On Consciousness

               Over at The Sweatervest Chronicles Mr. Blanchard discusses a conversation he had with a biology/philosophy student about the nature of consciousness . The biology/philosophy student thinks that consciousness is “a combination of biology and experience, spirituality, instinct, etc.” Mr. Blanchard seems to believe that experiences play a role, but that ultimately experiences and all of the other factors that affect consciousness are all some kind of chemistry. Mr. Blanchard asks “What do you think?” This is something that I have thought about a lot. My short answer is that Mr. Blanchard is absolutely right. Your consciousness is just the result of chemical reactions. When you feel a soft blanket the nerves in your skin send an electrical signal to your brain and the electro chemical reactions cause your brain to interpret those signals as softness. I think the natural, and more interesting, follow up questions are “If consciousness is just chemistry do we have free will? Is consciousness even real or just some sort of illusion?”

                I will answer the second question first. Of course it is real. What would it even mean for it to be an illusion? If consciousness is an illusion, who is being illuded? If I were to define consciousness, it would somehow involve what humans feel or experience. If consciousness is something different than what we thought it was, we need to change the definition.

                Do we have free will though? I think the answer is yes. I think there are two closely related reasons people believe this perspective on consciousness eliminates the possibility of free will. The first is that by understanding how the brain works that somehow makes it seems like you don’t really decide things it’s just a function of x, y, and z. The second is that it is potentially possible to predict what someone would do. Hypothetically if you knew exactly how all of the atoms in someone’s body (and really you would need to know the exact distribution of all mater and energy (and dark energy and what not) in the universe) and you had a perfect understanding of the laws of nature and you had access to some sort of super duper computer with oodles of processing power you could predict everything that person would do (on the quantum level things are supposedly random, so I don’t know if that changes anything).

                I will address the first reason first. Any sort of consciousness is necessarily going to work through some sort of process. I don’t understand how any consciousness in any possible universe could exist that didn’t work through a system or set of rules or whatever of some kind. Maybe you would argue that I am right and therefore it is not even theoretically possible for a free willed consciousness to exist in any sort of universe. If that’s your perspective I don’t really have a counter argument, and I will kinda address that towards the end.

                As to the second reason, I don’t think the predictability of consciousness necessarily means that it lacks free will. If I said to you “you have two options. I can give you a thousand dollars or I can punch you in the face” I think I can be confident of what you would choose. My being able to predict what you would choose does not mean you did not have a choice. You could halve chosen to be punched in the face, but you didn’t and never were going to which brings me to my second point. The future is by definition fixed. The future is what it is and always has been, and it will be until it happens. If circumstances change so that what you thought was going to happen won’t, the future hasn’t changed your expectations have changed. The future is by definition what will happen. What you will do is by definition in the future and therefore already fixed in a certain sense. Again I think you could argue that therefore consciousness in this universe or any other conceivable universe does not have free will since it is already determined in some sense. And again in that case I can’t say I necessarily disagree which I shall address in the next paragraph.

                I don’t really think it is possible to definitively determine whether or not there is free will. I guess I mostly just think it is the most useful way of looking at it. I feel like in a certain sense the only way to truly, truly describe anything is to talk about the physics of it, the exact protons, neutrons, electrons etc. and their relative position in the universe that make it up. I feel like everything else is really just an ultimately futile, though still useful, attempt to understand and make sense of the universe.  I think this is partly why some people tend to reject the idea that consciousness is just chemistry. It makes life seem meaningless or pointless. It makes the universe seem empty and just filled with random stuff. I don’t feel this way at all. One of the reasons is pictures like this.

(Credit:Wikipedia)

                I think the first time I saw an image like this my thought process went something like this. “This is a cool looking picture what are all of those big blotches? They can’t be stars.” Then I realize that some of them clearly have a spiral shape and think “Wow those are galaxies! What are all those lights behind them? Those are all galaxies too!” Then I realized I was looking at a picture of hundreds, maybe thousands of galaxies each with hundreds of billions of stars.

                There are creatures in this universe (and your one of them) that have the ability and the desire to study and understand the universe. That can build a telescope with a 2.4 meter mirror. Put that telescope on a big rocket. Launch that telescope into an orbit around Earth. Point it out towards the universe, realize that it is broken. Put humans in a shuttle on a rocket. Launch those humans up to the telescope to fix it. Point the telescope out to the universe again and take amazing picture like the one above; creatures that can study and understand themselves and how they came to be. Creatures that have the intelligence to ask questions like “What is consciousness?”  “Do we have free will?” No matter how you look at it, that is amazing.

 All glory to the hypnotoad!

The First Post of a Totally Awesome Blog

Do Lower Birthrates Lead to Longer Lives?

Hint: Yes, No, Maybe, I don’t know, Can You Repeat the Question?

          Hello and welcome to my blog. Why am I starting a blog? Excellent question hypothetical reader. I sometimes like to do little projects. This blog is mainly so that I have a reason not to half-ass said projects. Also I like economics, science, math, a good debate, among other things and would like to share my interests. I hope that people will enjoy my blog and maybe learn something, but mostly it is just a way for me to motivate myself and organize my thoughts. Anyways enough with introspective explanations and on to what this post is about.

             Do births per woman affect life expectancy? Another excellent and kinda random question hypothetical reader, weirdo (Yeah this is kinda silly, maybe even lame, but I couldn’t think of a good intro and this is my blog damn it!). Funny you should ask that just the other day(I have been slowly working on this for like two months so it was actually a while ago) I saw this excellent video by Hans Rosling showing statistics about health care for different countries (Watch it! It is very interesting and well presented).

One of the things that struck me was this graph showing life expectancy and births per woman.

             I thought this was very interesting, but I immediately questioned whether there was causation. There seem to be many things that are associated with births per woman that might explain the correlation. For instance as economies grow less people work in agriculture and there are more job opportunities for young women, so women generally have less children. I think there are also reasons why there might be causation. Families with fewer children might be able to dedicate more time, care and money on each child. The success of each child might also seem to be more important. I have heard of families only being able to afford to send one child to school and therefore sending the child they think is the most likely to succeed.

            What do you do when you have multiple theories that might explain a phenomenon? You turn to mathematics of course, in this case regression analysis. The great thing about regression is that it can help us understand how much of an effect a certain factor has independent of other factors. Regression can get complicated, but I think the basic idea is actually pretty simple. First you figure out which variable is the one that is being changed by other factors, in this case life expectancy. Then you figure out what variables are affecting it. The variable that is being changed is called the dependent variable and the others are called independent variables. Then you arrange the variables in an equation so that the independent is equal to a constant plus each variable multiplied by a coefficient, or multiplier.

Dependent = constant + (coefficient)*(indepent1) + (coefficient)*(independent2)

The coefficients are a measure of how strong of an effect the independent variables have on the dependent. For instance, if you wanted to know how education affects income, just looking at a graph of the two variables might lead to false conclusions if other variables have an effect as well. Perhaps you think parents’ income and age also have an effect. If you made a regression with those variables you might end up with something like this (numbers are made up).

(Thousands of dollars a year)

Income= 20 + .8(Years of Education) + .1(Parents’ income) + .05(age)

            This would indicate that an extra year of education leads to an $800 increase in income. If the coefficient was negative then an increase in the variable would cause a decrease in the dependent. The constant, 20, shows what the dependent, in this case income, would be if all the other variables were zero. Usually this does not make sense and is not important. In this case it would indicate newborn babies make 20 grand a year.

            We know that our dependent is going to be life expectancy and that one of the independents is births per woman, but what other factors affect life expectancy? I thought the main factor for life expectancy would be the quality of healthcare, so I got statistics from the World Bank on GPD per capita, health expenditure as a percent of GDP, and access to improved sanitation facilities. Before I talk about the results, I would like to emphasize that I am an amateur at best. Making a regression is easy, doing it the right way is really, really hard. I am doing it the easy way. To do the regression I used PSPP, a free version of SPSS, and got these results

Life Exp= 58.7 –(3.06)(Births) + (0)(GDP/Cap) –(.22)(Heal Exp)+ (.13)(Sanitation)

                This does not make sense. GDP has no effect on life expectancy and increased health spending shortens life spans. At first I was extremely confused. I tried doing a regression with just GDP/capita as the independent and it was still zero. I considered giving up on the whole thing. Then I realized a one dollar increase in GDP would have a miniscule effect on life expectancy. I redid the regression with GDP per capita divided by 1000 and things started to make more sense. Health expenditure still came out negative when sanitation was included. Maybe this is an indication that increases in healthcare spending are not used wisely. More likely there are certain tests you are supposed to do about the relationship between the variables that I don’t think I can do with PSPP. I am guessing something about how sanitation and health expenditures are related is messing everything up. I wish I could use a program that was actually designed to do regression like Eviews, but they cost hundreds of dollars, and if wishes were horses we would all be eating steak.  I decided that access to sanitation was a better indication of health and came up with the following sensible equation.

Life Exp=67.49 –(3.07)(Births) +(0.1)(GDP/Cap Thousands) +(0.13)Sanitation

                According to my results a decrease of one in the number of births per woman leads to an increase in life expectancy of 3 years. This is more than I thought it would be. I thought increases in GDP and healthcare were the main reason there was such a high correlation, although I would once again like to emphasize I do not have confidence in my own results. I do not think the percent of the population with access to improved sanitation facilities is a very good way of accounting for quality of healthcare. Many countries have 100% or very close. What is my conclusion? I don’t really have one. That wasn’t the really the point of this. The point was just to practice using regression and to look at an issue from a different perspective.