local book-store instead, and they’ll take things from there.

As the previous posts of today have looked variously at the recent and distant past, here’s a link to an article at Centauri Dreams, from which this is an excerpt:

What we now know is that we cannot, in economic times like these, count on government agencies to proceed with the next step. The Planetary Society has raised the needed money (boosted considerably by a $1 million donation) to build Lightsail-1, creating the vehicle out of three Cubesat spacecraft. Based on early reports, the spacecraft sounds much like the NanoSail-D sailcraft created at Marshall Space Flight Center. Planetary Society vice-president Bill Nye notes, “To get sunlight to push us through space, we need a large sail attached to a small spacecraft. Lightsail-1 fits into a volume of just three liters before the sails unfurl to fly on light. It’s elegant.” NanoSail-D, likewise, is small enough to fit into a suitcase.

As and when I get more time in the future, I’d like to add more content here regarding the human exploration of space, the search for exoplanets and the strange array of other solar systems we encounter as a result, plus a great deal more besides. Until that happens though, I’d recommend readers to check Centauri Dreams on a regular basis, being as it is a source of good clear writing explaining in detail just what we humans will be considering in the near and distant future with regard to our attempts to explore our solar system, galaxy and the Universe at large, through the combined efforts of telescopic arrays, robotic craft, and maybe one day even humans once again, although for the time being, manned projects appear to be lodged firmly on the back-burner.

Airing this Sunday, November 15th at 9pm ET/PT in the US, on the National Geographic Channel is a documentary called ‘Search for the Amazon Headshrinkers’, for which this is the description:

Terrifying legends from the Amazon tell of Indian headshrinkers who would shrink an enemy’s head to render the vengeful soul powerless.  Now, NGC has exclusive U.S. access to 45-year-old archive footage captured by explorer Edmundo Bielawski, purportedly the only known footage that shows the process of an actual ― recently deceased ― human head being shrunk. Author and explorer Piers Gibbon heads deep into the Amazon jungle in an attempt to trace Bielawski’s 1960s journey, rediscover the exact location where this scene was filmed and reconnect with the tribe today.  After a string of setbacks, Gibbon finally gets a striking clue that leads him on an arduous trek to the village of Tukupi, where he finds one aging warrior, the last of his generation, who could provide answers to the mystery once and for all.

This programme kicks off a week-long series of documentaries that will be shown on the National Geographic Channel, as part of their aforementioned Expedition Week, and later that same night, viewers are offered ‘Secrets of the Druids’.

Limited online time means I’m unable to offer readers a full preview here, but suffice it to say there is a plethora of information, resources and archive footage to be found by navigating to the series’ main page and taking it from there – as far as viewers outside the US are concerned, I imagine we’ll get to see this series at some point in what we hope is the near future.