People are usually sure that they’re living within a particular culture, but typically wonder if what they have is a civilization. It’s been that way since the days of Madame de Staël and Henry James, but the terms are still easily confused. The German historian Oswald Spengler considered civilization the teleological “inevitable destiny of culture.” And Samuel Huntington’s famous book The Clash of Civilizations, largely about the differences between the Euro-American and Arab worlds, protests that efforts to distinguish culture from civilization “have not caught on,” and the “civilization” of which he writes is really “culture,” a set of beliefs rather than a system of rule.
Category: ideas
The Struggle To Figure Out How Babies Learn (And Why It’s More Difficult For Robots To Learn)
We arrive ready to interact with other humans and our culture. The real genius of human babies is not simply that they learn from the environment – other animals can do that. Human babies can understand the people around them and, specifically, interpret their intentions.
Absolute Truths: The Lie Detector In The Age Of Alternative Facts
Geoffrey C. Bunn argues that the history of the lie detector doubles as the history of an attempt to contend with the rise of mass culture: the machine, as a manifestation of a widespread desire for order in an age of tumult. The device, Bunn suggests, is in many ways a work of science fiction that lurks, awkwardly, in the present reality—a machine that has been, from the beginning, in dialogue with pop culture and its myths.
Why Is Human Thought So Much More Complex Than Animal Thought? Tools
“The difference is due, [neuro-philosopher Andy Clark] believes, to our heightened ability to incorporate props and tools into our thinking, to use them to think thoughts we could never have otherwise. If we do not see this, he writes, it is only because we are in the grip of a prejudice – ‘that whatever matters about my mind must depend solely on what goes on inside my own biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of skin and skull.'”
The Battle For How We Define Ourselves – The Virtual Versus Physical
“Virtual reality confounds the idea of the ‘mind-body problem,’ the relationship between the conscious mind and physical body that’s remained a staple of the philosophy of mind since Aristotle and Plato. Mind-body dualism dictates that the mental being is “in here” while the physical self is “out there.” But questions of neurobiology make that whole proposition more complicated.”
Small Study: Virtual Reality Experiences May Boost Creativity
To assess their creativity, all students performed a series of problems from the Alternative Uses Task, a common measure of creative ability in which one is asked to come up with novel uses for a common object. Half came up with offbeat uses as they walked down the virtual corridor (whether or not doing so necessitated breaking down walls), while the others did so immediately afterwards. Either way, “superior creative performance was observed in the ‘break’ condition,” the researchers report. This result supports the thesis that the “bodily experience” of breaking down barriers “would spread to conceptual processing.”
A “Post-Truth” World? Here’s What It Means
“Whenever a fact contradicts one of our beliefs, we are prompted to restore consistency by revising some of the beliefs in our web. But in choosing what to revise, we are no longer guided by facts alone. Starting from the anomalous evidence, we look at the contested belief and its supporting justification(s), and assess how consistency can be most parsimoniously restored in light of the full web of our beliefs. We can end up revising anything, from doubting that we actually observed the anomalous evidence in the first place, to the principles of logic and mathematics that lie at the centre of our web.”
Social Media May Well Be Our New Oral History, As The Shrimp Fried Rice Thread Shows
Seriously: “Fewer and fewer people look to old stories for real enlightenment these days, and for many, questions of right and wrong can seem old-fashioned. But that’s not to say there isn’t a hunger for a discourse that can teach us what behavior is praiseworthy. Now, we look to Twitter.”
Is “Hyper-Liberalism” A Danger To Our Academies?
Practices of toleration that used to be seen as essential to freedom are being deconstructed and dismissed as structures of repression, and any ideas or beliefs that stand in the way of this process banned from public discourse. Judged by old-fashioned standards, this is the opposite of what liberals have stood for. But what has happened in higher education is not that liberalism has been supplanted by some other ruling philosophy. Instead, a hyper-liberal ideology has developed that aims to purge society of any trace of other views of the world.
What Distinguishes How Humans Think
How is it that human thought is so deeply different from that of other animals, even though our brains can be quite similar? The difference is due, Andy Clark believes, to our heightened ability to incorporate props and tools into our thinking, to use them to think thoughts we could never have otherwise. If we do not see this, he writes, it is only because we are in the grip of a prejudice—“that whatever matters about my mind must depend solely on what goes on inside my own biological skin-bag, inside the ancient fortress of skin and skull.”