Amazing mind reader reveals his 'gift'

THE FUTURE OF SEX

From Salon:

Imagine a woman being able to convert her own eggs into “pseudo-sperm” to fertilize herself – or perhaps instead an artificial womb that will carry the pregnancy to term while she continues her uninterrupted climb up the career ladder. Picture an older woman harvesting eggs from her own bone marrow to beat her ticking biological clock. Lifelong fertility, artificial wombs, “pseudo-sperm” – it sounds like the stuff of dystopian sci-fi, but a new book suggests it’s an inevitable reality. In “Like a Virgin: How Science Is Redefining the Rules of Sex,” author Aarathi Prasad writes, “This would be the great biological and social equalizer, a truly new way of thinking about sex. The question is not if it will happen, but when.” It isn’t just women who stand to benefit, either: Artificial wombs will actually give men “more potential than women to make a baby without the opposite sex,” says Prasad, a biologist and science writer. The takeaway is that “male plus female equals baby will no longer be our only path forward.”

The potential social implications of such advances are fascinating, but Prasad leaves those imaginings to the likes of Aldous Huxley. She’s more concerned with reviewing how our reproductive knowledge developed and what technologies are being developed — but in a relatively digestible way (more Jared Diamond than Jonah Lehrer). That said, Prasad cautions against future-panic, arguing that these developments could actually improve on current ethical quandaries around reproduction. For example, which is less morally fraught: stem cell eggs and artificial wombs, or paying a poor woman in a third-world country as an egg donor or surrogate mother?

More here.

BIG IS BACK

Big history in all its guises has been inhospitable to the questions of meaning and intention so central to intellectual history. This is not simply for the banal reason that the big historians usually scrutinize such a superficial slice of recorded history at the end of their grand sweeps: the skin of paint on the top of the Eiffel Tower, in Mark Twain’s marvellous metaphor. Nor is it just because human agency dwindles in significance in the face of cosmological or even archaeological time. It is due, for the moment at least, to the essential materialism of the two main strains of big history, what we might call the biologistic and the economistic tendencies. The biologistic tendency is neurophysiologically reductive: when all human actions, including thought and culture, can be explained by brain chemistry, reflections approximate to reflexes. In the economistic strain, intellect is assimilated to interests. Each age simply “gets the thought that it needs”. For instance, whether it’s Buddhism, Christianity or Islam in the Axial Age, it’s all the same in the end: simply the product of the problem-solving capacity of some rather clever but needy chimps. In these regards, at least when it treats the questions of most concern to intellectual historians, deep history can appear to be somewhat shallow.

more from David Armitage at the TLS here.

CIVILITY AND PUBLIC REASON

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse 

According to a prevailing conception among political theorists, part of what accounts for the legitimacy of democratic government and the bindingness of its laws is democracy’s commitment to public deliberation.  Democracy is not merely a process of collective decision in which each adult citizen gets precisely one vote and the majority rules; after all, that an outcome was produced by a process of majoritarian equal voting provides only a weak reason to accept it.  The crucial aspect of democracy is the process of public reasoning and deliberation that precedes the vote.  The idea is that majoritarian equal voting procedures can produce a binding outcome only when they are engaged after citizens have had ample opportunity to reason and deliberate together about matters of public concern.  We claimed in last month’s post that democracy is all about argument; this means that at democracy’s core is public deliberation.

In a democracy, public deliberation is the activity in which citizens exchange reasons concerning which governmental policies should be instituted.  This activity is necessary because democratic decision-making regularly takes place against a backdrop of disagreement, where different conceptions of public interest conflict.  It is important to note that although reasoning always has consensus among its goals, democratic deliberation is aimed primarily at reconciling citizens to the central reality of politics, namely that in a society of free and equal individuals, no one can get everything he or she wants from politics.  As democratic citizens, we disagree about which policies will best serve the public interest, and so, when democracy makes collective decisions, some of us will lose – our preferred policy will fail to win the requisite support.  Yet democratic laws and decisions are prima facie binding on us all, even when they conflict with our individual judgments about what is best.

Continue reading "Civility and Public Reason"

桥南

HOW CULTURE DROVE HUMAN EVOLUTION

A conversation with Joseph Henrich in Edge:

[JOSEPH HENRICH:] The main questions I've been asking myself over the last couple years are broadly about how culture drove human evolution. Think back to when humans first got the capacity for cumulative cultural evolution—and by this I mean the ability for ideas to accumulate over generations, to get an increasingly complex tool starting from something simple. One generation adds a few things to it, the next generation adds a few more things, and the next generation, until it's so complex that no one in the first generation could have invented it. This was a really important line in human evolution, and we've begun to pursue this idea called the cultural brain hypothesis—this is the idea that the real driver in the expansion of human brains was this growing cumulative body of cultural information, so that what our brains increasingly got good at was the ability to acquire information, store, process and retransmit this non genetic body of information. The two systems begin interacting over time, and the most important selection pressures over the course of human evolution are the things that culture creates—like tools. Compared to chimpanzees, we have high levels of manual dexterity. We're good at throwing objects. We can thread a needle. There are  aspects of our brain that seem to be consistent with that as being an innate ability, but tools and artifacts (the kinds of things that one finds useful to throw or finds useful to manipulate) are themselves products of cultural evolution.

Another example here is fire and cooking. Richard Wrangham, for example, has argued that fire and cooking have been important selection pressures, but what often gets overlooked in understanding fire and cooking is that they're culturally transmitted—we're terrible at making fires actually. We have no innate fire-making ability. But once you got this idea for cooking and making fires to be culturally transmitted, then it created a whole new selection pressure that made our stomachs smaller, our teeth smaller, our gapes or holdings of our mouth smaller, it altered the length of our intestines. It had a whole bunch of downstream effects.

More here.

HOW BILL CLINTON AD-LIBS HIS WAY TO A WINNING SPEECH

David Kusnet at CNN:

By one account, the former president spoke for 48 minutes and 5,895 words, while his prepared text, which had been distributed beforehand to the media, was only 3,136 words. No wonder, when asked about her husband's speech, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she was looking forward to comparing the "as prepared" and "as delivered" texts.

Reviewing each version, it's clear that the same person wrote both -- the same president who improvised 20% of his first State of the Union address and explained his health-care plan from memory to a joint session of Congress after the teleprompter displayed the text of an earlier speech.

Clinton's improvisations are instructive because they show how the nation's most popular political figure (69% approval rating, according to a USA Today/Gallup poll) still serves as extemporizer-in-chief. While most speakers ad-lib anecdotes, Clinton also explains complex issues off-the-cuff.

More here.  And here's the full speech from the DNC:

 Jesus Chris
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SINGAI NAADU (Official Music Video)

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN’S PASSION FOR LOOKING, NOT THINKING

Ray Monk in the New Statesman:

“Thinking in pictures,” Sigmund Freud once wrote, “stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.” There is, in other words, something primordial, something foundational, about thinking visually.

Such a view is anathema to many philoso- phers, a good many of whom believe that all thought is propositional, that to think is to use words. For some of the most distinguished philosophers in history, thinking and verbalis- ing were practically the same thing. Bertrand Russell sometimes to his great frustration, was hopeless at visualising and was more or less indifferent to the visual arts. His mental life seemed almost entirely made up of words rather than images. When his friend Rupert Crawshay-Williams once gave him an intelligence test that involved matching increasingly complicated geometrical shapes, Russell did extremely well up to a certain point and then exceptionally badly after that. “What happened?” Crawshay-Williams asked. “I hadn’t got any names for the shapes,” Russell replied.

In this, as in many other respects, Ludwig Wittgenstein was Russell’s opposite. For Wittgenstein, to think, to understand, was first and foremost to picture. In conversation with his friends, he several times referred to himself as a “disciple” or “follower” of Freud and many people since have been extremely puzzled what he might have meant by this. I think Freud’s remark quoted above might provide the key here, that it might have something to do with the emphasis one finds in Freud on the primordiality of “thinking in pictures”.

More here.

DOES CONTEMPORARY NEUROSCIENCE SUPPORT OR CHALLENGE THE REALITY OF FREE WILL?

Eddy Nahmias in Big Questions Online:

Humans love stories. We tell each other the stories of our lives, in which we are not merely players reading a script but also the authors. As authors we make choices that influence the plot and the other players on the stage. Free will can be understood as our capacities both to make choices—to write our own stories—and to carry them out on the world’s stage—to control our actions in light of our choices.
What would it mean to lack free will? It might mean we are merely puppets, our strings pulled by forces beyond our awareness and beyond our control. It might mean we are players who merely act out a script we do not author. Or perhaps we think we make up our stories, but in fact we do so only after we’ve already acted them out. The central image in each case is that we merely observe what happens, rather than making a difference to what happens.
How might neuroscience fit into the story I am telling? Most scientists who discuss free will say the story has an unhappy ending—that neuroscience shows free will to be an illusion. I call these scientists “willusionists.” (Willusionists include Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, Jonathan Bargh, Daniel Wegner, John Dylan Haynes, and as suggested briefly in some of their work, Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.) Willusionists say that neuroscience demonstrates that we are not the authors of our own stories but more like puppets whose actions are determined by brain events beyond our control. In his new book Free Will, Sam Harris says, “This [neuroscientific] understanding reveals you to be a biochemical puppet.” Jerry Coyne asserts in a USAToday column: “The ineluctable scientific conclusion is that although we feel that we’re characters in the play of our lives, rewriting our parts as we go along, in reality we’re puppets performing scripted parts written by the laws of physics.”
There are several ways willusionists reach their conclusion that we lack free will. The first begins by defining free will in a dubious way. Most willusionists’ assume that, by definition, free will requires a supernatural power of non-physical minds or souls: it’s only possible if we are somehow offstage, beyond the causal interactions of the natural world, yet also somehow able to pull the strings of our bodies nonetheless.(For example, Read Montague.) It’s a mysterious picture, and one that willusionists simply assert is the ordinary understanding of free will. Based on this definition of free will, they then conclude that neuroscience challenges free will, since it replaces a non-physical mind or soul with a physical brain.
But there is no reason to define free will as requiring this dualist picture.

REINVENTING SOCIETY IN THE WAKE OF BIG DATA

A conversation with Alex (Sandy) Pentland, in Edge:

[SANDY PENTLAND:] Recently I seem to have become MIT's Big Data guy, with people like Tim O'Reilly and "Forbes" calling me one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world. I'm not sure what all of that means, but I have a distinctive view about Big Data, so maybe it is something that people want to hear.

I believe that the power of Big Data is that it is information about people's behavior instead of information about their beliefs. It's about the behavior of customers, employees, and prospects for your new business. It's not about the things you post on Facebook, and it's not about your searches on Google, which is what most people think about, and it's not data from internal company processes and RFIDs. This sort of Big Data comes from things like location data off of your cell phone or credit card, it's the little data breadcrumbs that you leave behind you as you move around in the world.

What those breadcrumbs tell is the story of your life. It tells what you've chosen to do. That's very different than what you put on Facebook. What you put on Facebook is what you would like to tell people, edited according to the standards of the day. Who you actually are is determined by where you spend time, and which things you buy. Big data is increasingly about real behavior, and by analyzing this sort of data, scientists can tell an enormous amount about you. They can tell whether you are the sort of person who will pay back loans. They can tell you if you're likely to get diabetes.
They can do this because the sort of person you are is largely determined by your social context, so if I can see some of your behaviors, I can infer the rest, just by comparing you to the people in your crowd. You can tell all sorts of things about a person, even though it's not explicitly in the data, because people are so enmeshed in the surrounding social fabric that it determines the sorts of things that they think are normal, and what behaviors they will learn from each other.
As a consequence analysis of Big Data is increasingly about finding connections, connections with the people around you, and connections between people's behavior and outcomes. You can see this in all sorts of places. For instance, one type of Big Data and connection analysis concerns financial data. Not just the flash crash or the Great Recession, but also all the other sorts of bubbles that occur. What these are is these are systems of people, communications, and decisions that go badly awry. Big Data shows us the connections that cause these events. Big data gives us the possibility of understanding how these systems of people and machines work, and whether they're stable.