This link has been bookmarked by 7 people . It was first bookmarked on 24 Oct 2006, by Hoppy Blings.
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30 Oct 10
Katie DaySIMON BARON-COHEN
Psychologist, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge University; Author, The Essential Difference
A political system based on empathy
Imagine a political system based not on legal rules (systemizing) but on empathy. Would this make the worl -
20 Oct 09
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My colleagues and I have studied the essential difference between how men and women think. Our studies suggest that (on average) more men are systemizers, and more women are empathizers. Since most political systems were set up by men, it may be no coincidence that we have ended up with political chambers that are built on the principles of systemizing.
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The basic method of science after Einstein seems to be: identify something in your theory that is playing the role of an absolute background, that is needed to define the laws that govern objects in your theory, and understand it more deeply as a contingent property, which itself evolves subject to law.
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The basic method of science after Darwin
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21 Mar 08
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24 Aug 07
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We are entirely alone
Living creatures capable of reflecting on their own existence are a one-off, freak accident, existing for one brief moment in the history of the universe. There may be life elsewhere in the universe, but it does not have self-reflective consciousness. There is no God; no Intelligent Designer; no higher purpose to our lives. -
I think that many people find the suggestion dangerous because they see it as leading to a life devoid of meaning or moral values. They see it as a suggestion full of despair, an idea that makes our lives seem pointless. I believe that the opposite is the case. As the product of that unique, freak accident, finding ourselves able to reflect on and enjoy our conscious existence, the very unlikeliness and uniqueness of our situation surely makes us highly appreciative of what we have.
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Life is not just important to us; it is literally everything we have. That makes it, in human terms, the most precious thing there is. That not only gives life meaning for us, something to be respected and revered, but a strong moral code follows automatically.
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The fact that our existence has no purpose outside that existence is completely irrelevant to the way we live our lives, since we are inside our existence. The fact that our existence has no purpose for the universe — whatever that means — in no way means it has no purpose for us. We must ask and answer questions about ourselves within the framework of our existence as what we are.
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There is evidence that such change has occurred. Henry Harpending and I have, we think, made a strong case that natural selection changed the Ashkenazi Jews over a thousand years or so, favoring certain kinds of cognitive abilities and generating genetic diseases as a side effect.
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But at any rate, we have almost certainly changed. There is something new under the sun — us.
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This concept opens strange doors. If true, it means that the people of Sumeria and Egypt's Old Kingdom were probably fundamentally different from us: human nature has changed — some, anyhow — over recorded history. Julian Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, argued that there was something qualitatively different about the human mind in ancient civilization. On first reading, Breakdown seemed one of the craziest books ever written, but Jaynes may have been on to something.
If people a few thousand years ago thought and acted differently because of biological differences, history is never going to be the same. -
What would it be like if our political chambers were based on the principles of empathizing? It is dangerous because it would mean a revolution in how we choose our politicians, how our political chambers govern, and how our politicians think and behave. We have never given such an alternative political process a chance. Might it be better and safer than what we currently have? Since empathy is about keeping in mind the thoughts and feelings of other people (not just your own), and being sensitive to another person's thoughts and feelings (not just riding rough-shod over them), it is clearly incompatible with notions of "doing battle with the opposition" and "defeating the opposition" in order to win and hold on to power.
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We have had endless examples of systemizing politicians unable to resolve conflict. Empathizing politicians would perhaps follow Mandela and De Klerk's examples, who sat down to try to understand the other, to empathize with the other, even if the other was defined as a terrorist. To do this involves the empathic act of stepping into the other's shoes, and identifying with their feelings.
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A world where everything about a person can be found and archived is a world with no privacy, and therefore many technologists are eager to maintain the option of easy anonymity as a refuge for the private.
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The standard model of particle physics taught us that some of those properties, like mass, are only the consequence of a particles interactions with other fields. As a result the mass of a particle is determined environmentally, by the phase of the other fields it interacts with.
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I don't know which model of quantum gravity is right, but all the leading candidates, string theory, loop quantum gravity and others, teach us that it is possible that all properties of elementary particles are relational and environmental. In different possible universes there may be different combinations of elementary particles and forces. Indeed, all that used to be thought of as fundamental, space and the elementary particles themselves are increasingly seen, in models of quantum gravity, as themselves emergent from a more elementary network of relations.
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After Einstein we understand geometry is contingent and dynamical, which means it evolves subject to law. This means that Einstein's move can even be applied to aspects of what were thought to be the laws of nature: so that even aspects of the laws turn out to evolve in time.
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We can see by how I have stated it that these two methods are closely related. Einstein emphasizes the relational aspect of all properties described by science, while Darwin proposes that ultimately, the law which governs the evolution of everything else, including perhaps what were once seen to be laws-is natural selection.
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We physicists have now to understand Darwin's lesson: the only way to understand how one out of a vast number of choices was made, which favors improbably structure, is that it is the result of evolution by natural selection.
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Now the only possible way of accounting for the laws of nature, and for uniformity in general, is to suppose them results of evolution.
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This idea remains dangerous, not only for what it has achieved, but for what it implies for the future. For there are implications have yet to be absorbed or understood, even by those who have come to believe it is the only way forward for science. For example, must there always be a deeper, or meta-law, which governs the physical mechanisms by which a law evolves?
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16 Jul 07
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A world where everything about a person can be found and archived is a world with no privacy, and therefore many technologists are eager to maintain the option of easy anonymity as a refuge for the private...[but a]nonymity is like a rare earth metal. These elements are a necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive, but the amount needed is a mere hard-to-measure trace. In larger does these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishingly small doses, it's good for the system by enabling the occasional whistleblower, or persecuted fringe. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system. There's a dangerous idea circulating that the option of anonymity should always be at hand, and that it is a noble antidote to technologies of control. This is like pumping up the levels of heavy metals in your body into to make it stronger. Privacy can only be won by trust, and trust requires persistent identity, if only pseudo-anonymously. In the end, the more trust, the better. Like all toxins, anonymity should be keep as close to zero as possible.
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17 Nov 06
ken .Simon Baron Cohen: "Existing political systems are based on two principles: getting power through combat, and then creating/revising laws and rules through combat" - systematising (rules/regulatory control) versus empathy - taking action v bringing forth
action autism brain change coaching control emotion metaphor military organisation politics power process questions systems
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24 Oct 06
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