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sissij

How an Argument Over Zombies Helps Explain What Makes Us Human | Big Think - 1 views

bigthink.com/...es-to-understand-consciousness

human psychology knowledge bias

shared by sissij on 25 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Zombies are a big part of our pop culture. They are both a cathartic exploration of what it means to be human and a vehicle for social commentary. The word “zombie” comes from Haitian folklore and refers to a corpse animated by witchcraft.
  • The concept is kind of a mind trick. Imagine a being that looks and even talks like a human. It goes through all the normal motions of a human and yet has no consciousness. And you would have no idea that it is not like you.
  • If a p-zombie that is exactly like us, except for the sense of self and consciousness, is possible to logically conceive, then it could support dualism, an alternative view that sees the world consisting of not just the physical but also the mental.
  • sissij on 25 Apr 17
     
    What is human? In the past paradigms, we thought what separates human from all the other things is spirit. Then we thought it is reason that distinguish human from other animals. However, as we talked about in the modern paradigm, we say that there is no spirit or reason in human and all the decision we make is basically not our own. It is the result of numerous subconscious suggestions. So is there really a difference between zombie and human? I think there are people who live like a zombie and there are "zombies" that live like a human. --Sissi (4/24/2017)
Javier E

What Are You So Afraid Of? - NYTimes.com - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...what-are-you-so-afraid-of.html

emotion fear threat psychology

shared by Javier E on 26 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • We have clear directives about what is really worth our fear. Participants in the real parade of horrors include radical changes in the carbon cycle, the rate of species extinction, extreme weather, genetically modified food, institutional financial misconduct that puts our security at risk. The archive of very real menaces threatening us now is so full, it would seem we hardly know how to choose what to be scared of.
  • Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles. They are all things that have about as much chance of harming us as the characters behind some of this season’s top trending scary costumes: zombies, werewolves and cast members from “Duck Dynasty.”
  • while we fear snakes, spiders, darkness, open spaces and closed spaces, we do not fear the more likely instruments of danger — knives, guns, cars, electrical sockets — because, he says, “our species has not been exposed to these lethal agents long enough in evolutionary time to have acquired the predisposing genes that ensure automatic avoidance.” Which is to say, fear, real fear, deep fear, the kind that changes our habits and actions, is not something on which we are likely to follow sensible instruction.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • At a moment of such social, political and environmental urgency, I would like to think it is possible to tap into human fear to change behavior in some fundamental and strategic way. Yet what seems more likely to me is the possibility that fear is simply an unpredictable rogue impulse that all too often remains indifferent to the genuine threats around us. And that may be the scariest thing of all.
Javier E

Opinion | The Zombie Style in American Politics - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...republican-party-ideas.html

bad faith climate change inequality Russia logic

shared by Javier E on 05 May 19 - No Cached
  • This was an awkward observation for a party that, then as now, wanted to slash taxes for the rich and dismantle the social safety net. How would conservatives respond?
  • The answer was multilayered denial. Inequality wasn’t rising. O.K., it was rising, but that wasn’t a problem. O.K., rising inequality was unfortunate, but there was nothing that could be done about it without crippling economic growth.
  • You might think that the right would have to choose one of those positions, or at least that once you’d managed to refute one layer of the argument, say by showing that inequality was indeed rising, you could put that argument behind you and move on to the next one. But no: Old arguments, like the wights in “Game of Thrones,” would just keep rising up after you thought you had killed them.
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  • You see the same thing on climate change. Global warming is a myth — a hoax concocted by a vast conspiracy of scientists around the world. O.K., the climate is changing, but it’s a natural phenomenon that has nothing to do with human activity. O.K., man-made climate change is real, but we can’t do anything about it without destroying the economy.
  • eporting about these debates typically frames them as disputes about the facts and what they mean, when the reality is that one side isn’t interested in the facts.
  • in each case those making denialist arguments, while they may invoke evidence, don’t actually care what the evidence says; at a fundamental level, they aren’t interested in the truth. Their goal, instead, is to serve a predetermined agenda.
  • What the right’s positioning on inequality, climate and now Russian election interference have in common is that in each case the people pretending to be making a serious argument are actually apparatchiks operating in bad faith.
  • the pressures that often lead to false equivalence. Calling out dishonesty and bad faith can seem like partisan bias when, to put it bluntly, one side of the political spectrum lies all the time, while the other side doesn’t.
  • pretending that good faith exists when it doesn’t is unfair to readers. The public deserves to know that the big debates in modern U.S. politics aren’t a conventional clash of rival ideas.
Javier E

HBO's 'Years and Years' and the Numbness of Survival - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...608863

response pandemia disaster uk fiction lesson video crisis culture

shared by Javier E on 29 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • the thing that struck me most about the Lyonses wasn’t that they sighed and did nothing while the world around them disintegrated into disease and disinformation. It was that—mostly—they survived. The more things happened to them, the harder they clung to life and to one another. Most dystopian narratives deal with one kind of unimaginable crisis: a zombie apocalypse, a totalitarian regime, a terrifying disease
  • Years and Years, instead, shows how the alienation and paralysis sparked by a decade-plus of constant calamity are also symptoms of a kind of resilience. Human nature is to panic, to agonize, to fret and lose sleep and weep. Inevitably, though, it’s also to adapt.
  • The cost of getting through crisis after crisis, the show suggests, is numbness. “Emotion is a luxury,” Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York said in his daily press conference on Thursday morning. “We don’t have ... [that] luxury. Let’s just get through it.”
manhefnawi

Go to Sleep: Your Dreams May Help You Prepare for Disaster | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...-may-help-you-prepare-disaster

Dream

shared by manhefnawi on 12 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • You're missing a potentially vital opportunity to practice essential survival skills.
  • That's the theory explored by a recent report from Nautilus, which focuses on the science of dreaming. For a long time the general consensus has been that dreams, be they delightful or terrifying, are useless: a mish-mash of experiences, impulses, memories, and that random episode of The Walking Dead that you watched just before bedtime, all distilled into a surreal nightmare in which you're being chased through the halls of your old high school by zombies … and for some reason, you're not wearing pants.
  • Though not formally researched, anecdotes abound from people who've dreamed of a frightening experience only to then live through it in real life
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  • There's a lot to learn yet about why and how we dream, and per Davies, the most likely explanation is that dreaming is a multi-faceted and multi-functional process
  • You can rehearse any skill in a lucid dream,
  • He claimed that by practicing in his dreams, he’d learned to snowboard so well that he could do it without bindings, which is almost impossible
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