Levy Rivers's List: TouhgtNets/Post Modern

• as structured data, thought networks may be used as inputs to software “agents” to automate much of the drudgery of our online experience
• The word “thought” signifies a very elemental cognitive unit. We manipulate and compound these primitive structures to form ideas, arguments, and perspectives.
• This is where thought turns to action. With our thoughts collected and organized, we can put them to work: our thoughts may be collated with content and expressed as documents; they might traverse the Web to find related information; they might interface with social networks to connect like-minded individuals. Organized within semantic networks, thoughts have the power to direct computers on our behalf.
• Once we digitize our thoughts and put them online, our thoughts may interact with the world even when we’re not attending to them.

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• "According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."
• "According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."
• The problem of consciousness is indeed a serious challenge for materialism.  In fact, I think it's a fatal problem for materialism, as I've argued at length here and there.  But it simply isn't a problem for Darwinism in the same way. Even if one rejects materialism about consciousness, Darwinism can accommodate the resulting view straightforwardly.
• Even if materialism is rejected, there is still good reason to believe that there is such a dependence, via laws of nature that connect physical processes and consciousness.  But if so, there is no problem at all with the idea that evolution can select certain physical states, which yield certain states of consciousness.  If interactionist dualism (on which consciousness has a causal role) is true, evolution might even select for certain states of consciousness because of their beneficial effects.
• traditional theism requires that materialism be false, but the falsity of materialism does little to positively suggest that theism is true.

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• The setbacks for development — perhaps the single greatest economic force in the city over the last two decades — are likely to mean, in the words of one researcher, that the landscape of New York will be virtually unchanged for two years.

• The resolution may be difficult, but it’s essential. Americans must resolve to be smarter going forward than we have been for the past several years.
• The slogan? “Invest in the U.S.” By that I mean we should stop squandering the nation’s wealth on unnecessary warfare overseas and mindless consumption here at home and start making sensible investments in the well-being of the American people and the long-term health of the economy.
• Madoff summed up his activities with devastating simplicity. He is said to have told the F.B.I. that he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there.”
• Something for nothing became the order of the day. You want to invade Iraq? Convince yourself that oil revenues out of Baghdad will pay for it. (Meanwhile, carve out another deficit channel in the federal budget.) You want to pump up profits in the financial sector? End the oversight and let the lunatics in the asylum run wild.
• Plenty of people managed their credit wisely. But much of the country, including many of the top government officials and financial titans who were supposed to be guarding the nation’s wealth, acted as if there would never be a day of reckoning, a day when — inevitably — the soaring markets would crash and the bubbles explode.
• We were living in a dream world. The general public, and to a great extent the press, closed its eyes to the increasingly complex and baffling machinations of the financial industry, which kept screaming that oversight would ruin everything.
• Now that the reality of a stunning economic downturn has so roughly intervened, we at least have the option of being smarter going forward.
• We need to invest in a health care system that improves the quality of American lives, enhances productivity, puts large numbers of additional people to work and eases the competitive burden of U.S. corporations.

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• Instead, we got what Francis Fukuyama later called The Great Disruption. The information economy began to disrupt the industrial economy. The feminist revolution disrupted gender and family relations. The civil rights revolution disrupted social arrangements. The Vietnam War discredited the establishment.

• Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks
• As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise.

• Even leaving aside fairness to taxpayers, the government’s velvet-glove approach with the banks is deeply troubling, for one simple reason: it is inadequate to change the behavior of a financial sector accustomed to doing business on its own terms, at a time when that behavior must change.

• This time, too, there is an underlying commodity bubble, namely in housing. But it has had much wider ramifications, because financial institutions have become interconnected in two unprecedented ways. First, once distinct financial services became interconnected: banking, credit, insurance, and the trading of derivatives have become interlinked because they are conducted by the same companies. Second, financial institutions are more connected across national borders, so that there are entities across the globe that invested in toxic American-made instruments and are suffering as a result (including municipalities in Norway that invested tax revenues in American collateralized debt obligations, now worth 15 percent of their face value).
• There were governmental errors: monetary policy that was too loose; government monitoring agencies that were too lax; and government policies specifically intended to encourage home ownership among African-Americans and Hispanics that had the unintended but quite anticipatable effect of extending mortgages to those who lacked the ability to repay them. There were perverse alignments of market incentives, incentives that put personal interests at odds with corporate interests, and corporate interests at odds with the public interest. There were principal-agent problem within firms, where traders were remunerated with bonuses for selling collateralized debt obligations without regard to the long-run viability of the underlying assets. Rating agencies were corrupted because they were paid by the sellers of the goods they rated, offering unreliable evaluations that redounded against the purchasers of mortgage-backed securities. Large profits were made by companies that packaged and sold mortgages and mortgage-backed securities without needing to be concerned with their ultimate viability.
• These factors have received a good deal of attention. But they are not the whole story, and certainly not the most original part of the predicament. What seems most novel is the role of opacity and pseudo-objectivity. This may be our first epistemologically-driven depression. (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know.)

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• Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.
• Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.
• Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”
• Most of us make snap moral judgments about what feels fair or not, or what feels good or not. We start doing this when we are babies, before we have language. And even as adults, we often can’t explain to ourselves why something feels wrong.
• We don’t just care about our individual rights, or even the rights of other individuals. We also care about loyalty, respect, traditions, religions. We are all the descendents of successful cooperators.
• They link themselves together into communities and networks of mutual influence.

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• Meanwhile, the Obama administration wants weaker banks to move more quickly to relieve their balance sheets of the toxic assets, the home loans and mortgage bonds that nobody wants to buy right now. But the banks are resisting because they would have to book big losses.

  Finally, there is increasing anxiety in the industry that the administration could use the stress tests of the 19 biggest banks, due to be completed in the next three weeks, to insist on management changes, just as it did with General Motors when officials forced the resignation of its chief executive after examining that company’s books.

• Brooks finds much in this view to be nice: it emphasizes our social nature and our tendency toward cooperation; it also “explains the haphazard way most of us lead our lives without destroying dignity and choice”; and it turns our focus to how people are in fact motivated more by “feelings of awe, transcendence, patriotism, joy and self-sacrifice, which are not ancillary to most people’s moral experiences, but central.

• Unlike their flashier electronic cousins, glia speak in chemical whispers. Learning their language has been tougher. As a result, glial cells were long seen as inert nerve cement: just so many packing peanuts whose raison d’être is to keep our neurons from jiggling when we jog.
• Because the placement and relative strengths of the brain’s 100-trillion-plus synapses are so intimately associated with what defines us — learning, thinking, feeling, remembering and forgetting — in a strictly material sense one could say the soul resides in the synapses.

• The computational theory of mind, in essence, says that your brain works like a computer. That is, it takes input from the outside world, then performs algorithms to produce output in the form of mental state or action. In other words, it claims that the brain is an information processor where your mind is “software” that runs on the “hardware” of the brain.
• By contrast, a truly non-dualistic theory of mind has to state what is clearly obvious: your mind and your brain are identical. Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that an artificial human brain is impossible – it’s just that programming such a thing would be much more akin to embedded systems programming rather than computer programming
• For one thing, the brain itself isn’t structured like a Turing machine. It’s a parallel processing network of neural nodes – but not just any network.  It’s a plastic neural network that can in some ways be actively changed through influences by will or environment.
• Cognitive dissonance is the ability of the mind to believe what it wants even in the face of opposing evidence. Confirmation bias is the ability of the mind to seek out evidence that conforms to its own theories and simply gloss over or completely ignore contradictory evidence.

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