Theater of consciousness

In the 17th century Rene Descartes assumed that the pineal gland near the center of the human brain is the "principal seat of the soul." In his book Passions of the Soul, he split man into a body and a soul and emphasized that the soul is joined to the whole body by the small pineal gland through which the spirits in the brain's anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities.” Link1.  Link2. 

The pineal gland played an important role in Descartes’ account because it was involved in sensation, imagination, memory and the causation of bodily movements. The rest of the body was machine-like. However, he said very little about how the soul interacted with the body. In a different book Descartes expressed the view that everything in the mind must be conscious. In other words, there is no subconscious processing.

Descartes’ theory or model is rejected by most modern philosophers. The prevailing theories of mind are “theater models” of consciousness.

Bernard J. Baars’ In the Theater of Consciousness describes the “theater model” of consciousness as follows.

“The brain seems to show a distributed style of functioning, in which the real work is done by millions of specialized systems without detailed instructions from some command center. By analogy, the human body also works cell by cell; unlike an automobile, it has no central engine that does all the work. Each cell is specialized for a particular function according to instructions encoded in its DNA, its history, and chemical influences from other tissue. And the cell is of course the body’s basic unit of organization. In its own way the human brain shows the same distributed style of organization.

“The theater metaphor is useful because a great array of evidence indicates that consciousness creates access to many knowledge sources in the brain. And yet only a fraction of the brain seems to directly support conscious experience. This consciousness network seems to include the sensory areas of the cortex, perhaps some surrounding areas, and a few subcortical structures; together they provide the stage for the unconscious audience in the rest of the brain. Consciousness seems to the publicity organ of the brain. It is a faculty for accessing, disseminating, and exchanging information, and for exercising global coordination and control” (6-7).

Intuit will withdraw from IRS Free File program

Intuit, maker of TurboTax, will cease participating in the IRS Free File program (CNBC article). People will still be able to file free using TurboTax, since there is a free version of TurboTax outside the IRS's Free File program. CNBC says, "In the last tax season, Intuit delivered 17 million free tax filings, including roughly 3 million through IRS Free File, according to the company." So 14 million returns, about 82% of the 17 million, were filed using TurboTax's free version outside the IRS's Free File program anyway. The 82% is instead 90% for the latest eight tax seasons. 

Neither the CNBC article nor Intuit's blog mention ProPublica's smear campaign conducted between about April 2019 and February 2020. Regardless, I bet the smearing had something to do with Intuit's decision. I wrote several blog posts about the smearing. At least it gave Intuit a lot of bad publicity and spurred a government investigation (link).

The Intuit blog mentions the limitations and restraints of the IRS Free File program, but does not say what they are. Most or all of these limitations and restraints are ones imposed by the IRS. Very likely one is the IRS's no advertising mandate. Another likely one is the "dead-end street" problem within the IRS Free File program. A user can start using one of the free software offerings and later find out he or she does not qualify due to some obscure criteria. In other words, the software leads the user to a "dead-end street,"  and the user has wasted a lot of time. 

USPS pension Ponzi scheme

This Reason magazine article is about the United States Postal Service's pension system. Its pension system has a $50 billion unfunded liability. That's an "accounting term for the gap between what actuaries expect the system to owe current workers and retirees for the rest of their lives and the revenue it's expected to take in from paychecks and investment earnings." 

If a private sector company's pension plan has a severe unfunded liability, the federal government's PBGC will intervene and shut it down. The federal government is not likewise intervening on the USPS pension plan. This shows the federal government's hypocrisy and a double standard. 

The article also refers to the $70 billion unfunded liability of the USPS fund for paying health care expenses for retired workers. There is no PBGC counterpart for private sector plans that pay such expenses. Private sector companies are not required to prefund health care expenses for retired workers mainly because they could, theoretically, eliminate those benefits at any time. If a private company terminates a plan that pays retiree health care benefits, it doesn't make a new gaping hole because the payments it makes are small. Nearly all retirees get most of their health care expenses paid for by Medicare, Medicare Advantage, Medicaid and Medicare supplement insurance. In other words, there are alternative resources. However, there is no different resource for retiree USPS health care expenses. The federal government still has the funding obligation. The only way the federal government could get rid of its liability for USPS retirees is to stop paying their health care expenses. Rest assured that won't happen.

Nervous system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nervous_system

I post this now because I believe it is relevant to my prior post, What is consciousness for? The sensory or afferent nerves are involved in all awareness. The motor or efferent nerves are involved in all volitional bodily movement -- of legs, arms, hands, fingers, head, jaws, etc. So the nervous system links awareness/consciousness and volitional movement. The article 'What is consciousness for?' also links consciousness and volitional movement, but makes only one brief mention of the nervous system.

Very interesting.

What is consciousness for?

'What is consciousness for?' is the title of this excellent article about consciousness and volition. The entire article is there. The abstract follows.

"The answer to the title question is, in a word, volition. Our hypothesis is that the ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible. All conscious processes exist to subserve that ultimate function. Thus, we believe that all conscious organisms possess at least some volitional capability. Consciousness makes volitional attention possible; volitional attention, in turn, makes volitional movement possible. There is, as far as we know, no valid theoretical argument or convincing empirical evidence that consciousness itself has any direct causal efficacy other than volition. Consciousness, via volitional action, increases the likelihood that an organism will direct its attention, and ultimately its movements, to whatever is most important for its survival and reproduction."

New Alzheimer drug

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved use of a new drug -- Aduhelm or aducanumab developed by Biogen -- for treating Alzheimer’s disease. 

Three medical experts on an FDA advisory panel resigned from the panel after deciding the drug's effectiveness has not been sufficiently shown or that the drug will do more harm than good. Link.

The financial effect of the approval on Medicare and Medicare Advantage programs and beneficiaries will be huge. Only time will tell how huge. Medicare’s long-standing practice is to make coverage determinations without taking cost into consideration.  This article from the Kaiser Foundation puts an expected price tag on the drug of $56,000 per patient per year. Since the drug will be physician-administered, it will be covered by Medicare Part B, for which Medicare covers 80% of the cost and the patient 20% (up to the annual out-of-pocket maximum of $7,550 for in-network care and $11,300 for combined in-network and out-of-network care in 2021).

"[T]he drug’s approval could trigger hundreds of billions of dollars of new government spending, all without a vote in Congress or indeed any public debate over the drug’s value." "If even one-third of the estimated 6 million people with Alzheimer’s in the United States receives the new treatment, health-care spending could swell by $112 billion annually." (The Atlantic).

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are sacred cows to politicians and more than half of federal government spending. 

Philosophy and science compared

The book The Neural Basis of Free Will by Michael Tse gives an interesting comparison of philosophy and science in the Introduction.

Why has philosophy been unable to make substantial progress in solving the mind-body problem? The root of philosophy’s impasse is that its main tools – logical argumentation, “thought experiments,” “intuition pumps,” and persuasion – are inadequate to the task. By themselves, these tools are incapable of settling basic debates between scholars with conflicting views rooted in incompatible starting assumptions. Logic can derive conclusions for axioms, but it cannot derive axioms, or, for that matter, the assumptions, biases, hunches, or intuitions that seem to underlie so much philosophical argumentation. With no objective way to settle a conflict, it is rare to find a philosopher who has written, “I was wrong and my rivals were right.” Without an objective arbiter of truth such as that imposed by falsifiability, why would a philosopher ever concede, especially when doing so might diminish career standing? A field cannot move forward to the next stage of a problem, and acknowledge that what was once a problem has now been solved, unless those on the wrong side of the debate are forced to concede they were wrong. Science, in contrast, has nature to falsify theories and models, and the scientific method of experimentation and model-correction/abandonment that forces scientists to stand on the shoulders of giants. Whether or not scientists concede they were wrong does not matter in the long run. Nature forces their concessions. Scientists who dogmatically maintain a position despite concrete evidence to the contrary are left behind. Whereas philosophers receive acclaim for occupying a position and defending it persuasively, scientists receive acclaim for making new discoveries that push the field to modify existing models of reality. Science makes astonishing progress year after year, whereas philosophy makes slow progress over centuries – at least concerning mental causation, free will and the mind-body problem – because debates can be objectively settled in science but cannot be objectively settled in philosophy.

One could quibble with some of this, but I believe it is largely accurate. Some might take this to discredit philosophy, but such a critic has to rely on some philosophy when science has no good answer to some questions.