In the pre-Rosh Hashanah ritual of kapparot, some worshipers swing live chickens around their heads, “symbolically transfer[ring] their sins to the animals, which are then slaughtered.” The birds are clearly treated as property (they’re even valued by their weight). “At the same time, the chicken is used as a substitute for a human person, even if only metaphorically and temporarily.”
Category: ideas
The Problem With the Argument That We’re Hard-Wired to Be Promiscuous
“[The] basic logic is that … human beings are not naturally monogamous but rather have been explicitly designed by natural selection to seek out ‘extra-pair copulatory partners’.” The difficulty “is simply the fact that we’ve evolved to empathize with other people’s suffering, including the suffering of the people we’d betray by putting our affable genitals to their evolved promiscuous use.”
Is Our Digital Addiction Diluting Our Creativity?
“Scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.”
Our Fascination With Doomsday Scenarios
“Some researchers think that apocalyptic dread feeds off our collective anxiety about events that lie outside our individual control. … The desire to treat terrible events as the harbinger of the end of civilization itself also has roots in another human trait: vanity.” (Additional discussion on public radio’s The Takeaway.)
Why Do Humans Cry?
“One theory is that crying may have evolved as a kind of signal – a signal that was valuable because it could only be picked up by those closest to us who could actually see our tears.”
Does Peter Parker Have a Moral Responsibility to Be Spider-Man?
“The role taxes him significantly, hurting his studies and his personal life. Is Peter morally permitted to throw in his costume? I believe that he is. Taking up the role of a superhero is a supererogatory act – an act that’s good to do, but not wrong not to do.”
‘X-Phi’ (Experimental Philosophy) – Exploring the Great Questions in the Lab
Traditionally, the discipline of philosophy has been pursued in a chair at a desk. “But recently, ‘experimental’ philosophers have used surveys, fMRI’s, and other tools from psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science to analyze age-old philosophical problems.” Half a dozen professors debate whether x-phi is a promising new approach or a waste of time, money and equipment.
Online Dating – What We’re Learning About Human Nature
“Research presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association found that 22 percent of heterosexual couples surveyed met online, and researchers believe the Web could soon eclipse friends as the primary means of finding mates.”
Is The Web Really Dying? (History Tells Us That…)
“Evolution — not extinction — has always been the primary rule of media ecology. New media predators rise up, but other media species typically adapt rather than perish. That is the message of both history and leading media theorists, like Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. Television, for example, was seen as a threat to radio and movies, though both evolved and survived.”
An Excess Of Copies (It’s Information Overload)
“The reason information can increase like this is that, if the necessary raw materials are available, copying creates more information. Of course it is not new information, but if the copies vary (which they will if only by virtue of copying errors), and if not all variants survive to be copied again (which is inevitable given limited resources), then we have the complete three-step process of natural selection.”