“On the one hand, we have been encouraged to believe that we are no longer the sum of our products (as we were when we were still an industrial economy) but the sum of our experiences. On the other, we lack the ritual structures that once served to organize, integrate and preserve the stream of these experiences, so they inevitably feel both scattershot and evanescent. We worry that photographs or journal entries keep us at a remove from life, but we also worry that without an inventory of these documents … we’ll disintegrate. Furthermore, that inventory has to fulfill two slightly different functions: It must define us as at once part of a tribe (‘people who go to Paris’) and independent of it (‘people who go to Paris and don’t photograph the Eiffel Tower’).”
Category: ideas
Are We Close To Understanding The Science Of How The Brain Makes Thoughts?
“If consciousness is, as it should be, an organized state of matter, we seem to be lacking an essential component to describe it. For comparison, a building has bricks and pumps and electrical currents controlled by on-off switches flowing through countless wires. It is a mechanical contraption, working firmly within a set of physical laws. We understand buildings, and can build and fix them because we know the underlying physical principles under which they operate. Likewise, it is plausible that we can build brain-like systems having different kinds of experiential awareness like seeing or hearing, and that respond to such stimuli with certain actions. Many robots already do this.”
Finally, We’re Beginning To Understand Time
“We’ve made little progress since Einstein – until now. Some theorists, in their frustration, revert to Augustine’s deduction: that the flow of time is an illusion. Although this conclusion doesn’t fall within the realm of science (how could you falsify it?), it provides a convenient excuse for ignoring the most salient aspects of time, the flow and the now, the aspects that are at the heart of human experience. Now, in the early 21st century, it is time once again to examine the meaning of time.” Physicist Richard A. Muller explains why.
Bots Are Figuring Out How To Make Art (And Starting To Get Good At It)
“We’re always writing from our experiences of things that we’ve read and what we’ve heard and things that we’ve absorbed verbally. So to what extent can anyone author anything? And to what extent does this machine augment this capacity?”
The Brilliant Astronomer Who Opposed Copernicus And Galilieo On The Grounds Of Science, Not Religion
Johann Georg Locher “argued that Copernicus was wrong about Earth circling the Sun, and that Earth was fixed in place, at the centre of the Universe, like Ptolemy said. … Indeed, Locher even proposed a mechanism to explain how Earth could orbit the Sun (a sort of perpetual falling – this decades before Isaac Newton would explain orbits by means of perpetual falling), but he said it would not help the Copernicans, on account of the other problems with their theory.”
Want Creative Kids? Give Them Things That Will Bore Them
“Boredom is where creativity is born. Boredom is not the enemy. Boredom is the friend. Boredom is what gives rise to ‘What happens when I take a picture between my fingers? What happens when I turn the camera sideways?’”
The Personalities Of Rocks, A Chemistry Award For Volkswagen, And $10 Trillion Prizes: The 2016 Ig Nobels
“Investigations into rats wearing pants, the personalities of rocks and the truthfulness of 1,000 liars won Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday night at Harvard, where Nobel-winning scientists gathered to honor the strangest research of the year.”
What Machine Learning Is Teaching Us About How We Learn
“By bringing the tools of computation and machine intuition to the table, AI researchers are giving us a more complete picture of how we learn. They are also broadening the study of education to include quantitative, numerical models of the learning process itself. “The thing that AI brings to the table is that it forces us to get into the details of how everything works,” says John Laird, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. If there was any doubt that good teachers are important, machine learning is helping put it to rest.”
The Currency Of Feelings – What’s It Worth To You?
“The primacy of feelings in our economy has given rise to a new field of scholarly inquiry. ‘Affect studies’ refers to humanistic and social-scientific investigations of the ways that feelings are generated, experienced, and interpreted. An affect is a particular kind of feeling, one distinct from an emotion. For academics in the field, affects are feelings that reside not in individual people but in social groups, institutions, or physical spaces.”
The Next Big Intellectual Revolution Is Coming
All of the past “justice revolutions” have stemmed from improved communications. Oppression thrives on distance, on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed. The next revolution will not abolish the consequences of place of birth, but the privileges of nationhood will be tempered. While the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment around the world today seems to point in the opposite direction, the sense of injustice will be amplified as communications continue to grow. Ultimately, recognition of wrong will wreak big changes.