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The test then asked me to click on a set of faces paired with words such as “good” and “bad” and concepts such as “joy,” “peace,” “agony,” “terrible,” and “hurt.” Clearly, I thought, the idea would be a measurement of association

The entire test took about 10 minutes. I felt drained afterward, fearful of what I might learn about myself. I expected to show a strong to moderate bias for dark skin. According to the test, however—like some 17 percent of those who had taken it before me—I had “little to no automatic preference between skin tones.”

As I’ve noted elsewhere, what was fascinating about the “Mission: Impossible III” anecdote is that the Chinese censors weren’t always worried about heterodox ideas — a plea for freedom of speech or gay rights, say — but simply looking bad, losing face. The treatment of art as nothing more than a means of transforming the perception of China has a long and storied history under the communist regime.

“Likewise, [Hu] opposed the party’s dictum that ‘bright things’ be emphasized and elements of backwardness and darkness be de-emphasized,”

The turning point probably came in 1967 with the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s God and Other Minds, which applied the tools of analytic philosophy to questions in the philosophy of religion with an unprecedented rigor and creativity

The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology – that branch of theology which seeks to prove God’s existence without appeal to the resources of authoritative divine revelation – for instance, through philosophical argument.

the New Atheism is, in fact, a pop-cultural phenomenon lacking in intellectual muscle and blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It tends to reflect the scientism of a bygone generation, rather than the contemporary intellectual scene.

In the ancestral environment it was very important for people to detect in others whether they had a long-term commitment to the group,” Dr. De Dreu said. “Ethnocentrism is a very basic part of humans, and it’s not something we can change by education. That doesn’t mean that the negative aspects of it should be taken for granted.”

the effects of oxytocin described in Dr. De Dreu’s report were interesting but not necessarily dominant. The brain weighs emotional attitudes like those prompted by oxytocin against information available to the conscious mind. If there is no cognitive information in a situation in which a decision has to be made, like whether to trust a stranger about whom nothing is known, the brain will go with the emotional advice from its oxytocin system, but otherwise rational data will be weighed against the influence from oxytocin and may well override it

we must ask what lends objective worthiness to a life outside the moral realm.  Here is where the narrative character of a life comes into play.

There are values we associate with a good narrative and its characters that are distinct from those we associate with good morals.  A fictional character can be intense, adventurous, steadfast or subtle. 

When a life embodies one or more of these values (or others), and feels engaging to the one who lives it, it is to that extent meaningful.  There are narrative values expressed by human lives that are not reducible to moral values.  Nor are they reducible to happiness; they are not simply matters of subjective feeling.  Narrative values are not felt, they are lived

An intense life, for instance, can be lived with abandon.

We should not take this to imply that there is no relationship between meaningfulness and morality.  They meet at certain moral limits.  An evil life, no matter how intense or steadfast, is not one we would want to call meaningful.

But within the parameters of those moral limits, the relationship between a meaningful life and a moral one is complicated.  They do not map directly onto each other.

If we want to live meaningful lives, we might want to know something about what makes a life so.  Otherwise, we’re just taking stabs in the dark.

we are currently encouraged to think of ourselves either as consumers or as entrepreneurs.  We are told to be shoppers for goods or investors for return.  Neither of these types of lives, if they are the dominant character of those lives, strike me as particularly meaningful.

their narrative themes — buying, investing — are rarely the stuff of which a compelling life narrative is made.

In what I have called an age of economics, it is even more urgent to ask the question of a meaningful life:  what it consists in, how we might live one.  Philosophy cannot prescribe the particular character of meaning that each of us should embrace.  It cannot tell each of us individually how we might trace the trajectory that is allotted to us.  But it can, and ought to, reflect upon the framework within which we consider these questions, and in doing so perhaps offer a lucidity we might otherwise lack

Who among us has not asked whether his or her life is a meaningful one? 

cultural memes. The Darwinesque concept originates in Dawkins's 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. Memes are analogous to genes, Dennett has said, "replicating units of culture" that spread from mind to mind like a virus. Religion, chess, songs, clothing, tolerance for free speech—all have been described as memes. Tallis considers it absurd to talk of a noun-phrase like "tolerance for free speech" as a discrete entity. But Dennett argues that Tallis's objections are based on "a simplistic idea of what one might mean by a unit." Memes aren't units? Well, in that spirit, says Dennett, organisms aren't units of biology, nor are species—they're too complex, with too much variation. "He's got to allow theory to talk about entities which are not simple building blocks," Dennett says.

Geraint Rees, director of University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, complains that reading Tallis is "a bit like trying to nail jelly to the wall." He "rubbishes every current theory of the relationship between mind and brain, whether philosophical or neuroscientific," while offering "little or no alternative,"

How is it that he perceives the glass of water on the table? How is it that he feels a sense of self over time? How is it that he can remember a patient he saw in 1973, and then cast his mind forward to his impending visit to the zoo? There are serious problems with trying to reduce such things to impulses in the brain, he argues. We can explain "how the light gets in," he says, but not "how the gaze looks out." And isn't it astonishing, he adds, that much neural activity seems to have no link to consciousness? Instead, it's associated with things like controlling automatic movements and regulating blood pressure. Sure, we need the brain for consciousness: "Chop my head off, and my IQ descends." But it's not the whole story. There is more to perceptions, memories, and beliefs than neural impulses can explain. The human sphere encompasses a "community of minds," Tallis has written, "woven out of a trillion cognitive handshakes of shared attention, within which our freedom operates and our narrated lives are led." Those views on perception and memory anchor his attack on "neurobollocks." Because if you can't get the basics right, he says, then it's premature to look to neuroscience for clues to complex things like love.

Yes, many unanswered questions persist. But these are early days, and neuroscience remains immature, says Churchland, a professor emerita of philosophy at University of California at San Diego and author of the subfield-spawning 1986 book Neurophilosophy. In the 19th century, she points out, people thought we'd never understand light. "Well, by gosh," she says, "by the time the 20th century rolls around, it turns out that light is electromagnetic radiation. ... So the fact that at a certain point in time something seems like a smooth-walled mystery that we can't get a grip on, doesn't tell us anything about whether some real smart graduate student is going to sort it out in the next 10 years or not."

Dennett claims he's got much of it sorted out already. He wrote a landmark book on the topic in 1991, Consciousness Explained. (The title "should have landed him in court, charged with breach of the Trade Descriptions Act," writes Tallis.) Dennett uses the vocabulary of computer science to explain how consciousness emerges from the huge volume of things happening in the brain all at once. We're not aware of everything, he tells me, only a "limited window." He describes that stream of consciousness as "the activities of a virtual machine which is running on the parallel hardware of the brain." "You—the fruits of all your experience, not just your genetic background, but everything you've learned and done and all your memories—what ties those all together? What makes a self?" Dennett asks. "The answer is, and has to be, the self is like a software program that organizes the activities of the brain."

“Your results are not the least bit surprising,” he told me. “Anything short of sequencing is going to be short on accuracy — and even then, there’s almost no comprehensive data sets to compare to.”

“Even if they are accurately looking at 5 percent of the attributable risk, they’ve ignored the vast majority of the other risk factors — the dark matter for genetics — because we as a scientific community haven’t yet identified those risk factors,”

There are only 23 diseases that start in adulthood, can be treated, and for which highly predictive tests exist. All are rare, with hereditary breast cancer the most common. “A small percentage of people who get tested will get useful information,” Dr. Klitzman said. “But for most people, the results are not clinically useful, and they may be misleading or confusing.”

To be sure, my tests did provide some beneficial information. They all agreed that I lack markers associated with an increased risk of breast cancer and Alzheimer’s. That said, they were testing for only a small fraction of the genetic risks for these diseases, not for rare genetic variants that confer much of the risk. I could still develop those diseases, of course, but I don’t have reason to pursue aggressive screenings as I age.

He added: “If you want to spend money wisely to protect your health and you have a few hundred dollars, buy a scale, stand on it, and act accordingly.”

But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?

First, a central aspect of any culture’s existence as a coherent entity is the fact of its having its own language, regardless of what the language happens to be like.

Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.

Second, languages are scientifically interesting even if they don’t index cultural traits. They offer variety equivalent to the diversity of the world’s fauna and flora.

Cultures, to be sure, show how we are different. Languages, however, are variations on a worldwide, cross-cultural perception of this thing called life.

yet we still do not have a clue that we are not alone.

Finding Goldilocks planets closer to home will be the job of the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, to be launched in 2017. But if we want to know what the weather is like on these worlds, whether there is water or even life, more powerful instruments will be needed.

hundreds of light-years away, too far for detailed study. We will probably never know any more about these particular planets than we do now.

“but until we can observe the atmospheres and assess their greenhouse gas power, we don’t really know what the surface temperatures are like.”

Kepler has discovered 4,175 potential planets, and 1,004 of them have been confirmed as real

investigating the concept of a starshade, which would float in front of a space telescope and block light from a star so that its much fainter planets would be visible.

studying a method known as a coronagraph, in which the occulting disk is inside the telescope.

study dark energy, and they plan to include a coronagraph to search for exoplanets

The goal is to have a pool of dozens of “exo-Earths” to study in order to have any chance of seeing signs of life or understanding terrestrial planets

perhaps because as planets get bigger their mass and gravity increase, and they are better able to hang on to gas and lighter components.

The work complements and tightens studies done last year by Geoffrey Marcy and his colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley; that group looks into the nature of so-called super Earths, planets bigger than ours and smaller than Neptune.

common in the galaxy.

You can trace the Great Breach to Justice Kennedy’s words in the 2010 Citizens United case, which gave wealthy, secret donors unlimited power to manipulate American elections. The decision legalized large-scale bribery — O.K., influence buying — and ensured that we would never know exactly who was purchasing certain politicians.

Kennedy famously predicted the opposite. He wrote that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That’s the money quote — one of the great wish-projections in court history. But Kennedy also envisioned a new day, whereby there would be real-time disclosure of the big financial forces he unleashed across the land.In his make-believe, post-Citizens United world, voters “can see whether elected officials are ‘in the pocket’ of so-called moneyed interests.”

just the opposite has happened. The big money headed for the shadows. As my colleague Nicholas Confessore documented earlier this month, more than half the ads aired by outside groups during this campaign have come from secret donors. Oligarchs hiding behind front groups — Citizens for Fluffy Pillows — are pulling the levers of the 2014 campaign, and overwhelmingly aiding Republicans.

you can’t argue with the corrosive and dispiriting effect, on the rest of us, of campaigns controlled by the rich, the secret, the few.

This year, the Koch brothers and their extensions — just to name one lonely voice in the public realm — have operations in at least 35 states, and will spend somewhere north of $120 million to ensure a Congress that will do their bidding. Spending by outside groups has gone to $1 billion in 2012 from $52 million in 2000.

At the same time that this court has handed over elections to people who already have enormous power, they’ve given approval to efforts to keep the powerless from voting. In Texas, Republicans have passed a selective voter ID bill that could keep upward of 600,000 citizens — students, Native Americans in federally recognized tribes, the elderly — from having a say in this election.

What’s the big deal? Well, you can vote in Texas with a concealed handgun ID, but not one from a four-year college. The new voter suppression measure, allowed to go ahead in an unsigned order by the court last Saturday, “is a purposefully discriminating law,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in dissent, “one that likely imposes an unconstitutional poll tax and risks denying the right to vote to hun

With the 2010 case, the court handed control of elections over to dark money interests who answer to nobody. And in the Texas case, the court has ensured that it will be more difficult for voters without money or influence to use the one tool they have.

sadness, boredom is related to e

related

Wasn’t Newton sitting underneath an apple tree staring into space, and Archimedes wallowing in the bath, when clarity struck? In my own insignificant way, I think I have always understood that doing nothing is the key to getting somewhere.

It has none of the hallmarks of the grand boredom that I’m after – the sort with a rousing soundtrack as you emerge from the darkness of sloth into the light of inspiration.

Eventually you will step out into the brave new world. You have to move. That’s what boredom is for; and perhaps why God invented cramp and bed sores.

Since all animals sleep, we assume it has a biological purpose. The trouble is, we don’t know what that purpose is. There are many theories – energy conservation, growth promotion, immobilisation during hours of darkness when it might be dangerous to be out and about, consolidation of memories – but they are all open to serious objections.

Not only is sleep a reminder of our ultimate helplessness, or even of how circumscribed a place thought sometimes plays in our lives, there is also the fear of contagion, as if talking about sleep might induce it – just as this reference to yawning will get at least 50% of you yawning in the next 15 minutes. (It’s a fact, honest!)

Honest philosophers know they cannot complain about casting their philosophical pearls before drowsy swine, because they, too, have fallen asleep over the works of philosophers greater than themselves.

Dreams, of course, have figured more significantly in philosophy. Being a mode of consciousness – prompting Aristotle to say that “the soul makes assertions in sleep” (On Dreams 458b) – dreams seem one step up from the mere putting out of zzzs.

they place a philosophically interesting question mark against our confidence in the nature of the world we appear to share with others.

Naturally, dreams preoccupied him as much as the daily resurrection of the self. He suggested that dreams might be an attempt to make sense of the body’s passage from sleep to wakefulness.

nothing is more sleep-inducing than the egocentric tales of someone else’s solipsistic dreams. We long to hear that magic phrase “And then I woke up.”

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.

There's no variation in the environment, it's dark, it's white, and it's bland. It's monotonous and people really underestimate that,"

"The psychological effects are huge,"

hese typically manifest themselves as depression and psychosis from the extreme isolation. When surrounded by such baroness, with no recognizable features, people can be left feeling distant and alone. "That sense of isolation is strong," he says.

Your hormones start to get misplaced and this causes chaos switching you from Los Angeles to Timbuktu to Fiji time zones week by week,

When you confine people and put them in a stressed environment you see immune changes

That's a major aim of Antarctic research,

If we can find counter measures against both cognitive decline and physiological change that can be adapted to help people reach Mars.

"Ultimately it's the same as space -- you have a small group of people stuck in a tin can."

Chapian didn’t believe everything she read online, but she was also distrustful of mainstream fact-checkers and reported news. It sometimes felt to her like real facts had become indiscernible — that the truth was often somewhere in between. What she trusted most was her own ability to think critically and discern the truth, and increasingly her instincts aligned with the online community where she spent most of her time.

Her number of likes and shares on Facebook increased each year until she was sometimes awakening to check her news feed in the middle of the night, liking and commenting on dozens of posts each day. She felt as if she was being let in on a series of dark revelations about the United States, and it was her responsibility to see and to share them.

And while empirical evidence is important and we need more of it, the data almost never speak for themselves – a point amply illustrated by recent monetary events.

chwinger, as I remember the story, was never seen to use a Feynman diagram. But he had a locked room in his house, and the rumor was that that room was where he kept the Feynman diagrams he used in secret.

What’s the equivalent of Feynman diagrams? Something like IS-LM, which is the simplest model you can write down of how interest rates and output are jointly determined, and is how most practicing macroeconomists actually think about short-run economic fluctuations. It’s also how they talk about macroeconomics to each other. But it’s not what they put in their papers, because the journals demand that your model have “microfoundations.”

The Bernanke Fed massively expanded the monetary base, by a factor of almost five. There were dire warnings that this would cause inflation and “debase the dollar.” But prices went nowhere, and not much happened to broader monetary aggregates (a result that, weirdly, some economists seemed to find deeply puzzling even though it was exactly what should have been expected.)

What about fiscal policy? Traditional macro said that at the zero lower bound there would be no crowding out – that deficits wouldn’t drive up interest rates, and that fiscal multipliers would be larger than under normal conditions. The first of these predictions was obviously borne out, as rates stayed low even when deficits were very large. The second prediction is a bit harder to test, for reasons I’ll get into when I talk about the limits of empiricism. But the evidence does indeed suggest large positive multipliers.

The overall story, then, is one of overwhelming predictive success. Basic, old-fashioned macroeconomics didn’t fail in the crisis – it worked extremely well

In fact, it’s hard to think of any other example of economic models working this well – making predictions that most non-economists (and some economists) refused to believe, indeed found implausible, but which came true. Where, for example, can you find any comparable successes in microeconomics?

Meanwhile, the demand that macro become ever more rigorous in the narrow, misguided sense that it look like micro led to useful approaches being locked up in Schwinger’s back room, and in all too many cases forgotten. When the crisis struck, it was amazing how many successful academics turned out not to know things every economist would have known in 1970, and indeed resurrected 1930-vintage fallacies in the belief that they were profound insights.

mainly I think it reflected the general unwillingness of human beings (a category that includes many though not necessarily all economists) to believe that so many people can be so wrong about something so big.

. To normal human beings the study of international trade and that of international macroeconomics might sound like pretty much the same thing. In reality, however, the two fields used very different models, had very different intellectual cultures, and tended to look down on each other. Trade people tended to consider international macro people semi-charlatans, doing ad hoc stuff devoid of rigor. International macro people considered trade people boring, obsessed with proving theorems and offering little of real-world use.

does microeconomics really deserve its reputation of moral and intellectual superiority? No

Even before the rise of behavioral economics, any halfway self-aware economist realized that utility maximization – indeed, the very concept of utility — wasn’t a fact about the world; it was more of a thought experiment, whose conclusions should always have been stated in the subjunctive.

Kahneman and Tversky and Thaler and so on deserved all the honors they received for helping to document the specific ways in which utility maximization falls short, but even before their work we should never have expected perfect maximization to be a good description of reality.

True, a model doesn’t have to be perfect to provide hugely important insights. But here’s my question: where are the examples of microeconomic theory providing strong, counterintuitive, successful predictions on the same order as the success of IS-LM macroeconomics after 2008? Maybe there are some, but I can’t come up with any.

The point is not that micro theory is useless and we should stop doing it. But it doesn’t deserve to be seen as superior to macro modeling.

And the effort to make macro more and more like micro – to ground everything in rational behavior – has to be seen now as destructive. True, that effort did lead to some strong predictions: e.g., only unanticipated money should affect real output, transitory income changes shouldn’t affect consumer spending, government spending should crowd out private demand, etc. But all of those predictions have turned out to be wrong.

But, you say, we didn’t see the Great Recession coming. Well, what do you mean “we,” white man? OK, what’s true is that few economists realized that there was a huge housing bubble

But data never speak for themselves, for a couple of reasons. One, which is familiar, is that economists don’t get to do many experiments, and natural experiments are rare

The other problem is that even when we do get something like natural experiments, they often took place under economic regimes that aren’t relevant to current problems.

Both of these problems were extremely relevant in the years following the 2008 crisis.

you might be tempted to conclude that the empirical evidence is that monetary expansion is inflationary, indeed roughly one-for-one.

But the question, as the Fed embarked on quantitative easing, was what effect this would have on an economy at the zero lower bound. And while there were many historical examples of big monetary expansion, examples at the ZLB were much rarer – in fact, basically two: the U.S. in the 1930s and Japan in the early 2000

These examples told a very different story: that expansion would not, in fact, be inflationary, that it would work out the way it did.

The point is that empirical evidence can only do certain things. It can certainly prove that your theory is wrong! And it can also make a theory much more persuasive in those cases where the theory makes surprising predictions, which the data bear out. But the data can never absolve you from the necessity of having theories.

Over this past decade, I’ve watched a number of economists try to argue from authority: I am a famous professor, therefore you should believe what I say. This never ends well. I’ve also seen a lot of nihilism: economists don’t know anything, and we should tear the field down and start over.

Obviously I differ with both views. Economists haven’t earned the right to be snooty and superior, especially if their reputation comes from the ability to do hard math: hard math has been remarkably little help lately, if ever.

On the other hand, economists do turn out to know quite a lot: they do have some extremely useful models, usually pretty simple ones, that have stood up well in the face of evidence and events. And they definitely shouldn’t defer to important and/or rich people on polic

: compare Janet Yellen’s macroeconomic track record with that of the multiple billionaires who warned that Bernanke would debase the dollar. Or take my favorite Business Week headline from 2010: “Krugman or [John] Paulson: Who You Gonna Bet On?” Um.The important thing is to be aware of what we do know, and why.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.