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12 Mar 07

How to Grow a Super-Athlete - New York Times

www.nytimes.com/...04play-talent.html - Preview

brain development learning science

11 Mar 07

The American Scholar - A New Theory of the Universe - By Robert Lanza

www.theamericanscholar.org/...newtheory-lanza.html - Preview

biology cosmology physics science

We can never have any experience
that does not conform to these relationships, for they are the modes of
animal logic that mold sensations into objects. It would be erroneous, therefore,
to conceive of the mind as existing in space and time before this process,
as existing in the circuitry of the brain before the understanding posits in it
a spatio-temporal order.
Even Steven Weinberg concedes that although consciousness
may have a neural correlate, its existence does not seem to be derivable
from physical laws.
26 more annotations...
- Trying to trace life
  down through simpler stages is one thing, but assuming it arose spontaneously
  from nonliving matter wants for the rigor and attention of the quantum
  theorist.
- But before
  matter can exist, it has to be observed by a consciousness.
- The universe bursts into existence from life, not the other way
  around as we have been taught. For each life there is a universe, its own universe.
  We generate spheres of reality, individual bubbles of existence. Our
  planet is comprised of billions of spheres of reality, generated by each individual
  human and perhaps even by each animal.
- We can only imagine and recollect things while in the body; this is
  for sure, because sensations and memories are molded into thought and
  knowledge in the brain. And although we identify ourselves with our thoughts
  and affections, it is an essential feature of reality that we experience the world
  piece by piece.
- non-separability is now one of
  the most certain general concepts in physics
- The
  distinction between here and there is also not an absolute reality. Without
  consciousness, we can take any person as our new frame of reference. It is
  not my consciousness or yours alone, but ours.
- What I would question, with respect to solipsism, is the assumption that
  our individual separateness is an absolute reality.
- “If you deny the objectivity of
  the world unless you observe it and are conscious of it, then you end up with
  solipsism—the belief that your consciousness is the only one.”
- “No phenomenon is a real
  phenomenon until it is an observed
  phenomenon.”
- Max Born demonstrated that quantum waves are waves of probability,
  not waves of material
- If observed,
  particles behave like objects; if unobserved, they behave like waves and can
  go through more than one hole at the same time.
- Instead, the entities we observe are floating in a field
  of mind that is not limited by an external spacetime.
- Reality is not “there” with definite properties waiting to be discovered but
  actually comes into being depending upon the actions of the observer.
- Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle has its root here: position (location
  in space) belongs to the outer world, and momentum (which involves the
  temporal) belongs to the inner world.
- time is the inner form
  of animal sense that animates events—the still frames—of the spatial world.
  The mind animates the world like the motor and gears of a projector.
- It has been proven experimentally that when studying subatomic
  particles, the observer actually alters and determines what is perceived.
- Biocentrism is the only humanly comprehensible explanation
  for how the world can be the way it is.
- “I think it is safe to say that no one understands quantum mechanics,”
  said Nobel physicist Richard Feynman.
- Return to the revelation that we are thinking animals and that the material
  world is the elusive substratum of our conscious activity continually defining
  and redefining the real.
- Time
  is not an absolute reality but an aspect of our consciousness.
- Without perception, there is in effect no reality. Nothing has existence
  unless you, I, or some living creature perceives it, and how it is perceived further
  influences that reality.
- And more important than this, that the observer in a significant sense creates
  reality and not the other way around.
- But as exciting and glamorous as these theories are,
  they are an evasion, if not a reversal, of the central mystery of knowledge:
  that the laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer.
- Modern
  
  physics has become like Swift’s kingdom of Laputa, flying absurdly on
  >
  
  an island above the earth and indifferent to what is beneath
  >
- Ever since the remotest of times
  philosophers have acknowledged the primacy of consciousness—that all
  truths and principles of being must begin with the individual mind and self.
- Science has not succeeded in confronting the element of existence
  that is at once most familiar and most mysterious—conscious experience.

Observations on film art and FILM ART : This is your brain on movies, maybe

www.davidbordwell.net/blog - Preview

brain science

When you judge that in this story the good is unlikely to be rewarded, you react appropriately–regardless of what you know or believe about what happens next.
Carroll points out that imagining things can arouse intense emotions, and his book The Philosophy of Horror uses this point to explain the appeal of horrific fictions.
3 more annotations...
- we can feel emotions in response to thoughts as well as beliefs.
- Among other things, we ask how plausible certain outcomes are and how morally worthy they are.
- Because our minds evolved to deal with the real world, and there you never know exactly what will happen next. Every situation is unique, and no course of events is literally identical to an earlier one.

06 Mar 07

A Simpler Origin for Life

www.sciam.com/article.cfm - Preview

evolution science

04 Mar 07

Darwin's God

www.nytimes.com/...04evolution.t.html - Preview

religion science

No matter how much science can explain, it seems, the real gap that God fills is an emptiness that our big-brained mental architecture interprets as a yearning for the supernatural. The drive to satisfy that yearning, according to both adaptationists and byproduct theorists, might be an inevitable and eternal part of what Atran calls the tragedy of human cognition.
“Suppose science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me — should I then stop believing that she does?”
28 more annotations...
- Having a scientific explanation for mental phenomena does not mean we should stop believing in them, he wrote.
- The rituals are harsh enough to weed out the infidels, and both the group and the individual believers benefit.
- “what seems to be an adversarial relationship” between theists and atheists within a community is really a division of cognitive labor that “keeps social groups as a whole on an even keel.”
- There are costs to any individual of being religious: the time and resources spent on rituals, the psychic energy devoted to following certain injunctions, the pain of some initiation rites. But in terms of intergroup struggle, according to Wilson, the costs can be outweighed by the benefits of being in a cohesive group that out-competes the others.
- In other words, if the whole-group advantage outweighs the cost to any individual bird of being a sentry, then the sentry gene will prevail.
- “religion offered an opportunity to show that group selection was right after all.”
- The advantage might have worked at the group level too, with religious groups outlasting others because they were more cohesive, more likely to contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at sharing resources and preparing for warfare.
- Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves.
- It might be just as impossible to simulate the nonexistence of loved ones. A large part of any relationship takes place in our minds, Bering said, so it’s natural for it to continue much as before after the other person’s death. It is easy to forget that your sister is dead when you reach for the phone to call her, since your relationship was based so much on memory and imagined conversations even when she was alive. In addition, our agent-detection device sometimes confirms the sensation that the dead are still with us. The wind brushes our cheek, a spectral shape somehow looks familiar and our agent detection goes into overdrive. Dreams, too, have a way of confirming belief in the afterlife, with dead relatives appearing in dreams as if from beyond the grave, seeming very much alive.
- “The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness. We cannot conceive of ourselves as not existing.”
  Much easier, then, to imagine that the thinking somehow continues.
- But the spandrelists counter that saying these beliefs are consolation does not mean they offered an adaptive advantage to our ancestors.
- It is not enough for an agent to be minimally counterintuitive for it to earn a spot in people’s belief systems. An emotional component is often needed, too, if belief is to take hold.
- “minimally counterintuitive”: weird enough to get your attention and lodge in your memory but not so weird that you reject them altogether.
- The bottom line, according to byproduct theorists, is that children are born with a tendency to believe in omniscience, invisible minds, immaterial souls — and then they grow up in cultures that fill their minds, hard-wired for belief, with specifics.
- If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of “Descartes’ Baby,” published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.
- allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe
- The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random.
- Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.
- our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents
- Darwinians who study physical evolution distinguish between traits that are themselves adaptive, like having blood cells that can transport oxygen, and traits that are byproducts of adaptations, like the redness of blood.
- “spandrel” to describe a trait that has no adaptive value of its own
- Maybe, in fact, belief was the default position for the human mind, something that took no cognitive effort at all.
- To Atran, religious belief requires taking “what is materially false to be true” and “what is materially true to be false.”
- religions that share certain supernatural features — belief in a noncorporeal God or gods, belief in the afterlife, belief in the ability of prayer or ritual to change the course of human events — are found in virtually every culture on earth.
- Is explaining religion the same thing as explaining it away?
- These scholars tend to agree on one point: that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.
- Atran is Darwinian in his approach, which means he tries to explain behavior by how it might once have solved problems of survival and reproduction for our early ancestors.
- whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science.

25 Jan 07

Gore Film Sparks Parents' Anger - washingtonpost.com

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2007012401807.html - Preview

censorship global science warming

Members of the school board say they have been bombarded by thousands of e-mails and phone calls, many of them hurtful and obscene, accusing them of scientific ignorance, pandering to religion and imposing prior restraint on free speech.

05 Jan 07

Ray Kurzweil: Computers Will Extend Human Lifespan

www.techlearning.com/showArticle.jhtml - Preview

ai artificial_intelligence future medicine science technology

Kurzweil's vision of how technology will transform medicine - ehoefler on 2007-01-05

Build Your Own Universe

www.npr.org/...story.php - Preview

creation physics science universe

Physicists speculate about the possibility of creating a universe from scratch - ehoefler on 2007-01-05

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