Category: ideas

“Supercomputers are already used to predict weather and earthquakes, but there’s not currently enough computing power to model complex biological systems precisely enough to make endeavors like large-scale transitioning to wind energy, for example, feasible. An exascale computer would be powerful enough to uncover answers to questions about, say, climate change and growing food that can withstand drought. It could even predict crime (hopefully with more accuracy and fairness than current predictive policing systems).”

“Some of the answers to art’s mysteries can be found in the realm of science. Art is considered the domain of the heart, but its transporting effects start in the brain, where intricate systems perceive and interpret it with dazzling speed. Using brain-imaging and other tools of neuroscience, the new field of neuroaesthetics is probing the relationship between art and the brain.”

“A little over a decade after he published “On the Origin of Species,” in which he described his theory of natural selection shaped by “survival of the fittest,” Darwin published another troublesome treatise — “The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relationship to Sex.” This expanded on an idea he mentioned only briefly in “Origin.” Sometimes, he proposed, in organisms that reproduce by having sex, a different kind of selection occurs: Animals choose mates that are not the fittest candidates available, but the most attractive or alluring. Sometimes, in other words, aesthetics rule.”

Neurons in the part of the brain normally responsible for vision synchronise their activity to the sounds of speech in blind people, says Olivier Collignon at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCL) in Belgium. “It’s a strong argument that the organisation of the language system… is not constrained by our genetic blueprint alone,” he says.

“In the twenty-first century, the face is a database, a dynamic bank of information points—muscle configurations, childhood scars, barely perceptible flares of the nostril—that together speak to what you feel and who you are. Facial-recognition technology is being tested in airports around the world, matching camera footage against visa photos. Churches use it to document worshipper attendance. China has gone all in on the technology, employing it to identify jaywalkers, offer menu suggestions at KFC, and prevent the theft of toilet paper from public restrooms.”

“A lot of mathematics ultimately is artistic rather than useful. Sometimes you see a picture that’s got a lot of symmetry in it, like an M.C. Escher sketch, and it’s like, ‘Wow, that’s just so amazing!’ But when you study mathematics, you start to “see” things in higher dimensions. You’re not necessarily visualizing them in the same way that you could with a sculpture or piece of art. But you start to feel like this whole system of objects that you’re looking at, and the symmetries it has, are really just beautiful. There’s no other good word.”

By means of what is, at bottom, a self-gratifying act, spending money—rather than by means of compassion, piety, courage, or self-sacrifice—a lucky elite has set itself above ordinary people by virtue of its aesthetic tastes and preferences, which it has elevated to a self-defined enlightenment. The result, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett writes, is “a deep cultural divide that has never existed with such distinction as it does today.”

“I’d much rather live in a Universe where we discover that today’s view of physics is comically naïve. If I am so lucky as to live to see deep new discoveries about the true nature of reality, I hope to find them bizarre and shocking. In 1,000 years, physics and mathematics will probably have progressed so far that the very nature of the questions will be incomprehensible to us. Researchers will have moved on to bigger, more mind-blowing questions that today’s deepest thinkers are not yet even equipped to ask.”

“Computers are ingenious devices that exploit electronic states to control other devices—screens and loudspeakers—that make images and sounds. There are no images or sounds literally inside your computer, the way there are coins in your pocket. Information does not exist as a physical substance. It is a word we use, a form of shorthand if you like, to describe a process that allows a message to go from sender to receiver. However, in this theory, information, understood as the multiplication and arrangement of bits, at a certain point metamorphoses into conscious experience.”