Four years later

Long time readers will know that many, many QWERTYs have been shed on this blog over the desiccated corpse of my love life. A lot of the posts under my personal tag, and certainly most of the very long ones, have had something to do with it. I needed an outlet to introspect, and to put things in public that I used to keep to myself. I’m sure the topic isn’t as interesting to most people as it is to me, but I find my long-term emotional development extremely fascinating. It’s too bad I only started writing in 2010, but that’s neither here nor there. Other involved parties weren’t exactly thrilled with all the details that I shared, but I’ve learned my lesson on that.

        That’s important, because I’ve finally entered another relationship.

        It’s been a month and a half so far, and literally everything has been great. I have to laugh at junior high relationships, though - I figured it was a real accomplishment to make it past a month! I mean, surely thirty whole days is plenty of time to ruin the whole thing. This time, it took nearly a month for me to understand that, yes, that conversation actually happened and she did in fact say yes. Ironically, I’m probably more surprised about this turn of events than anyone else. Most people who’ve known about our friendship thus far figured it was going to happen sooner or later.

The story

        This isn’t actually a case of complete stupidity on my part. You see, after we went to PAX East (note the seemingly-outgoing individual) I got pretty interested. I was told it was just going to be friends for now (read as: “until further notice”, aka indefinitely), and I resolved myself to be okay with that. Surely I could manage to be friends with a single girl without developing romantic feelings for her. I mostly did! When I figured I was getting a bit past friendly, I’d talk to her about it honestly, so she could shoot me down (though the opposite outcome would be a nice surprise) and we could keep up with business as usual. There was lighthearted ribbing about my being a lifelong bachelor every time I inhaled my food twice as fast as everyone else. But I always got the distinct impression that she wasn’t gong to change that. She contends she chose her words carefully to avoid saying that, but I guess I think about things too much for that to work.

        So I got annoyed when basically everyone gave me advice to take the initiative, asking me when I was going to make a move, and so on. Granted, I’ve come a long way for my days of telling everyone they “don’t get it”. So I did tell them, each time, that it wasn’t going to happen and that was okay. Which is ironic, in retrospect, because in early December I had just finished dealing with what I hoped was the last stupid anxiety that was making it hard for me to see her as only a friend. Then, out of the blue, our usual goodbye hug was supplemented with a kiss on the cheek. I asked why, and the answer was “because I wasn’t brave enough to really kiss you”.

        Well, in that case!

Obligatory cheese

        It was surprisingly easy to let myself start falling in love again. I initially worried that it might take a while to completely change the nature of our relationship. After all, I’d spent months trying to avoid any untoward interest. As it turns out, there’s a lot of overlap between being very close as friends and dating. Thankfully, I only spent about two weeks of stopping myself mid-thought to ask “is it okay to think that? oh yeah, we said we were dating now! okay, carry on, brain”. And, dear reader, I’m happy. I even accidentally accomplished a goal for 2012 that I didn’t have the guts to commit to! I wrote my first love letter in more than four years. That’s not for your eyes, though. As for what I’ll say in public, here’s the story I recently added to the Facebook event commemorating our change of relationship status:

    "It’s hard to know where to start with this kind of blurb. Maybe the fact that we’re two out of a very small group of people specializing in linguistics within cognitive science. Maybe our shared interest in anime, or video games, or books. Maybe it should be about how a pair of introverts always enjoy each other’s quiet company. Maybe it’s an afternoon spent reading in the sun beside a beautiful lake and a beautiful girl. Maybe it starts with a familiar hand, raised in familiar excitement, in one lecture after another. Or maybe it’s something a bit less romantic, like a nosy classmate telling you never to wear white sock with jeans - in fact, never wear white socks at all.

    Let it not be said that men can’t change; I now own several pairs of non-white socks.“

        Meanwhile, I managed to prod and nag my way into a few nice pictures of us together, which I’ve screencapped for the sake of the album description.

Moving forward, looking back

        I’ll be honest: it’s weird to be starting from scratch with someone new. I’ve literally never done that before. It’s weird to be in a healthy relationship. It’s weird to receive a genuine compliment from someone I have great affection for. It’s weird to not be scared to speak my mind, and it’s weird to want to smile so often, and that she borrows books from my shelf and actually likes them, and that we curl up on the couch to play videos games we both like, and that we can study together, and the list goes on and on. It’s weird to spend so much of my time with one person, and not have the slightest desire for anyone else’s company. I keep finding out how awesome weirdness is.

        It’s a big change, one that comes after years of trying to move on. Four years of being single, all told. Still, it makes these moments of "so this is what a relationship is supposed to be like” that much more powerful. Turns out that desiccated corpse had plenty of life left in it after all.

        I hope I haven’t gone on too long. I just want to do the story justice. I have a number of dedicated readers that I don’t speak to on a regular basis, and if you’ve read even half of what I’ve written in the past, you really deserve to know how well things are going these days. I’m excited, and I hope that makes you happy, too.

Matthew Darling: Bachelor of Cognitive Science

A year ago, the Cognitive Science department at Carleton took a vote on whether the primary name for our degrees should be changed from Bachelor of Arts: Major in Cognitive Science: Specialization in X to Bachelor of Cognitive Science: Major in X. I voted in favour, and so did most other people apparently, because earlier this year the BCog became an option for us. I’ve finally gotten around to making the change, and I’m pretty happy about it, I think. The requirements for me to graduate didn’t really change from what they were when I first came to Carleton and the current calendar, so it was an easy decision from that point of view.

The important change is from Bachelor of Arts to BCog. My first thought was “well, nobody’s going to know what to think about this weird degree only offered at Carleton”. Then I remembered that you can often get a BA in psychology, or a BS in psychology. They’re probably quite similar degrees, but odds are there’s one or two differences in required credits. Cognitive science gets a free pass on some of the BA staples like “breadth requirements”, so from that perspective it makes sense to make us separate. But the other aspect is that if I’m BCog with a major in Linguistics, it acknowledges that I’m probably only a few credits away from a BA degree in Linguistics. I can’t necessarily say whether my degree is primarily focused on linguistics or on cognitive science, so I can’t speak on whether “majoring in cognitive science” is better than “majoring in linguistics”. But the specialization thing has always been really confusing, and I’m glad to be rid of that.

It’s really weird to think I’m not far away from graduating. Most of my prerequisites in other areas were taken care of last year, but I had to do logic and philosophy of science this year too. This semester, I’ve got one required cognitive science course and three linguistics courses. Next year will be pretty similar, though at some point I’ll be doing an AI course. Over the summer, assuming I’m at Carleton, I’ll be doing an independent study course to learn statistics the hard way via R rather than the typical “stats for psych students who are scared of math”.

I say all of this because it’s equal parts exciting and scary. As it turns out, I’ve learned stuff over the last three years. Still, I haven’t decided on what I’m going to do after I graduate. This summer is going to be important, I think, for deciding what I’ll do when I graduate. Still figuring that out, though. I’ve been told I could potentially travel to work at another university over the summer, but the trouble with that is I don’t know what my options are. Or if my recommendations are good enough to be accepted by professors I’ve never met.

Anyway, I’ve got some meetings to arrange before I start making decisions. Though, of course, I’ll be screwed if I take too long on that. But then homework. And other things that need to be done. Blaaarg.

[please direct any funny jokes about my bachelor-tude to your usual communication channels, or comment so everyone can chuckle]

Ebook of my blog archive

I love Pocket, especially now that it can read articles out loud. However, it doesn’t do so well with code samples, which are like prose but can’t be reformatted. I still put programming articles away in Pocket, but I can never read them on my phone like prose articles. I figured that my Kindle Keyboard might handle them a bit better, so I started looking for ways to pull articles out of Pocket to make a nice little ebook out of them.

        Calibre’s old Read It Later recipe doesn’t seem to do anything except pull your most recent articles, so that doesn’t allow me to choose specific ones (it may or may not allow filtering by tag in the future). As it turns out, crofflr works quite well if I’m willing to tag articles I want to send (among supporting other services)… but I’m super lazy and I really like Pocket as a dumping ground rather than a structured thing I maintain.

        Somehow, eventually, I discovered Readlists which seems more or less perfect. I realize that it takes more effort than just tagging articles, but I kind of like that I can keep the list forever and share it with others. Maybe I’ll bundle up a bunch of Emacs Lisp articles, put them in a readlist, and then share it. If the articles were automatically pulled out, there’s less control over the theme of the resulting ebook - I could get an article about OOP, another about Emacs Lisp, and another about Haskell all after each other. Anyway, if you’ve ever wanted to make a plain-text ebook out of blog articles, Readlists is perfect for the job.

        Getting to the point, I’ve put all my posts tagged with “recap” into readlists. You can download them, if you like. Rediscover things I will in retrospect decide I shouldn’t have written! Follow my journey from the last year of high school to the present! Or just get inspired to give your own blog the same treatment. It works quite well, for something that’s free and takes just a few minutes.

• 2010: http://readlists.com/504fefd7
• 2011: http://readlists.com/562ec99d
• 2012: http://readlists.com/556cc6f0

        A note: I’m going to write a few more posts about 2012, and I’ll add them to the Readlist when I do. I figure, it’s about 2012 the year, not about things I wrote in 2012. Spoiler: 2012 was a pretty good year.

Stuff I got for Christmas

So, for the past couple of years we’ve done this Christmas loot post thing. I planned on keeping it going this year, and I’m going to, even if it means posting about Christmas in the middle of January. I actually have two thousand words written about my holidays, but I’m not sure I want to inflict that upon the world. So I’ve extracted the loot table from that other post for your viewing pleasure.

Gifts received:

• A rather nice lap desk
• A bowl that is both round and wide for eating a mountain of cereal
• Price-split on a 23", rotation-capable monitor
• Paper Mario: Sticker Star (3DS)
• Ico & Shadow of the Colossus Collection (PS3)
• New winter hat with ear flaps
• Razer Onza Tournament Edition controller
• A bunch of cord management things as stocking stuffers
• From my maternal grandparents, at my request: $100
• A second pair of amazing thermal socks (the first of which I asked to have early)
• A Freekey

Gifts given:

• To Dad: Raspberry Pi and assorted extras, plus time required to turn it into a home theatre PC
• To my brother: A D&D book (plus my recommendation to parents and others on what to give him)
• To Mom: A small Bluetooth keyboard with a stand for tablets, hopefully allowing her Nexus 7 to replace her aging netbook
• For Mom’s birthday: A Kobo Glo
• For a friend in PEI: one Digispark and some assorted extras
• For M-: An external battery for charging her phone (settled on at Sacha Chua’s recommendation after I initially tried to build a MintyBoost)
• For my AP English teacher: A letter expressing my gratitude and how well things have gone for me at university thanks to all she taught us

Anyway, I may or may not inflict the full story of my winter break on the world. If I do, I won’t blame you for skipping it. If you wrote a 2000 word blog post about how you spent your break writing a 13 page essay (which was, ideally, going to be 20 pages) and submitted it just before midnight (by your supervisor’s time zone) and otherwise did boring family junk… I’d probably skip it too. I mean, maybe you can make that really interesting to read! But I don’t think I did. I might try to break it up into parts, but then I’m just making the boredom bite-sized. Decisions, decisions…

What should we count as part of the mind?

[This is an essay I put together for a philosophy of mind class. It’s probably not a good philosophy essay, but it’s still a philosophy essay - you’ve been warned. It’s sort of esoteric, but I kind of like it. This was written at the end of our first (of three) units, which was about identifying what exactly the mind is, what it would mean to have one, and so on. We were given a specific structure to follow: first section describe the author’s views, second section give your criticisms, and third section try to modify the author’s idea to be immune to your criticism. I’ve kept the same format because the transition between the seconds is just impossible to smooth out.

The topic I was responding to was “the mark of the mental” - trying to identify what belongs in the mind, and what doesn’t. Descartian dualists like this question because they want to know what’s part of the mind, and what’s just part of the physical body. But it’s also something that would allow us to identify when a creature has a mind. If we decide that expressing sadness is only possible with real cognition, and a computer program expresses something we’d call sadness - we have to say that computer is conscious.

Katalin Farkas proposed that the only things that are part of the mind are those we can introspect on (and that no one else can introspect on). So your belief that this essay is going to be boring is a mental phenomenon, because no one else can introspect on that. But can you introspect without verbal thought? Can bees introspect? You’ll see what I have to say about that in section two.]

Part 1 - Katalin Farkas and the Mark of the Mental

        In The Subject’s Point of View, Katalin Farkas sets out to propose a solution to the problem of the mark of the mental – one unifying feature for all mental phenomena. Her answer relies on the special access introspection grants us to our mental phenomena. In short, the things that we can know through introspection (and that no one else can know about us through introspection) comprise the contents of our minds. Farkas extends this to include whole categories, rather than individual instances of them – for example, all beliefs are mental. This includes beliefs we may not consciously be able to reflect on, or beliefs held by beings unable to introspect (such as animals). Following this train of thought, Farkas proposes that anything identified as a mental feature of human minds can be used to identify non-human minds – even those with no powers of introspection.

        Farkas explicitly distances herself from claims that introspection is infallible (Farkas, 24), and accepts so-called standing states as part of the mind because they are accessible to introspection (Farkas, 43-44). The fact that someone might receive incorrect or incomplete knowledge of their mind, in theory, has no effect on her proposal. It’s intended as a tool for identifying things that are mental, special and separate in some way from things that are “merely bodily” (Farkas, 35). Its role as an epistemic tool for acquiring knowledge is an entirely separate issue, so the difficulties present for introspective knowledge are largely irrelevant to the mark of the mental.

        Farkas also acknowledges a necessarily human perspective on our philosophy of the mind. However, her view is that once we have identified which sorts of things are mental in humans, we can look for them in other creatures to determine whether they have a mind (Farkas, 44). This mind may be lesser in some way than our own minds, but provided it exhibits some of the things we discover through introspection, it qualifies as a mind. How we might investigate these mental processes in creatures incapable of introspection, or at least incapable of communicating with human language, is up for debate.

        The mark of the mental is intended to capture a “common sense” conception of the mind (Crane, 2), which would generally extend to family pets and other animals. We’re likely to say that our pets desire certain things, or have basic sorts of beliefs; and so Farkas provides a mark of the mental that accommodates these intuitive judgements on what has a mind, and what does not. This extends the possession of a mind to creatures with weaker abilities than those Farkas possesses herself. However, one thing that Farkas fails to consider is minds that have greater abilities than her own – some of the things that are a part of their minds may be entirely outside what we can introspect. This is the objection I intend to develop in the next section.

Part 2 - Criticisms of Farkas

        One doesn’t have to look far for examples of minds with abilities outside those considered by Farkas. Animals may have mental capabilities completely foreign to the human mind – one example is spatial memory in honeybees, an ability which allows them to solve the infamously difficult “travelling salesman problem” (Lihoreau, Chittka, & Raine, 2010). Even closer to home, autism advocate Temple Grandin frequently speaks about the ways in which the autistic mind differs from the “neurotypical” mind, such as their ability to think visually rather than verbally (Grandin, 2010). Bees, given the complexity of their behaviour, surely have some sort of mind. And autistic people, unquestionably, have minds. Yet the character of these minds, the nature of their thoughts and desires, even the nature of their introspection, is likely so different as to require a wholly separate vocabulary. The systems developed in philosophy of mind are, by and large, developed by what Grandin calls “verbal minds.” Farkas proposes that introspection should serve as the mark of the mental for all minds, without considering different types of minds – all she considers is weaker minds of the same sort the “average” human has.

        Farkas requires that for something to be a mental feature, it must be “available to conscious acts of reflection” (Farkas, 44). The way that Farkas characterizes reflection, however, has more bias than just the anthropocentric one she admits. Introspection in a verbal human mind could be entirely different from the introspection of an imagistic mind. An imagistic mind may not even be capable of introspecting things that have no visual component, which comprises a large portion of what Farkas considers as part of the “mental realm”, such as beliefs and attitudes (Farkas, 22). Considering non-verbal variants of “the mental realm” raises the criteria for a single, unifying mark of the mental. Not only could some mental features unique to imagistic minds be “unconscious”, as Farkas considers in sections 2.2 and 2.3, but fundamentally inaccessible by introspection. The default definition of introspection relies on linguistic terms. Non-verbal mental features would escape a classification of “mental” which relies on this definition.

Part 3 - Saving Farkas?

        A reply to this objection that preserves introspection as the mark of the mental is difficult, as it deals directly with the limits of the term “introspection.” If introspection can’t be used to access the entire possible scope of the mental realm, then it couldn’t serve as the mark of the mental. If the term “introspection” can be extended to include the thought processes of non-verbal minds, then it would still serve as an appropriate mark of the mental. The number of ways in which it would have to be extended appears limitless, however – there are likely more possible sorts of minds than we can even imagine.

        Not only that, but as someone with a distinctly verbal mind, I’m likely unqualified to speculate on the nature of imagistic minds. Not to mention minds that think in terms of space-time, or scents and hormones, or subtle interactions of taste and touch, or any number of things I can’t even begin to conceive. However, the general principle of extending the term “introspection” remains the same: Consider what is meant by verbal introspection, and then look for a way to define it in a new modality. The challenge of this defence is not only conceptualizing a different sort of mind, but how to properly explain and illustrate it for others. We may find, in the end, that we’ve come so far from the original meaning of “introspect” that a whole new word is required, which could then safely serve as the mark of the mental in the system Farkas proposes.

Works cited

Crane, Tim. (2010). Elements of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Farkas, Katalin. (2008). Subject’s Point of View, The. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 24 October 2011, from http://lib.myilibrary.com.proxy.library.carleton.ca?ID=182555

Grandin, T. (2010, February). Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds [Video file]. Retrieved from: http://www.ted.com/talks/temple_grandin_the_world_needs_all_kinds_of_minds.html

Lihoreau, M., Chittka, L., & Raine, N. E. (2010). Travel Optimization by Foraging Bumblebees through Readjustments of Traplines after Discovery of New Feeding Locations. The American Naturalist , 176 (6), 744-757.

Norms of digital communication

I have this really, terrible habit of writing incredibly long e-mails. They’re as long, if not longer, than my blog posts. This is something I’ve done since junior high, and I’ve essentially never gotten the hang of writing short e-mails. I apologize for the length, I edit to remove junk, and they still wind up being huge. To the recipients of these e-mails over the years: I’m sorry! It just happens!

        I was trying to come up with an excuse, and I had a really brilliant thought: I write e-mails the same way I write letters. I sit down, I try to fill them with everything I wanted to say, and then I send them off with the intention of taking a bit of time before the next reply. It used to be that I didn’t have notifications for new e-mails, so it was something I only checked every once in a while - so it feels like I need to have all the information there in the original message. Even now that I have notifications, and I can get updates to an e-mail thread in Gmail without even refreshing the page, I still have a hard time thinking of e-mails as a fast form of communication.

        Instant messaging feels much more free, like a slowed down version of a face-to-face conversation. I speak in sentences rather than paragraphs. I like being able to take the time to figure out what I’m going to say; I’ve never felt comfortable saying “hang on, I need to stare into space for a few minutes while I decide how to answer your question so I don’t stick my foot in my mouth”. I… really don’t think people do that, even though an internet advice article said it was okay. At any rate, I do a lot of instant messaging and I’ve always loved having quick, easy contact with my friends while I’m doing other things on my computer. For a while, I guarantee I had more IM conversations than I spoke to people in person.

On Offline Messages and Photo Albums

        What I’m getting at is, there seem to be analogues between how I treat digital communication and more primitive things. The interesting bit is how much the ability to send offline messages changes the situation. I suppose they’re like the phone call, if IM is like a conversation face-to-face, because it doesn’t require both people to be in the same place (but they do require you to be around at the same time; I can’t think of a better analogy, if only because nobody checks their voice mail anymore) Calling someone on the phone to tell them something you just thought of seems so… primitive by comparison. They have to be available at the exact same time you are, and you’re potentially disrupting something because there’s no way to know what they’re doing at the moment. Offline messages can be sent whenever you want, and read whenever the recipient wants, and they don’t carry the long-form expectations I personally have of e-mail. If nothing else, I don’t need to think of a title for the message, which is always a challenge with e-mails.

        When Facebook chat was merely IM, I didn’t see the point of it - I rarely spend more than a few minutes at a time on Facebook, and I only visit a few times per day. I’d get ambushed by people I didn’t really talk to when I logged in, and it sucked because I got tired of being a jerk and saying every time “sorry, don’t have time to talk right now”. But now that they’ve merged the chat with messages, it’s actually become my primary method for IM. To the best of my knowledge, AIM and Xfire don’t support offline messages, and those are where I have most of my other conversations. When I have a link or something IM-worthy, I can send it over Facebook and the conversation tends to stay there rather than moving somewhere there’s less surveillance. Not to mention the people who don’t feel the need for dedicated IM now that they have Facebook messaging, which is a totally valid option, just like not everyone needs to use IRC.

        The one downside to offline messages on Facebook are that they’ve hidden away little artifacts that used to land on people’s walls. The other day, a friend of mine discovered Facebook’s “view friendship” feature - with the Timeline update, you can give your friendship a cover photo, provide a picture and a story for the first time you met, and it’s like the best photo album ever. There’s all these little pieces of conversations we were having that continued after the other person had logged out, full of references to games we’ve long forgotten about playing and jokes that are still pretty funny. But it’s all old stuff, from before Facebook messages existed as an alternative. And when I look at the page for my friendships with some other people, the amount of activity just doesn’t reflect how close we are. That’s perfectly fine right now, but it’s a missed opportunity for reminiscing in a few years.

Barely-qualifies-as-one Conclusion

        Anyway, I’m not sure there’s some grand thesis for me to argue for here. I just thought it was really illuminating to think about the influences of older forms of communication, and the expectations and norms that go with them, on more modern ones. It’s a relationship that goes both ways, too, though I’m mostly happy to discard phone calls, sending letters, and physical photo albums as entirely inferior to the alternatives. But I can say for sure that I’ve started to really appreciate actually spending time with people, in a way I’m not sure I would if I expected all interaction to be face-to-face. IM isn’t exclusive, though after a certain point it’s hard to manage a lot of high-volume conversations at once. But hanging out with someone is, and that means there’s nothing they’d rather do with that time than spend it with you, and I think that’s important.