The behavior of the taxon search field on SEINet has been a source of irritation for a while. The per-usage irritation is very low, but as a web page that I use frequently it does add up. Basically, the behavior I desire from the taxon search field is: I type a taxon name, I hit enter, records are queried by the taxon name I typed. The actual behavior of the taxon search field is fairly complicated and context-dependent. There is only one consistent way to execute a query based on the text you’ve typed into it: type the taxon name, left-click with the cursor outside the field, and hit ‘enter’. This is inconvenient because it forces frequent keyboard to mouse (well, trackball) transitions. With the keyboard alone, typing the taxon name and hitting ‘enter’, typing the taxon name and hitting ‘enter’ twice, and typing the taxon name and hitting ‘escape’ then ‘enter’ all work some but not all of the time.

Tyler Compton pointed me towards the solution to this, which I write here for my own future reference, since this blog happens to be a convenient place to simply store text in a way that is consistently findable across devices. In Chrome: install the ‘Codify’ extension, which allows you to enter a bit of JavaScript that the browser will run whenever a specified URL is loaded; enter the following for URLs that contain ‘swbiodiversity.org’:

const listItem = document.getElementById("taxa");
const newItem = document.createElement("taxa");
newItem.innerHTML = '<input type="text" id="taxa" size="60" name="taxa" value="" title="">';
listItem.parentNode.replaceChild(newItem, listItem);

On the to-do list: doing the same for taxon search fields on iNaturalist… which I’m expecting will be more difficult.

If you try to think through what’s going on in the famous double slit experiments, the wave / particle duality is the mental puzzle that’s made its way into the scientifically curious parts of pop culture. Now, just think of light as a particle. This is supposed to be the easy part–we can deal with light as a particle or light as a wave but balk at it being both. So, imagine light as a particle with two slits before it. Odds are, you have an image in your mind. I certainly do, as I write this. In this mental image, what is it we are imagining illuminates light?

A mental image is, I think, a simulation of visual experience. During our ordinary visual experiences, it is obvious that there is an observer. Although we don’t usually think about it, if we know a little about vision we recall that the visual experience relies on light being emitted in over here, bouncing off of or being absorbed by objects, ending up in our retinas, and so on. In mental images, this is less obvious. As a simulation of an experience that has these features, a mental image implies a mental observer, mental light, and mental retinas, but the image seems to simply appear, floating freely and unencumbered, on the mental stage. We can put our implied mental retina on stage as a new character if we like, but this is an unconvincing sock puppet. The implied mental retina is part of the stage, not a character on it.

In our ordinary uses of visualization, there’s no obvious utility in trying to keep track of the stage on which mental images appear, although it can be an entertaining mental exercise in its own right. If we watch our imagined particle of light speeding towards a slit, though, we should probably pause to consider what an absurd and self-contradictory image this is. If we cast visualization as a tool rather than a stage, this is like trying to use a hammer as a hose. We should be a little surprised if it works at all, rather than puzzled when it works poorly.

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I don’t know if this line of thinking leads to any insight into physics. I doubt it does. It might be useful as a prompt to consider the relationship between our representations and the phenomena represented. We should not assume that the two are compatible, and it is not obvious what outcome we should expect when they aren’t. What kind of relationship between representation and reality should we expect when the mental representation of a phenomenon is in direct conflict with what we know of the phenomenon? Does our understanding break down completely? How much of it breaks down? Does our awareness of the representation’s deficiencies allow us to correct for them?

Douglas Hofstadter (Gödel, Escher, Bach, p. 99), discussing whether mathematics would be the same in all conceivable worlds, writes: “[I]t seems that if we want to be able to communicate at all, we have to adopt some common base, and it pretty well has to include logic.”

I sympathize with Hofstadter, here. A conceivable world seems to imply that we can hold it in our minds and make some sense of it. However, this sentence does not recommend Hofstadter as a careful observer of human communication.

Or, if we hold Hofstadter’s viewpoint steady and see human communication in its light, we might conclude that the daily experience of the average human is to live in an inconceivable world. That’s an interesting idea to ponder, at least for as long as one can take it seriously rather than succumbing to a cynical, but superficial and uninteresting, interpretation. It is hard to doubt that we hold at least a little of the world in our minds. How much? What’s the SI unit for conceivability? Does a feeling of understanding use the same units, or another?

As a narrower and more straightforward subset we might look at dreams, which routinely violate any standard of coherence one might apply. Nonetheless, they occupy our consciousnesses for a substantial portion of every night and, although some of the content of dreams seems to defy translation into language, we don’t find ourselves incapable of communicating about dreams.

We could also rephrase Hofstadter’s point more narrowly. The phrase “communicate at all” might be a bit of hyperbole. I think he is making as an unstated assumption that we wish our communications on mathematics, conceivable worlds, and so forth to rise to some standard of clarity and comprehensibility. If we make the unstated assumption more explicit, we might say, “If we want to have conversations that are logical, we have to adopt some common base that includes logic.” A true enough statement, and perhaps not as vacuously tautological as it first appears.

Random thought of the day:

“Is a social construct” is a social construct.