January 2015 – Page 2 – Harmonia Philosophica

Love chemistry. Ending love. Killing the heart…

Love and heartache have always been inexorably tied. Recall the paranoid, lust-dizzy characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the tortured, memory-deprived lovers in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Wouldn’t it be nice if a pill could take away the pain of a breakup? Researchers are looking into it.

As unromantic as it sounds, love is essentially a biochemical cocktail, and a poorly understood one at that. Scientists do know that oxytocin—often called the love hormone—plays a powerful role in bonding. In one experiment, Adam Guastella, a clinical psychologist at the University of Sydney in Australia, administered oxytocin to quarreling lovers during couples’ therapy. “It does seem to help people reduce their hostility and increase their willingness to take another’s perspective,” he says. Inhibiting the hormone could have the opposite effect: When Emory University researchers injected drugs into the brains of prairie voles to block oxytocin receptors, the voles lost interest in their long-term mating partners. With the manipulation of oxytocin, a love “off button” seems possible. (1)

We were Gods.
Loving others.
Killing for love.
Getting killed for love.

Now we are educated.
Now we are evolved.
Now we are cowards.
Avoiding love.
With drugs.

Modern civilization.
Look under the surface.
Discover rot.

Schizophrenia. Voices. Spirits…

People with schizophrenia may hear either hostile voices goading them to jump off a bridge or a mother’s soothing words of advice, depending on the cultures in which they live, a new study suggests.

In the United States, schizophrenia’s symptoms include hallucinations of disembodied voices that hurl insults and make violent commands, says an international team led by Stanford University anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann. But in India and Ghana, schizophrenia patients often report positive relationships with hallucinated voices that they recognize as those of family members or God. The findings will be published in the January 2015 British Journal of Psychiatry.

“Learned cultural expectations about the nature of mind and self may encourage Americans with schizophrenia to pay more attention to negative, hostile voices”, Luhrmann says. (1)

The western man has been alienated from his own soul.
The western man has been alienated with the spirit world.

So it is more than logical that when he comes across these entities he is afraid.

Only if we accept our true spiritual nature, will we not be afraid of our spiritual nature…

Stem cells therapies. Stem cells marketing stunts.

An injured knee can cost a pro football player millions of dollars, or even an entire career. MIT Technology Review reports that, in an effort to regrow cartilage and heal injured tissue quickly, hundreds of players are injecting bone marrow cells into their knees and hips. Evidence is weak that the procedure actually works and, as with all unproven stem cell therapies, there could be risks involved. Just ask the lady who grew a bone in her eyelid after getting (illegal) cosmetic stem cell injections.

“We don’t really know exactly what it does, biologically”, orthopedic surgeon Freddie Fu told Tech Review. (1)

Science uses stem cells therapies as a promo for more research funding.
But on the other hand warns against stem cell therapies.
Marketing is good. As long as people do not die.
But how can you advocate for something if you do not believe in it? What kind of religion warns against practicing its own practices for fear of death?
Practices that are funded by the very same people (a.k.a. “taxes”) who are willing to take a chance and try these new therapies?
There was a time when science and religion was one thing.
There was a time when people believed in themselves.
Now we only believe in money.
And we just do not care about people.
As long as they are alive.
As long as they give us their money…

Peer review by patients! Understanding the Universe…

When it comes to clinical research, the participation of the people being treated—the patients—usually ends by the time the study is submitted to a journal. A few U.K.-based publishers are now looking to change that. Last month, BioMed Central, an open-access publisher, announced that in 2015 it will launch the journal Research Involvement and Engagement, which will closely collaborate with patients in all aspects of its editorial processes, including peer review. The new journal aims to capture the contributions of non-academics to scientific research.

But will patients be able to review scientific papers that require technical knowledge? “We will select patient reviewers to look at a particular paper depending on their area of expertise, which often links to the [medical] experiences they have had,” Staniszewska asserts. (1)

Peer review is crucial to science. But up to now the subjects of science were not asked for their opinion. Simply because science tends to have… “objects” rather than subjects.

Humans slowly find their place in the cosmos.

A cosmos full of life.
No objects.
Just subjects.
In denial of themselves.
Dreaming of objects.
A world full of life and life only.
There can be no other way.
There can be no other science.
But the science of humans.
Stop analyzing objects.
And you will understand the Universe…

Computer artists. Human cubist art.

Computers are starting to identify objects with near-human levels of accuracy, enabling them to do everything from creating automatic picture captions to driving cars. But now a collection of bizarre optical illusions for these artificial-intelligence systems (AIs) has revealed that machines don’t see the same way we do, which could leave them vulnerable to exploitation.

Image-recognition algorithms learn to recognise objects by training on a large number of images and identifying patterns that mark out a cat from a coffee cup, for example.

Jeff Clune of the University of Wyoming in Laramie and his colleagues wanted to know if they could hook up a particular type of image-recognition algorithm called a deep neural network (DNN) to a second algorithm designed to evolve different pictures.

Such genetic algorithms, working in conjunction with human judgement, have previously created images of apples and faces, so Clune wondered if replacing the human with a DNN, to work alongside the genetic algorithm, would work as well, resulting in a computer that could generate creative pictures by itself.

“We were expecting that we would get the same thing, a lot of very high-quality recognisable images,” Clune says. “Instead we got these rather bizarre images: a cheetah that looks nothing like a cheetah.”

It turned out that the genetic algorithm produced images of seemingly random static that AlexNet declared to be pictures of a variety of animals with more than 99 per cent certainty (see picture). Other images, generated in a different way, look like vaguely evocative abstract art to humans, but fool AlexNet into seeing a baseball, electric guitar or other household object.

The algorithm’s confusion is due to differences in how it sees the world compared with humans, says Clune. While we identify a cheetah by looking for the whole package – the right body shape, patterning and so on – a DNN is only interested in the parts of an object that most distinguish it from others. “It’s almost like these DNNs are huge fans of cubist art,” says Clune. (1)

A computer can be fooled by static.
And see a cheetach where we see nothing but dots…

The humans can be impressed by static.
And see a flower where only dots exist…

The difference cannot be expressed in words.
It can only be experienced.
And this is exactly why it is so fundamental…