Group items tagged

Some philosophers before Locke had suggested that it would be good to find the limits of the Understanding, but what Locke does is to carry out this project in detail. In the four books of the Essay Locke considers the sources and nature of human knowledge. Book I argues that we have no innate knowledge. (In this he resembles Berkeley and Hume, and differs from Descartes and Leibniz.) So, at birth, the human mind is a sort of blank slate on which experience writes. In Book II Locke claims that ideas are the materials of knowledge and all ideas come from experience. The term 'idea,' Locke tells us "…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks" (Essay I, 1, 8, p. 47). Experience is of two kinds, sensation and reflection. One of these - sensation - tells us about things and processes in the external world. The other - reflection - tells us about the operations of our own minds. Reflection is a sort of internal sense that makes us conscious of the mental processes we are engaged in. Some ideas we get only from sensation, some only from reflection and some from both.

"In the Global Language Network (GLN) each node represents a language and links connect languages that are likely to be co-spoken. In the example above, languages are connected according to the frequency of book translations. Node sizes represent the number of native and non-native speakers of a language and edge thickness represents the number of translations from one language to another"

In the last few years, it's become increasingly clear that food companies engineer hyperprocessed foods in ways precisely geared to most appeal to our tastes. This technologically advanced engineering is done, of course, with the goal of maximizing profits, regardless of the effects of the resulting foods on consumer health, natural resources, the environment or anything else. But the issues go way beyond food, as the City University of New York professor Nicholas Freudenberg discusses in his new book, "Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health." Freudenberg's case is that the food industry is but one example of the threat to public health posed by what he calls "the corporate consumption complex," an alliance of corporations, banks, marketers and others that essentially promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles.

In The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, Tali Sharot argues that we have a neurobiological basis for imagining a positive future. "Humans," she writes, "do not hold a positivity bias on account of having read too many self-help books. Rather, optimism may be so essential to our survival that it is hardwired into our most complex organ, the brain."

"In their book "Scorecasting", Toby Mascowitz, an economist, and Jon Wertheim, a journalist, make the provocative argument that home-field advantage, regardless of the sport in question, is caused entirely by biased referees. Umpires in baseball are more likely to call a strike on a close pitch if the visitors are batting. Football referees grant more extra time when the home team is trailing than when it is ahead."

"A northern-Italian miller in the sixteenth century, known as Menocchio, literate but not a member of the literary élite, held a number of unconventional theological beliefs. He believed that the soul died with the body, that the world was created out of a chaotic substance, not ex nihilo, and that it was more important to love one's neighbor than to love God. He found eccentric justification for these beliefs in the few books he read, among them the Decameron, the Bible, the Koran, and "The Travels of Sir John Mandeville," all in translation. For his pains, Menocchio was dragged before the Inquisition several times, tortured, and, in 1599, burned at the stake. He was one of thousands who met such a fate."

How the Mind Works By Steven Pinker Chapter One: Standard Equipment Why are there so many robots in fiction, but none in real life? I would pay a lot for a robot that could put away the dishes or run simple errands. But I will not have the opportunity in this century, and probably not in the next one either. There are, of course, robots that weld or spray-paint on assembly lines and that roll through laboratory hallways; my question is about the machines that walk, talk, see, and think, often better than their human masters. Since 1920, when Karel Capek coined the word robot in his play R.U.R., dramatists have freely conjured them up: Speedy, Cutie, and Dave in Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, Robbie in Forbidden Planet, the flailing canister in Lost in Space, the daleks in Dr. Who, Rosie the Maid in The Jetsons, Nomad in Star Trek, Hymie in Get Smart, the vacant butlers and bickering haberdashers in Sleeper, R2D2 and C3PO in Star Wars, the Terminator in The Terminator, Lieutenant Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the wisecracking film critics in Mystery Science Theater 3000.