39 items | 1 visits
D'coda Dcoda's List: knowledge,information,consciousness
-
Jun 14, 11
A video presentation for the World Bank's EduRadicals, Education Innovators & Thinkers.
-
-
A worldview is a important determinative factor for the acquisition of knowledge, that influences a man deep in everything what he does and think. It depends on the personal and collective worldview if one can be successful in any field of activity.
-
Geocentrism
There was a time when humankind generally believed that the “Earth is the center of the universe and other objects go around it”.
-
-
-
-
Science and technology researcher Professor Peter Bruza is leading a study to explore the similarities between associations in human and the quantum correlations, also known as quantum entanglement.
-
Professor Bruza said entanglement was a bizarre phenomenon in which seemingly separate quantum systems behaved as one.
-
-
-
A collective field phenomenon
The problem with intelligence is that it is not to be attributed to one person alone.
Intelligence is a collective field phenomenon and should not be considered as a special power of one individual. -
We share thoughts in a collective mind and we creates ideas in a collective. The genius is able to tune into this field and receive the ideas. But a genius should never feel as if he is superior towards others, because he cannot attribute these abilities to his own person.
-
-
-
Is complexity the secret to sentience, to a panpsychic view of consciousness?
-
The universal lingua franca of our age is information.
-
-
Jun 14, 11
-
Oxytocin is known as the “love hormone” because it encourages trust, cooperation and social bonding. But these effects may exist only for members of your own clan, according to a study published in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Psychologists at the University of Amsterdam found that Dutch men who inhaled oxytocin were more likely to associate positive words, such as joy and laughter, and complex positive emotions, such as hope and admiration, with Dutch people than with Germans or Arabs.
-
-
-
Human intelligence may be close to its evolutionary limit. Various lines of research suggest that most of the tweaks that could make us smarter would hit limits set by the laws of physics.
-
Brain size, for instance, helps up to a point but carries diminishing returns: brains become energy-hungry and slow. Better “wiring” across the brain also would consume energy and take up a disproportionate amount of space.
-
-
-
Over the past several years, experimental philosophers have presented several studies indicating that some philosophically relevant intuitions are subject to a host of undesirable biases (order effects, framing effects, and actor-observer differences among others). For example, our research suggests that heritable personality traits predict bias in some fundamental philosophically relevant intuitions
-
In response to these findings, “philosophical expertise” has been used to shield some parts of standard philosophical practice from the worries presented by experimental philosophers
-
-
-
"You've got to believe!" That's the advice professional magician Mark Mitton gave at his recent talk in the CUNY Cognitive Science Symposium. Here's the idea: in order for an illusion to be believable to the audience, the magician has to believe it too. This is, of course, puzzling for all of the sorts of reasons familiar to philosophers debating doxastic voluntarism and self-deception. How do you make yourself believe something that you know you don't?
-
There's a kind of advice given in all sorts of areas of human performance, music and sports to name two, that involves believing (or pretending?) something obviously absurd but is efficacious nonetheless
-
-
-
An interesting paper on the neurobiology of conscious awareness: Unconscious High-Level Information Processing.
-
The authors propose that consciousness may be associated, not with activation in any given area of the brain, but with recurrent information processing between areas, a kind of neural ping-pong.
-
-
Jun 16, 11
a look at a study reducing behavior to brain activity shows why it says nothing useful.
-
A reader pointed me to this study from a few months back which used fMRI to look at the effects of "Coaching With Compassion".
-
The paper describes an fMRI study of brain responses to being shown a variety of statements. The participants were students and the statements were about the university experience. They were either positive, negative, or neutral.
-
-
Jun 16, 11
Mental distress is a new euphemism for mental illness and the author explains why its a goofy term to be using.
-
The first thing that leaps out is that "mental" is redundant. What other kind of distress is there? Distress is mental, by default.
-
This awkward wording seems to be a result of the fact that it's an attempt to fuse some of the features of "mental illness" with some of the implications of "distress", a kind of verbal alchemy. What is mental distress? It's not mental illness, but it's not exactly not mental illness
-
-
-
Burundanga is a scary drug.
-
an extract of the brugmansia plant containing high levels of the psychoactive chemical scopolamine.
-
-
-
Matthew Baum has a new piece in Neuroethics entitled, "The MAOA Predisposition to Impulsive Violence: Is it Relevant to Criminal Trials?"
-
In Italy, a judge reduced the sentence of a defendant by 1 year in response to evidence for a genetic predisposition to violence. The best characterized of these genetic differences, those in the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), were cited as especially relevant. Several months previously in the USA, MAOA data contributed to a jury reducing charges from 1st degree murder (a capital offence) to voluntary manslaughter. Is there a rational basis for this type of use of MAOA evidence in criminal court? This paper will review in context recent work on the MAOA gene–environment interaction in predisposing individuals to violence and address the relevance of such findings to murder trials. Interestingly, the MAOA genetic variants impact future violence and aggression only when combined with the adverse environmental stimuli of childhood maltreatment. Thus nature and nurture interact to determine the individual’s risk. Based on current evidence, I argue there is a weak case for mitigation. But should future experiments confirm the hypothesis that individual differences in impulse control and response to provocation found in MAOA-L men (without abuse) are significantly magnified when combined with childhood maltreatment, the case could turn into a stronger one.
-
-
-
The Annals of General Psychiatry has a nice review piece entitled, "The 'antisocial' person: an insight in to biology, classification and current evidence on treatment."
-
Background: This review analyses and summarises the recent advances in understanding the neurobiology of violence and empathy, taxonomical issues on defining personality disorders characterised by disregard for social norms, evidence for efficacy of different treatment modalities and ethical implications in defining 'at-risk' individuals for preventive interventions.
-
-
-
After a couple of centuries of errors, today we know that there is greater genetic variation within races than across them. Racial groups differ in more or less 6 percent of their genes, which means that ninety four percent of variation occurs within conventional racial categories. Race is thus a construct without genetic basis. To be sure, it is not a biological fact, the American Anthropological Association says, but “a social mechanism invented during the 18th century” in part to justify the European colonial expansion. The notion that there are human subspecies stems primarily from colonial ideologies, particularly from the idea that nature, and thus God, ordained a hierarchy of races, a belief that justified slavery and underpinned the laws and the logic that governed colonial economies.
-
Consider the notion that there is a “white race,” which is generally defined in the U.S. as “descent from any of the original peoples of Europe,” as census folk say. The idea that a white race naturally stems from any European roots is very recent. Bear in mind that the Romans, the Greeks, the Gauls, the Franks, etc., never thought of themselves as “white,” as sharing the same racial boat by virtue of being “Europeans.” Julius Caesar could never think of himself as white. A direct descendant from Aphrodite, he was, instead, of the race of the gods. To find folks who believe that European ancestry, broadly conceived, endows them with a race, we have to go all the way to the 20th century. We have to picture a time when the children and grandchildren of European immigrants to the U.S. melted into a common culture and eventually into a common “white race.”
-
-
-
Grace Lee Boggs’ “The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century”
-
Grace Lee Boggs’ “The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century”
-
List Comments
(0)
List Info