Category: ideas

From his third autobiography: “If there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, … [with] no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, … as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy.” (Sounds like mindfulness to us …)

“No respectable historian would claim that if Newton had never been born we would still be ignorant about gravitation. Yet we still refer to the regularities of the behavior of physical bodies as ‘Newton’s Laws,’ the general regularities of simple inheritance as ‘Mendelism,’ and the science of biological evolution as ‘Darwinism.'”

“The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. … The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational. And it frequently requires complex thinking.” Compare that with, say, middle management in a big organization, or any number of “knowledge worker” jobs …

“Artificial intelligence is already used to automate and replace some human functions with computer-driven machines. These machines can see and hear, respond to questions, learn, draw inferences and solve problems. But for the Singulatarians, A.I. refers to machines that will be both self-aware and superhuman in their intelligence, and capable of designing better computers and robots faster than humans can today.”

Chris Anderson’s vision “today looks curiously conservative and static, and is both deeply reductive and pessimistic about human nature. We are happy to pay when we perceive value, even for the most unlikely products, such as bottled water. The ideas at the heart of Free do little to explain that.”

“There may be more to creativity than simply letting the ideas flow – brain measurements of a ‘creativity chemical’ are revealing a complex interplay between ingenuity and intelligence. While high levels of the chemical in a certain part of the brain seem to increase creativity in really smart people, the reverse is true in those of average intellect.”

“[S]o many of the features of the Chinese language” – the vocal tones, the lack of verb tenses, the very fact of words as ideographs rather than groups of letters – “which poets manipulate in complex and subtle ways, are totally untranslatable into English.” Yet there’s an abundance of classic Chinese verse in English: “despite all the barriers, this poetry does communicate, even urgently, to modern Western readers.” How do translators make this communication happen?

“Whether you measure miles of roadway or length of electrical cables, you find that all of these [measures of infrastructure necessary for a city] also decrease, per person, as city size increases. And all show an exponent between 0.7 and 0.9. Now comes the spooky part. The same law is true for living things. That is, if you mentally replace cities by organisms and city size by body weight, the mathematical pattern remains the same.”

“We are on the brink of technological breakthroughs that could augment our mental powers beyond recognition. It will soon be possible to boost human brainpower with electronic ‘plug-ins’ or even by genetic enhancement. What will this mean for the future of humanity? … Would it widen the gulf between the world’s haves and have-nots – and perhaps even lead to a distinct and dominant species with unmatchable powers of intellect?”

There’s an entire small industry of pundits decrying our web-enabled, Twitterfied short attention spans – and folks are trying meditation, Adderall, “lifehacking” and all manner of strategies to maintain focus. But, says Sam Anderson, “Focus is a paradox – it has distraction built into it. The two are symbiotic; they’re the systole and diastole of consciousness … We need both.”