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Birds are not noted for their advanced intelligence.

You might like this vision (RUDY RUCKER):

"A Knowable Gaian Mind

There will be an amazing new discovery in physics on a par with the discovery of radio waves or the discovery of nuclear reactions. This new discovery will involve a fuller understanding of the level of reality that lies "below" the haze of quantum mechanics--suppose we call this new level the domain of the subdimensions.

Endless free energy will flow from the subdimensions. And, by using subdimensional shortcuts akin to what is now called quantum entanglement, we'll become able to send information over great distances with no energy cost. In effect the whole world can become linked like a wireless network, simply by tapping into the subdimensional channel.

This universal telepathy will not be limited to humans; it will extend to animals, plants, and even ordinary objects. Via the subdimensions you'll be able to see every object in the world. Conversely, every object in the world will be in some limited sense conscious, in that it will be aware of all the other objects in the world.

A useful corollary is that any piece of brute matter will be a computer just as it is. That is, once we can reach into the inner self of an object, we'll become able to program the behavior of things like rocks or log--without our having to attach any kind of microprocessor as an intermediary.

Humans will communicate at a vastly enhanced level. Presently I communicate an idea by broadcasting a string of words that serves as a program for reconstructing one of my thoughts. Once we enjoy subdimensional telepathy, I can simply send you a link to the location of some particular idea in my head.

Machines will fade away and, in particular, digital computers will be no more. The emerging interactions of Earth's telepathically communicating beings will become a real and knowable Gaian mind. And then we will become aware of the other higher minds in our cosmos."

Not immediately, though.

Take a look at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pepperberg03/peppe rberg_index.html.

The last 4 paragraphs read thusly:

There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially speaking, "just blow us away." We were training Alex to sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different ways to make up new words; that is, to demonstrate evidence for segmentation. He babbles at dusk, producing strings like "green, cheen, bean, keen", so we have some evidence for this behavior, but we need more solid data.

Thus we are trying to get him to sound out refrigerator letters, the same way one would train children on phonics. We were doing demos at the Media Lab for our corporate sponsors; we had a very small amount of time scheduled and the visitors wanted to see Alex work. So we put a number of differently colored letters on the tray that we use, put the tray in front of Alex, and asked, "Alex, what sound is blue?" He answers, "Ssss." It was an "s", so we say "Good birdie" and he replies, "Want a nut."

Well, I don't want him sitting there using our limited amount of time to eat a nut, so I tell him to wait, and I ask, "What sound is green?" Alex answers, "Ssshh." He's right, it's "sh," and we go through the routine again: "Good parrot." "Want a nut." "Alex, wait. What sound is orange?" "ch." "Good bird!" "Want a nut." We're going on and on and Alex is clearly getting more and more frustrated. He finally gets very slitty-eyed and he looks at me and states, "Want a nut. Nnn, uh, tuh."

Not only could you imagine him thinking, "Hey, stupid, do I have to spell it for you?" but the point was that he had leaped over where we were and had begun sounding out the letters of the words for us. This was in a sense his way of saying to us, "I know where you're headed! Let's get on with it," which gave us the feeling that we were on the right track with what we were doing. These kinds of things don't happen in the lab on a daily basis, but when they do, they make you realize there's a lot more going on inside these little walnut-sized brains than you might at first imagine.

The question is, is Dyson being an Einstein, or a Bozo? For my money, on climate change, I'm going with the latter.

Well, with all due respect for Dyson and his past work, I'm inclined to agree here. First, I read his essay and he doesn't seem to have any real arguments, backed by real numbers. He's basically arguing from personal incredulity, and explaining at length how that makes him a heretic, and therefore right. Second, I was at one of his talks quite recently (he was promoting one of his books), and somebody in the audience asked him about Dawkins' The God Delusion (just published). Dyson almost exploded; his (very volubly expounded) thesis was that Dawkins does immeasurable harm to science, and, if I understood him correctly, he almost said that one can't be an atheist and a scientist. I was quite surprised, so I went and did a Google search on Dyson; I found a number of things, among which this. So, sadly, I believe Dyson has suffered a bad attack of the Brain Eater in his old age.

It's funny that this topic popped up on Slashdot. I read this other article today. I love the insight and debate that I'm exposed to when the subject of global warming comes up, so I figured I would share a related article.

Fermi's blunder, indeed.

Yep, even on the basis of a 'science-based' analysis (perfectly in tune with the current overemphasis on technology - this link given only as an example) that I totally agree with.

Thinking a little ahead (along the lines of Rucker, perhaps), one might ask how relevant 'sub-gaian' species might be for more developed entities.

CC.

It is even more complicated then that. Like a lot of behaviors, fear depends on a genetic component which requires stimulus from the environment to manifest making it is easier to teach fear of some things then of other things:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_p5 .html

. . . So she set up an experiment in which she videotaped the wild-born monkey reacting with fear to a snake, and she then showed this video to a captive-born monkey, which immediately acquired a fear of snakes and was not then prepared to reach across even a model snake to get a peanut. She now doctors the video, so that it has the same monkey reacting in the same way in the background, but the bottom half of the screen now instead of having a snake has a flower. Again, the captive-born monkey has never seen a flower, so after it sees a monkey reacting with extreme fear to this new thing called a flower it should just as easily learn a fear of flowers. But it doesn't. It just learns that some monkeys are crazy. . . .

... presumably a 4th July joke, replacing the April edition for obvious reasons.

On the other hand, Rudy Rucker in the 'Edge Question' 2007: "Endless free energy will flow from the subdimensions. And, by using subdimensional shortcuts akin to what is now called quantum entanglement, we'll become able to send information over great distances with no energy cost. In effect the whole world can become linked like a wireless network, simply by tapping into the subdimensional channel."

CC.

The idealized likelihood of any one particular person is one in 64 trillion different genetic combinations of mother and father chromosomes. And with 100 billion neurons being stimulated throughout childhood, how are we to say that birth order influences one particular variable that we measure with various psychology tests? There is an immense amount of complexity that we cannot yet isolate (ask the neuroscientists), even in estimating the likelihood of specific combinations of genes because of diffusion gradients, energy interaction dynamics of DNA, and all sorts of other phenomena that keep us guessing only in 'Idealized' cases-- birth order is nowhere near such an idealization, however.

* Wikipedia linked me to this re: birth order and intelligence.
* Judith Harris on birth order and related psychology.

Mashup comes from the underground music scene. It's when people download two copyrighted pieces of music which required lots of musical ability to produce and mix them together ironically on their Mac (which requires a hell of a lot less ability) and then generously donate the result to the Creative Commons.

Actually, that reminds me of my least favourite word, digerati. It's the blogosphere equivalent of the popular group in an American high school. Annoyingly it's usually used by socially well connected Web 2.0 types who have little talent or idea about the underlying technology.

Some culture-specific information is not associated with any particular source. It is "common knowledge." As such, learning of this type of information generally bypasses critical analysis. A prototypical example is that of word meanings. Everyone uses the word "dog" to refer to dogs, so children easily learn that this is what they are called. Other examples include belief in germs and electricity. Their existence is generally assumed in day-to-day conversation and is not marked as uncertain; nobody says that they "believe in electricity." Hence even children and adults with little scientific background believe that these invisible entities really exist, a topic explored in detail by Paul Harris and his colleagues.

According to my reading of this article http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bloom07/bloom07_in dex.html in Edge(*), Creationist beliefs take hold when a child is not exposed to scientific process, or grows up in an environment hostile to science. The problem is exacerbated when "trusted" authorities (parents, teachers, world leaders) show a disdain for science and scientific method. When these people state "it is only a theory", they are not necessarily lying, but are simply ignorant of science.

Children develop a world view which is intuitive: the world has been like this forever because it has not changed in my lifetime. When children observe scientific experiments, that are opened to a new way of thinking (structured/procedural/logical), that can slowly be developed to allow acceptance of things like geological timescales, and even that counter-intuitive idea of evolution. Without scientific exposure, the story told by the Creationist Museum feels right, which is the only trusted yardstick for right and wrong.

The problem is that a lack of science in schools feeds itself, and people without any grounding in science begin to call the whole of Science into question, and hearken back to the Good Old Days of Christian authoritarianism and intolerance.

Actually, no, it isn't. No serious intellectual or academic circle would waste their time with something so pointless.

As a Canadian, I cycle through most of the same sites. Add "Not Even Wrong", SciTechDaily, aldaily, edge.opg, and until quite recently Wired. I tried to read Lubos once or twice, I just can't do it. Something bad happened to Wired after the ownership changed. aldaily and edge.org are not what they used to be, either. Hate the new three-column format at the NYTimes. I read half as much content there since that style change. If I'm super bored and listless, I click on the lower left link on CNN and read about the ten tightest buns in college sports. Somehow I think CNN would know.

For a moment there I thought "The Register" was listed under the heading "For actually thinking". Good thing I wasn't drinking milk at the time. Mostly I read the Inquirer instead, despite their green-eyed malice toward the Wikipedia, 500 stories a year about stock photography, and another 300 stories a year about Wikipedia repeatedly declaring stock photography "non-notable", and an unrelated 200 stories a year about Sony's incompetence, if Shannon hasn't died recently, or Pamela hasn't been outed. Stories about the incompetence of HPaq, however, receive my undivided attention.

Scratch CTV. Never visit there. I prefer to get my water-insoluable fiber content from the hockey coverage at slam.canoe.ca. For a couple of seasons, I'd kill time when I was out of sorts watching Rick Mercer video from his site at CBC.

If the link is still there, this was one of the truly good ones. Right now I'm on a codec-impaired Fedora Core system so I can't check it myself. On my Feisty Fawn beta crash-box, X refused to start. No soup for me.

http://www.cbc.ca/mercerreport/backissues.php?seas on=2

I believe in a traditional family. Week of Feb 14, 2005.

If you're American, don't take offense. There's usually a whole segment of a Mercer episode devoted to offending Americans. This segment is not that one. I think the difference between Canadian humour and American humor is that Americans mock failure, while Canadians mock failure rebranded as success. If it hadn't been for Hurricane W. half of New Orleans might still be there, but then I digress.

In any case, Mercer has a few sharp words to direct towards "Tradition, Mark II". That's what I like. Speaking of chimps, I'll trawl edge.org or sciencedaily for six months for one good Sapolsky.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/sapolsky.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/02/07021 8134333.htm

With Sokal, he used the language of post-structural theory's mis-appropriation of scientific ideas in order to demonstrate how ludicrous post-structural theory's mis-appropriation of scientific ideas really is.

Here, Lethem is using/abusing the practice of attribution to demonstrate the destructiveness of copyright in the realm of ideas, and the inherent inter-relatedness of ideas in creative arts.

In this way, he is similar to John Brockman who wrote a book that was composed of a paragraph on each page, and each paragraph was usually a composite of several statements from other people's writings (often Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Weiner, TS Eliot, et al) That Brockman is now a literary agent for scientists only brings the whole thing to a big circle.

RS

This is what I think of Gentoo.

Is string theory a futile exercise as physics, as I believe it to be? It is an interesting mathematical specialty and has produced and will produce mathematics useful in other contexts, but it seems no more vital as mathematics than other areas of very abstract or specialized math, and doesn't on that basis justify the incredible amount of effort expended on it.

My belief is based on the fact that string theory is the first science in hundreds of years to be pursued in pre-Baconian fashion, without any adequate experimental guidance. It proposes that Nature is the way we would like it to be rather than the way we see it to be; and it is improbable that Nature thinks the same way we do.

The sad thing is that, as several young would-be theorists have explained to me, it is so highly developed that it is a full-time job just to keep up with it. That means that other avenues are not being explored by the bright, imaginative young people, and that alternative career paths are blocked.

* "PERSONAL FABRICATION: A Talk with Neil Gershenfeld"

* Democratizing Innovation

Bring on the future, where things like fab@home are in every home, where people no longer have to wait for companies to develop products, the people as a community develop them together, with the same spirit/philosophy of FOSS.

I don't want a Win/Mac box, I don't care how easy either of them appear, I want a free and open source box and neither Win/Mac provide me with that freedom. Here's a brief article I recommend everyone read:

The Land of "Nothing for free" by Jeremy Allison .

The fact that our society today is filled with people who would rather consume than fiddle is one of the reasons why gas guzzling cars with proprietary internals are still used by the majority. Eventually this will all change as people will more easily be able to develop their own hardware themselves (think something like fab@home in every home) with free/open hardware designs shared and improved upon.

The question is: do you want to support the FOSS movement or do you want to support companies who provide closed source software? I don't care if hardware from Microsoft or Apple can run Linux, I don't want my money going to either company, period. If other people enjoy tinkering with said hardware, cool. I believe we all should (and will, eventually) be developing hardware on our own. Those who would respond with, "I don't care about all that, I just want X,Y,Z" are the focal point of blame. Unwind the philosophy from the person and the soul is nothing but another bag of peas to scan at the check stand for Company A,B,C.

This contribution from last year's dangerous idea question places Leonard Susskind's annual salary on the line...

To me, the most interesting question by far in EDGE has been the one on 'What do you believe to be true even though you can't prove it?' There were some really cool answers that year, e.g. this hilarious (but equally insightful) one from Leonard Susskind.

Ask people why they support the death penalty or prolonged incarceration for serious crimes, and the reasons they give will usually involve retribution. There may be passing mention of deterrence or rehabilitation, but the surrounding rhetoric gives the game away. People want to kill a criminal as payback for the horrible things he did. Or they want to give "satisfaction' to the victims of the crime or their relatives. An especially warped and disgusting application of the flawed concept of retribution is Christian crucifixion as "atonement' for "sin'.

Retribution as a moral principle is incompatible with a scientific view of human behaviour. As scientists, we believe that human brains, though they may not work in the same way as man-made computers, are as surely governed by the laws of physics. When a computer malfunctions, we do not punish it. We track down the problem and fix it, usually by replacing a damaged component, either in hardware or software.

Basil Fawlty, British television's hotelier from hell created by the immortal John Cleese, was at the end of his tether when his car broke down and wouldn't start. He gave it fair warning, counted to three, gave it one more chance, and then acted. "Right! I warned you. You've had this coming to you!" He got out of the car, seized a tree branch and set about thrashing the car within an inch of its life. Of course we laugh at his irrationality. Instead of beating the car, we would investigate the problem. Is the carburettor flooded? Are the sparking plugs or distributor points damp? Has it simply run out of gas? Why do we not react in the same way to a defective man: a murderer, say, or a rapist? Why don't we laugh at a judge who punishes a criminal, just as heartily as we laugh at Basil Fawlty? Or at King Xerxes who, in 480 BC, sentenced the rough sea to 300 lashes for wrecking his bridge of ships? Isn't the murderer or the rapist just a machine with a defective component? Or a defective upbringing? Defective education? Defective genes?

Concepts like blame and responsibility are bandied about freely where human wrongdoers are concerned. When a child robs an old lady, should we blame the child himself or his parents? Or his school? Negligent social workers? In a court of law, feeble-mindedness is an accepted defence, as is insanity. Diminished responsibility is argued by the defence lawyer, who may also try to absolve his client of blame by pointing to his unhappy childhood, abuse by his father, or even unpropitious genes (not, so far as I am aware, unpropitious planetary conjunctions, though it wouldn't surprise me).

But doesn't a truly scientific, mechanistic view of the nervous system make nonsense of the very idea of responsibility, whether diminished or not? Any crime, however heinous, is in principle to be blamed on antecedent conditions acting through the accused's physiology, heredity and environment. Don't judicial hearings to decide questions of blame or diminished responsibility make as little sense for a faulty man as for a Fawlty car?

Why is it that we humans find it almost impossible to accept such conclusions? Why do we vent such visceral hatred on child murderers, or on thuggish vandals, when we should simply regard them as faulty units that need fixing or replacing? Presumably because mental constructs like blame and responsibility, indeed evil and good, are built into our brains by millennia of Darwinian evolution. Assigning blame and responsibility is an aspect of the useful fiction of intentional agents that we construct in our brains as a means of short-cutting a truer analysis of what is going on in the world in which we have to live. My dangerous idea is that we shall eventually grow out of all this and even learn to laugh at it, just as we laugh at Basil Fawlty when he beats his car. But I fear it is unlikely that I shall ever reach that level of enlightenment.

This originally appeared here.

There looks like there could be a link between what we see on media and our actions, and the mirroring of the behaviour we see may not necessarily even be conscious. Tell me this effect would be lessened during the playing of an actual game. I want to believe it doesn't have an effect, but...

(From edge.org, http://edge.org/q2006/q06_print.html )
MARCO IACOBONI
Neuroscientist; Director, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Lab, UCLA

Media Violence Induces Imitative Violence: The Problem With Super Mirrors

Media violence induces imitative violence. If true, this idea is dangerous for at least two main reasons. First, because its implications are highly relevant to the issue of freedom of speech. Second, because it suggests that our rational autonomy is much more limited than we like to think. This idea is especially dangerous now, because we have discovered a plausible neural mechanism that can explain why observing violence induces imitative violence. Moreover, the properties of this neural mechanism -- the human mirror neuron system -- suggest that imitative violence may not always be a consciously mediated process. The argument for protecting even harmful speech (intended in a broad sense, including movies and videogames) has typically been that the effects of speech are always under the mental intermediation of the listener/viewer. If there is a plausible neurobiological mechanism that suggests that such intermediate step can be by-passed, this argument is no longer valid.

For more than 50 years behavioral data have suggested that media violence induces violent behavior in the observers. Meta-data show that the effect size of media violence is much larger than the effect size of calcium intake on bone mass, or of asbestos exposure to cancer. Still, the behavioral data have been criticized. How is that possible? Two main types of data have been invoked. Controlled laboratory experiments and correlational studies assessing types of media consumed and violent behavior. The lab data have been criticized on the account of not having enough ecological validity, whereas the correlational data have been criticized on the account that they have no explanatory power. Here, as a neuroscientist who is studying the human mirror neuron system and its relations to imitation, I want to focus on a recent neuroscience discovery that may explain why the strong imitative tendencies that humans have may lead them to imitative violence when exposed to media violence.

Mirror neurons are cells located in the premotor cortex, the part of the brain relevant to the planning, selection and execution of actions. In the ventral sector of the premotor cortex there are cells that fire in relation to specific goal-related motor acts, such as grasping, holding, tearing, and bringing to the mouth. Surprisingly, a subset of these cells -- what we call mirror neurons -- also fire when we observe somebody else performing the same action. The behavior of these cells seems to suggest that the observer is looking at her/his own actions reflected by a mirror, while watching somebody else's actions. My group has also shown in several studies that human mirror neuron areas are critical to imitation. There is also evidence that the activation of this neural system is fairly automatic, thus suggesting that it may by-pass conscious mediation. Moreover, mirror neurons also code the intention associated with observed actions, even though there is not a one-to-one mapping between actions and intentions (I can grasp a cup because I want to drink or because I want to put it in the dishwasher). This suggests that this system can indeed code sequences of action (i.e., what happens after I grasp the cup), even though only one action in the sequence has been observed.

Some years ago, when we still were a very small group of neuroscientists studying mirror neurons and we were just starting investigating the role of mirror neurons in intention understanding, we discussed the possi

I see a lot of posts pushing the 'it is a free choice' fetish. The human brain is not purposefully designed to satisfy the requirements of the rational choice crowd, it is a byproduct of millions of years of accidential and pretty messy evolution. To put this in words that the slashdot geek can understand, the human brain has lots of exploits, and they cannot be patched, only worked around with difficulty. Our prospensity to addiction and short-term gratification at the expense of long-term goals are among these. As the marketing industry learns more about how the brain really works, these exploits become more effective, and the workarounds harder.

One easy article to start with is professor Clay Shirky's provokative essay on the end of free will: http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_2.html#shirky

The companies peddling MMO games that are designed to exploit a basic human weakness in a way that is ruinous to many people's lives are being deeply unethical, and should be held responsible for their actions. I've seen friends lose touch with everyone around them, becoming social hermits, unable to break loose from their WoW-induced addiction. They "must" join hour-long raids to live up to expectations in their guild, and taking breaks to be with friends or family is strongly discouraged by the game mechanics.

You may say that this is what you choose to do with your life. However, since the game is designed to subvert the ability to make free choices, just like hard drugs, an increasing number of people are not making a free choice to play the game. When they consider the balance of pros and cons, some of the "pros" are not there because that person has decided this is a good outcome, but because the game designers have exploited an irrational part of the brain that is not directly under conscious control. When such factors swing the balance in favour of continuing the game, you are not making a free decision, you are being owned.

Kudos to everyone out there who are playing WoW only by free, conscious decision. But are you sure you are one of them? It is very hard to tell the difference, especially when you are in the middle of it yourself. Ask anyone who has been through some serious addiction. I made a decision long ago never to play an MMO because I am not confident that I could stop before my decision to play more was determined by the game mechanics, and not by me.

The last refuge of modern sexists is the claim that even if men and women have the same average scores, men have a greater variance and therefore are more likely to produce the very top level mathematicians and scientists. For an example of the debate see Pinker vs. Spelke, or one could also read Dr. Elizabeth Spelke's papers including Sex differences in intrinsic aptitude for mathematics and science: A critical review.

Christina Sormani has a web page explaining why Penny Smith is likely to have solved the Millenium Problem on the Navier-Stokes equation. Smith's paper is the culmination of a lifetime of research similar to how Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem was a logical outcome of his previous research. This is not someone coming from out of nowhere providing a proof that has nothing to do with his or her prior specialty.

The debate is now over. Penny Smith has shown that there is in fact no variance between men and women that predisposes men to have the very top mathematicians. In fact the proof that environment trumps genetics has been demonstrated in the United States over the past decades: males born in the United States have been judged by government and industry to not be good enough in top-level mathematics which is why so much talent has to be imported from other countries. The United States is probably going to follow the path of the United Kingdom where cultural factors are causing boys mathematical achievement in school to collapse relative to that of girls.

Well, some scientists are claiming that. However, like in the previous cases of finding the "Holy Grail of the mind", the theory is far from perfect, completed or even generally supported. Yes, mirror neurons might have a lot of significance in motor functions and association, especially in language learning, but they're not the only thing contributing to our sense of 'being there' or imitation. Sadly, at the moment, they seem to be the latest media-hyped neuropsychology buzzword that is getting used way out of context in a lot of pseudo-research.

See this for a good debate about the original article written by Ramachandran: http://www.edge.org/discourse/mirror_neurons.html

Another excellent critique (read the replies as well) here: http://scienceblogs.com/mixingmemory/2006/07/mirro r_neurons_language_and_me.php

Mirror neurons are noticeably absent from the debate.

Have a look at an essay by V S Ramachandran a leading neuroscientist.

The mirror neuron, scientists tell us, takes things that we see others do and makes us feel like we're doing it ourselves. It's why we like watching things like TV and dancing. It's how we learn to imitate.

15 years ago, were graphics real enough to trigger a mirror neuron response in a human? Possibly -- I don't know. However, as we approach photorealism, isn't it time we studied this? See if a mirror neuron response is set up in a game-player? If so, then maybe the outraged parent mob are right -- maybe the computer games do train the behaviour.

Yes, there are further environmental triggers needed to cause the player to actually go out and kill someone -- a perfectly happy, balanced individual isn't going to pick up a gun just out of computer-learned habit -- but if we find that the behaviour is taught, then surely we are obliged to keep the games out of the hands of those who they may harm. Can we do a psychological assessment of every single consumer who wants to buy a PS3? No -- that would be thouroughly impractical.

So, if studies consistently showed a mirror neuron response while playing shooters, would we not be obliged to take violent games off the shelf...?

HAL

Yeah really. Who is the lady in the wheelchair? She is pretty hot. Hubba hubba.

I was just reading this:

DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism by Jaron Lanier.

While acknowledging Wikipedia's usefuless, criticizes its exalted status among the digitally connected.

I was just reading this:

DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism by Jaron Lanier.

While acknowledging Wikipedia's usefuless, criticizes its exalted status among the digitally connected.

I've got bad news: groupthink sites like wikipedia generally don't bring out the best and most intelligent ideas. Generally a new bright idea is only going to be shared by a few people, and a democratic process will squash those ideas. Combine this with the fact that a majority belief in a statement doesn't make it true and you have serious problems for a site that wants to create an intelligent debate. For a more detailed analysis of the failings of sites like wikipedia see this article.

I'd say yes. Plus she's a geek chick. What more could you ask for?

Cold gaze *shudder* http://physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/randall .html http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/trivers04/images/r andall300.jpg

First, it wasn't just the "technology" section, it was on the front page of the National Edition.

Second, Wikipedia is damned in both directions by the media: They are either too open and so all sorts of loonies can post whatever they want. Or, when the close up a bit, they are abandoning their own principles.

Anyone who hasn't read it needs to read DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism by Jaron Lanier and the spirited reply by Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold.

First, it wasn't just the "technology" section, it was on the front page of the National Edition.

Second, Wikipedia is damned in both directions by the media: They are either too open and so all sorts of loonies can post whatever they want. Or, when the close up a bit, they are abandoning their own principles.

Anyone who hasn't read it needs to read DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism by Jaron Lanier and the spirited reply by Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold.

PINKER VS. SPELKE

A DEBATE

The above debate hosted at Edge is now a bit dated but it does a good job of looking at gender and science. Our patriarchical history in the west has given us science as envisioned by men like Sir Francis Bacon. It led to a reductionist deterministic heritage that we've only recently begun to break free of. Women in general in the west are only a century or more free of being chattles to be disposed of by their fathers. I hope we'll see women bring to science a different mind set and new insights.

just my loose change

But I have to admit the vast self-promotional preambles attached to much of the otherwise often interesting stuff Edge puts out can be off-putting. I'm used to them and still needed a double take before I spotted the change of context. It just didn't sound like something Kelly would throw in, even if Brand's observation was perfectly relevant.

However, you and others really should try to get over your obsession with Wolfram's supposed lack of citations. Yes it does seem he missed a bit of what was going on in parallel during the decade plus he was buried in his own research, but the end product was a book, not an academic paper, and its copious notes do provide valuable coverage of the history prior to the early '90s.

Wolfram's earlier systematic research on the classification of one dimensional cellular automata was seminal to the field, turning it from something only seen as fit for mathematical recreations columns in the early '80s to one of the pillars of the rise of complex systems research in the late '80s. (I was an interested participant in both phases.)

I think you are confusing maturity with forgetting how to enjoy life. Children seem to naturally know how to have a good time so we equate having fun with youth. Maybe it's just a question of semantics, but I disagree with your definition.

For me, Maturity = responsibility. If you think about it, what is the one thing that defines being an adult versus a child. It's responsibility. As an adult, you are responsible for taking care of yourself (and possiblly your family) and you are responsible for your actions (at least in the eyes of the law). As a child, your family supports you financially, and you can get away with more transgressions.

Having said that, I don't disagree with the idea behind what you are saying. Getting older and accepting responsibilities doesn't mean you have to be a stick in the mud. You do have to be careful, though, because sometimes having fun and being responsible are in conflict. (I'd love to skip work today and go see a movie, but if I do that and loose my job, I won't be able to pay my bills...). So, yes, being mature does mean you can't always have as much fun as you'd like. But being mature shouldn't mean never being silly and having a good time. (Of course, it really is a matter of semantics. When our parents yelled at us to act mature, they were, in fact, telling us to stop being silly, and stop having a good time).

As far as the executive with the expensive car goes, I read an interesting article recently: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/gilbert03/gilbert_ index.html. It's about how we are lousy at predicting what will make us happy. Money doesn't really make us happy (once you have enough to meet your basic needs), but friends and family do.

WORD! Mom tells me my IQ tested quite high in the 3rd grade. I certainly dont feel connected to other people - they are more like something to help me not feel lonely. But, unlike you, I suck at many things. For the last 6 years I have been thinking a lot about motivation and lack thereof. It doesn't matter how smart you are - you are not going to learn algebra magically. You still have to have the motivation neccessary to read the book or pay attention in class or whatever. This is something I dont have. Making money and keeping myself comfortable and entertained has been quite easy for me so, what is my motivation to memorize boring facts? Video games are much easier to do. Reading http://www.edge.org/ won't make me a better person (maybe it's turned me into more of a racist!!). This train of thought is quickly meandering into la la land because my brain is too lazy to stay focused on my original point. anyway, see ya!

You know this idea that people make judgements in the first 50ms before you can really gain a conscious impression of it (though probably something flashes in your subconcious) remind me of one of the entries in the "Dangerous Ideas" article in Edge Magazine in which Nobel Prize winning biochemist Eric R. Kandel argues that much of what we call "free will" is processed unconsciously without awareness:

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_5.html

Interesting read for sure.

--Rob

You know this idea that people make judgements in the first 50ms before you can really gain a conscious impression of it (though probably something flashes in your subconcious) remind me of one of the entries in the "Dangerous Ideas" article in Edge (slashdot had it as a story a short while ago) in which Nobel Prize winning biochemist Eric R. Kandel argues that much of what we call "free will" is processed unconsciously without awareness:

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_5.html

ERIC R. KANDEL
Biochemist and University Professor, Columbia University; Recipient, The Nobel Prize, 2000; Author, Cellular Basis of Behavior

Free will is exercised unconsciously, without awareness

It is clear that consciousness is central to understanding human mental processes, and therefore is the holy grail of modern neuroscience. What is less clear is that much of our mental processes are unconscious and that these unconscious processes are as important as conscious mental processes for understanding the mind. Indeed most cognitive processes never reach consciousness.

As Sigmund Freud emphasized at the beginning of the 20th century most of our perceptual and cognitive processes are unconscious, except those that are in the immediate focus of our attention. Based on these insights Freud emphasized that unconscious mental processes guide much of human behavior.

Freud's idea was a natural extension of the notion of unconscious inference proposed in the 1860s by Hermann Helmholtz, the German physicist turned neural scientist. Helmholtz was the first to measure the conduction of electrical signals in nerves. He had expected it to be as the speed of light, fast as the conduction of electricity in copper cables, and found to his surprise that it was much slower, only about 90m sec. He then examined the reaction time, the time it takes a subject to respond to a consciously a perceived stimulus, and found that it was much, much slower than even the combined conduction times required for sensory and motor activities.

This caused Helmholz to argue that a great deal of brain processing occurred unconsciously prior to conscious perception of an object. Helmholtz went on to argue that much of what goes on in the brain is not represented in consciousness and that the perception of objects depends upon "unconscious inferences" made by the brain, based on thinking and reasoning without awareness. This view was not accepted by many brain scientists who believed that consciousness is necessary for making inferences. However, in the 1970s a number of experiments began to accumulate in favor of the idea that most cognitive processes that occur in the brain never enter consciousness.

Perhaps the most influential of these experiments were those carried out by Benjamin Libet in 1986. Libet used as his starting point a discovery made by the German neurologist Hans Kornhuber. Kornhuber asked volunteers to move their right index finger. He then measured this voluntary movement with a strain gauge while at the same time recording the electrical activity of the brain by means of an electrode on the skull. After hundreds of trials, Kornhuber found that, invariably, each movement was preceded by a little blip in the electrical record from the brain, a spark of free will! He called this potential in the brain the "readiness potential" and found that it occurred one second before the voluntary movement.

Libet followed up on Kornhuber's finding with an experiment in which he asked volunteers to lift a finger whenever they felt the urge to do so. He placed an electrode on a volunteer's skull and confirmed a readiness potential about one second before the person lifted his or her finger. He then compared the time it took for the person to will the movement with the time of the readiness potential.

Amazingly, Libet found that the readiness potential appeared not after, but 200 milliseconds before a person felt the urge to move his or her finger! Thus by merely

Has sci-fi overly stimulated designers, or is it the other way around?
What we focus on creates our future.
Better outlaw thinking before some one comes up with dangerous ideas.

Check out this dangerous idea

Guys like Edward De Bono have made a career by claiming to have the inside track on creative learning. I've studied epistemology since my mid teens and in answer to the question 'what is learning?' I've acquired a vast ignorance. Ultimately, for me, learning is a nurtured drive with inherent requirements, that is nourished by the new, by information, difference that makes a difference (Bateson). The high of learning comes when one recognizes that nature has given rise to you, an individual with the potential to encompass the principles of life in the small shell that houses your brain.The truth is most people are driven by the more primitive drives and default to being entertained.

Gregory Bateson suggested we can learn to learn, possibly learn to learn to learn; but, first we must experience what it means to learn. I believe that learning is a unique multifaceted experience that, once experienced, can, depending on the individual, entice the practioner ever onward.

The day my older sister took me by the hand and walked me into the nearest library I was hooked. I knew how to, read, loved to read, but had no idea of the universes of knowledge available. Yet even into grade 1 I stubbornly refused to learn to write. I read, I had lots to read, other people were doing the writing, what need had I to write?

Whatever learning is, whether it be as simple as deriving new patterns, or, as profound as Archimedes' Eureka!, we first must introduce children to the joy of learning. Most of them can take it from there.

just my loose change.

This is my response to "Science Must Destroy Religion," posted on Page 7

While your argument is well intentioned and rational on the surface, its fatal flaw is the presumption that society is capable of behaving rationally rather than emotionally. You might as well argue that people stop eating candy. Further, the benefits of science versus religion are not as clear-cut as you presume.

Firstly, and most importantly, I'll address the aspect of human behavior. To assert that religion is dangerous is to imply that religion is an impetus for negative behavior rather than a channel through which such behavior may be expressed. Religion may be yet another division of people into groups who plot against one another, but to believe that such division would cease to exist without religion is fantastical. Religion exists because people form groups, not the other way around. Religion is a result, or at least a byproduct, of the human condition.

If religion is a symptom of the human psyche, then the elimination of religion is an exercise in futility, and the benefits of such elimination would be nonexistent. People will continue to create artificial divides, and conflict will result. Further, since religion predicates, or at least coincides with, the existence of science, it would appear to be one of the most basic of human constructs. Therefore, we can presume that new individuals will continue to invent the idea of a supreme being, regardless of what we teach them. In fact, many ideas spring from the opposition of established concepts and beliefs, so it's likely that any suppression of religion would only be a finger in the dyke, so to speak, since eliminating one source would only cause it to spring up elsewhere. The same creative power which fuels art will eventually convince someone, somewhere, that they have had contact with such a supreme being, and others will be inclined to believe them, because people are inclined to believe charismatic individuals. It is unrealistic to believe that the void in "knowledge," left by the absense of religion would remain unfilled.

Religion is, by definition, a non-disprovable idea. Further, by definition, it is impossible to eliminate a non-disprovable idea through logic. You may not directly promote, or even consciously acknowledge, that the elimination of religion would be violent, but such a scenario would be inevitable. Since religion is a belief, it is immune to the effects of logic and reason. If one cannot use reason to counter an opposing idea, the only alternative is to eliminate the source of that idea, which is the person harboring it. Therefore, the only way to deliberately eliminate religion is through force, which would be a greater wrong than allowing it to exist; to criminalize religion is to criminalize free thought. In addition, the use of force is, of course, a form of oppression, and oppression has historically resulted in a massive backlash through direct and sympathetic resistance. Of course, some religious groups are attempting to use force to further their cause, but that's their own mistake; there's no need to follow them on the path of failure.

You assert that the danger of religious fanatics obtaining nuclear weaponry is grounds for the elimination of religion, however a more accurate interpretation would be that it's grounds to keep nuclear weaponry out of the hands of fanatics, whether they support religion, democracy, communism, or purple dinosaurs. Using fanaticism as a basis to reject religion is a non sequitur. The fact is that religious fanaticism is a subset of fanaticism, not the other way around. Fanatics will always exist, and some will always adopt an attitude of "victory at all costs." Whether they are fighting for mindshare, land, oil, fissionable material, women, or clothes is irrelevant. Irrational behavior cannot be eliminated by eliminating irrational etablished belief systems, even if such a thing was possible.

To extol the benefits

In case anyone wants to know what The_Naeblis is talking about.

I especially liked Geoffery Miller's dangerous idea: the reason we haven't made contact with ET is that advanced alien civlizations become too self-absorbed in the virtual universe to pay any attention to the physical universe. I think it's especially applicable to those of us who spend way too much time browsing and posting to slashdot (go out an procreate instead!).

I suppose our only hope is that some of the leaders of our virtual world (Bezos, Carmack, Allen) are also the pioneers of space exploration. Maybe we're not as doomed as Miller proposes.

Gotta like this one, if only for the term it uses : http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_6.html#rushkoff

I wish I'd seen it when I had this discussion. :-)