Brains and digital computers go about computation in very different ways—so different, in fact, that it’s less than clear to me that “computation” (in the Turing machine sense) is what brains are really doing. This probably accounts for why trivial brain tasks like detecting speech, understanding natural language, and recognizing faces are at present next to impossible to do well in software, as anyone who has tried to use their mobile phone’s voice activated dialing can attest.

Researchers at Stanford are onto this:

Now Kwabena Boahen, a neuroengineer at Stanford University, is planning the most ambitious neuromorphic project to date: creating a silicon model of the cortex. The first-generation design will be composed of a circuit board with 16 chips, each containing a 256-by-256 array of silicon neurons. Groups of neurons can be set to have different electrical properties, mimicking different types of cells in the cortex. Engineers can also program specific connections between the cells to model the architecture in different parts of the cortex.

Substance dualists should be happy about this kind of research for two reasons. First, if it works, it is likely to yield new tools of heretofore unheard-of levels of aweXomeness. For instance, right now Google image search offers up pictures of trees based on the close association of a web image with text that talks about generally arboreal things. With massively scalable brain-like image recognition, maybe we’ll be able to do web-scale searches for pictures of, say, tire swings with foreboding skies in the background. But then physicalists get jazzed about this kind of thing too.

The real payoff for substance dualists is in the utterly faithful simulation of the human brain. That this will be done someday is a certainty. And theories of quantum consciousness notwithstanding, the brain is a machine—an elaborate configuration of matter scrupulously obeying the laws of physics. If substance dualism is true, then the silicon brain should be qualitatively different from the human one. It might be able to associate visual images with one another, find subtle patterns in search spaces, and carry on a spoken conversation with a person, but we would predict that its soulless-ness will in some way be obvious. Kind of like when Dr. Kurnow asked SAL in 2010 how she felt about being powered down: the question made no sense to her. Enfleshed souls tend to be a bit touchier about that one.

I have long thought it a key aspect of the Classical school that we always have our apologetic money on the table. Hence if the brain is the organ of the mind, then as technology allows, let’s build a replica brain and have a talk with it. If it’s indistinguishable from a person, I lose a line of evidence. If, the better and better we get at making silicon brains, the more and more obvious it is that these things are not human, then we need to have a nice, long talk about just how silly it is for me to believe that I have an immaterial component that is essential to my identity.

The metaphysics of the human person notwithstanding, it just wouldn’t fun if they didn’t create some nice, new bioethical dilemmas while they were at it:

Engineers ultimately hope to use the information generated by the silicon cortex in a variety of ways–to build better neural prosthesis, for example. “The real-time aspect of this technology allows us in principle to interface the silicon cortex with the real cortex or brain,” says Gert Cauwenberghs, a neuroengineer at the University of California, San Diego. “There is the promise, at least in the future, to build a prosthesis to replace some lost motor function or sensory function.”

And I’m sure it will stop there. William Gibson, call your office.

h/t Slashdot

Normally it gets to be late January before I realize that I am rapidly running out of lagering season, and I end up in a rush to get them finished before the weather warms up. Lager yeasts need low temperatures and a couple of months of time to do their work, so absent a specialized freezer, it has to be Adeodatus’ crawlspace in January, February, and early March. This year I’m ahead of the game: he may be storing my carboys before the New Year.

This year’s light lager is very similar to the recipe I’ve used in the past, except this year I used White Labs Copenhagen Lager Yeast (at Adeodatus’ suggestion) and clover honey instead of wildflower (because they were out of wildflower):

I elected to do the amber lager again this year, not being overwhelmed with affection for the dunkel I did last winter. This too is derivative of previous works, but with the same yeast change and a touch more Saaz hops than in the past. I’m thinking of dry-hopping it, too, but that is yet to come:

UPDATE (12/28/06): After two full days of inactivity, I bought an extra couple of vials of White Labs German Lager yeast, since the store was out of Copenhagen. It’s been way too long for me to wait any longer. Beer at Home treated me better than right, charging me for only one of the replacements. Way to go, guys!

Last Saturday morning I brewed beer and baked an apple pie. Inexplicably, I didn’t take pictures of the pie.

The recipe is Beer At Home’s IPA kit. It should ferment down to about 1.010 in another week. As long as there are no delays in bottling, it will be marginally ready to drink in time for New Year’s.

If you were concerned, the pie really turned out alright, even being gluten-free as it was. Presentation left something to be desired—I really need to work on the crust, gluten or no—but it has gone over well.

UPDATE (12/19/06): I bottled it this evening. It’s good an hoppy, so if it doesn’t mellow during conditioning, it will be a winner.

Herewith my first IPA:

It’s about 1.039, which is a light initial gravity. Adjusting for temperature might push it a hair over 1.04, but if it doesn’t ferment out close to 1.000, it will be a light one regardless. Adeodatus just brewed this recipe (which is courtesy of Matt Causey at Beer At Home), and speaks favorably of it. I’ll let you know how it bottles.

And speaking of Zymurgy–which we have not in some time–I made a valiant effort in the late spring to brew a recipe Mrs. Berglund would enjoy, even though she does not historically have a taste for beer. I made it as light as I could with available ingredients, added no adjuncts and virtually no hops, and bottled it with a full ten ounces of strawberry-kiwi extract. If ever there was a girl beer, this was it.

Well, not long after I racked it, Kari was diagnosed as being gluten intolerant. This is actually a pretty big deal and a long story in itself, but for our purposes tonight, suffice it to say that the gluten-bearing barley in the Strawberry Kiwi Light Ale kind of killed the deal. I bottled it, let it carbonate, and finally tried one. It was disgusting. Seriously, it’s undrinkable.

The upshot is my sister likes it, so at least it won’t go to waste. I have higher hopes for this IPA.

Two weeks ago, on the night before the semester started and my reading list grew so dramatically, the moon was full and the sky was clear. I’ve been waiting months from the conditions of a clear sky, an uncommitted evening, and a non-tired Tim all to converge, and it’s my pleasure to inform you that this was it.

Brewing has been suffering along with blogging under the onslaught of SpotComponents and my massive three-hour load in school. Yet I have eked out a bit of it, and it has owned me. This latest product is hoppy.

The initial gravity reading, all foamy and everything:

The final gravity reading. You know you want some:

I took the initial gravity as 1.045, and the final as 1.007. That tells me 4% alcohol by volume, which I trust, as Douglas Adams said, about as far as I can comfortably spit out a rat. Will I never get good gravity data? Perhaps not. But I will get good beer.

Next up is lagers. Adeodatus ordered the goods for 30 gallons of lager between the two of us, so expect to hear about that soon.

Some zymurgystic banalities for you during this Election Week! I’m certainly not thinking about beer right now, being too busy hitting refresh on RCP about every ten minutes, but at least they both have “American” in their name.

Beer At Home’s October special is, appropriately, a stout. They call it “American Stout,” which in this case seems to mean “Porter.” The picture doesn’t capture it well, but this is pretty light stuff as far as stouts go.

American Stout prior to pitching.

And now, a Tim Berglund exclusive: a ho-hum wheat in late October! Only your colonialistic, totalizing metanarrative would tell me I can’t. Plus it was supposed to be a Blackberry Wheat (my fruit beers having enjoyed some success recently), but I forgot to put the blackberry extract in while I was bottling. I brewed the stout at pretty much the same time I was bottling this, so I was plenty busy.

American Wheat prior to bottling.

Monday night was way to hectic to indulge the tradition of the Hydrometer Photo, but I did get the ESB into bottles. Final gravity was about 1.010, and it is a beautiful amber brown, and it has a very hoppy finish. All is well.

And as an aside, I would like to make it clear that this sort of thing only happens to home distillers, not home brewers. The headline is misleading; it should say “moonshine,” which is slightly colloquial but far more accurate. And far more dangerous to boot.

My Zymurgy Blogging has been lax. Two weeks ago we had a very enjoyable dinner out with our most excellent neighbors, after which we retired to Berglund Manor to brew beer. We made a raspberry honey wheat, which is due to be bottled on Monday. (Technically, it’s just honey wheat at this point, since the raspberry extract is added just prior to bottling, but the goal is well enough in sight.)

I’ve taken a fair amount of slack for brewing such a girly beer, so I decided my next one had better be a bit more manful. Well, there’s now a company picnic scheduled for July 3, which should be just enough time for this glorious ESB (Extra Special Bitter) to finish out and find its way into bottles, thus vindicating my manhood:

The hydrometer shows 1.042. Compensated for temperature (it was 75°F), this is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.046.

And hey, if the fruit beer is a bit too…fruity, I’ve got a couple of customers lined up who insist they won’t complain.

NOTE TO ATF: When I say “customers,” I mean “wives of friends who will take homemade beer from me for free.”

Why so much brewing? Well, good question. First of all, it’s a bit of a pain to brew in the heat of the summer. Even with air conditioning, the temperature is still usually a bit too warm in the house to make it convenient, so I’d like to get the summer’s needs met before it gets too warm. Second, with the recent addition of the dedicated beer fridge (thank you, Jim), I’d like to accumulate a good variety in storage, so guests will always have their options open. A burst of brewing activity is required to prime the pump, as it were.

I planned ahead for last month’s transatlantic roundtrip flight by looking for a good book to read on the plane. I’ve had Rare Earth on my Amazon wish list for some time, so I ironically popped over to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy before leaving the country.

The book is written by Peter Ward, Professor of Geological Sciences and Curator of Paleontology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Donald Brownlee, Professor of Astronomy at the same university. Together they take a controversial stand in the new and radically cross-disciplinary field of astrobiology.

Astrobiology, sometimes referred to as the science with no data, concerns the study of life outside of Earth. Astronomers, paleontologists, chemists, biologists, and scientists of other disciplines are increasingly cooperating in the astrobiological inquiry as technology enables their reach farther outward and as origin-of-life research begins to prefer an off-world source for Earth’s first microbial life. (This is an account with which I am ultimately comfortable, although we normally use the phrase “out of this world” instead “off this world,” and my preferred account is beholden to theism rather than metaphysical naturalism. But I am getting ahead of myself.)

The book is eminently readable for the scientifically literate layman. Technical jargon that would only be accessible to the professional is mostly avoided, and explained well when necessary. Readers without a basic familiarity with astronomy, chemistry, and biology would probably find the book frustrating, but these readers would likely find it uninteresting as well. If this is the sort of stuff you like, you’ll get through this book with no problems.

Briefly summarized, the Rare Earth Hypothesis states that microbial life is common in the universe, but complex animal life is exceedingly rare, perhaps so rare as to occur only once in the cosmos. This hypothesis is defended by examining the history and present habitats of life on Earth, and by examining the features of the Earth and its surroundings that enable life.

Microbial life appears to have arisen on Earth just about as quickly as it possibly could have: fairly undisputed evidence of life’s existence appears within a few tens of millions of years of the oldest known rocks. Keeping in mind that the techniques used to date old igneous rocks actually measure the time of the rock’s transition from a liquid to a sold state, the planet seems to reveal that it played host to life very, very shortly after its surface quit being lava. This leads the authors to infer that microbial life originates quickly (however it originates) wherever conditions are even remotely amenable to its existence.

Ward and Brownlee further defend the Ubiquitous Microbes plank of the Hypothesis through a discussion of extremophiles. Extremophiles are microbes observed on earth to live at temperatures above 100°C or in conditions of extreme acidity, extreme salinity, high pressure, or other conditions normally considered to be sterile. These robust microbes provide evidence that microbial life, at least, does not require a lukewarm pond or carefully incubated nutrient agar in order to survive. Extremophiles lead the authors to believe that even a site less hospitable than the exquisitely appointed Earth might still host life, as long as it can maintain liquid water, has some kind of energy flux to drive metabolism, and possesses a few other sundries that are unusual but not nonexistent in the universe.

Animal life, they observe, seems more finicky. It does not appear to be comfortable above 40°C, and requires very stable and fairly specialized environmental conditions to survive and thrive. Ward and Brownlee occasionally caveat this to apply to “animal life as we know it,” but they seem to believe tentatively that animal life as we know it may for valid biochemical reasons be the only kind of animal life that is physically realizable in the cosmos (or capitalized “Universe,” as they prefer to say in the book). Animal life also seems to take a lot longer to develop, taking about two billion years for the first eukaryotes to appear and about 3.5 billion years for the really interesting things to happen in the Cambrian Explosion. Thus they conclude that the presence of animals should be rare in the cosmos.

But before there were even prokaryotes on Earth, just getting the right kind of planet in the right part of the universe was a chore more than worthy of a Titan. Aspiring planet creators need to choose a star with a long stable lifetime, yet with enough energy output to have a relatively broad habitable zone around it, where orbiting planets at least have a chance to maintain liquid water. The solar system needs an abundant supply of “metals” (a term astronomers use to describe elements heavier than helium, conspicuously including nonmetals heavier than helium), which ours happens to have in spades. The star also needs to be in the right part of the right kind of galaxy: not in a metal-poor elliptical or irregular galaxy; not too close to the middle of a spiral galaxy, where energy output would sterilize any life; and not too far out, where metals and are again scarce. The planet can’t exist too soon after the creation of the universe (again, all-important heavy elements are too rare), and it can’t arrive too late, when decelerating star formation will cause a paucity of the radioactive elements that drive the critical process of plate tectonics.

It helps the planet to have a Jupiter and a Moon as well. The Moon, which in our solar system is freakishly large compared to its companion planet, doesn’t just provide the ecologically significant tidal rhythm. More importantly, it helps stabilize the Earth’s remarkably consistent 23.5° axial tilt, which is key to both the stability and diversity of planetary climates. The authors assert that without the Moon, the Earth would likely flop around on its axis from time to time, even over time scales as short as thousands of years, with devastating climactic impact. Jupiter, for its part, adds stability to the orbits of other planets in the solar system and helps shepherd planet-sterilizing asteroids away from Earth. Asteroids capable of causing mass extinction events are believed still to have impacted Earth in the past, but they would be much more frequent and devastating without Jupiter to protect us.

An entire chapter is named for the “surprising importance of plate tectonics.” A major geological controversy just four decades ago, plate tectonics is now well-attested, and can be credited with several life-sustaining (and presumably rare) functions. By creating sizable landmasses with diverse climates (mountains, valleys, plains, etc.), tectonics provides a platform for the kind of biodiversity that helps insulate against mass extinctions. By exposing a fresh supply of silicate minerals like feldspar to chemical reaction with the atmosphere, tectonics helps regulate the climate. The movement of the Earth’s liquid core which drives tectonics enables the existence of the magnetic field, which shields us from all manner of harmful cosmic and solar radiation.

Most incredibly, the tectonic carbonate-silicate cycle actually exhibits a negative feedback characteristic that drives the temperature of the planet up or down as needed. It works like this: the warmer the Earth gets, the more efficiently the silicates emerging from the mantle are weathered. As these rocks are weathered, they react with CO₂ in the atmosphere, becoming sand and carbon-bearing limestone, and eventually being subducted back into the mantle. Carbon is “sequestered” in this process, thus decreasing atmospheric greenhouse gasses, and cooling the planet back towards the system’s set point. Alternatively, if the planet experiences a cooling trend, silicates are weathered less efficiently, and less carbon is subducted in the mantle. Greenhouse gas levels then increase, warming the planet back up again.

Considerable attention is given in the book to the early history of life on Earth. How the chapters on evolution advance the Rare Earth Hypothesis was not abundantly clear to me, except to say that if things happened as the naturalistic account would describe them, the Earth must be rare indeed. In the chapter on the Cambrian Explosion, the authors state, “For all of the animal phyla to appear in one single, short burst of diversification is not an obviously predictable outcome of evolution,” (p. 150, paperback edition) and for what it is worth, this layman would certainly agree. In any case, the Rare Earth Hypothesis may be somewhat controversial, but it is not so controversial as to question the naturalistic account for the origin and diversification of life. The book summarizes the broad narrative of the first 3.5 billion years of life on Earth, and explains some of the current thinking on key evolutionary questions clearly and lucidly. It does not depart from the naturalistic paradigm, as much as some readers might have liked it if it did.

The authors admit in the preface that the publication of the first edition in 2000 spurred vigorous discussion, some of which has “often left the realm of scientific discourse where we’d intended it to take place, and entered the areas of religion, ethics, and science fiction.” Fair enough. Testing whether their hypothesis is true or not is essentially beyond the reach of present technology (although they do suggest guidelines in a closing chapter), but it is a mark of a bold and influential idea to gain a hearing among those well outside of your discipline. Indeed, no question of enduring existential import is likely to be confined exclusively to a single area of intellectual inquiry with a label like Paleontology, Philology, or Eschatology. If you can have a department head in it, it’s probably too narrow to matter when it’s late and you can’t sleep. The questions that matter are going to have to be attacked in more ways than one, and the rarity of Earth is obviously one such question.

Engaging this book as an Evangelical–not desiring arbitrarily to shut off a rich means of intellectual inquiry, theology–I see much to embrace. The authors are unsurprisingly Darwinists, but only as a matter of professional course (and surely personal and scientific conviction), not in any way required by their broader Hypothesis. The timing, position, composition, and behavior of the galaxy, solar system, sun, and Earth are exceedingly rare regardless of one’s preferred abductive criteria for forming explanations of the origin and diversity of life. Beyond that question, and beyond my respected fellow Evangelicals who require that the Earth be young, this is very much our book.

It is not unlike the God of Evangelical revelation and tradition to craft a special place for his creatures to live, and to provide richly for their survival and eventual technological and social progress. It is consistent with the Old and New Testament teaching on evil that God would ordain calamities like earthquakes and volcanoes toward a greater good (although it is admittedly speculative to identify this greater good as a climatological control loop). Moreover, to affirm the Hypothesis is nearly to recovery the pre-Copernican centrality of Man that has remained so evident in revelation even while science has sojourned elsewhere for almost five centuries. Besides being a winning science text for the enjoyment and education of the lay science audience, this is a book that speaks strongly to the growing Evangelical intuition that science is reluctantly suggesting teleological conclusions. I thank Drs. Ward and Brownlee for their excellent work in writing it.