I spent yesterday at the Being Human conference (it bears no relationship to the excellent BBC show about a ghost, vampire, and werewolf who share a flat in Bristol), an all-day event at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

via flickr

While I posted a few pictures yesterday, I didn’t really write about it in any depth, because the wifi managed to fail during the opening remarks, and I never got on the network. Otherwise, I must say that the whole event was beautifully organized– and as someone who’s planned and participated in a lot of conferences, I know what I’m talking about.

via flickr

The overall theme of the conference, “Being Human,” was interpreted largely in terms of our scientific understanding of perception, body schema, decision-making, and how we come to experience the world and consciousness as transparent, seamless things. It was sponsored by the Bauman Foundation, which as I understand it has been supporting work at the intersection of neuroscience and contemplative practice for quite some time; its leader is Peter Bauman, a Tangerine Dream veteran turned CEO, so it’s got an interesting pedigree.

via flickr

More broadly, the whole event sees itself as part of a bigger enterprise, which we might think of as being better humans, through recognizing our collective similarities, and the inescapability of our interdependence. As Bauman put it,

A shift to a more interconnected world is possible only when our hearts are open, as well as our minds…. if we want a more enlightened future for our species, we have to know who we are…. we long to understand, so we can feel at home in this mystery, and at home in this universe.

For me, the opening talks were the most interesting and engaging. Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist and performance artist, gave a talk about perception that, as he put it, aimed to get the audience “to know less at the end than you think you do now.” Perception, he argued, is the foundation of being human: “everything begins with perception,” he said, including the way we see the world, ourselves, and our place in the world.

via flickr

But the straightforward relationship we think exists between the world and our perception of it is a brilliant construction, something our senses and minds put together. Take perceiving light, for example. All kinds of animals sense light: “Even jellyfish perceive light,” Lotte noted, “and they don’t even have brains.” For humans, the ability to sense color is rather important, and most of the talk was devoted to showing that we don’t really SEE in the straightforward sense: perceptions involves all kinds of automatic, unconscious choices and exclusions, and a huge amount of interpretation. “All information is inherently meaningless, because it could mean anything,” Lotte said. “Its the meanings that we see.” The brain actively creates relationships between information, partly be enacting information and engagement, then by associating meaning with those relationships. “We always see meaning,” as he put it. “That’s ALL we ever see.”

via flickr

When it comes to seeing, context is everything; understanding why that’s so and what it means is one key to understanding what it means to be human. The other big key, as he put it at the end of the talk, is that “We can see ourselves see.” This ability to see ourselves see, to become aware of the degree to which our perception of the world is dependent on experience and context, is what makes us conscious of us agency, choice, compassion.

V. S. Ramachandran followed with a talk about phantom limbs, and how the phenomenon reveals all kinds of things about the plasticity of our body schema– or what Thomas Metzinger later called self-models– but also suggests that there are ways in which bodies are entangled that we’re only beginning to understand (but which perhaps things like tantra have been making use of).

via flickr

Thomas Metzinger followed this thread with a talk research like the virtual embodiment and robotic re-embodiment project, which is exploring how we can use VR to transpose the sense of where the body is in virtual space, and the problem of what GE Moore called the “transparency of consciousness.” Normally we have no access to the construction process: we don’t have a sense of neurons firing, but only the final product– which is why we have a sense of direct engagement with reality. “consciousness is an invisible interface.” Our sense of self– the thing that defines being human– is produced by the self model and that transparency.

via flickr

A second thread looked at recent work on the nature of biases and irrationality– or what we normally define as biases and irrationalities– in decision-making and perception.

via flickr

Laurie Santos gave an amusing talk on the evolution of irrationality, using her research on monkey economics. It turns out that when given tokens that they can exchange for snacks, capuchin monkeys figure out the fundamentals of markets pretty quickly, and also exhibit the same kind of risk and loss aversion that humans do. What this suggests is that if we define human qualities or capabilities by those that are exclusively human, we have to exclude things like economic decision-making– which may not leave us with very much to work from. On the other hand, if we’re not bothered by the fact that we share some qualities of the mind with other animals, this has implications for how connected we should see ourselves to the rest of the animal world.

via flickr

David Eagleman’s talk on neuroscience and decision-making was just as engaging, and also aimed at big questions. In decision making, he argued, you have different networks evaluating economic cost, hedonic reward, and social signaling, and these three systems essentially fight for priority. He further argued that we now know quite a bit about the ways brain development or pathologies affect moral decision-making, to the degree that we can now begin to incorpor
ate it into our understandings of justice, punishment, and free will. (There are plenty of cases of people who develop deviant behavior with brain damage: Parkinson’s medicine, for example, can make people less risk averse, leading to jags of compulsive gambling and other risk-taking.) The law argues that we are practical reasoners (free to choose how we act), and that all brains have an equal capacity, but neuroscience suggests that these are poor assumptions; but neuroscience argues that that’s just not so. “When we talk about morality and decision making,” he concluded, “we’re really talking about the neurological bases of morality and decision making,” and we need the law to recognize that.

The other highlight for me was Paul Ekman’s talk on emotions. “It’s totally misleading and an oversimplification” to think of emotions as positive or negatives, he argued: “emotions would not have been survived our evolutionary history if they were inherently negative.” Every emotion can be experienced in a constructive or a destructive way.

One problem is that the language we have for describing our own emotions isn’t very elaborate. Emotions are actually families of experiences, not single things: happiness, for example, is a whole package of emotions, which we experience in different contexts but describe with the same term. Likewise, his FACS (facial action coding system) distinguishes some 200 different signals of anger, but no language comes close to describing all of them.

Further, the equipment we’re born with to understand emotions in others, isn’t as good as we think. Ekman has done some of the classic work on micro-facial expressions and lying, and he’s concluded that we’re actually terrible liars, but even worse lie detectors. It’s possible to detect lies if we know how to look for them, but people conspire in being misled. (What a lovely thought.)

So what did the conference yield? I felt like there were a couple big takeaways, but also some tensions that were never really resolved.

Not surprisingly, a number of the speakers made an explicit or explicit case for varieties of mindfulness being useful in overcoming the biases or limits that their work mapped out. You can’t meditate your way to free will; but being more knowledgeable about inherent biases can help keep you from being their slave.

Another recurring theme was that what we think of as bad elements of our natures may not be so. As Laurie Santos notes, for a long time we looked at the things we like about ourselves– language, technology, tool use, cooperation, etc.– in other species, but her work suggests that some behaviors that we think of as biases or errors actually may be helpful. Paul Ekman, likewise, argued that there really aren’t bad emotions, but bad outcomes: fear is a perfectly useful emotion in the right context and in the right amount, but debilitating if it overwhelms us.

On the other hand, there was a split between the universalist vision of Bauman and the neuroscientists– which held that their results point to universals in the human condition– and the arguments of Anne Harrington and Hazel Markus, who argued that culture plays a strong role in shaping illness and our reactions to treatments (Harrington pointed to the history mesmerism and neuropathy), and our success in dealing with challenges or problems (this was Markus’ talk).