Stardate 20040520.1046

(On Screen): One of the puzzles of the human brain is how it can perform the computational work it does in as short a time as it does. I read an article one about a study of typing.

Subjects sat in front of a computer screen and were presented with text to transcribe. One thing that the experimenters varied was how far ahead the typist was permitted to see, and as they could see further ahead, their typing rate increased. (It leveled out at about 13 characters of look-ahead, IIRC.) But another thing they experimented with was including a few misspelled words, which many of the typists corrected on the fly. Based on their models of the process of visual recognition of characters and words and the motor process of controlling fingers on a keyboard, the article ruefully concluded that humans seemed to be able to type about twice as fast as the models predicted.

One possible explanation is application of massive parallelism. It seems that our brains are constantly formulating alternatives, and then rejecting most of them at the last instant. This seems to happen at all levels, ranging from small motor operations (striking a key) all the way to large scale plans. That's why alcohol, a depressant, makes people uninhibited and seems to make them more active: it's decreasing the activity of the all-essential final "reject most of it" stage, and more of those tentative plans make it through into behavior.

All of us have had the experience of thinking something which almost immediately horrified us, "Why would I think such a thing?" I call it "High cliff syndrome".

At a viewpoint in eastern Oregon on the Crooked River, looking over a low stone fence into a deep canyon with sheer walls, a little voice inside me whispered, "Jump!" AAAGH! I became nervous, and my palms started sweating, and I decided I was no longer having fun and got back into my car and continued on my way.

Young women for a while wore what I think were called "tube-tops"; stretchy knit cylinders of cloth around their upper torsos which were held in place only by friction. Once in a while when I was talking to a young woman wearing such a thing, I would again find myself feeling nervous, with my palms sweating, because I realized that a small voice inside me was trying to make me reach out to yank downwards on the thing to reveal treasures beneath. AAAGH!

I've never done anything like that. But we all internally construct those kinds of plans all the time; it isn't an indication of evil that we do so. Moral behavior comes in that final rejection stage; it is in what we permit ourselves to do, not what we think, that morality manifests, because we cannot control our thoughts.

When I've read news reports lately about some kinds of obnoxious protests, I have mused to myself, "Perhaps it's time to issue shoot-to-kill orders to security guards." Perhaps if some people who made grandstanding protests ended up dead, it might cause others to start really thinking about the consequences of their behavior."

Obviously I don't think this should really happen. But it does seem to me that a lot of protesters are willing to do the things they do, and say the things they say, and advocate the things they advocate, because they suffer no consequences for it. They have license, but feel no responsibility. There are negative consequences, but someone else suffers the consequences, not the protesters. If such protests had negative consequences for the protesters then protest might become more responsible.

As I was thinking about this, I realized that there are severe consequences for them even if there are no shoot-to-kill standing orders. For domestic anti-war protesters who hate Bush more than they hate bin Laden, and foreign "allies" who fear and resent America more than they fear Islamic extremism, the result of an American defeat in this war will be death, destruction, poverty, misery, and tyranny for them. Their own best interests require an American victory.

I guess the difference between them and us is that we who support the war can see that, and they apparently can't.

Update: Drumwaster comments.

Update 20040521: Andrew Solovay writes to say that no less than Edgar Allen Poe wrote about that little voice, which he called "the Imp of the Perverse".

Update 20040525: Apparently the protesters are quite brave, and take major risks. I had no idea!

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