Aaron Freeman:

You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.

And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her eyes, that those photons created within her constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.

And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.

And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly. Amen.

Economist, The Higgs Boson: { Science’s Great Leap Forward }

••••••

Well said.

People are asking, “What does this ‘God Particle’ mean for me? How will it change my daily life?”

The realistic answer is that it likely won’t. We’ve made it possible to live here (for now, although it’s not working out too well for us) in a “human bubble” and not care much about anything outside of human culture, human perspective, and how the rest of the world relates to us. It’s possible to go on living here and not give a damn about nature or science, because we don’t really have to encounter the former anymore, and can rely on others for the latter.

But should it be like that? I don’t know that there’s anything more sublime, more important, more vital than trying to know the world on its own terms. Once you’ve had a taste — a real taste — it’s near impossible to go back.

Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

••••••

The first part is true — at least for me, with most things I do. Get them out quickly and maybe regret them a little, later, when I’ve wizened up.

But at least they’re out there… I attended a science-related talk last week and, at the end, one of the speakers’ suggestions (for young people who have graduated or will soon) was to { publish } their ideas, or else those thoughts/creations/etc. may as well be nonexistent. Especially now.

The second part, I’m afraid of.

100% Honest, Transparency, Disclosure - is this the future that we want? | World Future Society (via wildcat2030)

••••••

OS:

DO NOT WANT.

I began to “consider the time-saving benefits” but had a hard time not obliterating after “Casual sex? No one has to waste words flirting with impossible candidates.”

Problem: Minds change. Humans change based on new inputs & interactions. A seemingly impossible candidate can become attainable, but you wouldn’t know it from first impressions of their thoughts about you. In fact, knowing those thoughts at all could ruin something potentially beautiful down the line.

Hell, what I thought of the person I love now, before knowing him, has become a funny, shared story. I don’t think it would’ve worked out in this “naked brain [dys]topia”.

Our mouths may be strange, messy, and occasionally full of shit… but our culturally-defined niceties and “dancing around the subject” evolved to such ridiculous complexities probably because they’re more of a help than hindrance.

(via wildcat2030)

In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt. He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals. In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical fields. For the echolocating bat, it’s air-compression waves. The small subset of the world that an animal is able to detect is its umwelt. The bigger reality, whatever that might mean, is called the umgebung.

The interesting part is that each organism presumably assumes its umwelt to be the entire objective reality “out there.” Why would any of us stop to think that there is more beyond what we can sense? In the movie The Truman Show, the eponymous Truman lives in a world completely constructed around him by an intrepid television producer. At one point an interviewer asks the producer, “Why do you think Truman has never come close to discovering the true nature of his world?” The producer replies, “We accept the reality of the world with which we’re presented.” We accept our umwelt and stop there.

To appreciate the amount that goes undetected in our lives, imagine you’re a bloodhound dog. Your long nose houses two hundred million scent receptors. On the outside, your wet nostrils attract and trap scent molecules. The slits at the corners of each nostril flare out to allow more air flow as you sniff. Even your floppy ears drag along the ground and kick up scent molecules. Your world is all about olfaction. One afternoon, as you’re following your master, you stop in your tracks with a revelation. What is it like to have the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human being? What can humans possibly detect when they take in a feeble little noseful of air? Do they suffer a hole where smell is supposed to be?

Obviously, we suffer no absence of smell because we accept reality as it’s presented to us. Without the olfactory capabilities of a bloodhound, it rarely strikes us that things could be different. Similarly, until a child learns in school that honeybees enjoy ultraviolet signals and rattlesnakes employ infrared, it does not strike her that plenty of information is riding on channels to which we have no natural access. From my informal surveys, it is very uncommon knowledge that the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is visible to us is less than a ten-trillionth of it.

Our unawareness of the limits of our umwelt can be seen with color blind people: until they learn that others can see hues they cannot, the thought of extra colors does not hit their radar screen. And the same goes for the congenitally blind: being sightless is not like experiencing “blackness” or “a dark hole” where vision should be. As a human is to a bloodhound dog, a blind person does not miss vision. They do not conceive of it. Electromagnetic radiation is simply not part of their umwelt.

The more science taps into these hidden channels, the more it becomes clear that our brains are tuned to detect a shockingly small fraction of the surrounding reality. Our sensorium is enough to get by in our ecosystem, but is does not approximate the larger picture.

I think it would be useful if the concept of the umwelt were embedded in the public lexicon. It neatly captures the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day — and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen.

— David Eagleman, { EDGE }

Imagine:

If wherever we encountered new information, sentence by sentence, frame by frame, we could easily know the best thinking on it.

If we had confidence that this represented the combined wisdom of the most informed people—not as anointed by editors, but as weighed over time by our peers, objectively, statistically and transparently.

If this created a powerful incentive for people to ensure that their works met a higher standard, and made it perceptibly harder to spread information that didn’t meet that standard.

These goals are possible with today’s technologies.

They are the objectives of Hypothes.is.

paleblued0t:

Those who follow my Facebook wall posts no doubt have noticed a heavy political slant to many of them, involving support for many liberal causes, among those being gay rights. It might seem like I should not care quite so much about this particular issue, given that I am not homosexual, nor do I know very many people who are. I am, however, a member of a minority group myself - one whose members often also live in secrecy for fear of ostracism or judgment from friends and family, who are banned from joining organizations like the Boy Scouts, who are rated as “potentially deficient” by the military, and who are according to public opinion polls greatly mistrusted by a large segment of society. I am an atheist. 

I have been an atheist for probably about 4 or 5 years now, though it’s hard to give an exact figure because the realization happened slowly over a long period of time. It was resisted at first, but the more I learned about the world, the more I learned about the pathological dishonesty of leading theologians (including many hypocrites and con men who make millions by peddling lies and ignorance to their followers - Pat Robertson, Kent Hovind, Ted Haggard, Jimmy Swaggart, Peter Popoff, Roy Comfort, John Hagee, Ken Copeland, Marjoe Gortner, the late Jerry Falwell and Oral Roberts, and on and on), the countless contradictions and absurdities in the Bible, its promotion of brutal and antisocial behaviors, and the seemingly endless conflict between religion and science, I realized that I could not continue to support any religion; I agree wholeheartedly with the words of Thomas Paine, who said that churches are “human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit”. I simply have yet to hear a convincing argument for the existence of any gods, and while I of course cannot say with certainty that one does not exist, I must be honest with myself and say that I am an agnostic atheist. I am simply unconvinced by any arguments in favor of the existence of a deity; I do not believe in gods for exactly the same reasons that I do not believe in unicorns or leprechauns.

The rift between science and religion was a particular sticking point for me when it came to losing my faith. Despite the fact that the two do not need to be in disagreement (the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria”), many theologians nevertheless create conflict between the two because while science by definition does not and cannot disprove the existence of any supernatural reality, it can and does disprove *specific* claims about supernatural realities found in various holy books. This causes irreconcilable conflicts with those who equate their holy book with their deity, and has led to a centuries-long record of churches stifling scientific knowledge, from the age of the earth and universe to heliocentricity to biological evolution. If forced to choose between a system of investigating nature which has led to dramatic increases in our standard of living, including modern medicine, worldwide transportation, indoor plumbing and climate control, modern agricultural methods, instant global communication, and much more; and fealty to ancient books which have been used to promote bigotry, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, violence, prejudice, genocide and ignorance; I choose the former.

I have tried to keep my rejection of religion to myself at first, for various reasons. Naturally I wanted to avoid any conflict with my family members, some of whom I’d expect to react fairly negatively to this fact. However, I let my true beliefs slip out at times, partly because I am opinionated, and find this to be an important topic, and partly because I feel that a person should not be forced into silence about who they are or what they do or do not believe. In a world where religious fundamentalism leads to violent repression of women and other minorities, retards the advance of science and lifesaving technologies that could result from stem cell research, and contributes to the AIDS epidemic which kills millions of people every year (via dogmatic objection to contraception use in the third world), I feel that people who hold secular humanist views should not be afraid to speak up against these injustices, without having to fear retribution from the majority of the population who are religious. The current political climate in this country, with an entire political party becoming increasingly beholden to irrational beliefs and bigotry based on religious fundamentalism has also persuaded me to out myself out of serious concern for the damage that this kind of irrationalism has done and is continuing to do to this country. I do find encouragement from various places. Polls show that increasing numbers of Americans are admitting to atheism, or at least to belonging to no specific religion. The march of gay rights is proceeding slowly but surely across the country, showing an increasing tolerance for minority views and lifestyles. We even now have a black president, which can make one optimistic that we may even elect an openly atheist president some day. Hopefully the day will come when someone growing up in this country will not need to feel the need to keep these sorts of ideas to themselves.

I anticipate a bit of a negative reaction to this, and understandably so. In fact, I’ve found it remarkably difficult to post this note, having kept it on my hard drive for several weeks. Religion is a topic which we tend to take very personally, for it ties into some of the most fundamental questions we have about our existence. We are a species capable of contemplating our own mortality. We have all lost loved ones, and will inevitably lose more. Religion gives people a hope that they can escape their own death, that they can see lost friends and family again, that they can enjoy an existence free from the suffering and despair that is an unfortunate part of life on earth. I would like to believe that these things are possible, but I see no compelling reason to believe them to be true. And I’m ok with that. I don’t believe that something must last forever in order to have any value or meaning. Life is precious, and though it is temporary, I would rather face that reality honestly than to comfort myself in baseless promises of something more. 

Surely, some people have already become aware of my beliefs (or lack thereof, in this case), but others may not have. I welcome any questions or comments about this, as long as they are civil and reasonable. Hopefully I can do my part to dispel common misconceptions or falsehoods regarding atheists - that we “hate” god, that we want to be wild hedonists or sociopaths, or whatever else a person may think about the subject. Simply put, there seem to be some prevalent stereotypes about atheists that are completely and utterly false. We are not less moral, or more violent, or more generally harmful to society than believers, despite what many preachers would have you believe. I am not an atheist because I want to scorn morality; I look forward to a day when our societal ethics can be arrived at through rational discussion, argument, and reason, rather than blindly followed from ancient texts, and when people are not deprived of basic rights because of the color of their skin, their gender, or their sexual orientation. I am an atheist simply because I am unconvinced about the existence of any gods. I am an atheist because I believe I would prefer a hard truth to a comforting fiction. Because I believe two hands put to work will accomplish more than a million clasped in prayer. Because I believe that knowledge is more important than belief.

———

“… in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them…as the Lord your God has commanded you.” - Deuteronomy 20:16-17

“Slay the pagans wherever you may come upon them, and take them captive, and besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every conceivable place…” - Quran, 9:5

“I tell you that to everyone who has, more will be given, but as for the one who has nothing, even what they have will be taken away. But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them—bring them here and kill them in front of me” - Luke 19:26-27

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Well, let’s see how this goes over….

(via wildcat2030)

via { wildcat2030 }

“THE ELUSIVE BIG IDEA”

By NEAL GABLER
Published: August 13, 2011

Neal Gabler is a senior fellow at the Annenberg Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California and the author of “Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination.”

THE July/August issue of The Atlantic trumpets the “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year.” Take a deep breath. The ideas include “The Players Own the Game” (No. 12), “Wall Street: Same as it Ever Was” (No. 6), “Nothing Stays Secret” (No. 2), and the very biggest idea of the year, “The Rise of the Middle Class — Just Not Ours,” which refers to growing economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China.

Now exhale. It may strike you that none of these ideas seem particularly breathtaking. In fact, none of them are ideas. They are more on the order of observations. But one can’t really fault The Atlantic for mistaking commonplaces for intellectual vision. Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world.

They could penetrate the general culture and make celebrities out of thinkers — notably Albert Einstein, but also Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Betty Friedan, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould, to name a few. The ideas themselves could even be made famous: for instance, for “the end of ideology,” “the medium is the message,” “the feminine mystique,” “the Big Bang theory,” “the end of history.” A big idea could capture the cover of Time — “Is God Dead?” — and intellectuals like Norman Mailer, William F. Buckley Jr. and Gore Vidal would even occasionally be invited to the couches of late-night talk shows. How long ago that was.

If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.

Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

The post-idea world has been a long time coming, and many factors have contributed to it. There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests.

There is the eclipse of the public intellectual in the general media by the pundit who substitutes outrageousness for thoughtfulness, and the concomitant decline of the essay in general-interest magazines. And there is the rise of an increasingly visual culture, especially among the young — a form in which ideas are more difficult to express.

But these factors, which began decades ago, were more likely harbingers of an approaching post-idea world than the chief causes of it. The real cause may be information itself. It may seem counterintuitive that at a time when we know more than we have ever known, we think about it less.

We live in the much vaunted Age of Information. Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about.

And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.

Marx pointed out the relationship between the means of production and our social and political systems. Freud taught us to explore our minds as a way of understanding our emotions and behaviors. Einstein rewrote physics. More recently, McLuhan theorized about the nature of modern communication and its effect on modern life. These ideas enabled us to get our minds around our existence and attempt to answer the big, daunting questions of our lives.

But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them. We are like the farmer who has too much wheat to make flour. We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.

The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.

We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop, keeps us connected to our friends and our cohort. Ideas are too airy, too impractical, too much work for too little reward. Few talk ideas. Everyone talks information, usually personal information. Where are you going? What are you doing? Whom are you seeing? These are today’s big questions.

It is certainly no accident that the post-idea world has sprung up alongside the social networking world. Even though there are sites and blogs dedicated to ideas, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Flickr, etc., the most popular sites on the Web, are basically information exchanges, designed to feed the insatiable information hunger, though this is hardly the kind of information that generates ideas. It is largely useless except insofar as it makes the possessor of the information feel, well, informed. Of course, one could argue that these sites are no different than conversation was for previous generations, and that conversation seldom generated big ideas either, and one would be right.

BUT the analogy isn’t perfect. For one thing, social networking sites are the primary form of communication among young people, and they are supplanting print, which is where ideas have typically gestated. For another, social networking sites engender habits of mind that are inimical to the kind of deliberate discourse that gives rise to ideas. Instead of theories, hypotheses and grand arguments, we get instant 140-character tweets about eating a sandwich or watching a TV show. While social networking may enlarge one’s circle and even introduce one to strangers, this is not the same thing as enlarging one’s intellectual universe. Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.

To paraphrase the famous dictum, often attributed to Yogi Berra, that you can’t think and hit at the same time, you can’t think and tweet at the same time either, not because it is impossible to multitask but because tweeting, which is largely a burst of either brief, unsupported opinions or brief descriptions of your own prosaic activities, is a form of distraction or anti-thinking.

The implications of a society that no longer thinks big are enormous. Ideas aren’t just intellectual playthings. They have practical effects.
An artist friend of mine recently lamented that he felt the art world was adrift because there were no longer great critics like Harold Rosenberg and Clement Greenberg to provide theories of art that could fructify the art and energize it. Another friend made a similar argument about politics. While the parties debate how much to cut the budget, he wondered where were the John Rawlses and Robert Nozicks who could elevate our politics.

One could certainly make the same argument about economics, where John Maynard Keynes remains the center of debate nearly 80 years after propounding his theory of government pump priming. This isn’t to say that the successors of Rosenberg, Rawls and Keynes don’t exist, only that if they do, they are not likely to get traction in a culture that has so little use for ideas, especially big, exciting, dangerous ones, and that’s true whether the ideas come from academics or others who are not part of elite organizations and who challenge the conventional wisdom. All thinkers are victims of information glut, and the ideas of today’s thinkers are also victims of that glut.

But it is especially true of big thinkers in the social sciences like the cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, who has theorized on everything from the source of language to the role of genetics in human nature, or the biologist Richard Dawkins, who has had big and controversial ideas on everything from selfishness to God, or the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has been analyzing different moral systems and drawing fascinating conclusions about the relationship of morality to political beliefs. But because they are scientists and empiricists rather than generalists in the humanities, the place from which ideas were customarily popularized, they suffer a double whammy: not only the whammy against ideas generally but the whammy against science, which is typically regarded in the media as mystifying at best, incomprehensible at worst. A generation ago, these men would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens. Now they are crowded out by informational effluvium.

No doubt there will be those who say that the big ideas have migrated to the marketplace, but there is a vast difference between profit-making inventions and intellectually challenging thoughts. Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some, like Steven P. Jobs of Apple, have come up with some brilliant ideas in the “inventional” sense of the word.

Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational. It is thinkers who are in short supply, and the situation probably isn’t going to change anytime soon.

We have become information narcissists, so uninterested in anything outside ourselves and our friendship circles or in any tidbit we cannot share with those friends that if a Marx or a Nietzsche were suddenly to appear, blasting his ideas, no one would pay the slightest attention, certainly not the general media, which have learned to service our narcissism.

What the future portends is more and more information — Everests of it. There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.

Think about that.

••••••

OS:

A funny thing to post on Tumblr, isn’t it? …Who will stop and read?

Glad I didn’t miss it — thanks.

Reposting the entire article as text + link to the original article on NY Times.
*Bold text is my own emphasis.

I don’t want to believe that ideas are passe… Gabler even admits, most of what we see out here (online) might just be conversation, being as unimportant as conversation ever was. Is it right to say that the idea is lost, that fewer of us have big ideas, when in fact, so many more individuals are able to self-publish — isn’t it, then, more like the end paragraph? There are no fewer thinkers, but fewer of them are heard or seen or read, in this mess.

But then, I have to agree with this, in part:

… there is a vast difference between profit-making inventions and intellectually challenging thoughts. Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some, like Steven P. Jobs of Apple, have come up with some brilliant ideas in the “inventional” sense of the word.
Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational.

With every week a new article about how “The Internet is Changing the Way We Think”, maybe it isn’t entirely true that material inventions don’t do the job. Maybe they are doing something surprising — changing the way we think into some mode we hadn’t thought of before. So right away, we say that it is wrong, it’s stupid, and we compare it to what we know and have come to value… and then, much later, we grow into it. Isn’t it always like that?

But then, there are things we have now, material things, that are incredibly powerful, wonderful, democratic, accessible tools for thought, invention, progression, etc. But we use them to un-think. We use them to facilitate our lives, for the short term. To play “Angry Birds”.

It’s also funny, to me, that Gabler calls out our “increasingly visual culture”, and brands it as “a form in which ideas are more difficult to express”. I don’t know about all that. I assume he means it’s difficult as opposed to writing? How is it so easy to say which form is better for the formation of big ideas? Maybe it’s an age for the artist, then… it may be true that it’s not an easy task, but once it’s done well, the image is a thing that can tell a story much faster than any written piece, and often, in more languages. It’s easier to get someone to look at a picture than it is to have them conquer a wall of text. That’s part of the success of Tumblr, too. But that also depends, what kind of picture. It’s also hard to get anyone to spend time with an image they don’t immediately understand. It’s as perplexing as that text. Those are both things that require bravery and a desire for knowledge and maybe the will to be uncomfortable.

How can we provoke curiosity about the most important things?