Stories, News, Books, and Videos on Science, Technology, Computers, Environment and the Realites of Life, for the general, smart public
Mind / Brain
Topics about the science and philosophy of the brain and the mind
Book Review – Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel C. Dennett
Feb 11th
The four aitia… That is what Aristotle used as tools of mind in order to fully understand all that is understandable about anything in the universe. For example, you want to know what a hammer is? Well, you’ll just have to ask yourself what is the material cause of this object, or what is it made of; that’s an easy answer: it’s made of wood and iron, maybe cured steel or another high rigidity/resistance metal. After this, you’ll have to ask yourself what is the formal cause of this object called hammer, or what is its architecture, its design, how do all its elements hang on to each other, and what are its most inner workings; for a hammer this shouldn’t be a hard question to answer: the wooden rigid stick, which is tailor made for grabbing with one or two hands, is firmly attached to the metallic compact solid mass which represents the hammer head that comes in many forms and sizes depending on what the hammer was designed to do. And here we are at the third question we might ask about this object, and that is what is its efficient cause, who or what natural or artificial industrial process created this object; that’s an easy answer, right?! Yes, a interesting answer for an interesting question, but not as interesting as the last aitia…
What is the final cause of this object? What’s it made for? Well, even though it was designed for a specific purpose like driving nails, forging metal, fitting parts, and breaking up objects, its reason d’etre could be as various as human nature. Who hasn’t heard about Hell’s Angels favorite weapon, the ball pean hammer?! It’s as sexy and dangerous as it can be useful in the house. This reason d’etre, the purpose, the meaning of things stays at the heart of Dennett’s undertaking. Even though we start with hammers and simple things we will finally dodge the most sacred of mysteries… the origin of man, the meaning of life. How will Dennett manage to derive meaning, purpose from nature’s red in tooth and claw, that’s an answer you’ll find by reading the book. Here, we will skim through the ideas of the thinkers that lived before Darwin which laid down the most beautiful but least understood – by friend or foe – scientific theory that ever existed. Beautiful, but what dreadful implications to our human existence it had!
Hell's Angels Ball-Pean Hammer
For reasons easy to understand, much of the answers about the origin and the meaning of life have been bedeviled by naive assumptions and too much irrational wishful thinking. The why questions have been replaced by how questions with the hope that maybe the answer to the latter one would somehow yield a spark of intellectual brilliance that would solve the conundrums of the first… but what a coward way to avoid answering the main problem this treacherous and avoiding road would prove to be!
How did the thinkers before Darwin explain the complexity of nature? John Locke goes at the heart of what many of today’s uneducated users of science and technology still think it’s common sense. Consider for example his following phrase: “So if we will suppose nothing first, or eternal: Matter can never begin to be: If we suppose bare Mater, without Motion, eternal: Motion can never begin to be: If we suppose only Matter and Motion first, or eternal: Thought can never begin to be. For it is impossible to conceive that Matter either with or without Motion could have originally in and from itself Sense, Perception, and Knowledge, as is evident from hence, that then Sense, Perception, and Knowledge, must be a property eternally inseparable from Matter and every particle of it.”
The simple error in logic of the above statement muddled the meme complex of explanations that tried to explain the reason for man’s existence and for the causes of life and complexity. The fact of the matter is that to assume that something complex must derive from something more complex than the thing we’ve started to explain leads of course to a God that has a creator, this assuming we’re not going to throw away the logic in the middle of the argument; that is, the God of God has a God and so on ’till eternity. What is that? Plain bullshit, if you ask me !
So, we needn’t use this kind of recursivity because the scientific evidence proves that nature works the other way around: complex things evolve from things that are not so complex. It’s more like a construction project coordinated by blind and purposeless forces in which cranes build by nature assemble less complex natural systems into more complex ones that have greater degrees of freedom. We don’t have to postulate sky-hooks, that is, god given metaphysical helping hands that defy scientific explanation, because there is a lot that we can explain without taking this road. As Darwin put it, “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved”.
DARWIN’S DANGEROUS IDEA – Check Reviews on Amazon.com
DARWIN’S DANGEROUS IDEA – Check Reviews on Amazon.co.uk
Much of Dennett’s book is directed at explaining the above logic, but don’t worry; things start to get more fiery in the end once we start to reverse engineer the most complex of cranes: the memes and their most intricate and time consuming effects on the human mind : the quest for meaning, purpose and the perfect ethical algorithm. This i think, is the most interesting part of the book. Dennett deconstructs the erroneous assumption/intuition that makes us think there is a real meaning, a real purpose in life, a perfect ethical course of action that anyone can take. The reality is that there is no real meaning just like there is no real self, (see here), there is no real purpose in life just because there are no sky-hooks; there are cranes that serve distinct natural systems that have distinct interests which will more than likely conflict with each other. Just like Richard Dawkins put it, in this battle “blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”
Do you want to go deep down the rabbit whole? Then read this book !
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9/11 thoughts, the Peak Oil linkage, and how to separate the ice cream from the bullshit
Oct 27th
Conspiracy theorists, 9/11 thruthers, or the so called 9/11 debunkers are ready to put their hands into fire in order to make us think they’d proven that the U.S. Government’s leadership is inherently diabolical, ready to succumb to any fiendish plan for the achievement of their global domination and oligarchical nirvana. It just fits too well for them and for any other anyone that doesn’t have an education about causation and statistics, that the predicament of Peak Oil, which we currently start to realize we find ourselves in, kick started the Bush’s administration conspiracy engines and lead it to its most extreme and unimaginable of actions. So let’s analyze this course of actions just like a skeptic would and see if this could ever happen in 2001′s American complex, but faulty, and bureaucratic society.
Several versions of the conspiracies are traveling in the memosphere, but here we’ll tackle the most unlikely one: The Bush Administration & Co meaning the Bush family, Dick Cheney, several bankers, and several CEO’s from petroleum and military corporations managed to pull out a plan for a false flag attack and kill almost 4000 of their own citizens. All this was done in order to take control of the major oil fields in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, etc. It seems plausible right? The US is running out of cheap oil, so they try to take hold of it right at the source. Additionally, in Iraq, for example, the CIA couldn’t so easily apply CIA’s sponsorship programs in order to corrupt the right kind of politicians and decision makers because of the Saddam Regime. So, after 9/11 the US Administration acted as though it did conspire against its own people by promptly invading Afghanistan and Iraq and securing all their major oil fields. All elements fit too well in the story, so it seems, right?
First of all, the fact that the US Administration acted as though it conspired against its people doesn’t mean it did conspire, but that it just took advantage of that times’ situation. They just profiteered like a hungry hyena would devour a dead carcass when no lions lie around; the dead carcass was of course the result of another animal’s struggle for existence. Looters that robbed women, children, and weak men right after the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake didn’t provoke the earthquake, but abided by their selfish agenda and took advantage of the quandaries that bedeviled those moments. You see, the shear ruthfulness of the looters, just like the ruthfulness of the ones responsible for the killing of more than one million Iraqis, doesn’t prove anything but the outright selfish nature of the human being and nothing else. In order to prove US Administration’s implication in the planning of 9/11 you need more than this contingency of events and coincidences to happen.
A lot of conspiracy theorists retort to the argument of the impossibility of covering up such a grand-diabolical plan without a couple of whistle blowers whirling out from the sway of the conspirators, by giving examples such as the Manhattan project or the conspiracy of silence surrounding the development of the F-117 Stealth Fighter. The reason that these are not good analogies is that 9/11, unlike the later two, is inherently vulnerable to individual selfishness and does not abide the rules of behavior in a group with individuals that share a common interest. Let’s analyze these two motives one by one!
Individual selfishness shows us that this conspiracy wasn’t impossible because people are so inherently good, but because they are so inherently selfish, greedy and jealous. For such a conspiracy to yield success there must surely have been hundreds of people needed: the engineers that placed explosives on almost all the floors of the 3 buildings that collapsed, the operators that flew the two empty planes into the twin towers from some underground secret base, the shills that masqueraded someone or some act at all TV stations around US, the military personnel that did not scramble any jet fighter in order to intercept the “so obvious hijacked airplanes”, and the list goes on and on. Hundreds of people with hundreds of mindsets and motives for their involvement in this diabolical conspiracy, and no whistle blower until now? There surely must have been some individuals that didn’t get paid enough or didn’t get paid as much as their buddy and would certainly have regained that difference in money by blowing the whistle. Again, the greatest conspiracy of human kind with so much money to be made by any whistle blower and we have yet to be been given the pleasure to meet any of them?
The second motive, the group behavior. The reason there were no whistle blowers on the Manhattan Project or the F-117 Stealth fighter is that there wouldn’t have been anything to gain from by making public that information. Besides some techno-geeks and a certain percentage of the technical press that would have surely devoured the data, the majority of the public wouldn’t have found that news of too much interest. The benefits of being a whistle blower would surely be outnumbered by the risks, including legal ones considering you would be charged with putting your national security on thin ice. So, the good of the group’s (i.e. the country) interests would surely bring more personal benefits than the risk of deserting would have. Now, put side by side the conspiracy of the Manhattan Project with the Conspiracy of 9/11. By being a whistle blower on 9/11 you would surely be seen as a hero not as a traitor, and you would surely have more to benefit because, by the virtue of being the biggest and fiendish conspiracy of them all, all the planet’s eyes are going to be on you. Now ask yourselves: Isn’t it all logical? Isn’t it all clear that if there was a 9/11 Bush Conspiracy there would be a very high probability of there being a whistle blower by now, just as it were in the cases of CIA’s drug smuggling operations, banking cartel corruption cases, 3rd world countries support of terrorist groups, and the list can go on forever?
The reality is that one thing that some of the conspiracy theorists will never get is that the US would have gotten hold of the oil fields one way or another. They would have gone to war with Afghanistan and Iraq without any right just as they did with Bosnia, and in that case there wasn’t any oil involved. In fact you can search the web and find relatively conclusive evidence that that US was preparing to go to war with Afghanistan a couple of months before 9/11.
And yes, 9/11 was because of oil. The CIA and some American corporations felt their presence in Afghanistan way before 2001 and that managed to anger up the wrong kind of people over there. Simple as that.
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Peak Consumption – Or how to mac your way out of plenitude right into scarcity
Oct 23rd
What are the main sets of behaviors which our modern brains are genetically and environmentally wired for? One attentive thinker might curiously ask in what kind of environment do these people (i.e. us) live in order to take a non-shallow attempt at dividing and conquering the issue in question. Some sets of behaviors that yielded some 100.000 years ago in the societies of hunter gatherers tribes from the plains of Africa might be completely untraceable in today’s culture and society.
The fact of the matter is that cultures evolved just like human beings evolved, from so simple beginnings where only people and a small set of tools and rules were needed in order to survive, to societies so perplexing in complexity that no one could knowingly give himself the task of trying to understand how the whole system works and hope to succeed; the days of polymaths are long day gone. Leaving aside my humble intellectual modesty, all systems, no matter how complex they are, are driven and manage to govern themselves by some simple sets of rules. I doubt anyone can deny that this simple axiom is abided by all complex systems which are to be found in the universe we live in.
It just so seems that ancient societies, hunter gatherers tribes, were foremost driven by their most visceral desire also present, though belly-fulled, in every human being living today: the will to survive. The lack of food and resources cemented this basic rule at the base of all the systematization, socialization, and culture development that bedeviled their ancient societal evolution.
But, unlike the days past gone, here we are on this planet, almost 7 billion defiant consumers making a living in the biggest tribe that had ever existed. Survival, although a serious issue in a lot of poor countries, is hardly a prime time audience maker in today’s modern society. If the primal, reptilian, hardcore urge to survive has supposedly long been handled by modern science and technology knack and by the plethora of resources available and ready to be exploited anytime, anywhere, what is the main rule that governs our contemporaries’ dynamic?
Whatever the rule is, it surely makes the wealthy wealthier, and the poor poorer, not by conspiracy but by design. Leaving this minor detail aside, the system managed to produce wonders of technology that could easily be classified as magic, and, antithetically, is responsible for some of the most futilitarian environmental stories ever written in human history. So, if environmental safety may not be one of our main concerns as we burn fossil fuels with the utmost stolidity and without any consideration to their increasing scarcity, if basic personal survival is of no concern either because, as we’ve explained, this issue is almost already solved by society’s specialization of farming and the food system indulged by the vast amounts of petroleum, then what’s the main artificer that drives all of our daily struggle?
Because oil took the burden of daily individual food production out of the prime time of modernistic living, then maybe this meant that our desires had to follow exactly the same rule that each and every other evanescent product of nature follows: they had to evolve, not because the must have started to evolve, but just because oil industry opened up a new landscape, a new set of adaptation opportunities that were never possible before. So, unlike daily survival imposed and restricted by scarcity, daily consumption tendered and given plenty of rope by today’s plenitude of resources is the new main rule by which we engage in our everyday life.
The consumption of objects increases our social status and thus satisfies some of our most primeval urges, the will to socialize, to be liked, respected, feared; all these have effect because they offer us a sense of security and well being. Does a Ferrari and a private plane make a man more sexy? We’ll, you’ll just have to look at the women he’s taking to dinner and you’d probably find out that, obviously, he’s very sexy. And that’s available to women also. How many of us didn’t we hear about the rich old lady having fun with young model Kens? It’s all about the status, that’s why it’s all about consumption now days.
There’s no conspiracy here, there’s no design of society by some evil controlling entity in order to make us consume more, it’s just that our vulnerability to consumption due to behavior that is triggered abnormally by false flags that used to be of necessity thousands and million of years ago makes us unknowingly build the consumption based autonomous system that we live in. And because we’re living in the world of the selfish gene everyone will try to make a living; this is the reason for the distribution of wealth which we see today. Our society is like a flock of birds, never governed by anyone, but driven as a whole by each and every constitutive element; it’s built by each and everyone of us, it was never built for us.
I’ll also make the bold assumption that consumption is the single prime rule by which our today’s society powers itself. That’s why global warming is here, that’s why peak oil is waiting around the corner, that’s why environmental issues have long stopped to be minor problems, and that is why maybe sometime in the future we’ll have to hark back to the survival rule again.
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Two tips on critical thinking – Always asking questions and how to get the right answers
Oct 9th
Blessed be the evolution of language and the environmental triggers which contrived its architecture! Language made possible the appearance of coherent, highly social, and clever groups of hominids acting as a single intelligent entity which could more easily foresight mother nature’s squeamish evolutionary roadblocks. As an individual that was part of that group you could more than likely increase your chances of survival by communicating complex information with the other members of the tribe; this complexity in the transfer of information could have only be achieved by the knack of language architecture. Tool building skills, hunting skills, food gathering skills, and cultural memes, you could easily have access to by learning to use the already evolved language circuitry of your brain.
Although some may see language just as a tool used in order to communicate to others the already complex thinking dynamics of our brain, conversely, we can easily find reasons to ponder on language’s gift of speeding up and stimulating thinking instead. What if language’s talent was to spark the creativeness, to provide “food for thought”, to create the architecture of thinking? What if real thinking was non-existent before the evolution of complex language? What if the evolution of language was the main cause, the main artificer, for the appearance of highly intelligent hominids and not the other way around? Or could it be that I’m exaggerating by completely reversing the real state of affairs, thus being sucked in another “Chicken or Egg?” evolutionary conundrum? Either way, language still remains a major fuel source for our brain without which brilliant minds and creative thinkers would be as rare as hen’s teeth.
The thoughts we have, the good ideas, the bad ideas, the sometimes wonderful stories we have to tell, they’re all smeared in the voluminous neuronal circuitry of the brain by specialized content fixation mechanisms, that, by the nature of brain’s architecture and wiring, we could rarely get them to coherently coalesce, to fully aggregate with one another using its internally operating mechanisms. The real way they sex each other is by means of language. Say, two ideas belonging to the same mind need to merge with each other but the current neural wiring makes it impossible for them to meet; so, one of those ideas is transferred verbally into someone else’s brain, it is processed, and then the result of that computation, that is, the same idea but slightly altered, easily molded into another format is then returned into the brain of the communication initiator. Now, because the idea is now slightly modified it may more easily find a neural path leading to the idea which it was impossible to reach a few moments ago. (see illustration).
Now, if talking to others helps us gather our thoughts, clear our mind, and spark creativeness, then why shouldn’t talking to oneself achieve the same tactical benefit? In 1960, E.M. Forster cleverly summoned the above : “How can i tell what i think until i see what i say?“. In 1991, in Consciousness Explained, Dennet said that “pushing some information through one’s ears and auditory system may well happen to stimulate just the sorts of connections one is seeking…“; by talking to oneself your thoughts become more coherent, more interconnected, and more importantly they become the artificers of new thoughts, new ideas, sometimes brilliant ones.
So how should one talk to himself in order to bootstrap the all-too-needed creativeness software? More than likely simply mumbling nonsensical words will not spark the plug of any creative thinking, but maybe asking questions relevant to the problem you’re trying to solve will perhaps have this desired effect. Aristotle had four questions that he used to ask about everything there was: the four aitia. He wanted to know the material cause of something, that is, the stuff from which that entity is made of; the efficient cause or what brought about the entity into existence; the formal cause or questions about that entity’s architecture, structure, or shape; and the final cause, that is, what is the purpose of the entity in the world. From so simple questions, forms of inquiring so manifestly complex and lucrative will easily start to evolve in your brain.
If asking questions may be the correct way to get the engines running, how are we to be able to speed up this process and manage not to get stuck unwillingly into a mental cul de sac? If the answers to the questions we address to ourselves are not readily available how are we to appease our mental hunger? As I’ve stated in a recent article, following a sufficient amount of channels of information and at the same time maintaining a good dose of skepticism towards all these dispensers of memes and temes, even though that dose’s measure will have to be tuned to the credibility of the source, will give you the gift of being one step ahead in the race to find out the truth.
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Tools for thought – How to protect your mind and make sense of the multitude of information which transits your senses
Oct 1st
There’s so much “food for thought” in this era of unlimited information that there is no wonder you can easily get fooled by shills pretending to be truth harbingers. How can we make sense of these peta-bytes of memes and temes without being smeared by their facile non sequiturs educed by the same shills of information generation that may not always have all of our best interest on their agenda?
Divide and Conquer! So what if we let these shills tear each other apart and do their job for us? They’ll expose each other’s lies, miss-information, propaganda, fractures in logic, ethics and their so called moral standards; this, they’re already doing! In books, newspapers, blogs, tea parties, television shows, social networking websites and the list goes on and on. The memes and temes are having sex with each other through the waging of war between individuals, and groups of individuals: governments, non-profit organizations, nations, corporations, etc. All you have to do in order to make sense of all this apparent hogwash of data is to listen to a little bit of what all the channels have to say. All of them will expose to you “their real truth” and will beg for you to enshrine their version on the most precious wall of your house. Cognitive dissonance… how many times have you read two books in which the authors clearly had antithetical opinions, and you couldn’t make your mind on the truthfulness of either of their abstract views; you just flip-flopped from strongly believing one and then the other? Maybe plenty! Maybe that is the reason you couldn’t make your mind on the issues debated, because of the abstractedness, and of course because of the ideas expressed being loaded with the burden of subjectivity and bias.
So what are we to make of all this disarray? Is there no objective reality? Is there no real truth, but an infinity of them molded by each individual onto its subjectively helter-skelter? Would i be able to answer this question, i would had surely solved the questions that mind boggle today’s most brilliant physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers. But, leaving aside this intellectual unpretentiousness, maybe some truths are more frequent, more rife than others, at least in the set of universes that we live in, and this is all that matters. Maybe just because almost all apples that had been seen have fallen on the ground when they’ve gotten ripe, and maybe because almost all politicians are mass manipulators that deceived their credulous masses, then this constancy in history may be the only thing we need to consider in order to take these facts as “frequent truths” that we’ll more than likely encounter in our lifetime.
What should be our first three basic “tools of critical thinking” with which we should masticate the “food for thought” that so blithely invades all of our senses? The first and the most important is the tool of accessing all channels of information. The mainstream media, alternative media, blogosphere, are all worth paying attention to as long as you use all of their brushes to paint your own personal version of the truth. All are worth a pint of heed as long as they don’t manage to bite all your mental fingers.
Ask yourself what is the main reason of the source, which you’ve got the information from, to spread that data onto people like you. A source like, for example, the Richard Dawkins Foundation would surely have a different set of reasons for spreading its ideas than CNN (the Cable News Network) or the other corporate media companies would have. The first one is a non profit organization whose mission is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering, whilst CNN …, well, take a look at the main share holders and you’ll promptly find out more about the possible reasons for its existence. This tool will help you hand pick the sources that are least likely to spread insidious information. The sources’ reason of existence should be taken into account prior to taking into consideration their data as reliable or not. Non-profit, scientific, skeptical, non-biased sources should be regarded as the most trust-worthy, though not amenable to absolutely blind praising.
Search for the middle ground and beware of the “absolute truthers“. Lodged inside the truthers’ arrogance lie all the sins of non-critical thinking; climate change and peak oil negationism, crazy conspiracy theories, and a hell lot of other bunch of nonsensical constructs are its offspring. The agenda of these groups of people certainly does not comprise “finding the truth” as their main pursuit, but maybe “finding their truth“. Although they’re highly recommended to be ignored, we’re not absolutely required to do that; once in a while every nut may have a great idea worth taking into account.
Until now everything’s all talk and no trousers, so i should let others speak. Here’s Dr. Richard Paul in a video made available on Youtube by the Foundation for Critical Thinking in which he cuts to the chase and presents his 5 standards to critical thinking: Clarity, Precision, Accuracy, Relevance, and Depth. A short but interesting introduction to skeptical, reliable thinking…
