David Linden

An new interview with neuroscientist David J. Linden provides some physiological context and grounding for reconsidering and thinking anew about what it means to be human.

From the Point of Inquiry introduction:

Click here for the complete Point of Inquiry introduction and links to the interview and the iTunes subscription page for P.O.I.

David Linden’s The Accidental Mind provides more evidence for the essential role and function of narrativity or, in Linden’s words, the “always-on narrative creation system in the left cortex” in cultural evolution — especially in relation to myth, religion, scientific methodology, and the arts in general.

Taking into account the physiological can only further our understanding of how myths, religions, scientific theories, and aesthetic values have changed and evolved in the past and what directions and forms they might take in the future.

Steven Pinker

from the TED.com introduction:

“Steven Pinker’s books have been like bombs tossed into the eternal nature-versus-nurture debate. Pinker asserts that not only are human minds predisposed to certain kinds of learning, such as language, but that from birth our minds — the patterns in which our brain cells fire — predispose us each to think and behave differently.

His deep studies of language have led him to insights into the way that humans form thoughts and engage our world. He argues that humans have evolved to share a faculty for language, the same way a spider evolved to spin a web. We aren’t born with “blank slates” to be shaped entirely by our parents and environment, he argues in books including The Language Instinct; How the Mind Works; and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.”

Click here to go to TED.com for more about Steven Pinker.

What makes something funny? Some years ago I picked up an anthology of pieces (they weren’t quite formal essays), by humorist S. J. Perelman. In the introduction the editor begins to answer the question but leaves off writing to attend to a laughing fit so severe he had to lie down on a couch with a cold wet cloth on his forehead.

Then there is the question of taste and political correctness. I’ll just pose the question: Why are so many jokes that many or most of us would laugh at in poor taste or politically incorrect? One person’s joke is another’s person’s “teachable moment.”

Some humorous writing or telling is good for the moment, while some pieces, episodes, images, scenes have something that triggers the humor center in generation after generation — certain lines and scenes in Shakespeare, for example, or Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels come to mind. I’m sure you can think of your own.

Here is a list of philosophical humor links selected from an even more comprehensive list at http://consc.net/phil-humor.html Some of them are sure to get you laughing or thinking about laughing (can you think and laugh at the same time?).

• Philosophical kisses
• Non-philosopher’s guide to philosophical terms
• Philosophical warning labels
• Philosophy light-bulb jokes
• A Descartes joke
• Understanding philosophy through jokes
• Brain in a vat at the wheel of a runaway trolley
• The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook
• Husserl parody
• The Postmodernism Generator
• Realists Anonymous
• Tractatus Fuselagico-Umbilicus
• Witteringswine’s Philosophical Tribulations
• A fragment of a lost Platonic dialogue
• Tech support, Nietzsche style
• History of Greek philosophy
• Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding
• A rant about Kant
• Philosophy Comics
• Principia Comica
• Philosophy Cartoons
• Lump of Clay
• Berkeley on Locke on the material world
• Kant attack ad
• Kierkegaard
• History of Western Philosophy in 90 seconds
• Monty Python’s International Philosophy sketch
• Analytic philosophy as reflected in the works of Monty Python
• I also dated Zarathustra
• Self-referential story
• Everything is equally interesting
• Socrates’ Argument Clinic
• New logical particles
• Tractatus Logico-Randomus
• Zombies on the web
• Introductory philosophy quiz
• How to be a philosopher
• Nanophilosophy
• Philosophy Action Figures
• The Metaphysics Lecture
• Philosopher Jokes
• Chomskybot
• Mathematical Jokes
• Mathematical Humor
• Physics Humor
• Psychology Humor Page
• Science Humor
• Self-Reference Jokes
• Twinkies Project

Get ready to laugh.

Ready? OK. Here goes.

A number of years ago the philosopher Thomas Nagel proposed a question in an essay titled eponymously with the question itself — What is it like to be a bat? In this essay Nagel analyzes certain reductionist theories of mind while exploring the various ways in which it can be said that we can in some sense “know” what it is like to be someone or something other than ourselves.

This question—What is it like to be a bat?—and the eponymous essay in which it was first proposed have been touchstones ever since for anyone interested in the philosophy of mind, the mind/body problem, and the meaning, reality, or nature of consciousness and subjectivity.

The entire, fascinating subject can be handled less philosophically, more personally, colloquial-like. Imagine we are sharing a leisurely Sunday morning brunch at your favorite restaurant. I bring up Nagel’s essay in a light-hearted way and note the following:

• Changing just one letter, I ask: What is it like to be a Bob?
• Changing two words, I ask: What is it like be you?
• Changing even more words: What is it like to be something that can ask such questions?
• And so on.

The form of the question is simple; its contents, infinite.

If we ever meet, and you happen to ask me what it was like to laugh out loud (really hard and long) after writing the above, I would begin my answer by recounting an episode in the editor’s introduction to an anthology of  essays by the humorist S. J. Perelman. The editor excuses himself mid-introduction, just after rhetorically posing the question: What is humor? Upon returning to finish writing the introduction, the editor informs us that beginning to think of an answer sent him into a laughing fit so severe that he had to lie down on a couch with a cold wash cloth draping his forehead.

The editor never does answer the question, instead he cleverly suggests that the Perelman essays to follow will present an answer to the question of what humor is — what makes something funny — much better than any answer he might attempt in the expository prose of his introduction.

One final question. If you ask: What is it like to be us? I would answer laughter (don’t laugh now, wait a sec, keep reading), I would answer that laughter defines us right now, at this very moment.  But only if you laugh, right now.

LOL

Kurt Gödel and Werner Heisenberg each described limits to certainty — Gödel in mathematics and Heisenberg in quantum physics. But those limits appear illusory in the context of more inclusive meta-narratives: complementarity in physics and Gödel-mapping in information theory. Adopting a narrative stance allows us to think through or transcend the proposed limits.

Kurt Gödel

This inclusive, transcendence-inducing capacity of narrativity would seem to render narrative somehow qualitatively different, unique — somehow superior in relation to other forms of discourse.

Werner Heisenberg

Michael Shermer

In his recent Scientific American article, Michael Shermer brings out some facts that may explain why and how untested stories—theories in search of an hypothesis, if you will—can trump scientific reasoning. I think that some of the facts about brain functioning that Shermer discusses also provide an insight into possible reasons for why the conflict between science and religion and other mythic types of thinking has persisted for so many centuries and appears set to persist for many centuries into the future.

Here is a quote from the article; you can read more via the link that follows;

We have evolved brains that pay attention to anecdotes because false positives (believing there is a connection between A and B when there is not) are usually harmless, whereas false negatives (believing there is no connection between A and B when there is) may take you out of the gene pool. Our brains are belief engines that employ association learning to seek and find patterns. Superstition and belief in magic are millions of years old, whereas science, with its methods of controlling for intervening variables to circumvent false positives, is only a few hundred years old. So it is that any medical huckster promising that A will cure B has only to advertise a handful of successful anecdotes in the form of testimonials.

Here is the link to the original article:

How Anecdotal Evidence Can Undermine Scientific Results: Scientific American

What is marvelous, amazing, about nature is that it was here before us and will be here long after we are gone. In the meanwhile we sit around the campfire and entertain ourselves with stories.

The following selections from a recent popular book on cosmology, Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang by Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, would make for good reading at a campsite under a dark, star-filled desert night sky:

Cosmology, the study of the origin and evolution of the universe, has some unique limitations that call for a high degree of caution. Scientists cannot perform direct experiments on the universe, and they cannot travel back in time. The best they can do is gather indirect information about the history of the universe through painstaking observations of distant objects that emitted their light a long time ago and try to piece together a logical account. But the evidence is uneven, with highly detailed information about some epochs and little or no information about others. Even if one story fits all the available evidence well, there is always the possibility that another story might fit just as well, or better (7-8).

The history of the universe can be compared to a play in which the actors–matter and radiation, stars and galaxies–dance across the cosmic stage according to a script set by the laws of physics. The challenge for the cosmologist is to figure out the story line after arriving at the show 14 billion years too late, long past the crucial opening scenes (18).

from intro to set of Wired articles on info-glut:

Sensors everywhere. Infinite storage. Clouds of processors. Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions. Because in the era of big data, more isn’t just more. More is different

Article by Chris Anderson:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”

S

o proclaimed statistician George Box 30 years ago, and he was right. But what choice did we have? Only models, from cosmological equations to theories of human behavior, seemed to be able to consistently, if imperfectly, explain the world around us. Until now. Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models. Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all. > > >

Click here to read the rest of Anderson’s article.

from a review of Susan Neiman’s Moral Clarity on Slate.Com:

I

f you’re a philosopher, the easiest way to introduce yourself is not by elaborating a doctrine, but by telling a story. That’s because philosophical views are always arguments with previous views, and so they arise within a historical narrative. Susan Neiman is a masterly storyteller; her new book Moral Clarity offers retellings of the Odyssey and the Book of Job that are themselves worth the price of admission. But she also has stories about the origins of her own position that place her in both larger intellectual narratives and more local political ones.

Neiman, an American philosopher who runs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, worries that American progressives have drifted away from the values and intellectual traditions of the West, stretching from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment (this is the larger narrative).

Click here to read the entire review.