With the science of optics came the invention of the telescope and the microscope, both devices furthered our thresholds of perception. With the passing of new thresholds comes new information, new patterns and the reconfiguring of patterns new and old leads to innovation and invention.
The fields of molecular biology and nanotechnology are two examples of new information opening up and being engineered. New fields of information, and, its implementation, can open up further fields and so on.
Perhaps one of the most immediate problems we face is a deluge of information that must be investigated and peer reviewed. Recently, a post grad, posted on/. that, in his opinion, there are too many Phds. I think there aren't enough Phds, and, further, we don't have the systems in place to gardner the results of the Phds now doing research.
"ultruism" is an accepted variant spelling of altruism. By way of example the following links to the book cited in my post: "Harvard University Press/Unto Others/Reviews
... the group--may be a mechanism for the evolution of ultruism...Readers will be impressed by the breadth of the analysis...
IIRC Stephen Gould, in his book "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory", also uses the variant spelling, although, knowing Gould's penchant for neologisms and his mastery of english, I wouldn't bet heavily on it.
The idea of ultuism being tied to kinship has ties into the idea that our relatively, large brain developed to handle our complex social relationships.
"For natural selection to work, the costs of brain evolution must be outweighed by the advantages gained in terms of fitness. For many years, explains ecological psychologist Robin Dunbar (University of Liverpool, United Kingdom), "people thought that the ability to hunt or forage better was what drove the evolution of our brains. But a better diet had to come before we could grow a bigger brain." Dunbar believes instead that brain evolution in primates and more generally in mammals "has been driven by the need to manage social relationships, and in primates, in particular, to coordinate coherence in social groups through time and space". More complex social interactions, he says, mean that individuals are better able to pool resources to solve problems like finding food, and so they survive better."
Ultruism, while not a human specific trait, IIRC, Orcas will give their lives for the lives of other pod members, ultruism, as practised by our kinds is difficult to jive with the tenents of evolution. There have been attempts to define ultruism in terms of the mainstream theory of evolution, I know S. Gould took a stab at it in his seminal book The Structure of Evolutionary Theory and
Unto Others
The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior by Elliott Sober, David Sloan Wilson, represents another attempt, but the bottom line is there is no clear answer (which explains why it's on the list:)).
Generally answers seem to cluster around the idea of kinship and the furthering of an individuals gene pool.Perhaps the answer will come in tandem with the solution to another evolutionary riddle pertaining to our kind, why is it we have such relatively small canines? The males of most primate species have large canines especially for fighting, usually other males in order to win controll of groups of females. Some speculation has it that monogamy in our kind did away with the need for large canines, or maybe, in our kind females did away with the male perrogative of controlling breeding?
MS won't catch up with Google for the same reason Open Source won't catch up with MS on the desktop.
Point and Click users want what their friends and family want. They want to share pics, audio/video files, text files, powerpoint presentations, etc., etc. And on the desktop MS has won the race to place first in the consumers' mind in that regard.
When you buy tissue do you think tissue or do you think Kleenex? You might buy some generic brand buy you think Kleenex. Until interoperability becomes commonplace buyers will think Windows on the desktop because that's what their event horizon presents them with.
Remember the joke in Pulp Fiction... the baby tomato out for a walk with it's parent tomatoes dallies behind, angering the papa tomato, who stomps the baby tomato and yells: "Ketchup"... when you think ketchup you think Heinz, when consumers think Personal Computing they think Windows. I doubt that the majority even know what an OS is, as it all comes bundled.
While I'm on a rant, I think MS has chased the dream of the PC as a multimedia server, but I don't think they saw the dual core, multiprocessor model coming to the mass consumer market and their licensing strategy will have to morph to fit the market, as what is the PC becomes an appliance destined for the home basement as a server while laptops become ubiquitous.
Perhaps the most ironic POV prevalent in Open Source is that users are lusers and marketers are hypocritical scum, yet there are marketing people who would happily undertake to promote Open Source products, for the simple reason of undertaking the challenge, but when their kind is treated as piriah it's unlikely too many will be forth coming.
I wouldn't buy my books in bulk by publisher. When I choose a book it's by way of research into the author(s)' background. By way of example, many history books from the 50s and 60s that I've picked up have a strong bias as the authors were promulgating their theory as either pro marxist or antimarxist. I'd no idea that much of the soft sciences were a battle ground for Marxists ideologues. Who's to say what biases the publisher may express throughout the collection and why limit yourself to the exegencies of one publishing house in a search for knowledge.
"WinXP was MS's effort to integrate NT with some of the benefits of Win9x. XP is built off Win2k, hell, it essentially is Win2k with a theme engine......WinXP is NT 5.1"
You're right, but nominally, to the end user, WinXP is the Windows OS, it is the successor to the Win9x line, and, in presenting it as the de facto choice, they have made assumptions that screw their user base. My dad, for instance, a career Naval Officer/pilot, has run a PC since Win95, he's now upgraded his and my mom's PC to WinXP pro (he's the kinda guy that believes you should buy the top of the line), but he has no idea of what Admin privledges mean, or that he should run a limited user account. MS forcing the choice to WinXP should have defaulted to a secure setup, and/or, a must see interactive tutorial that tried to ensure point and click users understood basic security in terms of the merger of Win9x technology with NT.
Also, I don't see how MS is going to push Windows into a market dominated by dual core technology, multiprocessors box without running afoul of their existing pricing structure.
The intent of my post was to profile my user history as one that, while raised on a wintel platform, has seen a divergence wherein MS can serve as a multimedia/webbox, but is better left behind when chosing an OS for the upcoming dual core, multiprocessor workstations.
While I was started on a TI 99/4 my parents got for me, sans monitor, and hooked up to an old 14 inch b&w TV, every machine following that was a wintel box up to being introduced to Mandrake (as it then was) 6.
DOS 3.3 was the first MS OS I understood, so much so that, when the first DOSSHELL came out, I asked why would someone need that? I jumped on the NT technology because, when it first came out, it was well documented, (vis a vis my experience) and it allowed a whole new playing field. When NT 4 came out MS moved Video and Printer drivers from User mode to kernel mode. This was, IIRC, about the time Bill Gates had his vision of the PC integrated multi media household. I believe the PC version of Windows has persued this vision of multimedia OS to the point of having become in WinXP an ugly, bloated kludge, but it does, as much as possible, deliver in an ugly way, as a backward compatible multimedia OS.
Win 2K was the last OS to maintain the promise that Win New Technology brought with it. Win XP saw the culimnation of MS' effort to integrate Win95/98/ME with some of the benefits of NT, but the end result is an all and everything everyman's stew meant to satisfy the cravings of the masses.
I run WinXP on a web box for multimedia but thanks to the lessons gleaned online (/.:) I'm moving on to a *BSD, or one of the upcoming microkernel OSes to do research.
Schooled in economics I took a position as a litigation appraiser because it was a good job offer and I enjoyed working with market values. Foremost it's necessary to understand the adversarial system. Both parties to litigation will hire their own appraiser, usually the best they can afford, and, the job of that appraiser will be to fix a value that favours their client. The end result, all too often, is that the board will award a value somewhere between the values arrived at by the opposing litigants. It's really a sorry business and I got out of it quickly.
Gregory Bateson, the American biologist said... "adversarial systems are notoriously subject to irrelevant determinism. The relative strength of the adverseries is likely to rule the decision regardless of the relative strength of their arguments."
While not explicitly linked to biomimicry, the implications relate to this relatively new field. There's now a web site dedicated to dissiminating the developing ideas. My introduction came from reading
Biomimicry by Janine M. Benyus. I found a copy in the central library and I think most city libraries would have a copy. It's not a rigorous read and an easy one. As the fields of molecular biology and nanotechnology grow, implementations of biomimicry will provide avenues to harness nature according to it's own rules, or, so I hope.:)
"...photography is the art of seeing for other people...
Your definition of photography is engaging but I can't subcribe to it. Photography, for me, is the interplay of light and form. There is a need to have a "working knowledge" (differs with each practioner) of light and optics; then there follows a need to come to an understanding of our visual system, with this comes composition, and, composition requires a personal aesthetic, as well as groking the basic grammar. Colour theory has to be acquired with the taking of colour photos. But after all this is learnt you're back to basic form and light, which is why Ansel Adams is such and enduring master. Learning darkroom technique teaches masking and burning which, for me, is the magic touch of photography.
I introduced my daughter to photography the same way I learnt. I gave her a Pentax K1000 with a few lenses and an extension tube set, a good supply of ilford b/w 400 and a book on the Zone System. There's so much to learn that starting with the basics is mandatory. Taking pics by point and shoot is to photography what using Windows and using a mouse to point and click is to computer literacy.
Classical economics, perhaps most identified with John M. Keynes, has faced the problem of mobility of the working force repeatedly since, cirica 1960 when it was suggested that structural unemployment presented the need to prepare workers to shift careers and move to where the jobs are. Classical economics has faced it's own needs to shift to new paradigms in the face of work by Complexity theorists like Brian Authur, but the problems of worker mobility remain. There are all sorts of barriers to mobility, whether vertical or lateral, but getting people to move to where the employment opportunities are is a sticky one.
If India needs english speaking teckies, then it presents the old problem of worker mobility in a new light. Taking a page from Hot money it may be a new trend will arise where skills will move to where the relative cost of living will maintain or increase their net income. Living in a foreign land can be a bitch but if it means putting money in the bank then, perhaps, as a short term strategy it will win converts and create a global work force. This may be aided by the adoption of English as the lingua franca.
From Man and Machine
An average human brain contains about 100 Billion neurons, although, at this point in your life, you may have fewer.
An average neuron has 1500 signal connections to other neurons.There are about 0.15 quadrillion of these "synapses" in the brain.
The senses transduce external stimuli into neural action which modifies the states of connected neurons. Each of the 100 Billion neurons in your brain is in a changing state at every instant
It is interesting to estimate how many arithmetic operations might be required to simulate an average human brain. If this simulation is done in the simplest possible way - by adding the contribution of every synapse to every neuron we could proceed as follows:
Number of synapses in a brain =
synapses per neuron * neurons in a brain =
1500 * 100 000 000 000 = 1 500 000 000 000 000 = 1.5 x 1014
Number of calculations per synapse = 2 (read current state of synapse, add to sum for connected neuron. Note these are integer operations (not floating point))
Number of calculations per second per synapse = 1000 (allows for a maximum firing rate of 500Hz for each synapse, which is about 2 to 5 times higher than normally recorded)
Total number of integer operations per second = 1.5 x 1014 * 2000 = 3.0 x 1017
Brain:
300,000,000,000,000,000 iOps / second
To Simulate 1 Brain requires 120,000,000 Pentium-4 Processors
(each P4 operating at 3Ghz)
We work with models, model are based on presuppositions underlying suppositions which if correct give the model predictive power. We aren't going to map the brain one on one for a long, long, time, if ever. What we can try to do is construct models that allow us to predict how the brain will work given any set of restrictions.
Uhmmm... yes and no. The study of epistemology has guided my readings since grade school. I've tried to understand the philosophical idea of epistemology, in terms of understanding knowledge, and epistemology as defined as the methodology of science. Generally, I started out in grade school with B. Russell's "History of Western Philosopy", and went on from there. In terms of the methodology of science I relied alot on Medawar and Popper, especially Popper's idea of falsification. Readings in this area lead to empiricism and the structure of experiment, along with the a need to understand the ceteris paribus clause. In a used book store, I found an old book titled "The Conduct of Inquiry" by A. Kaplan, great book that has much to teach. So, yes I've an understanding of the scientific method, but, no, I don't believe I fully understand it, nor do I understand knowledge. I think knowledge, as negative entropy needs to viewed in terms of co-evolution and notation, and, thus never in terms of the individual. We know there is a window for learning language, which if missed, leaves a person in a primitive state, maybe ignorant, as you suggest. OTOH, DNA, is a recipe for life and, it could be argued, a successful, empirical experiment. Does your definition of ignorance imply progress by trial and error? What's the difference between trial and error and the hypothetical-deductive method?
I should have ended my post in terms of mitigating against change using science.
The problems we face in terms of climate change and shifts in the parameters of the biosphere are matters of conjecture. Apologists from any one camp can float an argument to support their agenda. It's reminescent of Winston Churchill's quip: "These, gentlemen, are the opinions upon which I base my facts." In a political arena opinions are as likely to take the day as are facts.
Maybe the point to be highlighted is one of judgement. If you're crossing a rope bridge, over an abyss, and, you think it's showing signs of giving way, do you sprint for the other side or do you go gingerly, testing as you go, looking for more proof of what's happening? In the first world, the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle is not ruggedly robust, or, highly redundant. Redundancy as a concept is, historically, only yesterday's news. The internet is an example of an infrastructure built with redundancy in mind. So, if the biosphere is showing signs of change, do we hope for benign change and/or for science to sprint to the rescue? Sir Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of deductive reasoning, suggested we had to wrest the secrets of life from nature, like a mythological hero wresting a prize from some monster. I think many, maybe all of us, are subject to living, in part, in the heroic age, and, I think that is the greatest danger. The ancient Greeks fostered the idea of hubris as one of mankind's greatest weaknesses. The philosophy of the heroic age doesn't hold in an indeterminate universe and science shouldn't be seen as the ultimate big stick that will beat back the threats of nature.
Life, as we know it, is characterzed as an non-equilibrium, open-system. The sun rains down ~10^24 calories per year on the biosphere. Carbon based life forms, in the perfect mileu of water, harness this energy in various ways.But it's a system of systems and subject, as much as we know, to Systems Theory. If we know change is in the works do we risk positive feedback and trust in science to carry us past any threat?
There is a strong consensus that climate change is happening. Will climate change force a parameter shift that will invite a runaway state? The concept of key species tells us that specific species are necessary to maintaining the ecology of an eco niche. Could climate change destroy key species and cause collapse of ecosystems. This brings on the old bogey man of the domino effect.
Change is inevitable, so it's really a matter of placing your bet on science as the ultimate super hero, or, do we begin to exercise caution now to mitigate against change. After all there's no place like home.
What differentiates an addiction from an adaptation? When can an adaptation be said to have become an addiction? Playing with these ideas is a fun portal to understanding our makeup, but, at least for me, the answers aren't obvious. We function to a large degree by systems of negative feedback, with a few benign positive feedback loops, for example a sexual orgasim is the result of positive feedback, which for many can be said to be an addiction, there's evidence that less sexually active people live longer. Death is another example of positive feedback. Negative biological feedback systems keep us within balanced parameters. Balance while cycling is a great example of negative feedback functioning. Maybe an addiction can be said to be an adaptation that has gone into runaway and challenges the health of the system? My reading suggest our feedback systems are hierarchical and what is a benign or healthful adaptaion on one level can be a harmful addiction on another.
We're barely out of the cradle in terms of our evolution. Our species, for the sake of argument, can be said to be ~100,000 years old. We are omnivoires, with a strong taste for meat. In a geological timeframe we've just finished dinning on the brains of the smaller tribe of our species we just decimated. In terms of extraterrestrials our fiction, in the majority of cases, portraits aliens as geocidal killers come to eradicate our species and plunder the planet. When we portrait aliens as allies they invariably team up with us to defeat other aliens. We're warring, tribal xenophobes and it's likely the old joke holds true: if there's intelligent, extraterrestrail, life their intelligence is demonstrated in their not having contacted us. It's not unlikely that interplanetary congress excludes violence and violent species. The "conquest" of space may require the efforts of all peoples of a planet working together and perhaps only by working together will we be ready to meet whatever advanced interplanetary culture travels space.
just my $.01
Subvocalization is the way the to go
on
Cubicle Privacy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Excepting speed readers, who learn to quell subvocalization as a portal to speed reading, we all subvocalize. NASA has looked into sensors that detect the neural activity concurrent with subvocalization and act as an interface for a computer. This would be great for dictating sensitive information, not to mention, silencing the cell users who, for reasons unknown, feel it's necessary to raise the decible of their voice to let the world in on their mundane conversation. Maybe hardware like this can be implanted.
Slashdot Mirror
The fields of molecular biology and nanotechnology are two examples of new information opening up and being engineered. New fields of information, and, its implementation, can open up further fields and so on.
Perhaps one of the most immediate problems we face is a deluge of information that must be investigated and peer reviewed. Recently, a post grad, posted on /. that, in his opinion, there are too many Phds. I think there aren't enough Phds, and, further, we don't have the systems in place to gardner the results of the Phds now doing research.
P h d... is that pronounced fud?
I know your intention wasn't to amuse, but thankyou anyway. I find you to be very funny. :)
more hits from: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/SOBUNT_R.html"
IIRC Stephen Gould, in his book "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory", also uses the variant spelling, although, knowing Gould's penchant for neologisms and his mastery of english, I wouldn't bet heavily on it.
From a webpage on Molecular Insights into Human Brain Evolution by Jane Bradbury, the following quote applies:
"For natural selection to work, the costs of brain evolution must be outweighed by the advantages gained in terms of fitness. For many years, explains ecological psychologist Robin Dunbar (University of Liverpool, United Kingdom), "people thought that the ability to hunt or forage better was what drove the evolution of our brains. But a better diet had to come before we could grow a bigger brain." Dunbar believes instead that brain evolution in primates and more generally in mammals "has been driven by the need to manage social relationships, and in primates, in particular, to coordinate coherence in social groups through time and space". More complex social interactions, he says, mean that individuals are better able to pool resources to solve problems like finding food, and so they survive better."
Generally answers seem to cluster around the idea of kinship and the furthering of an individuals gene pool.Perhaps the answer will come in tandem with the solution to another evolutionary riddle pertaining to our kind, why is it we have such relatively small canines? The males of most primate species have large canines especially for fighting, usually other males in order to win controll of groups of females. Some speculation has it that monogamy in our kind did away with the need for large canines, or maybe, in our kind females did away with the male perrogative of controlling breeding?
!Happy Birthday Canada!
Point and Click users want what their friends and family want. They want to share pics, audio/video files, text files, powerpoint presentations, etc., etc. And on the desktop MS has won the race to place first in the consumers' mind in that regard.
When you buy tissue do you think tissue or do you think Kleenex? You might buy some generic brand buy you think Kleenex. Until interoperability becomes commonplace buyers will think Windows on the desktop because that's what their event horizon presents them with.
Remember the joke in Pulp Fiction... the baby tomato out for a walk with it's parent tomatoes dallies behind, angering the papa tomato, who stomps the baby tomato and yells: "Ketchup"... when you think ketchup you think Heinz, when consumers think Personal Computing they think Windows. I doubt that the majority even know what an OS is, as it all comes bundled.
While I'm on a rant, I think MS has chased the dream of the PC as a multimedia server, but I don't think they saw the dual core, multiprocessor model coming to the mass consumer market and their licensing strategy will have to morph to fit the market, as what is the PC becomes an appliance destined for the home basement as a server while laptops become ubiquitous.
Perhaps the most ironic POV prevalent in Open Source is that users are lusers and marketers are hypocritical scum, yet there are marketing people who would happily undertake to promote Open Source products, for the simple reason of undertaking the challenge, but when their kind is treated as piriah it's unlikely too many will be forth coming.
I wouldn't buy my books in bulk by publisher. When I choose a book it's by way of research into the author(s)' background. By way of example, many history books from the 50s and 60s that I've picked up have a strong bias as the authors were promulgating their theory as either pro marxist or antimarxist. I'd no idea that much of the soft sciences were a battle ground for Marxists ideologues. Who's to say what biases the publisher may express throughout the collection and why limit yourself to the exegencies of one publishing house in a search for knowledge.
You're right, but nominally, to the end user, WinXP is the Windows OS, it is the successor to the Win9x line, and, in presenting it as the de facto choice, they have made assumptions that screw their user base. My dad, for instance, a career Naval Officer/pilot, has run a PC since Win95, he's now upgraded his and my mom's PC to WinXP pro (he's the kinda guy that believes you should buy the top of the line), but he has no idea of what Admin privledges mean, or that he should run a limited user account. MS forcing the choice to WinXP should have defaulted to a secure setup, and/or, a must see interactive tutorial that tried to ensure point and click users understood basic security in terms of the merger of Win9x technology with NT.
Also, I don't see how MS is going to push Windows into a market dominated by dual core technology, multiprocessors box without running afoul of their existing pricing structure.
The intent of my post was to profile my user history as one that, while raised on a wintel platform, has seen a divergence wherein MS can serve as a multimedia/webbox, but is better left behind when chosing an OS for the upcoming dual core, multiprocessor workstations.
DOS 3.3 was the first MS OS I understood, so much so that, when the first DOSSHELL came out, I asked why would someone need that? I jumped on the NT technology because, when it first came out, it was well documented, (vis a vis my experience) and it allowed a whole new playing field. When NT 4 came out MS moved Video and Printer drivers from User mode to kernel mode. This was, IIRC, about the time Bill Gates had his vision of the PC integrated multi media household. I believe the PC version of Windows has persued this vision of multimedia OS to the point of having become in WinXP an ugly, bloated kludge, but it does, as much as possible, deliver in an ugly way, as a backward compatible multimedia OS.
Win 2K was the last OS to maintain the promise that Win New Technology brought with it. Win XP saw the culimnation of MS' effort to integrate Win95/98/ME with some of the benefits of NT, but the end result is an all and everything everyman's stew meant to satisfy the cravings of the masses.
I run WinXP on a web box for multimedia but thanks to the lessons gleaned online (/.:) I'm moving on to a *BSD, or one of the upcoming microkernel OSes to do research.
DYI it's easy and you get geek points.
Gregory Bateson, the American biologist said... "adversarial systems are notoriously subject to irrelevant determinism. The relative strength of the adverseries is likely to rule the decision regardless of the relative strength of their arguments."
When good hands go bad.
While not explicitly linked to biomimicry, the implications relate to this relatively new field. There's now a web site dedicated to dissiminating the developing ideas. My introduction came from reading Biomimicry by Janine M. Benyus. I found a copy in the central library and I think most city libraries would have a copy. It's not a rigorous read and an easy one. As the fields of molecular biology and nanotechnology grow, implementations of biomimicry will provide avenues to harness nature according to it's own rules, or, so I hope. :)
Your definition of photography is engaging but I can't subcribe to it. Photography, for me, is the interplay of light and form. There is a need to have a "working knowledge" (differs with each practioner) of light and optics; then there follows a need to come to an understanding of our visual system, with this comes composition, and, composition requires a personal aesthetic, as well as groking the basic grammar. Colour theory has to be acquired with the taking of colour photos. But after all this is learnt you're back to basic form and light, which is why Ansel Adams is such and enduring master. Learning darkroom technique teaches masking and burning which, for me, is the magic touch of photography.
I introduced my daughter to photography the same way I learnt. I gave her a Pentax K1000 with a few lenses and an extension tube set, a good supply of ilford b/w 400 and a book on the Zone System. There's so much to learn that starting with the basics is mandatory. Taking pics by point and shoot is to photography what using Windows and using a mouse to point and click is to computer literacy.
If India needs english speaking teckies, then it presents the old problem of worker mobility in a new light. Taking a page from Hot money it may be a new trend will arise where skills will move to where the relative cost of living will maintain or increase their net income. Living in a foreign land can be a bitch but if it means putting money in the bank then, perhaps, as a short term strategy it will win converts and create a global work force. This may be aided by the adoption of English as the lingua franca.
An average neuron has 1500 signal connections to other neurons.There are about 0.15 quadrillion of these "synapses" in the brain.
The senses transduce external stimuli into neural action which modifies the states of connected neurons. Each of the 100 Billion neurons in your brain is in a changing state at every instant
It is interesting to estimate how many arithmetic operations might be required to simulate an average human brain. If this simulation is done in the simplest possible way - by adding the contribution of every synapse to every neuron we could proceed as follows:
Number of synapses in a brain =
synapses per neuron * neurons in a brain =
1500 * 100 000 000 000 = 1 500 000 000 000 000 = 1.5 x 1014
Number of calculations per synapse = 2 (read current state of synapse, add to sum for connected neuron. Note these are integer operations (not floating point))
Number of calculations per second per synapse = 1000 (allows for a maximum firing rate of 500Hz for each synapse, which is about 2 to 5 times higher than normally recorded)
Total number of integer operations per second = 1.5 x 1014 * 2000 = 3.0 x 1017
Brain:
300,000,000,000,000,000 iOps / second
To Simulate 1 Brain requires 120,000,000 Pentium-4 Processors (each P4 operating at 3Ghz)
We work with models, model are based on presuppositions underlying suppositions which if correct give the model predictive power. We aren't going to map the brain one on one for a long, long, time, if ever. What we can try to do is construct models that allow us to predict how the brain will work given any set of restrictions.
OMG, the crazy bastards... now they've patented the future.
Uhmmm... yes and no. The study of epistemology has guided my readings since grade school. I've tried to understand the philosophical idea of epistemology, in terms of understanding knowledge, and epistemology as defined as the methodology of science. Generally, I started out in grade school with B. Russell's "History of Western Philosopy", and went on from there. In terms of the methodology of science I relied alot on Medawar and Popper, especially Popper's idea of falsification. Readings in this area lead to empiricism and the structure of experiment, along with the a need to understand the ceteris paribus clause. In a used book store, I found an old book titled "The Conduct of Inquiry" by A. Kaplan, great book that has much to teach. So, yes I've an understanding of the scientific method, but, no, I don't believe I fully understand it, nor do I understand knowledge. I think knowledge, as negative entropy needs to viewed in terms of co-evolution and notation, and, thus never in terms of the individual. We know there is a window for learning language, which if missed, leaves a person in a primitive state, maybe ignorant, as you suggest. OTOH, DNA, is a recipe for life and, it could be argued, a successful, empirical experiment. Does your definition of ignorance imply progress by trial and error? What's the difference between trial and error and the hypothetical-deductive method?
I should have ended my post in terms of mitigating against change using science.
Maybe the point to be highlighted is one of judgement. If you're crossing a rope bridge, over an abyss, and, you think it's showing signs of giving way, do you sprint for the other side or do you go gingerly, testing as you go, looking for more proof of what's happening? In the first world, the infrastructure that maintains our lifestyle is not ruggedly robust, or, highly redundant. Redundancy as a concept is, historically, only yesterday's news. The internet is an example of an infrastructure built with redundancy in mind. So, if the biosphere is showing signs of change, do we hope for benign change and/or for science to sprint to the rescue? Sir Francis Bacon, one of the fathers of deductive reasoning, suggested we had to wrest the secrets of life from nature, like a mythological hero wresting a prize from some monster. I think many, maybe all of us, are subject to living, in part, in the heroic age, and, I think that is the greatest danger. The ancient Greeks fostered the idea of hubris as one of mankind's greatest weaknesses. The philosophy of the heroic age doesn't hold in an indeterminate universe and science shouldn't be seen as the ultimate big stick that will beat back the threats of nature.
Life, as we know it, is characterzed as an non-equilibrium, open-system. The sun rains down ~10^24 calories per year on the biosphere. Carbon based life forms, in the perfect mileu of water, harness this energy in various ways.But it's a system of systems and subject, as much as we know, to Systems Theory. If we know change is in the works do we risk positive feedback and trust in science to carry us past any threat?
There is a strong consensus that climate change is happening. Will climate change force a parameter shift that will invite a runaway state? The concept of key species tells us that specific species are necessary to maintaining the ecology of an eco niche. Could climate change destroy key species and cause collapse of ecosystems. This brings on the old bogey man of the domino effect.
Change is inevitable, so it's really a matter of placing your bet on science as the ultimate super hero, or, do we begin to exercise caution now to mitigate against change. After all there's no place like home.
Slashdot story Sunday 10 April 2005.
The CIA Factbook has little to say, but a Wired article seems to dismiss the threat, although it notes information is hard to come by.
What differentiates an addiction from an adaptation? When can an adaptation be said to have become an addiction? Playing with these ideas is a fun portal to understanding our makeup, but, at least for me, the answers aren't obvious. We function to a large degree by systems of negative feedback, with a few benign positive feedback loops, for example a sexual orgasim is the result of positive feedback, which for many can be said to be an addiction, there's evidence that less sexually active people live longer. Death is another example of positive feedback. Negative biological feedback systems keep us within balanced parameters. Balance while cycling is a great example of negative feedback functioning. Maybe an addiction can be said to be an adaptation that has gone into runaway and challenges the health of the system? My reading suggest our feedback systems are hierarchical and what is a benign or healthful adaptaion on one level can be a harmful addiction on another.
just my $.01
Excepting speed readers, who learn to quell subvocalization as a portal to speed reading, we all subvocalize. NASA has looked into sensors that detect the neural activity concurrent with subvocalization and act as an interface for a computer. This would be great for dictating sensitive information, not to mention, silencing the cell users who, for reasons unknown, feel it's necessary to raise the decible of their voice to let the world in on their mundane conversation. Maybe hardware like this can be implanted.