This post contains some potentially disturbing stuff.

I’ve recently read a few stories related to suicides that reminded me of a pamphlet that I produced a few years ago and clandestinely distributed in a local shopping mall. The pamphlet’s name is Suicide is easier than you might think #1 and is intended as a joke. Here it is[1].

The world is a horrible place. Why bother with the pain and disappointment when suicide is easier than you might think?

Here’s how:
• Find a bridge spanning a busy highway (no less than 3 lanes wide and with a speed limit of no less than 100km/h). It is important that during peak times a large number of cars should be traveling together at relatively high speed. A good example is the N1/M5 interchange at about 16:00.
• Take as many pain killers as you feel necessary (alcohol will also do). You may feel that anything less than sober is cheating, in which case you’d want to skip the sedatives. Personally I would want the experience to be as clear as possible, so no booze or drugs.
• Go to the bridge during a time when the combination of traffic volume and speed is at its peak. If you go by car, park it somewhere unobtrusive. Take a few small pebbles or acorns with you. I’d prefer acorns since I’d not want to damage any cars unnecessarily. Whether you have ID or anything that might identify you on your person is up to you.
• On the side of the bridge facing the on-coming traffic stand at a spot directly over the middle lane of the oncoming traffic.
• Pick an oncoming car and drop an acorn when the car is about 10-20 meters away. If it drops in front of the car drop the next one a little later, if it lands on the roof of the car, drop the next one earlier. Repeat this experiment until you have a rough idea of where a car should be when you jump for you to hit the front of the bonnet. This is your jump point.
• Look out for a truck or bus heading towards the bridge at approximately the same speed as the cars against which you tested the drop. Try and choose one as far away as possible. You may want to choose one in a colour that is significant to you. Don’t feel that you have to take the first one, it’s your choice and you can attach as much meaning to it as you want. You should be as comfortable with your choice as possible. The best possible scenario would be if the truck is followed by several other cars in the lanes beside and behind it.
• Get onto and sit on the railing of the bridge with your legs dangling over the side. Do this only once you’ve picked your truck and are committed to the jump. Getting onto the railing too soon might mean that a passerby will have time to stop and grab you. You may want to practice getting onto the railing at the edge of a similar bridge beforehand.
• When your truck gets to your jump point, breathe deep, look up if you want to and push forward with your arms and legs.

The joke here is intended to be about how unexpected it is to find a practical guide to suicide stuffed among adverts for skin treatments, yoga studios, outdoor trance parties and specialist pet photographers. And what better place to contemplate suicide than a shopping mall? I’m not sure if anyone that picked one up laughed, but it made me smile to drop them off and, a few days later, to find that some had been taken[2].
By some random happening the last suicide story that I read occurred a few days ago in the self same mall where I had dropped off my pamphlets some years ago, and the method was even similar – a jump.

A witness, who asked not to be named, said the man had apparently been arguing with a woman, believed to be his girlfriend, before climbing on to the railing and plummeting, landing near Markhams.

Suicide seems to be one of the things that society is most sensitive about, not wanting to touch or discuss it. While suicide isn’t a universal human taboo[3] it seems to be something that our society really cannot come to terms with, perhaps because it is such a melancholy act. It’s reasons are never clear but it is invariably linked to two conditions: grief and honour. This is a strange combination, as if the loss of honour produces a grief too severe to bear. I initially thought of writing about the weird relationship that we have to suicide (a strange mixture of dissapointment, judgement and admiration) but as I went around reading about the act of suicide something else became far more compelling, the brutality of it.

Part of the appeal of suicide is the perception that it frees the individual from an unbearable pain; mostly emotional, but also physical. But if you exclude assisted suicide for the terminally ill, suicide in its classic, solitary form is a primitive, error-prone and brutal thing. I was surprised to find out that there are actually very few ways to commit suicide. Guns, water, blades, suffocation[4], electrocution, hanging, burning, falling, beheading and medication – that’s about it. Suicidemethods.net provides practical detail about suicide and reality checks about what happens if you fail. Unlike Disturbeddoorway.com I don’t think that it intends being voyeuristic about it. However, if you’re willing to deal with the graphic nature of it there are two specific suicide descriptions that I feel captures the terrible physical reality of a suicide attempt. The first is a description and the second an actual video. Both are traumatic and sad. A police officer recalled

We were called 911 to a scene but not told what kind of emergency we had. This was late at night. A man comes walking to our ambulance holding both hands to his face. I asked him what happened? He could barely talk and then he was hard to understand. He had blown off the part of the front of his face. He had lost some upper and lower jaw and tongue and nose by a rifle. He said he pulled it away at the last minute and that is why part of his face was gone instead of head.
suicidemethods.net

The second is the a video of the suicide of US politician Budd Dwyer during a press conference prior to his sentencing for a bribery conviction – it is very graphic and my link is not for the sake of gore but because I really, really didn’t realise how stone cold real a gunshot is.

Albert Camus made an elegant point; There is only one really serious philosophical question, and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that. Deciding to die is a very fundamental thing and perhaps our society is right to be fearful of suicide because we are so very bad at it.

I am not a scientist – I design and write software. Anyone who works in the field that this post deals with will be able to take it apart in no time, but I stand by my qualitative comments on the significance of Alex for our concept of intelligence.

As the entire world knows by now, Alex the Parrot died a few days ago. He was 31.
Alex was made famous for his considerable communication skills. He was the leading subject of an experiment running over three decades by Dr. Irene Pepperberg – a US academic (comparative psychologist).

Alex

I saw a documentary on Alex and his cohorts a few years ago and there is no denying that their skills and innocent charm were/are magical. Do yourself a favour, read an example of a conversation with Alex here. I grew up with an African Grey parrot[1] and while he/she[2] had an extensive vocabulary of calls and words/phrases I have no doubt that they were learned by rote. Lonka(the parrot) did learn to use phrases correctly, such as calling out to my dad as he left for work in the mornings, but those were limited to very simple, routine situations.
Alex’s abilities were in an entirely different league. Able to combine several attributes of one or more items (color, material, count, size) to answer questions that require comparisons, algebra etc he was reported by some to have had an intelligence comparable to a 5-year-old human.

Another fascinating aspect to Alex’s life is the training technique Dr. Pepperberg used to teach Alex. She would train[3] Alex together with a human colleague. These sessions would basically involve Alex competing against the human for rewards. Alex would observe what the human trainer did to receive the reward (e.g. identify the colour of a wooden block) and then learn to do the same. This would result in a natural competition[4] in which Alex’s learning is speeded up by competing with the human for that delicious treat.

What I’m interested in is the ongoing debate about animal intelligence. Alex was used as a case in point by both sides of the argument. Supporters of the idea that Alex showed a very simple form of human-type intelligence point to his ability to combine various attributes of several items into relatively complex comparisons[2] as an indicator of a flexible form of intelligence that goes beyond simple recognition and repetition. Detractors claim that his behaviour, while complex, is rote – simple repetition and recognition.
Another supporter point is that Alex was able to independently express his desires[6]. However, all animals express desire, the dog whining at the door means ‘I wanna pee’.

What I’m interested in is the detractors’ description of their objections, Dr. Herbert Terrace, arguing against classifying Alex’s intelligence as human-like, describes it as ‘a complex discriminative performance’. Ouch.
But wait! He describes it as ‘a complex discriminative performance’ – complex. Not to want to make trivialising assumptions about Dr. Terrace’s wider argument or his work I am excited about this statement. Sure, he does characterise Alex’s behaviour as a performance (i.e. trained for repetition), but he does concede ‘complex’.
One of my favourite books of all time is Steven Pinker‘s How the Mind Works. It describes, amongst other things, the Computational Theory of Mind which holds that the brain is a computational device(a machine) which produces intelligent behaviour and cognition through a highly, highly parallalised, ridiculously complex form of information processing.
In short, that human intelligence is a simple product of the brain’s ability to process thousands of events in parallel using its roughly 100 billion neurons and their roughly 3 quadrillion interconnection points(synapses). The secret to this ability lies not in some mystic breath of life, but simply on the brain’s complexity. One of the intelligent behaviours that the brain produces is language and something that is important to note is that Dr. Pepperberg does not characterise Alex’s sentences as language, they are responses – either to questions or to his own desires. I agree with this; a voice assisted satellite navigation system does not use language, it produces responses in the form of human words. But this is not a fundamental difference in the mechanism that produces the intelligence – complex information processing.
If you really understand computer programming it should be clear that a very similar mechanism produces computer intelligence[7]. A computer’s information processing capability is a direct result of the stacking on top of one another of thousands of layers of trivial logical operations. A computer can, after all perform only boolean logic[8] – but stacking those on top of one another in layer upon layer of interconnected pieces produces a spell checker[9].
I believe that the same applies to the brain. There is no magic point at which the brain all of a sudden becomes ‘intelligent’, going from being able to perform basic functions like breathing and recognising poisonous foods through to ‘!bang! I see it all now! I understand’. Fuck that. Intelligence is simply a function of the complexity of the device(machine/organ) that processes the information(reported by our senses) received by the system(the body). And in that sense I feel strongly that Alex was intelligent, not ‘intelligent’ or ‘exhibiting signs of intelligence’; intelligent in the same way that a human is intelligent, the same way that a forest of trees is intelligent and that an evolutionary microchip is intelligent.
And no, I’m not into that whole Gaia, we are all one and interconnected bullshit. Yes, we are all interconnected, yes there is information processing that occurs between individual organisms. But without having to resort to some flaky notion of an overmind, individual organisms/devices like that microchip, Alex and I are intelligent in exactly the same way – the mechanism is the same.

Alex’s intelligence was massively less complex than a human’s, as it was massively more complex than the microchip’s, but it’s the same. Yes, there are still mysteries that complex information processing begin to answer today(such as consciousness – neither Alex nor the microchip was/is conscious as far as we know) – but intelligence isn’t one of them.
It is arrogant and ignorant of the biological reality of the human brain to claim that our intelligence is somehow special or different from that of any other animal or neural life form.

And so, to Alex – I hope you had fun, you were cool. I’m sure that as the last electrical pulses jumped chemically from neuron to neuron in your brain you saw those delicious moments in your life, those wonderful cork nuts that you ate as you spoke.

Cork Nut

[1] By all accounts still alive, but having flown the coop about 5 years ago. Some months later my parents were walking around their town when they heard Lonka’s distinctive calls coming from a nearby house.
[2] Determining the sex of parrots is a notoriously difficult and error prone business
[3] Here we have one of the crucial points of this post, was she training Alex or teaching him, and is there a difference?
[4] The absolute fundamental environment[i] in which all animal(including human) development takes place – competition.
[i] not to be confused with the process that produces that development; being natural selection
[5] She asks ‘How many?’, he says ‘Two’, she asks ‘What’s different?’, he says ‘Color’.
[6] He says ‘Wanna go back’
[7] No, I’m not going to call it ‘intelligence’, it is intelligence.
[8] is it less? is is more? is it equal? That’s all you need.
[9] And here we can speculate about whether the internet(the most complex machine ever built) has already or is still waiting to become measurably intelligent itself.

Time flies when you’re having fun.
Or just when the world is swallowing you whole.

I’m fascinated by the brain[1]; its origin, its work and its deterioration.
More than anything I’m fascinated by its ability[2] to observe itself.
Right now I’m observing a phenomenon related to the plasticity of time in the brain; I’m madly accelerating towards each year’s end.
It’s almost May, soon it will be July and then it will be October – each year accelerates.

July will be October -

It turns out that this sense of acceleration that overwhelms me is very real.

The brain has two distinct time keeping modes: a Circadian rhythm (aka the body clock) and a momentary perception of time passing.
From what I’ve read, these are intertwined and are both controlled by the Suprachiasmatic nucleus. However, they function separately.
The body’s circadian rhythm is relatively fixed[3], but it seems that our perception of time and the real time in which our senses operate is changeable.
The Suprachiasmatic nucleus controls these independently, separating our body’s concept of time, from that of our conscious mind.

Research is showing that a variety of factors influence the functioning of this tiny instrument to the extent where time really, physically, perceptually speeds up.The most common such influence is age[4].
My grandparents have many times mentioned that the days pass really quickly, even though they are retired and spend all of them sitting in different chairs humming to themselves.
Remember how long a school term was in primary school? A week took fucking forever to pass, never mind an entire term!
Your Suprachiasmatic nucleus is accelerating. The world really is moving faster.

Acceleration -

Here’s a fascinating experiment that shows the real plasticity of not only our perception of time, but of the rate of our brains’ internal clocks.

Psychologist Dr David Eagleman, [...] asked volunteer Jesse Kallus to perform a terrifying backwards free-fall of 33 metres.
If the [theory was] correct, Jesse’s perception of time would be slowed by the terrifying experience.[...]
Dr Eagleman came up with a cunning device: the “perceptual chronometer”, a wristwatch-like device which flicked blindingly fast between two LED screens.
Normally the flicker would be so fast Jesse could only see a blur. But if time slowed down for him, he might be able to discern the two different screens and read a random number on one of them.
All Jesse had to do was jump, and read. As he ascended the 33ft metal cage no-one seemed to believe this curious experiment might work.
When Jesse landed, he noted he had seen “98″. [...] In fact the number was 96. Not quite spot-on, but the two numbers look very similar on a digital screen.
Further jumps got similar results – all suggesting that time did seem to slow down for Jesse during the jump.

Whether or not the science of this experiment is sound, we cannot deny the evolutionary imperitive for this in the brain.
When we are not under threat and simply need to operate efficiently under rote conditions (performing a repetitive piece of work, walking far etc.) the brain can safely speed up time, thereby reducing the energy that it consumes in processing events in real time.
But when reaction time is crucial (e.g. in dangerous situations) the brain’s clock speeds up, processing more information, consuming more energy, slowing down time.

Of course, none of this helps me to catch a hold of the days that zoom past the foot of our bed.

[1] Not just the human brain. Sure, it is the most complex we know of, but even the common house fly’s brain is radical. The house fly’s optimised neural wiring gives it a reaction time of one 50th of a second, twelve times faster than a human’s.
[2] At least in humans
[3] Michel Siffre spent 2 months in a cave in 1962 foregoing any means of telling time – his circadian rhythm remained relatively in tact, but his ability to measure the passing of time (guessing what time it was) was totally lost.
[4] There are numerous scholarly articles on this topic – but they don’t make for good reading so I won’t cite any.