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markfrankel18

Jesus wept … oh, it's bad plumbing. Indian rationalist targets 'miracles' | W... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...india-blasphemy-jesus-tears

science knowledge religion

shared by markfrankel18 on 25 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • When water started trickling down a statue of Jesus Christ at a Catholic church in Mumbai earlier this year, locals were quick to declare a miracle. Some began collecting the holy water and the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni began to promote it as a site of pilgrimage.So when Sanal Edamaruku arrived and established that this was not holy water so much as holey plumbing, the backlash was severe. The renowned rationalist was accused of blasphemy, charged with offences that carry a three-year prison sentence and eventually, after receiving death threats, had to seek exile in Finland.
Javier E

Strange things are taking place - at the same time - 0 views

edition.pagesuite.com/...dynamic_article_popover.aspx

coincidence miracle randomness fate psychology research

shared by Javier E on 06 Dec 22 - No Cached
  • In February 1973, Dr. Bernard Beitman found himself hunched over a kitchen sink in an old Victorian house in San Francisco, choking uncontrollably. He wasn’t eating or drinking, so there was nothing to cough up, and yet for several minutes he couldn’t catch his breath or swallow.The next day his brother called to tell him that 3,000 miles away, in Wilmington, Del., their father had died. He had bled into his throat, choking on his own blood at the same time as Beitman’s mysterious episode.
  • Overcome with awe and emotion, Beitman became fascinated with what he calls meaningful coincidences. After becoming a professor of psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia, he published several papers and two books on the subject and started a nonprofit, the Coincidence Project, to encourage people to share their coincidence stories.
  • “What I look for as a scientist and a spiritual seeker are the patterns that lead to meaningful coincidences,” said Beitman, 80, from his home in Charlottesville, Va. “So many people are reporting this kind of experience. Understanding how it happens is part of the fun.”
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Beitman defines a coincidence as “two events coming together with apparently no causal explanation.” They can be life-changing, like his experience with his father, or comforting, such as when a loved one’s favorite song comes on the radio just when you are missing them most.
  • Although Beitman has long been fascinated by coincidences, it wasn’t until the end of his academic career that he was able to study them in earnest. (Before then, his research primarily focused on the relationship between chest pain and panic disorder.)
  • He started by developing the Weird Coincidence Survey in 2006 to assess what types of coincidences are most commonly observed, what personality types are most correlated with noticing them and how most people explain them. About 3,000 people have completed the survey so far.
  • he has drawn a few conclusions. The most commonly reported coincidences are associated withmass media: A person thinks of an idea and then hears or sees it on TV, the radio or the internet. Thinking of someone and then having that person call unexpectedly is next on the list, followed by being in the right place at the right time to advance one’s work, career or education.
  • People who describe themselves as spiritual or religious report noticing more meaningful coincidences than those who do not, and people are more likely to experience coincidences when they are in a heightened emotional state — perhaps under stress or grieving.
  • The most popular explanation among survey respondents for mysterious coincidences: God or fate. The second explanation: randomness. The third is that our minds are connected to one another. The fourth is that our minds are connected to the environment.
  • “Some say God, some say universe, some say random and I say ‘Yes,’ ” he said. “People want things to be black and white, yes or no, but I say there is mystery.”
  • He’s particularly interested in what he’s dubbed “simulpathity”: feeling a loved one’s pain at a distance, as he believes he did with his father. Science can’t currently explain how it might occur, but in his books he offers some nontraditional ideas, such as the existence of “the psychosphere,” a kind of mental atmosphere through which information and energy can travel between two people who are emotionally close though physically distant.
  • In his new book published in September, “Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen,” he shares the story of a young man who intended to end his life by the shore of an isolated lake. While he sat crying in his car, another car pulled up and his brother got out. When the young man asked for an explanation, the brother said he didn’t know why he got in the car, where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He just knew he needed to get in the car and drive.
  • David Hand, a British statistician and author of the 2014 book “The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day,” sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Beitman. He says most coincidences are fairly easy to explain, and he specializes in demystifying even the strangest ones.
  • “When you look closely at a coincidence, you can often discover the chance of it happening is not as small as you think,” he said. “It’s perhaps not a 1-in-a-billion chance, but in fact a 1-in-a-hundred chance, and yeah, you would expect that would happen quite often.”
  • the law of truly large numbers. “You take something that has a very small chance of happening and you give it lots and lots and lots of opportunities to happen,” he said. “Then the overall probability becomes big.”
  • But just because Hand has a mathematical perspective doesn’t mean he finds coincidences boring. “It’s like looking at a rainbow,” he said. “Just because I understand the physics behind it doesn’t make it any the less wonderful.
  • Paying attention to coincidences, Osman and Johansen say, is an essential part of how humans make sense of the world. We rely constantly on our understanding of cause and effect to survive.
  • “Coincidences are often associated with something mystical or supernatural, but if you look under the hood, noticing coincidences is what humans do all the time,”
  • Zeltzer has spent 50 years studying the writings of Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychologist who introduced the modern Western world to the idea of synchronicity. Jung defined synchronicity as “the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning.”
  • One of Jung’s most iconic synchronistic stories concerned a patient who he felt had become so stuck in her rationality that it interfered with her ability to understand her psychology and emotional life.
  • One day, the patient was recounting a dream in which she’d received a golden scarab. Just then, Jung heard a gentle tapping at the window. He opened the window and a scarab-like beetle flew into the room. Jung plucked the insect out of the air and presented it to his patient. “Here is your scarab,” he said.The experience proved therapeutic because it demonstrated to Jung’s patient that the world is not always rational, leading her to break her own identification with rationality and thus become more open to her emotional life, Zeltzer explained
  • Like Jung, Zeltzer believes meaningful coincidences can encourage people to acknowledge the irrational and mysterious. “We have a fantasy that there is always an answer, and that we should know everything,”
  • Honestly, I’m not sure what to believe, but I’m not sure it matters. Like Beitman, my attitude is “Yes.”
oliviaodon

Are Diet Pills an Aggressively Marketed Scam? | Huffington Post - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...t-and-nutrition_b_5409651.html

scam knowledge

shared by oliviaodon on 27 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • occasionally lured by the promises of effortless slimming
  • Dr.-Oz-endorsed Garcinia Cambogia pills are languishing in his kitchen cupboard - because they don’t seem to work. Bruni applauds the recent interest in fighting aggressively marketed junk-that-makes-us-fat, and wants to remind us that we should also pay attention to aggressively marketed pills
  • most of the supplements marketed as fat burners have little or no science to support their claims
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The ever increasing list of fat-burning supplements is industry driven, and is likely to grow at a rate that is not and cannot be matched by similar increase in scientific underpinning.
  • In other words, marketers are quick to announce miracle solutions based of the flimsiest of evidence collected on a few lab mice or a cell culture.
  • Health claims were introduced in 1994, have been so miserably abused and have become so utterly misleading that it’s just time to say goodbye.
  • oliviaodon on 27 Oct 16
     
    This article relates to knowledge claims that take advantage of one's time and money. 
Emily Freilich

The Man Who Would Teach Machines to Think - James Somers - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...309529

artificial intelligence science technology progression

shared by Emily Freilich on 08 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, thinks we've lost sight of what artificial intelligence really means. His stubborn quest to replicate the human mind.
  • “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say—maybe they wouldn’t go this far—but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done
  • Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself.
  • ...43 more annotations...
  • “It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.”
  • Computers are flexible enough to model the strange evolved convolutions of our thought, and yet responsive only to precise instructions. So if the endeavor succeeds, it will be a double victory: we will finally come to know the exact mechanics of our selves—and we’ll have made intelligent machines.
  • Ever since he was about 14, when he found out that his youngest sister, Molly, couldn’t understand language, because she “had something deeply wrong with her brain” (her neurological condition probably dated from birth, and was never diagnosed), he had been quietly obsessed by the relation of mind to matter.
  • How could consciousness be physical? How could a few pounds of gray gelatin give rise to our very thoughts and selves?
  • Consciousness, Hofstadter wanted to say, emerged via just the same kind of “level-crossing feedback loop.”
  • In 1931, the Austrian-born logician Kurt Gödel had famously shown how a mathematical system could make statements not just about numbers but about the system itself.
  • But then AI changed, and Hofstadter didn’t change with it, and for that he all but disappeared.
  • By the early 1980s, the pressure was great enough that AI, which had begun as an endeavor to answer yes to Alan Turing’s famous question, “Can machines think?,” started to mature—or mutate, depending on your point of view—into a subfield of software engineering, driven by applications.
  • Take Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that bested the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Deep Blue won by brute force.
  • Hofstadter wanted to ask: Why conquer a task if there’s no insight to be had from the victory? “Okay,” he says, “Deep Blue plays very good chess—so what? Does that tell you something about how we play chess? No. Does it tell you about how Kasparov envisions, understands a chessboard?”
  • AI started working when it ditched humans as a model, because it ditched them. That’s the thrust of the analogy: Airplanes don’t flap their wings; why should computers think?
  • It’s a compelling point. But it loses some bite when you consider what we want: a Google that knows, in the way a human would know, what you really mean when you search for something
  • Cognition is recognition,” he likes to say. He describes “seeing as” as the essential cognitive act: you see some lines a
  • How do you make a search engine that understands if you don’t know how you understand?
  • s “an A,” you see a hunk of wood as “a table,” you see a meeting as “an emperor-has-no-clothes situation” and a friend’s pouting as “sour grapes”
  • That’s what it means to understand. But how does understanding work?
  • analogy is “the fuel and fire of thinking,” the bread and butter of our daily mental lives.
  • there’s an analogy, a mental leap so stunningly complex that it’s a computational miracle: somehow your brain is able to strip any remark of the irrelevant surface details and extract its gist, its “skeletal essence,” and retrieve, from your own repertoire of ideas and experiences, the story or remark that best relates.
  • in Hofstadter’s telling, the story goes like this: when everybody else in AI started building products, he and his team, as his friend, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, wrote, “patiently, systematically, brilliantly,” way out of the light of day, chipped away at the real problem. “Very few people are interested in how human intelligence works,”
  • For more than 30 years, Hofstadter has worked as a professor at Indiana University at Bloomington
  • The quick unconscious chaos of a mind can be slowed down on the computer, or rewound, paused, even edited
  • project out of IBM called Candide. The idea behind Candide, a machine-translation system, was to start by admitting that the rules-based approach requires too deep an understanding of how language is produced; how semantics, syntax, and morphology work; and how words commingle in sentences and combine into paragraphs—to say nothing of understanding the ideas for which those words are merely conduits.
  • , Hofstadter directs the Fluid Analogies Research Group, affectionately known as FARG.
  • Parts of a program can be selectively isolated to see how it functions without them; parameters can be changed to see how performance improves or degrades. When the computer surprises you—whether by being especially creative or especially dim-witted—you can see exactly why.
  • When you read Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought, which describes in detail this architecture and the logic and mechanics of the programs that use it, you wonder whether maybe Hofstadter got famous for the wrong book.
  • ut very few people, even admirers of GEB, know about the book or the programs it describes. And maybe that’s because FARG’s programs are almost ostentatiously impractical. Because they operate in tiny, seemingly childish “microdomains.” Because there is no task they perform better than a human.
  • “The entire effort of artificial intelligence is essentially a fight against computers’ rigidity.”
  • “Nobody is a very reliable guide concerning activities in their mind that are, by definition, subconscious,” he once wrote. “This is what makes vast collections of errors so important. In an isolated error, the mechanisms involved yield only slight traces of themselves; however, in a large collection, vast numbers of such slight traces exist, collectively adding up to strong evidence for (and against) particular mechanisms.
  • So IBM threw that approach out the window. What the developers did instead was brilliant, but so straightforward,
  • The technique is called “machine learning.” The goal is to make a device that takes an English sentence as input and spits out a French sentence
  • What you do is feed the machine English sentences whose French translations you already know. (Candide, for example, used 2.2 million pairs of sentences, mostly from the bilingual proceedings of Canadian parliamentary debates.)
  • By repeating this process with millions of pairs of sentences, you will gradually calibrate your machine, to the point where you’ll be able to enter a sentence whose translation you don’t know and get a reasonable resul
  • Google Translate team can be made up of people who don’t speak most of the languages their application translates. “It’s a bang-for-your-buck argument,” Estelle says. “You probably want to hire more engineers instead” of native speakers.
  • But the need to serve 1 billion customers has a way of forcing the company to trade understanding for expediency. You don’t have to push Google Translate very far to see the compromises its developers have made for coverage, and speed, and ease of engineering. Although Google Translate captures, in its way, the products of human intelligence, it isn’t intelligent itself.
  • “Did we sit down when we built Watson and try to model human cognition?” Dave Ferrucci, who led the Watson team at IBM, pauses for emphasis. “Absolutely not. We just tried to create a machine that could win at Jeopardy.”
  • For Ferrucci, the definition of intelligence is simple: it’s what a program can do. Deep Blue was intelligent because it could beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Watson was intelligent because it could beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.
  • “There’s a limited number of things you can do as an individual, and I think when you dedicate your life to something, you’ve got to ask yourself the question: To what end? And I think at some point I asked myself that question, and what it came out to was, I’m fascinated by how the human mind works, it would be fantastic to understand cognition, I love to read books on it, I love to get a grip on it”—he called Hofstadter’s work inspiring—“but where am I going to go with it? Really what I want to do is build computer systems that do something.
  • Peter Norvig, one of Google’s directors of research, echoes Ferrucci almost exactly. “I thought he was tackling a really hard problem,” he told me about Hofstadter’s work. “And I guess I wanted to do an easier problem.”
  • Of course, the folly of being above the fray is that you’re also not a part of it
  • As our machines get faster and ingest more data, we allow ourselves to be dumber. Instead of wrestling with our hardest problems in earnest, we can just plug in billions of examples of them.
  • Hofstadter hasn’t been to an artificial-intelligence conference in 30 years. “There’s no communication between me and these people,” he says of his AI peers. “None. Zero. I don’t want to talk to colleagues that I find very, very intransigent and hard to convince of anything
  • Everything from plate tectonics to evolution—all those ideas, someone had to fight for them, because people didn’t agree with those ideas.
  • Academia is not an environment where you just sit in your bath and have ideas and expect everyone to run around getting excited. It’s possible that in 50 years’ time we’ll say, ‘We really should have listened more to Doug Hofstadter.’ But it’s incumbent on every scientist to at least think about what is needed to get people to understand the ideas.”
Javier E

A Better Way to Teach Math - NYTimes.com - 2 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...a-better-way-to-teach-math

math education learning discovery

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • “Almost every kid — and I mean virtually every kid — can learn math at a very high level, to the point where they could do university level math courses,”
  • “If you ask why that’s not happening, it’s because very early in school many kids get the idea that they’re not in the smart group, especially in math. We kind of force a choice on them: to decide that either they’re dumb or math is dumb.”
  • In particular, math teachers often fail to make sufficient allowances for the limitations of working memory and the fact that we all need extensive practice to gain mastery in just about anything.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • current teaching approaches underestimate the amount of explicit guidance, “scaffolding” and practice children need to consolidate new concepts. Asking children to make their own discoveries before they solidify the basics is like asking them to compose songs on guitar before they can form a C chord.
  • he gained a reputation as a kind of math miracle worker. Many students were sent to him because they had severe learning disabilities (a number have gone on to do university-level math). Mighton found that to be effective he often had to break things down into minute steps and assess each student’s understanding at each micro-level before moving on.
  • Mighton saw that if he approached teaching this way, he could virtually guarantee that every student would experience success. In turn, the children’s math anxiety diminished. As they grew more confident, they grew excited, and they began requesting harder challenges. “More than anything, kids love success,” he says, “and they love getting to higher levels, like in a video game.”
  • Mighton saw that if you provided painstaking guidance, children would make their own discoveries. That’s why he calls his approach “guided discovery.”
  • Schools in British Columbia evaluate students based on whether they meet expectations for learning outcomes. “Teachers who used Jump were suddenly finding that they had all of their kids in the ‘fully meeting expectations’ category,” Grant told me. “It was such a foreign experience. It doesn’t typically happen when we’re teaching science or language arts. And they were kind of at a loss. ‘What do we do about this?’”
  • Even deeper, for children, math looms large; there’s something about doing well in math that makes kids feel they are smart in everything. In that sense, math can be a powerful tool to promote social justice. “When you have all the kids in a class succeeding in a subject, you see that they’re competing against the problem, not one another,” says Mighton. “It’s like they’re climbing a mountain together. You see a very healthy kind of competition. And it makes kids more generous to one another. Math can save us.”
sissij

That Fingerprint Sensor on Your Phone Is Not as Safe as You Think - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ones-apple-google-samsung.html

new york times research

shared by sissij on 11 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • SAN FRANCISCO — Fingerprint sensors have turned modern smartphones into miracles of convenience.
  • While such wizardry is convenient, it has also left a gaping security hole.
  • Still, the findings raise troubling questions about the effectiveness of fingerprint security on smartphones.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Full human fingerprints are difficult to falsify, but the finger scanners on phones are so small that they read only partial fingerprints.
  • “It’s as if you have 30 passwords and the attacker only has to match one,”
  • “I’m not worried,” he said. “I think it’s still a very convenient way of unlocking a phone. But I’d rather see Apple make me enter the PIN if it’s idle for one hour.”
  • sissij on 11 Apr 17
     
    I have been using the fingerprint sensor on my phone, but I have never think about the security problems lying beneath it. Since I has always been told that human fingerprints are unique so it is very secured to have a fingerprint sensor on the phone. However, my assumption about the fingerprint sensor is not correct because the app is only taking partial picture of the fingerprint so it become more likely to be insecure. I feel like I am always making those assumptions because I am lazy about learning the truth. --Sissi (4/11/2017)
Javier E

Stephen Hawking on God, Science and the Origins of the Universe - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4206804575467921609024244.html

God universe anthropic principle multiverse cosmology

shared by Javier E on 06 Sep 10 - Cached
  • As recent advances in cosmology suggest, the laws of gravity and quantum theory allow universes to appear spontaneously from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.Our universe seems to be one of many, each with different laws. That multiverse idea is not a notion invented to account for the miracle of fine tuning. It is a consequence predicted by many theories in modern cosmology. If it is true it reduces the strong anthropic principle to the weak one, putting the fine tunings of physical law on the same footing as the environmental factors, for it means that our cosmic habitat—now the entire observable universe—is just one of many. Each universe has many possible histories and many possible states. Only a very few would allow creatures like us to exist. Although we are puny and insignificant on the scale of the cosmos, this makes us in a sense the lords of creation.
Javier E

Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...beyond-billboards.html

Christianity Christmas myth sin

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al
  • at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.
Javier E

Humans, Version 3.0 § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM - 0 views

seedmagazine.com/...humans_version_3.0

future evolution adaptation brain science music language writing

shared by Javier E on 08 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Where are we humans going, as a species? If science fiction is any guide, we will genetically evolve like in X-Men, become genetically engineered as in Gattaca, or become cybernetically enhanced like General Grievous in Star Wars.
  • There is, however, another avenue for human evolution, one mostly unappreciated in both science and fiction. It is this unheralded mechanism that will usher in the next stage of human, giving future people exquisite powers we do not currently possess, powers worthy of natural selection itself. And, importantly, it doesn’t require us to transform into cyborgs or bio-engineered lab rats. It merely relies on our natural bodies and brains functioning as they have for millions of years. This mystery mechanism of human transformation is neuronal recycling, coined by neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, wherein the brain’s innate capabilities are harnessed for altogether novel functions.
  • The root of these misconceptions is the radical underappreciation of the design engineered by natural selection into the powers implemented by our bodies and brains, something central to my 2009 book, The Vision Revolution. For example, optical illusions (such as the Hering) are not examples of the brain’s poor hardware design, but, rather, consequences of intricate evolutionary software for generating perceptions that correct for neural latencies in normal circumstances.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Like all animal brains, human brains are not general-purpose universal learning machines, but, instead, are intricately structured suites of instincts optimized for the environments in which they evolved. To harness our brains, we want to let the brain’s brilliant mechanisms run as intended—i.e., not to be twisted. Rather, the strategy is to twist Y into a shape that the brain does know how to process.
  • there is a very good reason to be optimistic that the next stage of human will come via the form of adaptive harnessing, rather than direct technological enhancement: It has already happened. We have already been transformed via harnessing beyond what we once were. We’re already Human 2.0, not the Human 1.0, or Homo sapiens, that natural selection made us. We Human 2.0’s have, among many powers, three that are central to who we take ourselves to be today: writing, speech, and music (the latter perhaps being the pinnacle of the arts). Yet these three capabilities, despite having all the hallmarks of design, were not a result of natural selection, nor were they the result of genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancement to our brains. Instead, and as I argue in both The Vision Revolution and my forthcoming Harnessed, these are powers we acquired by virtue of harnessing, or neuronal recycling.
  • Although the step from Human 1.0 to 2.0 was via cultural selection, not via explicit human designers, does the transformation to Human 3.0 need to be entirely due to a process like cultural evolution, or might we have any hope of purposely guiding our transformation? When considering our future, that’s probably the most relevant question we should be asking ourselves.
  • One of my reasons for optimism is that nature-harnessing technologies (like writing, speech, and music) must mimic fundamental ecological features in nature, and that is a much easier task for scientists to tackle than emulating the exhorbitantly complex mechanisms of the brain
Javier E

Obama As A "Third Culture Kid" Ctd - The Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - The Daily Beast - 0 views

andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/...s-a-third-culture-kid-ctd.html

culture multiculturalism Obama globalized limits knowledge

shared by Javier E on 18 May 11 - No Cached
  • you could just as easily argue that TCKs will never know some really important things - can never know them - precisely because they've never had the experience of growing up in one culture which they knew (however erroneously) to be the way the world is. 
  • That isn't simply an indictment of the kind of smug and self-important cosmopolitanism on display in your reader's letter.  Nor is it simply a defense of the kind of organic experiential knowledge that is only possible when one is rooted to a particular place and time.  At bottom, it is a profound statement about the limits of human knowledge itself. 
  • Travel the world and try to transcend your culture all you want, but you won't ever succeed.  Not really.  As Alasdair Macintyre put it, we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.  There will always be a part of us that it is the product of the time and place and family in which we first came of age, perhaps especially when we are reacting to that experience and trying to "transcend" it.  And even if by some miracle we actually succeeded in that project, then whatever else we may have gained, we will also have lost the ability to be truly a part of any culture from the inside. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The game of "Who sees the world more broadly?" is a silly one to play.  And also dangerous in these times when what we really need are shrewd leaders who are so intimately familiar enough with American politics and culture that they not only see the breadth of our problems, but also their depth.
Javier E

The Politics of Fraudulent Dietary Supplements - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ulent-dietary-supplements.html

diet supplements medicine science skepticism

shared by Javier E on 07 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • One pill makes you smarter. One pill makes you thin. One pill makes you happy. Another keeps you energized. And so what if tests conducted by scientists in New York and Canada have found that the substances behind these miracle enhancements may contain nothing more than powdered rice or houseplants. If enough people believe they’ll be healthier, well, it’s a nice racket.
  • Nice, to the tune of $13 billion a year in sales. And here in Utah, which is to the dietary supplement business what Northern California is to marijuana, a huge industry has taken hold,
  • We’re not talking drugs, or even, in many cases, food here. Drugs have to undergo rigorous testing and review by the federal government. Dietary supplements do not. Drugs have to prove to be effective. Dietary supplements do not.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • These are the Frankenstein remedies — botanicals, herbs, minerals, enzymes, amino acids, dried stuff. They’re “natural.” They’re not cheap. And Americans pop them like Skittles, despite recent studies showing that nearly a third of all herbal supplements on the market may be outright frauds.
  • To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 1994, when Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah midwifed through Congress a new industry protected from all but minimal regulation. It is also an industry that would make many of his closest associates and family members rich. In turn, they’ve rewarded him with sizable campaign contributions.
  • Even though serious illnesses, and some deaths are on the rise from misuse of these supplements, Hatch is determined to keep regulators at bay. “I am committed to protect this industry and the integrity of its products,” he told a gathering of potency pill-pushers and the like in Utah last fall.
  • what about the medical implications? These pills and powders can’t, by law, make specific claims to cure anything. So they claim to make you healthier. The consumer is left playing doctor, reading questionable assertions that course through the unfiltered garbage of the Internet.
  • there was this finding reported in the authoritative Annals of Internal Medicine: “Enough is enough: Stop wasting money on vitamin and mineral supplements.”
  • So, the industry keeps growing, with 65,000 dietary supplements now on the market, consumed by nearly half of all Americans. The larger issue is mistrust of authority, a willful ignorance that knows no political side. Thus, right-wing libertarians promote a freewheeling market of quack products, while left-wing conspiracy theorists disdain modern medicine in favor of anything sold as “natural” or vaguely countercultural. These are some of the same people who will not vaccinate their children.
aqconces

BBC - Future - Cancer: The mysterious miracle cases inspiring doctors - 0 views

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Cancer cure Science

shared by aqconces on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “We watched for a period of a few months and the tumours just disappeared,”
  • “There had been no doubt about her diagnosis,” he says. “But now there was nothing in the biopsies, or the scans.”
  • After 20 weeks, the patient was cancer-free.
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  • our immune system should hunt out and destroy mutated cells before they ever develop into cancer. Occasionally, however, these cells manage to sneak under the radar, reproducing until they grow into a full-blown tumour.
Javier E

Among the Disrupted - NYTimes.com - 0 views

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postmodernism media tech disruption culture

shared by Javier E on 25 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind.
  • Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability.
  • the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms:
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  • Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology
  • The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past.
  • even as technologism, which is not the same as technology, asserts itself over more and more precincts of human life, so too does scientism, which is not the same as science.
  • The notion that the nonmaterial dimensions of life must be explained in terms of the material dimensions, and that nonscientific understandings must be translated into scientific understandings if they are to qualify as knowledge, is increasingly popular inside and outside the university
  • The contrary insistence that the glories of art and thought are not evolutionary adaptations, or that the mind is not the brain, or that love is not just biology’s bait for sex, now amounts to a kind of heresy.
  • So, too, does the view that the strongest defense of the humanities lies not in the appeal to their utility — that literature majors may find good jobs, that theaters may economically revitalize neighborhoods — but rather in the appeal to their defiantly nonutilitarian character, so that individuals can know more than how things work, and develop their powers of discernment and judgment, their competence in matters of truth and goodness and beauty, to equip themselves adequately for the choices and the crucibles of private and public life.
  • are we becoming posthumanists?
  • In American culture right now, as I say, the worldview that is ascendant may be described as posthumanism.
  • The posthumanism of the 1970s and 1980s was more insular, an academic affair of “theory,” an insurgency of professors; our posthumanism is a way of life, a social fate.
  • In “The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973,” the gifted essayist Mark Greif, who reveals himself to be also a skillful historian of ideas, charts the history of the 20th-century reckonings with the definition of “man.”
Javier E

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-P... - 0 views

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existential book notes continental European philosophers philosophy

shared by Javier E on 23 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • The phenomenologists’ leading thinker, Edmund Husserl, provided a rallying cry, ‘To the things themselves!’ It meant: don’t waste time on the interpretations that accrue upon things, and especially don’t waste time wondering whether the things are real. Just look at this that’s presenting itself to you, whatever this may be, and describe it as precisely as possible.
  • You might think you have defined me by some label, but you are wrong, for I am always a work in progress. I create myself constantly through action, and this is so fundamental to my human condition that, for Sartre, it is the human condition, from the moment of first consciousness to the moment when death wipes it out. I am my own freedom: no more, no less.
  • Sartre wrote like a novelist — not surprisingly, since he was one. In his novels, short stories and plays as well as in his philosophical treatises, he wrote about the physical sensations of the world and the structures and moods of human life. Above all, he wrote about one big subject: what it meant to be free. Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience, and this set humans apart from all other kinds of object.
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  • Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.
  • Even if the situation is unbearable — perhaps you are facing execution, or sitting in a Gestapo prison, or about to fall off a cliff — you are still free to decide what to make of it in mind and deed. Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.
  • The war had made people realise that they and their fellow humans were capable of departing entirely from civilised norms; no wonder the idea of a fixed human nature seemed questionable.
  • If this sounds difficult and unnerving, it’s because it is. Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety. He heightens this anxiety by pointing out that what you do really matters. You should make your choices as though you were choosing on behalf of the whole of humanity, taking the entire burden of responsibility for how the human race behaves. If you avoid this responsibility by fooling yourself that you are the victim of circumstance or of someone else’s bad advice, you are failing to meet the demands of human life and choosing a fake existence, cut off from your own ‘authenticity’.
  • Along with the terrifying side of this comes a great promise: Sartre’s existentialism implies that it is possible to be authentic and free, as long as you keep up the effort.
  • almost all agreed that it was, as an article in Les nouvelles littéraires phrased it, a ‘sickening mixture of philosophic pretentiousness, equivocal dreams, physiological technicalities, morbid tastes and hesitant eroticism … an introspective embryo that one would take distinct pleasure in crushing’.
  • he offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility.
  • In this rebellious world, just as with the Parisian bohemians and Dadaists in earlier generations, everything that was dangerous and provocative was good, and everything that was nice or bourgeois was bad.
  • Such interweaving of ideas and life had a long pedigree, although the existentialists gave it a new twist. Stoic and Epicurean thinkers in the classical world had practised philosophy as a means of living well, rather than of seeking knowledge or wisdom for their own sake. By reflecting on life’s vagaries in philosophical ways, they believed they could become more resilient, more able to rise above circumstances, and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment or anxiety.
  • In the tradition they passed on, philosophy is neither a pure intellectual pursuit nor a collection of cheap self-help tricks, but a discipline for flourishing and living a fully human, responsible life.
  • For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the starting point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself.
  • Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend ourselves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.
  • What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or ‘genealogy’ that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way. For him, all philosophy could even be redefined as a form of psychology, or history.
  • For those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or for those fighting against colonialism, existentialism offered a change of perspective — literally, as Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest.
  • She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.
  • the existentialists inhabited their historical and personal world, as they inhabited their ideas. This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre and was an early adopter of existentialism
  • What is existentialism anyway?
  • An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself. — By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.
  • Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence. — They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free — — and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes — an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself.
  • On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown. — Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. — Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating. —
  • The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist’s job is to describe. This is the activity that Husserl kept reminding his students to do. It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ‘things themselves’. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly as they appear, rather than as we think they are supposed to be.
  • Husserl therefore says that, to phenomenologically describe a cup of coffee, I should set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. Then I can concentrate on the dark, fragrant, rich phenomenon in front of me now. This ‘setting aside’ or ‘bracketing out’ of speculative add-ons Husserl called epoché — a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics,
  • The point about rigour is crucial; it brings us back to the first half of the command to describe phenomena. A phenomenologist cannot get away with listening to a piece of music and saying, ‘How lovely!’ He or she must ask: is it plaintive? is it dignified? is it colossal and sublime? The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ — phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage — so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience.
  • Husserlian ‘bracketing out’ or epoché allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question ‘But is it real?’, in order to ask how a person experiences his or her world. Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience. It lets philosophers talk about life more or less as non-philosophers do, while still being able to tell themselves they are being methodical and rigorous.
  • Besides claiming to transform the way we think about reality, phenomenologists promised to change how we think about ourselves. They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences.
  • For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘about-ness’ or ‘of-ness’.
  • Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy.
  • Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects ‘really’ are, and the question of what the mind ‘really’ is. By doing the epoché and bracketing out all consideration of reality from both topics, one is freed to concentrate on the relationship in the middle. One can apply one’s descriptive energies to the endless dance of intentionality that takes place in our lives: the whirl of our minds as they seize their intended phenomena one after the other and whisk them around the floor,
  • Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is:
  • Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep.
  • a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.
  • Three simple ideas — description, phenomenon, intentionality — provided enough inspiration to keep roomfuls of Husserlian assistants busy in Freiburg for decades. With all of human existence awaiting their attention, how could they ever run out of things to do?
  • For Sartre, this gives the mind an immense freedom. If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back. We are protean.
  • way of this interpretation. Real, not real; inside, outside; what difference did it make? Reflecting on this, Husserl began turning his phenomenology into a branch of ‘idealism’ — the philosophical tradition which denied external reality and defined everything as a kind of private hallucination.
  • For Sartre, if we try to shut ourselves up inside our own minds, ‘in a nice warm room with the shutters closed’, we cease to exist. We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are.
  • One might think that, if Heidegger had anything worth saying, he could have communicated it in ordinary language. The fact is that he does not want to be ordinary, and he may not even want to communicate in the usual sense. He wants to make the familiar obscure, and to vex us. George Steiner thought that Heidegger’s purpose was less to be understood than to be experienced through a ‘felt strangeness’.
  • He takes Dasein in its most ordinary moments, then talks about it in the most innovative way he can. For Heidegger, Dasein’s everyday Being is right here: it is Being-in-the-world, or In-der-Welt-sein. The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something.
  • Thus, for Heidegger, all Being-in-the-world is also a ‘Being-with’ or Mitsein. We cohabit with others in a ‘with-world’, or Mitwelt. The old philosophical problem of how we prove the existence of other minds has now vanished. Dasein swims in the with-world long before it wonders about other minds.
  • Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last. Karl Jaspers was one of those who made this mistake, as he later recalled, and Beauvoir observed similar dismissive attitudes among the French students in Berlin.
  • In any case, most of those who disagreed with Hitler’s ideology soon learned to keep their view to themselves. If a Nazi parade passed on the street, they would either slip out of view or give the obligatory salute like everyone else, telling themselves that the gesture meant nothing if they did not believe in it. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.
  • for Arendt, if you do not respond adequately when the times demand it, you show a lack of imagination and attention that is as dangerous as deliberately committing an abuse. It amounts to disobeying the one command she had absorbed from Heidegger in those Marburg days: Think!
  • ‘Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’ Haffner thought modernity itself was partly to blame: people had become yoked to their habits and to mass media, forgetting to stop and think, or to disrupt their routines long enough to question what was going on.
  • Heidegger’s former lover and student Hannah Arendt would argue, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, that totalitarian movements thrived at least partly because of this fragmentation in modern lives, which made people more vulnerable to being swept away by demagogues. Elsewhere, she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the most extreme failures of personal moral awareness.
  • His communicative ideal fed into a whole theory of history: he traced all civilisation to an ‘Axial Period’ in the fifth century BC, during which philosophy and culture exploded simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as though a great bubble of minds had erupted from the earth’s surface. ‘True philosophy needs communion to come into existence,’ he wrote, and added, ‘Uncommunicativeness in a philosopher is virtually a criterion of the untruth of his thinking.’
  • The idea of being called to authenticity became a major theme in later existentialism, the call being interpreted as saying something like ‘Be yourself!’, as opposed to being phony. For Heidegger, the call is more fundamental than that. It is a call to take up a self that you didn’t know you had: to wake up to your Being. Moreover, it is a call to action. It requires you to do something: to take a decision of some sort.
  • Being and Time contained at least one big idea that should have been of use in resisting totalitarianism. Dasein, Heidegger wrote there, tends to fall under the sway of something called das Man or ‘the they’ — an impersonal entity that robs us of the freedom to think for ourselves. To live authentically requires resisting or outwitting this influence, but this is not easy because das Man is so nebulous. Man in German does not mean ‘man’ as in English (that’s der Mann), but a neutral abstraction, something like ‘one’ in the English phrase ‘one doesn’t do that’,
  • for Heidegger, das Man is me. It is everywhere and nowhere; it is nothing definite, but each of us is it. As with Being, it is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to see. If I am not careful, however, das Man takes over the important decisions that should be my own. It drains away my responsibility or ‘answerability’. As Arendt might put it, we slip into banality, failing to think.
  • Jaspers focused on what he called Grenzsituationen — border situations, or limit situations. These are the moments when one finds oneself constrained or boxed in by what is happening, but at the same time pushed by these events towards the limits or outer edge of normal experience. For example, you might have to make a life-or-death choice, or something might remind you suddenly of your mortality,
  • Jaspers’ interest in border situations probably had much to do with his own early confrontation with mortality. From childhood, he had suffered from a heart condition so severe that he always expected to die at any moment. He also had emphysema, which forced him to speak slowly, taking long pauses to catch his breath. Both illnesses meant that he had to budget his energies with care in order to get his work done without endangering his life.
  • If I am to resist das Man, I must become answerable to the call of my ‘voice of conscience’. This call does not come from God, as a traditional Christian definition of the voice of conscience might suppose. It comes from a truly existentialist source: my own authentic self. Alas, this voice is one I do not recognise and may not hear, because it is not the voice of my habitual ‘they-self’. It is an alien or uncanny version of my usual voice. I am familiar with my they-self, but not with my unalienated voice — so, in a weird twist, my real voice is the one that sounds strangest to me.
  • Marcel developed a strongly theological branch of existentialism. His faith distanced him from both Sartre and Heidegger, but he shared a sense of how history makes demands on individuals. In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers,
  • Marcel made it his central existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.
  • Bettelheim later observed that, under Nazism, only a few people realised at once that life could not continue unaltered: these were the ones who got away quickly. Bettelheim himself was not among them. Caught in Austria when Hitler annexed it, he was sent first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald, but was then released in a mass amnesty to celebrate Hitler’s birthday in 1939 — an extraordinary reprieve, after which he left at once for America.
  • we are used to reading philosophy as offering a universal message for all times and places — or at least as aiming to do so. But Heidegger disliked the notion of universal truths or universal humanity, which he considered a fantasy. For him, Dasein is not defined by shared faculties of reason and understanding, as the Enlightenment philosophers thought. Still less is it defined by any kind of transcendent eternal soul, as in religious tradition. We do not exist on a higher, eternal plane at all. Dasein’s Being is local: it has a historical situation, and is constituted in time and place.
  • For Marcel, learning to stay open to reality in this way is the philosopher’s prime job. Everyone can do it, but the philosopher is the one who is called on above all to stay awake, so as to be the first to sound the alarm if something seems wrong.
  • Second, it also means understanding that we are historical beings, and grasping the demands our particular historical situation is making on us. In what Heidegger calls ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, Dasein discovers ‘that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up’. At that moment, through Being-towards-death and resoluteness in facing up to one’s time, one is freed from the they-self and attains one’s true, authentic self.
  • If we are temporal beings by our very nature, then authentic existence means accepting, first, that we are finite and mortal. We will die: this all-important realisation is what Heidegger calls authentic ‘Being-towards-Death’, and it is fundamental to his philosophy.
  • Hannah Arendt, instead, left early on: she had the benefit of a powerful warning. Just after the Nazi takeover, in spring 1933, she had been arrested while researching materials on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organisation at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Her apartment was searched; both she and her mother were locked up briefly, then released. They fled, without stopping to arrange travel documents. They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The family would invite people for dinner, then let them leave through the back door at night.
  • As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.
  • Much as they liked Camus personally, neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. For them, life is not absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.
  • For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control. It is not that such factors are unimportant: class and race, in particular, he acknowledged as powerful forces in people’s lives, and Simone de Beauvoir would soon add gender to that list.
  • Sartre takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom. They form part of my ‘situation’, and this may be an extreme and intolerable situation, but it still provides only a context for whatever I choose to do next. If I am about to die, I can decide how to face that death. Sartre here resurrects the ancient Stoic idea that I may not choose what happens to me, but I can choose what to make of it, spiritually speaking.
  • But the Stoics cultivated indifference in the face of terrible events, whereas Sartre thought we should remain passionately, even furiously engaged with what happens to us and with what we can achieve. We should not expect freedom to be anything less than fiendishly difficult.
  • Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free — context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives — for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense.
  • Nor did he mean that privileged groups have the right to pontificate to the poor and downtrodden about the need to ‘take responsibility’ for themselves. That would be a grotesque misreading of Sartre’s point, since his sympathy in any encounter always lay with the more oppressed side. But for each of us — for me — to be in good faith means not making excuses for myself.
  • Camus’ novel gives us a deliberately understated vision of heroism and decisive action compared to those of Sartre and Beauvoir. One can only do so much. It can look like defeatism, but it shows a more realistic perception of what it takes to actually accomplish difficult tasks like liberating one’s country.
  • Camus just kept returning to his core principle: no torture, no killing — at least not with state approval. Beauvoir and Sartre believed they were taking a more subtle and more realistic view. If asked why a couple of innocuous philosophers had suddenly become so harsh, they would have said it was because the war had changed them in profound ways. It had shown them that one’s duties to humanity could be more complicated than they seemed. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said later.
  • Poets and artists ‘let things be’, but they also let things come out and show themselves. They help to ease things into ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), which is Heidegger’s rendition of the Greek term alētheia, usually translated as ‘truth’. This is a deeper kind of truth than the mere correspondence of a statement to reality, as when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’ and point to a mat with a cat on it. Long before we can do this, both cat and mat must ‘stand forth out of concealedness’. They must un-hide themselves.
  • Heidegger does not use the word ‘consciousness’ here because — as with his earlier work — he is trying to make us think in a radically different way about ourselves. We are not to think of the mind as an empty cavern, or as a container filled with representations of things. We are not even supposed to think of it as firing off arrows of intentional ‘aboutness’, as in the earlier phenomenology of Brentano. Instead, Heidegger draws us into the depths of his Schwarzwald, and asks us to imagine a gap with sunlight filtering in. We remain in the forest, but we provide a relatively open spot where other beings can bask for a moment. If we did not do this, everything would remain in the thickets, hidden even to itself.
  • The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series Cosmos by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘a way for the cosmos to know itself’. Merleau-Ponty similarly quoted his favourite painter Cézanne as saying, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ This is something like what Heidegger thinks humanity contributes to the earth. We are not made of spiritual nothingness; we are part of Being, but we also bring something unique with us. It is not much: a little open space, perhaps with a path and a bench like the one the young Heidegger used to sit on to do his homework. But through us, the miracle occurs.
  • Beauty aside, Heidegger’s late writing can also be troubling, with its increasingly mystical notion of what it is to be human. If one speaks of a human being mainly as an open space or a clearing, or a means of ‘letting beings be’ and dwelling poetically on the earth, then one doesn’t seem to be talking about any recognisable person. The old Dasein has become less human than ever. It is now a forestry feature.
  • Even today, Jaspers, the dedicated communicator, is far less widely read than Heidegger, who has influenced architects, social theorists, critics, psychologists, artists, film-makers, environmental activists, and innumerable students and enthusiasts — including the later deconstructionist and post-structuralist schools, which took their starting point from his late thinking. Having spent the late 1940s as an outsider and then been rehabilitated, Heidegger became the overwhelming presence in university philosophy all over the European continent from then on.
  • As Levinas reflected on this experience, it helped to lead him to a philosophy that was essentially ethical, rather than ontological like Heidegger’s. He developed his ideas from the work of Jewish theologian Martin Buber, whose I and Thou in 1923 had distinguished between my relationship with an impersonal ‘it’ or ‘them’, and the direct personal encounter I have with a ‘you’. Levinas took it further: when I encounter you, we normally meet face-to-face, and it is through your face that you, as another person, can make ethical demands on me. This is very different from Heidegger’s Mitsein or Being-with, which suggests a group of people standing alongside one another, shoulder to shoulder as if in solidarity — perhaps as a unified nation or Volk.
  • For Levinas, we literally face each other, one individual at a time, and that relationship becomes one of communication and moral expectation. We do not merge; we respond to one another. Instead of being co-opted into playing some role in my personal drama of authenticity, you look me in the eyes — and you remain Other. You remain you.
  • This relationship is more fundamental than the self, more fundamental than consciousness, more fundamental even than Being — and it brings an unavoidable ethical obligation. Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had being trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. Levinas did more: he turned philosophy around entirely so that these relationships were the foundation of our existence, not an extension of it.
  • Her last work, The Need for Roots, argues, among other things, that none of us has rights, but each one of us has a near-infinite degree of duty and obligation to the other. Whatever the underlying cause of her death — and anorexia nervosa seems to have been involved — no one could deny that she lived out her philosophy with total commitment. Of all the lives touched on in this book, hers is surely the most profound and challenging application of Iris Murdoch’s notion that a philosophy can be ‘inhabited’.
  • Other thinkers took radical ethical turns during the war years. The most extreme was Simone Weil, who actually tried to live by the principle of putting other people’s ethical demands first. Having returned to France after her travels through Germany in 1932, she had worked in a factory so as to experience the degrading nature of such work for herself. When France fell in 1940, her family fled to Marseilles (against her protests), and later to the US and to Britain. Even in exile, Weil made extraordinary sacrifices. If there were people in the world who could not sleep in a bed, she would not do so either, so she slept on the floor.
  • The mystery tradition had roots in Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’. It owed much to the other great nineteenth-century mystic of the impossible, Dostoevsky, and to older theological notions. But it also grew from the protracted trauma that was the first half of the twentieth century. Since 1914, and especially since 1939, people in Europe and elsewhere had come to the realisation that we cannot fully know or trust ourselves; that we have no excuses or explanations for what we do — and yet that we must ground our existence and relationships on something firm, because otherwise we cannot survive.
  • One striking link between these radical ethical thinkers, all on the fringes of our main story, is that they had religious faith. They also granted a special role to the notion of ‘mystery’ — that which cannot be known, calculated or understood, especially when it concerns our relationships with each other. Heidegger was different from them, since he rejected the religion he grew up with and had no real interest in ethics — probably as a consequence of his having no real interest in the human.
  • Meanwhile, the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel was also still arguing, as he had since the 1930s, that ethics trumps everything else in philosophy and that our duty to each other is so great as to play the role of a transcendent ‘mystery’. He too had been led to this position partly by a wartime experience: during the First World War he had worked for the Red Cross’ Information Service, with the unenviable job of answering relatives’ inquiries about missing soldiers. Whenever news came, he passed it on, and usually it was not good. As Marcel later said, this task permanently inoculated him against warmongering rhetoric of any kind, and it made him aware of the power of what is unknown in our lives.
  • As the play’s much-quoted and frequently misunderstood final line has it: ‘Hell is other people.’ Sartre later explained that he did not mean to say that other people were hellish in general. He meant that after death we become frozen in their view, unable any longer to fend off their interpretation. In life, we can still do something to manage the impression we make; in death, this freedom goes and we are left entombed in other’s people’s memories and perceptions.
  • We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.
  • The aspects of our existence that limit us, Merleau-Ponty says, are the very same ones that bind us to the world and give us scope for action and perception. They make us what we are. Sartre acknowledged the need for this trade-off, but he found it more painful to accept. Everything in him longed to be free of bonds, of impediments and limitations
  • Of course we have to learn this skill of interpreting and anticipating the world, and this happens in early childhood, which is why Merleau-Ponty thought child psychology was essential to philosophy. This is an extraordinary insight. Apart from Rousseau, very few philosophers before him had taken childhood seriously; most wrote as though all human experience were that of a fully conscious, rational, verbal adult who has been dropped into this world from the sky — perhaps by a stork.
  • For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot understand our experience if we don’t think of ourselves in part as overgrown babies. We fall for optical illusions because we once learned to see the world in terms of shapes, objects and things relevant to our own interests. Our first perceptions came to us in tandem with our first active experiments in observing the world and reaching out to explore it, and are still linked with those experiences.
  • Another factor in all of this, for Merleau-Ponty, is our social existence: we cannot thrive without others, or not for long, and we need this especially in early life. This makes solipsistic speculation about the reality of others ridiculous; we could never engage in such speculation if we hadn’t already been formed by them.
  • As Descartes could have said (but didn’t), ‘I think, therefore other people exist.’ We grow up with people playing with us, pointing things out, talking, listening, and getting us used to reading emotions and movements; this is how we become capable, reflective, smoothly integrated beings.
  • In general, Merleau-Ponty thinks human experience only makes sense if we abandon philosophy’s time-honoured habit of starting with a solitary, capsule-like, immobile adult self, isolated from its body and world, which must then be connected up again — adding each element around it as though adding clothing to a doll. Instead, for him, we slide from the womb to the birth canal to an equally close and total immersion in the world. That immersion continues as long as we live, although we may also cultivate the art of partially withdrawing from time to time when we want to think or daydream.
  • When he looks for his own metaphor to describe how he sees consciousness, he comes up with a beautiful one: consciousness, he suggests, is like a ‘fold’ in the world, as though someone had crumpled a piece of cloth to make a little nest or hollow. It stays for a while, before eventually being unfolded and smoothed away. There is something seductive, even erotic, in this idea of my conscious self as an improvised pouch in the cloth of the world. I still have my privacy — my withdrawing room. But I am part of the world’s fabric, and I remain formed out of it for as long as I am here.
  • By the time of these works, Merleau-Ponty is taking his desire to describe experience to the outer limits of what language can convey. Just as with the late Husserl or Heidegger, or Sartre in his Flaubert book, we see a philosopher venturing so far from shore that we can barely follow. Emmanuel Levinas would head out to the fringes too, eventually becoming incomprehensible to all but his most patient initiates.
  • Sartre once remarked — speaking of a disagreement they had about Husserl in 1941 — that ‘we discovered, astounded, that our conflicts had, at times, stemmed from our childhood, or went back to the elementary differences of our two organisms’. Merleau-Ponty also said in an interview that Sartre’s work seemed strange to him, not because of philosophical differences, but because of a certain ‘register of feeling’, especially in Nausea, that he could not share. Their difference was one of temperament and of the whole way the world presented itself to them.
  • The two also differed in their purpose. When Sartre writes about the body or other aspects of experience, he generally does it in order to make a different point. He expertly evokes the grace of his café waiter, gliding between the tables, bending at an angle just so, steering the drink-laden tray through the air on the tips of his fingers — but he does it all in order to illustrate his ideas about bad faith. When Merleau-Ponty writes about skilled and graceful movement, the movement itself is his point. This is the thing he wants to understand.
  • We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I’ve ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point.
  • By prioritising perception, the body, social life and childhood development, Merleau-Ponty gathered up philosophy’s far-flung outsider subjects and brought them in to occupy the centre of his thought.
  • In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on 15 January 1953, published as In Praise of Philosophy, he said that philosophers should concern themselves above all with whatever is ambiguous in our experience. At the same time, they should think clearly about these ambiguities, using reason and science. Thus, he said, ‘The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity.’ A constant movement is required between these two
  • As Sartre wrote in response to Hiroshima, humanity had now gained the power to wipe itself out, and must decide every single day that it wanted to live. Camus also wrote that humanity faced the task of choosing between collective suicide and a more intelligent use of its technology — ‘between hell and reason’. After 1945, there seemed little reason to trust in humanity’s ability to choose well.
  • Merleau-Ponty observed in a lecture of 1951 that, more than any previous century, the twentieth century had reminded people how ‘contingent’ their lives were — how at the mercy of historical events and other changes that they could not control. This feeling went on long after the war ended. After the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many feared that a Third World War would not be long in coming, this time between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Javier E

Look At Me by Patricia Snow | Articles | First Things - 0 views

www.firstthings.com/...look-at-me

interaction personal tech conversation distraction robot parenting autism

shared by Javier E on 08 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • Maurice stumbles upon what is still the gold standard for the treatment of infantile autism: an intensive course of behavioral therapy called applied behavioral analysis that was developed by psychologist O. Ivar Lovaas at UCLA in the 1970s
  • in a little over a year’s time she recovers her daughter to the point that she is indistinguishable from her peers.
  • Let Me Hear Your Voice is not a particularly religious or pious work. It is not the story of a miracle or a faith healing
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • Maurice discloses her Catholicism, and the reader is aware that prayer undergirds the therapy, but the book is about the therapy, not the prayer. Specifically, it is about the importance of choosing methods of treatment that are supported by scientific data. Applied behavioral analysis is all about data: its daily collection and interpretation. The method is empirical, hard-headed, and results-oriented.
  • on a deeper level, the book is profoundly religious, more religious perhaps than its author intended. In this reading of the book, autism is not only a developmental disorder afflicting particular individuals, but a metaphor for the spiritual condition of fallen man.
  • Maurice’s autistic daughter is indifferent to her mother
  • In this reading of the book, the mother is God, watching a child of his wander away from him into darkness: a heartbroken but also a determined God, determined at any cost to bring the child back
  • the mother doesn’t turn back, concedes nothing to the condition that has overtaken her daughter. There is no political correctness in Maurice’s attitude to autism; no nod to “neurodiversity.” Like the God in Donne’s sonnet, “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” she storms the walls of her daughter’s condition
  • Like God, she sets her sights high, commits both herself and her child to a demanding, sometimes painful therapy (life!), and receives back in the end a fully alive, loving, talking, and laughing child
  • the reader realizes that for God, the harrowing drama of recovery is never a singular, or even a twice-told tale, but a perennial one. Every child of his, every child of Adam and Eve, wanders away from him into darkness
  • we have an epidemic of autism, or “autism spectrum disorder,” which includes classic autism (Maurice’s children’s diagnosis); atypical autism, which exhibits some but not all of the defects of autism; and Asperger’s syndrome, which is much more common in boys than in girls and is characterized by average or above average language skills but impaired social skills.
  • At the same time, all around us, we have an epidemic of something else. On the street and in the office, at the dinner table and on a remote hiking trail, in line at the deli and pushing a stroller through the park, people go about their business bent over a small glowing screen, as if praying.
  • This latter epidemic, or experiment, has been going on long enough that people are beginning to worry about its effects.
  • for a comprehensive survey of the emerging situation on the ground, the interested reader might look at Sherry Turkle’s recent book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age.
  • she also describes in exhaustive, chilling detail the mostly horrifying effects recent technology has had on families and workplaces, educational institutions, friendships and romance.
  • many of the promises of technology have not only not been realized, they have backfired. If technology promised greater connection, it has delivered greater alienation. If it promised greater cohesion, it has led to greater fragmentation, both on a communal and individual level.
  • If thinking that the grass is always greener somewhere else used to be a marker of human foolishness and a temptation to be resisted, today it is simply a possibility to be checked out. The new phones, especially, turn out to be portable Pied Pipers, irresistibly pulling people away from the people in front of them and the tasks at hand.
  • all it takes is a single phone on a table, even if that phone is turned off, for the conversations in the room to fade in number, duration, and emotional depth.
  • an infinitely malleable screen isn’t an invitation to stability, but to restlessness
  • Current media, and the fear of missing out that they foster (a motivator now so common it has its own acronym, FOMO), drive lives of continual interruption and distraction, of virtual rather than real relationships, and of “little” rather than “big” talk
  • if you may be interrupted at any time, it makes sense, as a student explains to Turkle, to “keep things light.”
  • we are reaping deficits in emotional intelligence and empathy; loneliness, but also fears of unrehearsed conversations and intimacy; difficulties forming attachments but also difficulties tolerating solitude and boredom
  • consider the testimony of the faculty at a reputable middle school where Turkle is called in as a consultant
  • The teachers tell Turkle that their students don’t make eye contact or read body language, have trouble listening, and don’t seem interested in each other, all markers of autism spectrum disorder
  • Like much younger children, they engage in parallel play, usually on their phones. Like autistic savants, they can call up endless information on their phones, but have no larger context or overarching narrative in which to situate it
  • Students are so caught up in their phones, one teacher says, “they don’t know how to pay attention to class or to themselves or to another person or to look in each other’s eyes and see what is going on.
  • “It is as though they all have some signs of being on an Asperger’s spectrum. But that’s impossible. We are talking about a schoolwide problem.”
  • Can technology cause Asperger’
  • “It is not necessary to settle this debate to state the obvious. If we don’t look at our children and engage them in conversation, it is not surprising if they grow up awkward and withdrawn.”
  • In the protocols developed by Ivar Lovaas for treating autism spectrum disorder, every discrete trial in the therapy, every drill, every interaction with the child, however seemingly innocuous, is prefaced by this clear command: “Look at me!”
  • If absence of relationship is a defining feature of autism, connecting with the child is both the means and the whole goal of the therapy. Applied behavioral analysis does not concern itself with when exactly, how, or why a child becomes autistic, but tries instead to correct, do over, and even perhaps actually rewire what went wrong, by going back to the beginning
  • Eye contact—which we know is essential for brain development, emotional stability, and social fluency—is the indispensable prerequisite of the therapy, the sine qua non of everything that happens.
  • There are no shortcuts to this method; no medications or apps to speed things up; no machines that can do the work for us. This is work that only human beings can do
  • it must not only be started early and be sufficiently intensive, but it must also be carried out in large part by parents themselves. Parents must be trained and involved, so that the treatment carries over into the home and continues for most of the child’s waking hours.
  • there are foundational relationships that are templates for all other relationships, and for learning itself.
  • Maurice’s book, in other words, is not fundamentally the story of a child acquiring skills, though she acquires them perforce. It is the story of the restoration of a child’s relationship with her parents
  • it is also impossible to overstate the time and commitment that were required to bring it about, especially today, when we have so little time, and such a faltering, diminished capacity for sustained engagement with small children
  • The very qualities that such engagement requires, whether our children are sick or well, are the same qualities being bred out of us by technologies that condition us to crave stimulation and distraction, and by a culture that, through a perverse alchemy, has changed what was supposed to be the freedom to work anywhere into an obligation to work everywhere.
  • In this world of total work (the phrase is Josef Pieper’s), the work of helping another person become fully human may be work that is passing beyond our reach, as our priorities, and the technologies that enable and reinforce them, steadily unfit us for the work of raising our own young.
  • in Turkle’s book, as often as not, it is young people who are distressed because their parents are unreachable. Some of the most painful testimony in Reclaiming Conversation is the testimony of teenagers who hope to do things differently when they have children, who hope someday to learn to have a real conversation, and so o
  • it was an older generation that first fell under technology’s spell. At the middle school Turkle visits, as at many other schools across the country, it is the grown-ups who decide to give every child a computer and deliver all course content electronically, meaning that they require their students to work from the very medium that distracts them, a decision the grown-ups are unwilling to reverse, even as they lament its consequences.
  • we have approached what Turkle calls the robotic moment, when we will have made ourselves into the kind of people who are ready for what robots have to offer. When people give each other less, machines seem less inhuman.
  • robot babysitters may not seem so bad. The robots, at least, will be reliable!
  • If human conversations are endangered, what of prayer, a conversation like no other? All of the qualities that human conversation requires—patience and commitment, an ability to listen and a tolerance for aridity—prayer requires in greater measure.
  • this conversation—the Church exists to restore. Everything in the traditional Church is there to facilitate and nourish this relationship. Everything breathes, “Look at me!”
  • there is a second path to God, equally enjoined by the Church, and that is the way of charity to the neighbor, but not the neighbor in the abstract.
  • “Who is my neighbor?” a lawyer asks Jesus in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus’s answer is, the one you encounter on the way.
  • Virtue is either concrete or it is nothing. Man’s path to God, like Jesus’s path on the earth, always passes through what the Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade called “the sacrament of the present moment,” which we could equally call “the sacrament of the present person,” the way of the Incarnation, the way of humility, or the Way of the Cross.
  • The tradition of Zen Buddhism expresses the same idea in positive terms: Be here now.
  • Both of these privileged paths to God, equally dependent on a quality of undivided attention and real presence, are vulnerable to the distracting eye-candy of our technologies
  • Turkle is at pains to show that multitasking is a myth, that anyone trying to do more than one thing at a time is doing nothing well. We could also call what she was doing multi-relating, another temptation or illusion widespread in the digital age. Turkle’s book is full of people who are online at the same time that they are with friends, who are texting other potential partners while they are on dates, and so on.
  • This is the situation in which many people find themselves today: thinking that they are special to someone because of something that transpired, only to discover that the other person is spread so thin, the interaction was meaningless. There is a new kind of promiscuity in the world, in other words, that turns out to be as hurtful as the old kind.
  • Who can actually multitask and multi-relate? Who can love everyone without diluting or cheapening the quality of love given to each individual? Who can love everyone without fomenting insecurity and jealousy? Only God can do this.
  • When an individual needs to be healed of the effects of screens and machines, it is real presence that he needs: real people in a real world, ideally a world of God’s own making
  • Nature is restorative, but it is conversation itself, unfolding in real time, that strikes these boys with the force of revelation. More even than the physical vistas surrounding them on a wilderness hike, unrehearsed conversation opens up for them new territory, open-ended adventures. “It was like a stream,” one boy says, “very ongoing. It wouldn’t break apart.”
  • in the waters of baptism, the new man is born, restored to his true parent, and a conversation begins that over the course of his whole life reminds man of who he is, that he is loved, and that someone watches over him always.
  • Even if the Church could keep screens out of her sanctuaries, people strongly attached to them would still be people poorly positioned to take advantage of what the Church has to offer. Anxious people, unable to sit alone with their thoughts. Compulsive people, accustomed to checking their phones, on average, every five and a half minutes. As these behaviors increase in the Church, what is at stake is man’s relationship with truth itself.
Javier E

Is our world a simulation? Why some scientists say it's more likely than not | Technolo... - 3 views

www.theguardian.com/...ted-world-elon-musk-the-matrix

simulation reality computer technology universe

shared by Javier E on 11 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Musk is just one of the people in Silicon Valley to take a keen interest in the “simulation hypothesis”, which argues that what we experience as reality is actually a giant computer simulation created by a more sophisticated intelligence
  • Oxford University’s Nick Bostrom in 2003 (although the idea dates back as far as the 17th-century philosopher René Descartes). In a paper titled “Are You Living In a Simulation?”, Bostrom suggested that members of an advanced “posthuman” civilization with vast computing power might choose to run simulations of their ancestors in the universe.
  • If we believe that there is nothing supernatural about what causes consciousness and it’s merely the product of a very complex architecture in the human brain, we’ll be able to reproduce it. “Soon there will be nothing technical standing in the way to making machines that have their own consciousness,
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  • At the same time, videogames are becoming more and more sophisticated and in the future we’ll be able to have simulations of conscious entities inside them.
  • “Forty years ago we had Pong – two rectangles and a dot. That’s where we were. Now 40 years later, we have photorealistic, 3D simulations with millions of people playing simultaneously and it’s getting better every year. And soon we’ll have virtual reality, we’ll have augmented reality,” said Musk. “If you assume any rate of improvement at all, then the games will become indistinguishable from reality.”
  • “If one progresses at the current rate of technology a few decades into the future, very quickly we will be a society where there are artificial entities living in simulations that are much more abundant than human beings.
  • If there are many more simulated minds than organic ones, then the chances of us being among the real minds starts to look more and more unlikely. As Terrile puts it: “If in the future there are more digital people living in simulated environments than there are today, then what is to say we are not part of that already?”
  • Reasons to believe that the universe is a simulation include the fact that it behaves mathematically and is broken up into pieces (subatomic particles) like a pixelated video game. “Even things that we think of as continuous – time, energy, space, volume – all have a finite limit to their size. If that’s the case, then our universe is both computable and finite. Those properties allow the universe to be simulated,” Terrile said
  • “Is it logically possible that we are in a simulation? Yes. Are we probably in a simulation? I would say no,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at MIT.
  • “In order to make the argument in the first place, we need to know what the fundamental laws of physics are where the simulations are being made. And if we are in a simulation then we have no clue what the laws of physics are. What I teach at MIT would be the simulated laws of physics,”
  • Terrile believes that recognizing that we are probably living in a simulation is as game-changing as Copernicus realizing that the Earth was not the center of the universe. “It was such a profound idea that it wasn’t even thought of as an assumption,”
  • That we might be in a simulation is, Terrile argues, a simpler explanation for our existence than the idea that we are the first generation to rise up from primordial ooze and evolve into molecules, biology and eventually intelligence and self-awareness. The simulation hypothesis also accounts for peculiarities in quantum mechanics, particularly the measurement problem, whereby things only become defined when they are observed.
  • “For decades it’s been a problem. Scientists have bent over backwards to eliminate the idea that we need a conscious observer. Maybe the real solution is you do need a conscious entity like a conscious player of a video game,
  • How can the hypothesis be put to the test
  • scientists can look for hallmarks of simulation. “Suppose someone is simulating our universe – it would be very tempting to cut corners in ways that makes the simulation cheaper to run. You could look for evidence of that in an experiment,” said Tegmark
  • First, it provides a scientific basis for some kind of afterlife or larger domain of reality above our world. “You don’t need a miracle, faith or anything special to believe it. It comes naturally out of the laws of physics,”
  • it means we will soon have the same ability to create our own simulations. “We will have the power of mind and matter to be able to create whatever we want and occupy those worlds.”
sissij

There's a Major Problem with AI's Decision Making | Big Think - 0 views

bigthink.com/...black-box-ai

science research bias

shared by sissij on 24 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • For eons, God has served as a standby for “things we don’t understand.” Once an innovative researcher or tinkering alchemist figures out the science behind the miracle, humans harness the power of chemistry, biology, or computer science.
  • The process of ‘deep learning’—in which a machine extracts information, often in an unsupervised manner, to teach and transform itself—exploits a longstanding human paradox: we believe ourselves to have free will, but really we’re a habit-making and -performing animal repeatedly playing out its own patterns.
  • When we place our faith in an algorithm we don’t understand—autonomous cars, stock trades, educational policies, cancer screenings—we’re risking autonomy, as well as the higher cognitive and emotional qualities that make us human, such as compassion, empathy, and altruism.
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  • Of course, defining terms is of primary importance, a task that has proven impossible when discussing the nuances of consciousness, which is effectively the power we’re attempting to imbue our machines with.
  • What type of machines are we creating if we only recognize a “sort of” intelligence under the hood of our robots? For over a century, dystopian novelists have envisioned an automated future in which our machines best us. This is no longer a future scenario.
  • sissij on 24 Apr 17
     
    In the fiction books, we can always see a scene that the AI robots start to take over the world. We humans are always afraid of AI robots having emotions. As we discussed in TOK, there is a phenomenon that the more robots are like human, the more people despise of them. I think that's because if robots start to have emotions, then they would be easily out of our control. We still see AI robots as lifeless gears and machines, what if they are more than that? --Sissi (4/23/2017)
anonymous

The Dress Promised Me Something the Doctors Couldn't - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...thing-the-doctors-couldnt.html

shared by anonymous on 27 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Dress Promised Me Something the Doctors Couldn’t
  • My obsessive online shopping wasn’t really about the clothes.
  • I said to my friend, “I want you to bury me in this dress,” which I found funny because I thought I was dying. And then I thought it wasn’t funny at all.
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  • Even if the doctors couldn’t pin down what was going on with me, I was so alarmed by my symptoms and the doctors’ gravest guesses that I felt anxious about whether or not I would have a future.
  • What was certain is that I was shrinking. Rapidly, uncontrollably.
  • My clothes hung loose at the waist and sloughed off my shoulders as if they belonged to a stranger, so I bought a stranger’s dress. Kate Spade, $348 retail.
  • I found it for $50 at an online designer consignment store while on hold with the hospital; a nurse was checking on the results of my bone marrow biopsy.
  • Online shopping was the sort of thing one might do if she were on hold with her cable company, not awaiting a possible blood cancer diagnosis.
  • I filled my cart with a cobalt dress, a blush silk blouse, a slinky skirt.
  • On paper, the doctors said, it looked like it could be lymphoma. The symptoms were classic: fever, night sweats, weight loss.
  • A biopsy of my enlarged lymph node showed it to be benign.
  • Two weeks earlier, a doctor had taken a surgical drill to my hip and hollowed out my bones with a syringe fit for a large horse. “Painful” was a deficient descriptor.
  • “I just don’t know what else to do,” my doctor said.
  • I sat still while my insides turned over. A cold sweat crept across my face. I closed my eyes, shook my head and returned to my shopping cart. I was not going to dwell.
  • No — I was going to shop. I was going to shop until I could think of nothing else. I punched in my credit card number and bought the Kate Spade.
  • Then I rushed to my closet, threw open the double doors and began rifling through Target impulse buys and ill-fitting hand-me-down
  • we’ll have to keep looking
  • I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t do illness anymore. I could only do this.
  • I spun around in it, watching the hem rise and fall. Something about it made me feel less like a haggard patient and more like the kind of woman who went to cocktail parties dripping with perfume and family money.
  • Over the next few months, I made it my mission to build a new wardrobe from scratch. The process demanded every moment of my free time, every spare thought
  • We both knew it was impractical. The clothes were expensive and high maintenance, most of them over-the-top fancy for my modest life in nonprofit communications.
  • But they felt vital. I told myself I was overdue for some frivolity, that I deserved to treat myself.
  • For my next doctor’s appointment, I picked out a Valentino pencil skirt that fit snugly against my new, withered body.
  • I hurled the clothes into boxes and garbage bags. They smelled like the hospital, all burned coffee and antiseptic. I didn’t want them. I didn’t even want to look at them. I wanted silk. I wanted velvet.
  • “Can I see you again in six weeks? We can repeat blood work then and come up with a timeline for scans. Does that sound like an OK plan?”
  • “Just that I live here,” I said, gesturing at my body. “I have to live here.”
  • That night I ran my fingers through my hair, and a clump of blond strands fell loose into my palm. “It’s just stress,” I told my cat. I brushed my hands together, letting my hair fall into the trash, and returned to my shopping list.
  • Each one had lived a life before me. Now I held onto them in the dim light of my bedroom like tangible hope.
  • We’re forced to find hope in what we used to mock: God, the afterlife, miracles, hemp oil. Healing, by any means. Healing, against all odds.
  • After every appointment, after every failed attempt to name my illness, I would prop myself in bed, choose new dresses and think of all the places I would wear them.
  • The clothes promised me something the doctors, as they continue to search for a diagnosis, still can’t: an uncomplicated future. And I promised a future to the clothes.
  • This was their life after life. And they deserved that, didn’t they?
  • anonymous on 27 Mar 21
     
    This is an extremely moving and well written article. It discusses mental reactions and decisions of a woman facing an unrecognized illness.
cvanderloo

Nearly 500 Charged With Coronavirus-Related Fraud In Past Year : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...related-fraud-in-the-past-year

Coronavirus COVID fruad

shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Call it a nasty side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic — the flare-up in fraud, scams and hoaxes as some people have tried to use the crisis to line their pockets illegally.
  • The grand total that fraudsters tried to scam from the government and the public in those cases is more than $569 million.
  • The department's efforts to target fraud related to COVID-19 fraud date back to last March when then-Attorney General William Barr instructed federal prosecutors across the country to investigate and prosecute scams, price gouging and other coronavirus-related crimes aggressively.
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  • One measure created was the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, which gives loans to businesses to keep employees on the payroll.
  • Economic Injury Disaster Loans, a program designed to provide loans to small businesses and agricultural entities, was also a target for fraud. The department said it has seized $580 million in proceeds so far from fraudulent loan applications.
  • Unemployment insurance — weekly federal unemployment benefits worth $600 a week — also came on line because of the CARES Act.
  • Most notable among these scams are the fake cures and treatments for COVID-19. These have run from attempts to sell everything from industrial bleach to colloidal silver as a miracle cure or treatment for the virus.
  • According to the memo, $626 million in funds had been seized or forfeited due to civil and criminal investigation by the Justice Department involving the Economic Injury Disaster Loans and PPP measures. The subcommittee memo said that amounts to "less than 1% of the nearly $84 billion in potential fraud identified in these programs."
caelengrubb

The COVID-19 Paradigm Shift-From Values To Careers To Whole Economies - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...-to-careers-to-whole-economies

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • Paradigm shifts come along maybe once in a generation. They create a profound realignment across the globe, across industries, across economies and across populations.
  • “Paradigm shifts arise when the dominant paradigm under which normal science operates is rendered incompatible with new phenomena, facilitating the adoption of a new theory or paradigm.”
  • COVID-19 is creating a paradigm shift that is realigning every system in every industry across the global at once – in an instant.
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  • Our 21st century tools and technologies that seem to work miracles and make us feel invincible and powerful, are practically defenseless in the face of COVID-19. We are left with only the primitive weapons of cloth masks and keeping our distance.
  • Where we once dismissed people who bag our groceries, or drive our kids’ school buses, for example, now we realize they are “essential workers.” 
  • “There is enough.” As Buckminster Fuller, futurist, famed architect, and creator of the geodesic dome said, there is enough of every resource for everyone on the planet; it’s just a matter of distribution.
  • Competitors were in their corners, battling out for marketshare or geopolitical power and dominance.
  • We are experiencing that now, watching sharing be taken to an entirely new level to manage COVID-19.  
  • With literally everyone working from home and only “seeing” each other on Zoom or Skype, how we look, what we wear, and the usual vanity concerns are out the window.
  • The way women lead was (still) being undervalued and dismissed as “too soft” or second-rate in many powerful circles.
  • Women are the majority force in the healthcare battalions keeping us and our loved ones alive and giving comfort to those who lose their battles in our absence. 
  • There are many more shifts occurring from COVID-19 – from a greater appreciation for nature, to more kindness and compassion, a clearer sense of how we spend our time, to careers and businesses.
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