Clipmarks | wildcat's philosophy collection

The Cultural Evolution Of Religion

Sun, 12 Oct 2008 00:15:46 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

First off, let me clear the field of an obvious source of what I think is rather fruitless discussion. The authors begin by summarizing three models of the evolution of religion: the evolutionary group selection scenario (religion as an adaptation for group living), the cultural by-product scenario (religion derives from the necessity of a theory of others’ mind and sensitivity to one’s reputation), and the cultural group selection scenario (where competition among social groups favors the spread of costly practices to maintain in-group cohesion).

To begin with, they debunk the oft-repeated claim that religiosity increases charitability. It turns out studies that have made that link are entirely based on self-reporting, a notoriously unreliable source of behavioral evidence

A series of “Good Samaritan” studies found that people’s actual (as opposed to self-reported) charitable behavior shows no correspondence whatsoever with the degree of religious belief

Tags: culture, evolution, religion

The second enlightenment project

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 13:29:00 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: just discovered and exploring

Clip Source: www.2enlightenment.com

The following table suggests an evolution of key principles of how society has been organized in the Industrial Age and how we expect these principles to morph as society becomes more complex, integrated and constantly changing. These undergird the basis for the idea of a need for a Second Enlightenment.

Independent

(Either/Or)

Interdependent

(And/Both) Systemic

Self-interest

Help
Each Other Succeed

Concomitant

Good Linear
Thinking Connective
Thinking Synthesis
& Generation Static
Structures Modules,
Webs and Networks Dynamic
Adaptability Reductionism
Holism Connective
Analysis Standard
Education and Accountability Unlearning,
Uplearning and Non-Linear Transformative
Learning

Meaning
from Materialism
Meaning from Creativity/Spiritualism Balance
of Values Competition
Collaboration Generative
Development Prediction
and Certainty Anticipation
and Ambiguity Parallel

Strategic and

Ecological

Planning

Tags: second enlightenment

Very Long-Term Backup- Rosetta

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:01:14 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: One side of the disk contains a graphic teaser. The design shows headlines in the eight major languages of the world today spiraling inward in ever-decreasing size till it becomes so small you have trouble reading it, yet the text goes on getting smaller. The sentences announce: “Languages of the World: This is an archive of over 1,500 human languages assembled in the year 02008 C.E. Magnify 1,000 times to find over 13,000 pages of language documentation.”

This graphic side of the disk is pure titanium. A black oxide coating has been added to the surface. The text is etched into that, revealing the whiter titanium. This bold sign board is needed because the pages of genesis which are etched on the mirror-like opposite side of the disk are nearly invisible.

Clip Source: kk.org

This problem of long-term digital storage seemed a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act generationaly. How could a society think in terms of centuries unless there was a reliable way to transmit and store its knowledge over centuries? This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 1998, dedicated to technical solutions for Managing Digital Continuity. At this meeting Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive suggested a new technology developed by Los Alamos labs, and commercialized by the Norsam company, as a solution for long term digital storage. Norsam promised to micro-etch 350,000 pages of information onto a 3-inch nickel disk with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years.

Might it be possible to etch an entire library onto a set of disks? It might be worth trying. All we needed was a finite data set that a society might want to have backed up.

The disk is 3 inches in diameter, and mounted beneath a glass hemisphere.

Tags: backup, disk, rosetta, digital continuity

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: the prophet of boom and doom

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:41:52 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: In December he lectured bankers at Société Générale, France’s second biggest bank. He told them they were sitting on a mountain of risks – a menagerie of black swans. They didn’t believe him. Six weeks later the rogue trader and black swan Jérôme Kerviel landed them with $7.2 billion of losses.

As a result, Taleb is now the hottest thinker in the world. He has a $4m advance on his next book. He gives about 30 presentations a year to bankers, economists, traders, even to Nasa, the US Fire Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. But he doesn’t tell them what to do – he doesn’t know. He just tells them how the world is. “I’m not a guru. I’m just describing a problem and saying, ‘You deal with it.’”

take a moment and read the article

Clip Source: business.timesonline.co.uk

When this man said the world’s economy was heading for disaster, he was scorned. Now traders, economists, even Nasa, are clamouring to hear him speak

He is telling me how to live. “The only way you can say ‘F*** you’ to fate is by saying it’s not going to affect how I live. So if somebody puts you to death, make sure you shave.”

To explain: black swans were discovered in Australia. Before that, any reasonable person could assume the all-swans-are-white theory was unassailable. But the sight of just one black swan detonated that theory. Every theory we have about the human world and about the future is vulnerable to the black swan, the unexpected event. We sail in fragile vessels across a raging sea of uncertainty. “The world we live in is vastly different from the world we think we live in.”

Last May, Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. It said, among many other things, that most economists, and almost all bankers, are subhuman and very, very dangerous.

Tags: nassim nicholas taleb, economy, black swans

Why the World Still Needs Philosophy

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 18:35:21 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.oycf.org

This new century has the potential to be either the worst or the best of times for humanity. The worst of times because there is no end in sight to the struggle between a dehumanizing global economy and the irrational forces (sexism, racism, and superstition) threatened by its hegemony. Unlike any other time in history, ours has sufficient stupidity, power and hatred to destroy the conditions for the possibility of life on this planet before they may be preserved anywhere else; the destructive powers at our disposal far exceed our present capacity to express love or altruism. Yet, it could very easily be the best of times because we finally have technological resources sufficient to provide a good life for the entire
population of the earth.

While the desires of human beings are at least potentially finite, most of us, with varying degrees of comprehension, allow our lives to run by insatiable institutions

artificial entities have no motive other than profit and unlimited accumulation

Tags: perspectives

The Role of Meaning in Human Thinking

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 12:50:56 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: jetpress.org

The creation of meaning to interpret and communicate perceived phenomena is a fundamental trait of human intelligence. This article explains some major ways in which this is achieved, focusing on language and the perception of embodiment. It examines the representational aspects of natural language, which account for the ambiguity of linguistic signs, and describes how these manifest in metaphor, connotation and emotive expression. The article argues that the human propensity to create meaning lies largely in this representational ambiguity, which underlies all forms of symbolism. However, the ambiguity of natural language has a paradoxical side, since it is also at fault in many shortcomings of human communication, such as misunderstanding and prejudicial stereotyping. This article argues that any attempt to emulate human ways of thinking, for example in Artificial Intelligence research, should take this paradoxical factor into account.

Tags: ai, ambiguity, language

The Secrets of Storytelling: Why We Love a Good Yarn

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:24:50 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.

These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.

By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.

Popular tales do far more than entertain, however. Psychologists and neuroscientists have recently become fascinated by the human predilection for storytelling. Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions?

Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history. Anthropologists find evidence of folktales everywhere in ancient cultures, written in Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Chinese, Egyptian and Sumerian

Tags: storytelling, human universals

The Zombification Of Philosophy (Of Mind)

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:06:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Massimo Pigliucci is Professor in the Departments of Ecology & Evolution and of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, NY.

an interesting view , go read it

Clip Source: www.scientificblogging.com

David Chalmers is a famous philosopher of mind. His fame rests in great part on his 1996 book, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory. It’s too bad that the crucial idea behind the book, dualism, is hopelessly flawed, and -- more surprising yet -- that Chalmers got away with one of the most idiotic thought experiments ever, which a lot of people inexplicably seem to think is oh-so-very clever.

Let us start by recalling what dualism is: in philosophy the idea traces back at least to Descartes (though some would consider Plato a dualist), and his contention that while everything else in humans and animals is “mechanical” (i.e., made of matter), the mind is an exception, since it’s made of some kind of distinct mind stuff (he was pretty vague about exactly what this mind stuff might be, and so is Chalmers, incidentally

I think a lot of scientists do a disservice to themselves and to the public by not taking philosophy seriously

Tags: calmers, zombies, philosophy, consciousness

HYPERPOLITICS (AMERICAN STYLE) A Talk By Mark Pesce

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:21:06 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: The power redistributions of the 21st century have dealt representative democracies out. Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges ahead, and 'rebooting' them is not enough. The future looks nothing like democracy, because democracy, which sought to empower the individual, is being obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers him.

Clip Source: www.edge.org

Introduction

In his well-received talk at this year's Personal Democracy Forum (organized by Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry), "digital ethnologist" Mark Pesce makes the point that "we have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the transformation of the natural landscape into man-made artifice, the 'hyperconnectivity' engendered by these new toys is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will collapse into about twenty.

"we may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for humans to develop software which made full use of it"

"where sharing had been a local and generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter of the planet".

Tags: hyperpolitics, talk, digital ethnology

The Coming Death Shortage

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 11:33:49 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: "Why the longevity boom will make us sorry to be alive" a must read.
Though I fail to agree with many of the premises of this article, the critical views it presents are important and the issues need be taken into consideration seriously

Clip Source: www.theatlantic.com

Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward "engineered negligible senescence"—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have "a good chance of success in mice within ten years." The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. "In ten years we'll have a pill that will give you twenty years," says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. "And then there'll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born."

The critical issue, in Goldman's view, will be not the costs per se but determining who will pay them. "We're going to have a very public debate about whether this will be covered by insurance," he says

Tags: longevity, death, economy, future, public debate

Science meets Poetry at ESOF2008

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 12:36:20 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: lucky he who could attend

Clip Source: www.esof2008.org

The Science meets Poetry Session provides the participants of ESOF2008 with a unique opportunity to meet contemporary poets from all over Europe, some of whom write about science, some of whom are themselves scientists (including even a Nobel Laureate from the USA), and some who are simply poets, but fascinated by science as we all are.

The purpose of this session is to demonstrate that literature and science are not poles apart, as people sometimes imagine, but actually come together in our modern world. It will be argued that poets are in fact closer to scientists in their way of thinking, in their sociology and in many of their preoccupations than previously suspected. Poet-scientists have probably always existed, but, today, there is a growing band of poets – some of whom are not scientists – for whom science is a key subject of inspiration.

Tags: esof2008, science, poetry

Evolutionary Game Theory And The Mathematics Of Altruism

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 03:02:00 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: A fascinating example of cooperation we have right here at CM

Clip Source: www.scientificblogging.com

Why do humans cooperate in things as diverse as environment conservation or the creation of fairer societies, even when they don’t receive anything in exchange or, worst, they might even be penalized?

This is a question that has puzzled academics Why do humans cooperate in things as diverse as environment conservation or the creation of fairer societies, even when they don’t receive anything in exchange or, worst, they might even be penalized? This is a question that has puzzled academics for centuries, especially since in evolution the basis for the “survival of the fittest” is, after all, selfishness.

But in an article just published in the journal Nature, three Portuguese theoretical physicists developed a mathematical model capable of providing a way out from this conundrum through the introduction of social diversity

the act of cooperation may depend on one’s social context/ranking

when social diversity was taken into account

the numbers of those cooperating increased

Tags: evolutionary, game theory, mathematics, altruism

The social psychology revolution is reaching its tipping point

Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:37:44 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

Go and look in your bookshop: new thinking is seeping into politics

It took a long time. Longer than it should have. But in the end, the penny dropped.

Back in the 1980s, Tony Blair, a junior Shadow minister, was sitting quietly with his constituency agent, John Burton, when he suddenly exclaimed: “You know, John, I understand it all. Finally, I've got it.” When Burton asked him what he was talking about, Blair triumphantly replied: “Microeconomics!”

I wonder whether in a couple of decades' time, our own fumbling first acquaintance with new thinking will appear similarly amusing. For an intellectual revolution is under way that will change the way we think about public policy just as the free market economists did in the 1980s. I wonder whether one day soon a future party leader will turn round to his agent and say: “Finally, I've got it! Human behaviour.”

Those who doubt that there is something going on in the world of ideas should get themselves a publisher's catalogue

Tags: psychology, revolution, politics, economics

11 Ways to Build an Extraordinary Life

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:16:30 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: Have a vision for your future...

Clip Source: www.steve-olson.com

How can you build the life you want? The answer to that question is different for each of us. But it’s critical that you answer it, because in the answer you will find purpose and meaning. Many of us look for happiness in things, but happiness doesn’t come from things, it comes from how we relate to ourselves and our world.

Be True to Yourself

Have a Vision for Your Future

Avoid Debt

Save

Continue Your Education

Take Responsibility for Change

Learn from Mistakes -

Build Quality Relationships/Discard Destructive Ones

Love: Look for a partner who is on a similar journey as yours, who has similar goals and values, and build on your relationship by giving your love and encouragement

Friendship: Look for people with similar values, who give as much as they take, with which you can share interests and hobbies.

Do the Right Thing Even When it is Unpopular

Honor Your Commitments - Do not make commitments lightly

Be Charitable

Tags: life, extraordinary

Is the Internet Bad for Science?

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:28:26 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: as always, the answer depends on the person, in this case, who is the scientist doing the research.

Clip Source: blog.wired.com

Using the internet to search for scientific articles is bad for researchers, says University of Chicago sociologist James Evans in an article published today in Science.

His argument is a classic computer-versus-paper library dilemma, updated for science: when researchers search online, they tend to arrive at just a few high-ranking articles. Lost is the breadth of scholarship encountered by old-fashioned, page-turning browsing.

"As more journal issues came online, the articles referenced tended to be more recent, fewer journals and articles were cited, and more of the citations were to fewer journals and articles," writes Evans, who analyzed the citation patterns of 34 million journal articles that went online between 1998 and 2005.

He conclues, "The forced browsing of print archives may have stretched scientists and scholars to anchor findings deeply into past and present scholarship

Tags: internet, science, journals, articles