What in the world should I do with my life?

Ok, so I'm now going through a dilemma that I'm sure is not too uncommon: I have no idea what I want to do after college. I am a junior planning on 5 years, and I am majoring in math, physics, and french. My original plan when I came to college was to go to graduate school in physics. I've recently decided that I do not think physics graduate school is right for me. This is for two main reasons: 1. I haven't been thrilled about the research experiences I have had; they were not all that exciting to me. 2. I have recently become very interested in medical sciences. When I hear about some new study with the brain, or the HPV vaccine, or any new medical development, I get very excited.

So, I was thinking of medical school as a possible option. However, problems with this include 1. I may be more interested in the research aspect of things, so getting an MD makes slightly less sense than getting a PhD. 2. Med. school is hella expensive, and although I have heard you can easily pay off the loans on a doctor's salary, I would want to do pro bono work in Africa or somewhere like that for a while once I get done with med. school, but I would be flat broke :(

I considered an MD/PhD program, which is good because 1. get the MD and research, and 2. It's free! However, it is impractical because 1. it is nearly impossible to get into, and 2. it takes about a million years to finish.

Also, medical physics does not seem like a great option, because it seems somewhat limited in scope (meaning if I got a PhD in it, I'd be working with radiology machines my whole life.)

So, I am opening my future up to the class. Anyone here interested in medical research? What are you plans? Any suggestions?

How to make a person

There are several new technologies that raise some interesting questions, such as: what does it mean to be human? How do you define consciousness? For instance, if Dan and Steve go under the knife, and Dan gets Steve’s brain, and Dan’s brain and Steve’s body both get chucked, who is still alive—Dan or Steve? We’ve not come quite that far in technology for this particular question to be particularly relevant, but it can be thought of as an extreme example of the sorts of questions that are relevant.

First of all, millions of people use antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy in the treatment of depression. Many people, depressed and non-depressed, are a little freaked out by these things and would hesitate to take them, because they are afraid that the drugs or the ECT would “change” them. I think this is a really interesting idea that a lot of people I have talked to seem to share. People seem to think that by using a drug or something that alters your brain chemistry, you are making yourself a different person. I think Phineas Gage is a good example. He was a construction worker who got a tamping iron literally driven through his skull, which caused major damage to the frontal lobe of his brain. According to friends and family, Gage was a totally different person after the accident. It makes you wonder what the change seemed like to Gage: when he got the iron driven through his head, the Phineas Gage everyone knew and loved died. Did the Phineas Gage that Phineas Gage himself knew and loved die as well? If you change your personality such that you become unrecognizable to the world, are you still the same person? I am not going to claim that taking Prozac is the same as getting an iron driven through your brain, but in the sense that they alter the way your mind works, the two are similar.

Another interesting question can be raised about the increasing power of artificial intelligence. As a neat example, check out Kismet, a robot built at MIT that was made to simulate social interactions. He physically responds to people much like other people do. For instance, he has a range of stimulation in which he is happy. If nothing much is going on around him, he will get bored. If someone walks into the room, he will appear interested and look around. If you wave something right in front of his face, he will display fear and back away to maintain his personal space. Watching videos of Kismet, I thought he was the cutest little thing and I fell completely in love with him. He was like a puppy or a little kid; he certainly seemed real to me. When we can create robots that can elicit this sort of emotional response from people, we have to start wondering to what extent the robots actually are real. After all, we are ourselves bio-electronic machines. We can not empirically see any physical soul anchored in our bodies; therefore, how can we really say we are any different from robots? And when we see Kismet respond in interest or in fear, can we really say that what he is feeling is not real?

Also, on a less philosophical note, I played around a lot my freshman year with various chatbot programs—programs designed to chat with you like a real person would. My favorite was Billy—a bot who started out with an extremely limited vocabulary, but who built up his sense of vocab and grammar based on your interactions with him. Here are a couple of quotes I managed to get him to actually say:

Billy: “When I was younger, I had a tappin’.”

Billy: “Actually, my girlfriend has my mother.”

Erin: “You sick bastard!”

Billy: “My mother used to tell me that!”

Erin: “Will you be my omega?”

Billy: “Not for a million dollars!”

Real-world holodecks

The “Identity Crisis” reading had a very interesting example about a woman who became disabled after an accident, and used a character she created over the internet to help herself learn to live with her disability. I was quite surprised by this example because I feel it goes against the norm when it comes to creating characters over the internet: hers is a case of confronting the realities of her life head-on in a manner that is safer than through the real world. I felt like I should at least mention her example because it is a very strong counterexample to what I’d like to talk about here: the use of the internet for escapism. For instance, there is always the guy who spends more time playing World of Warcraft than studying. On Facebook, you can waste hours reading about the (real or unreal—who knows?) facets of the lives of people you never see anymore. Second Life, an internet community that has over four million accounts, allows users to trade actual money for fake money that they can use in the game. Think about that: you can take the money you earn after a hard day’s work and spend it on improving your character’s life—not your own. Over four million accounts?? What are these people getting out of this?

The concept really isn’t that new. Consider Walden, written way back when in the 1850s. Thoreau gets so sick of the society he lives in that he runs off to the woods and writes about how great a time he has. Before kids had video games to replace reality, they played pretend. People still enjoy getting lost in a book. These online communities like WoW and Second Life do the same thing as these other methods of escapism, but they make it easier to escape, and they offer a greater depth of escape. First of all, anyone with an internet account can log in and sign up for one of these things, and it takes literally minutes to get started. Second, the number of different “realities” you can find yourself in, or make for yourself, on the internet is quickly approaching infinity. For any interest you have, someone already probably has it, and is probably talking about it in some chat room. Thirdly, the internet has the ability to integrate multiple media (in the case of WoW—images and sound) to create a very realistic environment. Because of the ease with which one can now escape to the internet, more and more people are using it to escape the everyday world. Is this healthy? Are people better off spending so much of their lives devoted to these fake worlds? I really can’t answer this, and any opinions would be quite welcome, because, frankly, I am stuck. From a psychological viewpoint, spending hours each day on Facebook or WoW does seem a bit messed up, because it precludes dealing with the challenges of your real life. On a more philosophical note, however, one could argue that these multiple, realistic worlds presented by the internet allow people to choose which reality they prefer to live in.

As an example, think of the holodeck from Star Trek, which can perfectly imitate pretty much any environment, and any person, you want. If you had a choice, how much time would you spend in the holodeck each day?

Memes and cultural evolution

I once read a book by Daniel Dennett titled Freedom Evolves. It was a neat look by a biologist/philosopher on free will vs. determinism, and how the two can be reconciled by the idea that free will can evolve. One part that he talked about extensively that ties in well with what we’re reading in class is the idea of memes­. Memes are basically just cultural genes, for example: brushing your teeth, Ugg boots, marriage. Anything that can be passed on over generations like a gene, but is not genetically inherited, is a meme. So all of these fads we talk about, the things the coolhunters are trying so hard to keep track of, are memes.

I think this is a very interesting way to look at fads because it lets us talk about them in the context of natural selection and evolution. Because, really, fads evolve in the same way genes do. Remember pogs? I barely do. That is an example of a meme that was evolutionarily unfit, so it eventually went extinct. Religion, however, is one of the oldest and most thriving memes out there. Natural selection, or I guess I’d have to call it cultural selection in the case of memes, is constantly weeding out these fads—only the fit survive. The difference between natural and cultural selection is that with cultural selection, we get to play God. I believe that this makes memes infinitely more complex than genes, but in a paradoxical sense. If we are the ones who determine what meme is fit, what fad is cool, then how come we have such trouble anticipating what will come in style in a few years?

This is an interesting question, and I guess it hints at the tremendous complexity of the social networks that rule over what is cool. I remember taking an online personality test, and it asked me “Do you adopt your friends’ slang more than they adopt yours?” I have always thought that question was impossible to answer—because the adoption of new slang is much more complicated than that. Few people out there are pure sources of slang. It’s not as simple as “there are the makers of slang, and the users of slang”. Picking up a catchphrase, just like any other fad, even at just the level of the individual, is a complex interaction: you first appraise the catchphrase in your own mind: “Do I myself think this is cool?” You then appraise the person saying it: “Is this person cool, and can I trust that a catchphrase they use would be cool?” Finally, if you’re creative, you might ask yourself: “Can I make it even cooler?” and there you can become both an acceptor and a creator of slang.

I have to wonder to what extent “coolhunting” is a science and to what extent some people just get lucky when guessing what will be cool. After all, if thousands of advertisers and marketing firms are blindly guessing at what will be a hit, then statistically, at least one of them has got to be right. Do coolhunters really know more than the rest of us? Or are we all equally blind? In this world of fads that we ourselves created, it is possible that something emerged that is nothing like we expected, and nothing that we can hope to understand.

Ethics in animal research... and ice cream

I went to a meeting of the neuroscience club with my friend tonight. We were talking with a fairly famous researcher of Parkinson’s disease (whose name I shouldn’t give out because apparently she’s always getting death threats from PETA) who works with primates in her research. We had a discussion with her on the ethics of using animals in research; the discussion took place in Lakefront on Langdon, and the club bought us all ice cream to eat during the discussion.

The cool thing I found in my hunt tonight was the format of the discussion we had. Why Lakefront on Langdon? It is loud, crowded, and difficult to fit a group of 20 or so students (which is about how many we had). And the ice cream was an interesting (and nice) touch. Maybe this was the club’s way of “cooling” a relatively serious discussion. By adding the ice cream, and by holding it in a place that is generally reserved for less formal affairs, we were making the discussion less formal, and less serious. Does making it less serious make it cool as well? I would say it does. I mean, congress has the same sort of discussions that we had tonight, only the format is very different. We took advantage of the academic community. We were a group of young people interested in science as well as ethics, we had the opportunity to talk to a leading researcher in her field, and we weren’t stiffs about it. That’s pretty cool.

The emergence of viruses

I found the Duncan Watts reading “Epidemics and Failures” from Six Degrees to be very exciting. I read The Hot Zone this fall, and I was fascinated by it. I was taking a course at the time called Contemporary Population Problems for which we were required to write a paper on some population problem. Spurred on by my reading of The Hot Zone, and my wonder at how a disease like Ebola that has such horrible effects on the individual scale could have such little effect on the population as a whole, I decided to write my paper on infectious diseases, and under what conditions an infectious disease will be a population killer. This now appears pertinent to what we’re discussing in class, so I’d like to talk a little about one point I discovered while researching for my paper. I read an article written by R.M. Anderson titled “The Transmission Dynamics of Sexually Transmitted Diseases: The Behavioral Component” (I unfortunately cannot find the article online now—sorry, no link.) In the article, Anderson defines the basic reproductive rate R₀ as the “average number of secondary infections generated by one primary case in a susceptible population of defined density” per unit time. He worked with a model that assumed that R₀ is a product of the parameters β, D, and c, where β is the probability of transmission of the virus per partner per unit time, D is the duration of infectiousness, and c is the average number of sexual partners per unit time. Each one of these parameters must be looked at by examining the virus and the population it affects—a population in which safer sex is practiced, or a population in which a higher proportion of people are monogamous, will obviously be less affected by the virus than other populations would be. I’m assuming we’re going to have to take this somewhere in class pertaining to cultural viruses or memes or fads or something. How does the Anderson article apply? First of all, it brings up the interesting idea that we can actually quantify these dynamics. Second of all, on a more conceptual note, it says that we have to look at the emergence of a cultural fad in the context of the state of society at the time. So this kind of brings us back to the idea of the kairos, as mentioned in the Blogging as a Social Action reading. We can only understand why a cultural fad emerges if we understand the interaction of the fad with the specific culture.