IdeaFestival

"Life examined" confers life skills

Don't look now, but a certain subject is making a comeback in American universities, and one reason is that it offers an extremely important skill in an era characterized by the need to incorporate and make sense of a wide range of information.

David E.  Schrader, executive director of the American Philosophical Association, a professional organization with 11,000 members, said that in an era in which people change careers frequently, philosophy makes sense.  'It’s a major that helps them become quick learners and gives them strong skills in writing, analysis and critical thinking,' he said.

Chaucer told it like it was

As most of our literary attention is often given to the bard, William Shakespeare (and rightly so) I thought it only fitting to spend some time discussing one given the title "The father of English Poetry", Geoffrey Chaucer. If Chaucer and Shakespeare were side by side, Shakespeare would get the limo and Chaucer would be left to search for a cab.

Quantum computing for Dummies

Performing an essential public service by tackling one extraordinary concept at at time, SEED Magazine offers this one page guide to quantum computing.

I'm thinking this will be just the thing to crib for tonight's dinner party.

Wayne

Seeing what you see

Can the epic problem of the mind, "the experience of our matter," the first-person experience, be modeled?

Jonah Lehrer writes about one attempt to do just that, the Blue Brain project.

Physics has a long history of breakthroughs fueled by conceptual ambition. Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein could conceptualize problems and answers by building abstract models using the accurate symbology of math, or drawing upon artful metaphors to visualize the unknowable. As Lehrer has pointed out elsewhere, one of Niels Bohr's central insights was that the world of electrons was essentially a Cubist world.

In the animal kingdom, intelligence comes at a cost

Does the ability to learn come at a cost to health? According to Carl Zimmer at Science Times, that's the conclusion from research showing that for some animals, being smart doesn't equate with living longer. The big idea, as one biologist in the story suggests, is this:

Dr. Kawecki suspects that each species evolves until it reaches an equilibrium between the costs and benefits of learning. His experiments demonstrate that flies [which he has trained to associate some foods with nourishment and some with predators!] have the genetic potential to become significantly smarter in the wild. But only under his lab conditions does evolution actually move in that direction. In nature, any improvement in learning would cost too much.

That cost is measured in other ways as well. Using the example of human infants, which come into the world in an obvious state of helplessness, another researcher put it this way:

'We use computers with memory that’s almost free, but biological information is costly,' Dr. Dukas said. He added that the costs Dr. Kawecki documented were not smart animals’ only penalties. 'It means you start out in life being inexperienced,' Dr. Dukas said.

"Lots of Animals Learn, but Smarter Isn’t Better" is well worth a few moments of your time.

Wayne

Large Hadron Collider to write modern chapter in creation story

In the latest in a series of terrific TED presentations filmed and posted to YouTube, particle physicist Brian Cox explains why the Large Hadron Collider matters.

Twelve particles of matter stuck together by four forces of nature interact in ways that have resulted in the mind and the eyes you are now using to read this post. To complete the mathematical equations in the Standard Model, which, as Cox says, elegantly describes why the sky is blue and could, given enough computing power, suggest why DNA is shaped the way it is, particle physicists want to uncover the Higgs Boson, which the last remaining undiscovered particle predicted by the Standard Model.

He concludes the 17 minute video with a three minute description of what particle physics means to him. Pointing to the stage props around him, he memorably says that everything from Saturn V rockets, to great literature to DNA to science itself "are the things that hydrogen atoms do when given 13.7 billion years." What's more, this narrative, which has only come into focus in the past fifty years, leaves him feeling privileged to be a part of this moment in history.

But to answer the question with which he begun, the LHC matters, he says, because it will write the next chapter of the creation story. Enjoy.

Wayne

Information age: what happens to the "cognitive surplus?"

Making the rounds in support of his new book, Here Comes Everybody, digital media theorist Clay Shirky has been asking some provocative questions lately - for example, is there a cognitive surplus waiting to be tapped? 

Put another way - and I think this is a Shirky formulation from several years ago and a question for which I certainly have no answers - what happens to society when everything knowable can be known? He elaborates on these and other issues in the video above.

Wayne

Counter-factual history: playing "what if"

In a Long Now confrontation yesterday, historian Niall Ferguson and futurist Peter Schwartz squared off over how to assess the past and future. What biases do we bring to an interpretation of the past or of what might happen in the future? The following passage appealed to me because it suggested that wide thinking is needed about deep causes.

Also, I dig the idea of "counter-factual history."

Historians also have heuristic biases, Ferguson added, such as their expectation that 'great events should have great causes.' Historians have much to learn from complexity theory and evolution, he said. His own work with 'counter-factual history' helps expose critical moments in history and provides a way to 'think about what didn’t happen.' The counter-factual technique is an application of scenario thinking to the past.

The Long Now seminars, which have recently featured people such as Craig Venter, Paul Saffo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, are archived here. Use this link to subscribe to the podcasts.

Wayne

Wikipedia: counter-factual history

What are the digital literacies?

Initial results from one of the largest ethnographic studies of kids in their native, digital environment are now available. Could the cheap availability of media be creating a new generation of creatives?

Sure, kids have long been attracted to extracurricular activities like dance or sports. But researchers say digital media is bringing up a new generation who are creators of media rather than just passive consumers of it. Within these digital environments among peers, kids who create and evaluate media are deriving a sense of competence, autonomy, self-determination and connectedness, researchers say.

The case studies discussed last Wednesday are part of a $50 million long-range MacArthur Foundation initiative, the digital media and learning project, to study whether - and how - digital media might be changing kids. Full results will be available later in the year.

More on the results of this study can be found on C|NET.

Wayne

A science of consciousness? I doubt it.

If like me you really, truly, unhealthily enjoy reasoning about consciousness, the biennial Tucson Science of Consciousness get together has posted abstracts of presentations from its just-concluded conference. It was that conference and my discovery of David Chalmers' description of the "hard problem" of consciousness that got me interested in philosophy of mind in the first place, and I've since written about it here many, many times. If it's any consolation, I suffer just as much as you do.

At any rate, this ought to keep you busy for the next 24 months.

On Splintered Mind Eric Schwitzgebel describes his '08 Tuscon presentation and his doubts about the whole we'll-figure-it-out consciousness enterprise. If I understand his position correctly, brain science might eventually provide a truthful account of phenomenal experience, but subjective report is ultimately needed and those reports can be shown to be unreliable, as he has demonstrated through some experimentation.

Schwitzgebel offers a succinct explanation of this line of thought elsewhere on his blog.

Unlike natural and symbolic languages, which hold descriptive and predictive powers, your consciousness and mine is in direct contact the world, constantly editing reality so that it's intelligible and at some level, comprehensible. And unlike language, there are no one-to-one equivalences to be deployed in the conquest of matter, no clever formulas or stirring poetry to keep what's real at a manageable distance. Consciousness seeks meaning in a confrontation with everything, all at once.

This should boggle us. I'm not surprised that the mechanism itself should incomprehensible. And I too tend to think it will remain so.

Like I said, I enjoy this stuff.

Reading these words on your computer screen, you're probably aware of a certain phenomenal experience of your own. Something like 'wow!" And by "wow!" you're thinking that "Wayne has just had another one of his crap-tasm's!"

Says you.

I wouldn't know what you mean.

Wayne