As long as the idea persists that myth, purpose and meaning are things to be burned away by the acid of scientific reason, evolution and science will be silent about creativity.
Category: ideas
Information Over Insight? Is That what We’ve Become?
“Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become.”
What Happens When Governments, Or Revolutionaries, Declare War On Intelligence
Ariel Dorfman, who knows a thing or two about what happens when anti-intellectualism overwhelms a country: “The resurgence of nationalism in our time has not yet reached the homicidal extremes it did when Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco misruled their lands, but the United States still faces an assault on rational discourse, scientific knowledge, and objective truth. And this war on intelligence, too, despite the edulcorated pieties that come from those who carry it out, will lead to many deaths.”
Finding ‘Allah’ In Viking Graves Opens Questions About Scandinavian History
For one thing, “the evidence, she added, supported the theory that the Viking settlements in the Malar Valley of Sweden were, in fact, a western outpost of the Silk Road that stretched through Russia to silk-producing centers east of the Caspian Sea.” But was there a deeper cultural and religious exchange as well?
Why Making It Easy For Contrarians Is Good For All Of Us
“Making it cheap to express unpopular opinions makes it easier for outsiders to gauge what the average viewpoint of a group of scholars might be. And when an article causes a controversy, calls to uphold a field’s standards should be met with some skepticism, especially when those standards would prohibit the publication of the unpopular opinion in the first instance. After all, if academic freedom doesn’t mean the protection of unpopular and disruptive minority views, what could it possibly be for?”
Study: How You Read Affects How Much You Remember
“One study revealed that people think they are better at comprehending information when they read it on a digital screen. This resulted in those readers reading the text much faster than those reading the text in paper format. Yet despite spending less time reading the text, the digital readers predicted they would perform better on a quiz about the text than the people who read the text on paper. Yet when the digital and paper groups were tested, the paper groups outperformed the digital groups on memory recall and comprehension of the text. They also were closer to their test result predictions than the digital group was.”
A Visit To Google’s ‘Moonshot Factory’
“A snake-robot designer, a balloon scientist, a liquid-crystals technologist, an extradimensional physicist, a psychology geek, an electronic-materials wrangler, and a journalist walk into a room. The journalist turns to the assembled crowd and asks: Should we build houses on the ocean?” Is this the set-up to a joke? No, it’s The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson proposing his own “moonshot idea” on a reporting trip to Google’s X, “perhaps the only enterprise on the planet where regular investigation into the absurd is not just permitted but encouraged, and even required.”
Have Our Senses Been Polluted?
“I don’t mean to depict our sensorium — the entire range and capacity of our sensory experience — as a pure state that has been defiled by light, noise, flavor and scent pollution; that would just be another version of the original-sin-and-fall narrative. I would argue rather that we have managed to turn the senses against themselves by pitting overwhelming light against lights, overpowering sound against sounds, intense flavor against flavors, penetrating aroma against aromas. In each case, the result is a marked simplification in the field of possible experiences — one or two stimuli will outshine, outsmell or outshout the rest.”
Consciousness – What’s Real And What’s Not (And That’s Difficult To Determine)
“We live in a time when scientists seem to like nothing better than to expose our everyday view of reality as delusional. They say, “You see the color red, but in fact, out there are only atoms; there are no colors. You hear music, but out there, there are no sounds,” etc. This gives them the authority to describe an entirely different reality, in which deciding between chocolate or strawberry ice cream, say, is nothing more than a matter of warring cohorts of neurons transferring their electrical charges and chemical processes this way and that, while outside your brain there is only a flavorless world of atomic particles. It’s a vision that denies not only our existence—as people choosing between ice-cream flavors—but also the existence of the things we experience.”
Academic Journal Publishes, Then Yanks, Article Defending Colonialism (Just In Time For Columbus Day)
“‘The Case for Colonialism,’ written by a political science professor at Portland State University, drew immediate outcries from scholars when it was published last month by Third World Quarterly. Fifteen members of the journal’s 34-member board resigned in protest, and two petitions demanded that the journal retract the piece.” However, Noam Chomsky (of all people) argued against retraction, saying that rebuttal was the better course. “The article recently disappeared from the journal’s website with an explanation that it was withdrawn ‘at the request of the academic journal editor, and in agreement with the author of the essay, Bruce Gilley.'”