Author: Douglas McLennan

Tech has sold us on the idea of making things easier, of reducing the friction in our lives. But friction is how we sharpen up, get better, figure things out. It turns out that making things easier can make the bigger picture more difficult. – Medium

“It has been said, indeed, that the eighteenth century was less the Age of Reason than the Age of Feelings—because so many Enlightenment thinkers took pride in recognizing the importance of the sentiments, as their intellectual predecessors often had not. (In Hume’s famous line: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the Passions.”) The aim of building a rational society meant contending with the ways in which human beings are not creatures of sweet reason. And that meant, in turn, having some way of deciding what rationality demanded.” – New York Review of Books

‘The Reformation and Counter-Reformation participated in parallel projects of religious discipline: while Catholics disciplined populations to believe, Protestants disciplined populations of unbelievers.’ Belief in the modern sense of the word was bred of the resulting strain. The demands imposed on Christians by inquisitors and Puritans alike proved too much for many of them. Dissidents emerged in both the Catholic and Protestant traditions, who emphasised the subjectivity of religious conviction. Belief was to become opinion. – History Today

“By linking brain activity to an image or sound in real time, we can use simple game-like techniques to get people to train themselves to forge new neural connections and voluntarily adopt (or avoid) certain mental states.”  – Aeon