TED addiction sets in
I’m really starting to like TED talks. They’re short, often you can just listen to them without the visuals, the presenters are usually skilled and entertaining, and there are lots of interesting topics. Here are a few favorites out of what I’ve watched so far. More to come!
Neuroscience:
VS Ramachandran on your mind – He talks about an assortment of neurological disorders and treatments, none of which is new to me, but at the end he talks about synesthesia and draws some very interesting speculation about creativity as a function of brain structure.
Christopher deCharms looks inside the brain – Using real-time FMRI to begin mapping between thought and reality in both directions.
Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer – Computer models of how brains work, specifically the beginnings of simulating human brains in digital computers. This is something I’m interested in getting into, and I’m glad someone is finally heading in this direction.
VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization – On the importance of mirror neurons.
Mathematics:
Ron Eglash on African fractals – Wow, I had no idea.
Biology:
Janine Benyus: Biomimicry in action and Janine Benyus shares nature’s designs – Taking nanomaterial designs from nature. I heartily approve.
Dean Ornish says your genes are not your fate – Very short, but a good exhortation to improve your health.
Dan Buettner: How to live to be 100+ – Lifestyle lessons from the regions that produce the most centenarians.
Global Threats:
Peter Ward on Earth’s mass extinctions – Interesting theory I hadn’t heard before, that many of the Earth’s mass extinctions were caused by hydrogen sulfide emissions from the oceans, triggered by rising temperatures.
Philosophy:
Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions – Oh, hell yes! He says what we’re all thinking!
Richard Dawkins on militant atheism – First time I’ve seen him speak. Totally agree.
Randy Pausch: Really achieving your childhood dreams – Its long, but totally worth listening to. He totally deserves the standing ovation he gets at the end.
Transhumanism:
Gregory Stock: To upgrade is human – Echoes a lot of my own sentiments.
Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling science – Starts talking about the US economic problems, but then gets into convergence of biological and robotic technology, mentioning a few things I hadn’t heard of, leading into discussion of upcoming evolution of our species.
Aubrey de Grey says we can avoid aging – This is the first de Grey output I’ve consumed, and I’m quite impressed. Especially with how he characterizes the crazy attitudes of death advocates.
Arts:
Theo Jansen creates new creatures – The sculptor explains how his wonderful “animals” work. He sounds almost like a proper crackpot inventor too – he wouldn’t be out of place in Gizmo.
Space:
George Dyson on Project Orion – I’ve been a fan of Project Orion for a long time, but this talk adds some personal detail about the people involved that I hadn’t heard before.
George Smoot on the design of the universe – He has some 3D animations of that long-range galaxy survey.
General:
Julian Assange: Why the world needs WikiLeaks – First time I’ve seen Assange speak.
James Nachtwey’s searing photos of war – Powerful photographs.
Bill Strickland makes change with a slide show – Heartening. I had no idea this sort of thing was going on.
Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity and Sir Ken Robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! – this guy is an excellent speaker, and I really like what he has to say about education.
Clifford Stoll on … everything – Holy cow, I love this guy!
Book report: “The Mind’s I” by Hofstadter and Dennett
The nature of the thing called “I” is something I frequently ponder. It’s an important question to me as someone interested in uploading, artificial intelligence and immortality in general. For these reasons I’m always eager to tackle a philosophy book on the subject of the nature of consciousness.
This one is a collection of essays and excerpts from other works, followed by comments and analyses by Hofstadter and Dennett. Since publication, I’m given to understand that some of the essays have been soundly criticized by others in the field, but that doesn’t apply to all of them, and they still make an interesting read.
There are some insightful stabs in various directions, some nice thought experiments, and some decent arguments that minds like ours do not necessarily have to be implemented in meat.There’s also an entertaining dialog with God by Raymond Smullyan that gesticulates at my feelings on determinism versus free will, perhaps better than I can.
I didn’t really gain any deeper insight into the core question of consciousness though. What I really gained from reading this is an appreciation that philosophers tend to pick a direction of argument and run with it a ways, and collectively they’re sketching out a big circle around the problem. In other words, there’s a lot of collective tail-chasing going on.
Book report: “Resentment Against Achievement” by Robert Sheaffer
Reading this book helped me gain some perspective on some aspects of western society that have always bothered me, namely the seeming antagonism between the rich and the poor, the ambitious and the lazy and the smart and the stupid, the nature of public education, and the tradeoff between government theft (“taxes”) and the need for economic safety nets for individuals.
Despite its narrow focus, there’s too much meat in this book for me to summarize and I’m not sure I could do it justice. I really recommend reading it if you are bothered by anti-intellectual or anti-progress attitudes. I’ll cover a few of the main threads with some quotes I appreciated.
Sheaffer ties together several self-defeating societal problems and reminds us that they have defeated societies before. The French Revolution was one example, and he makes the case that the Roman Empire fell because the emerging Christian cult (which was very different then than it is now, not that that excuses the present incarnation) weakened it by changing many of its highest achievers into anti-achievers.
One problem is education, and the way our public educational system is weakened by its mandate to treat everyone identically. Achieving success is usually fairly easy for those well-educated in a well-chosen profession. But for many – especially the lower classes – getting a good education is not easy. Youth who value things like “being cool” over being accomplished are allowed to disrupt the education of those children who actually would like to be someone, through bullying, disrupting classes, promotion of their failure-oriented values and lowering of testing standards so “no child is left behind” despite the fact they should be. Anyone familiar with the classic struggle of nerd versus jock will understand this. As a result of frustration or trying to comply with these pressures, children who might otherwise be someone become failures and often adopt the pro-failure resentful attitude that caused the problem in the first place, and may pass it on to the next generation.
… we cannot claim to love our culture, our accomplishments, our arts and sciences, or any of civilization’s fine achievements when we say it is as acceptable for students to fail as it is for them to succeed. No, we must admit that it is better to succeed than to fail, or else it is a waste of time and effort to even try to educate anyone. Having admitted this, we must conclude that we are right to accord special honor and recognition to those who have disciplined themselves to succeed. We must likewise admit that those who succeed in education are for the most part justified in their expectation of enjoying greater economic rewards than those who do not; for if all must be equal, then why should anyone ever strive to succeed? And if no one strives to succeed, then what becomes of civilization?
In another section, he goes on at length about how socialism and Christianity are counter-productive ideologies in that they are both designed to prevent people from achieving anything.
The notion that people are themselves in any way responsible for their own well-being, or lack thereof, is poisonous to Christian and socialist values alike; for once we admit that the affluent have earned their wealth, we have no justification for envy of them. Therefore, the resentful must pretend that there was no choice, that they are not themselves to blame for their own failures.
…
Like an entirely Christian society, an entirely Marxist society is in open conflict with reality. For reasons of doctrine, it must be in perpetual war against achievement because the fruit of achievement is wealth, and wealth is equated with sin. Nonetheless, in order for that society to survive and remain to some degree competitive with the more humane and rational societies of the world, achievement must be encouraged.
He also gives an example of how deeply and subtly integrated resentment is in our society: There are African-American studies and women’s studies programs in universities. Both are historically oppressed groups with justified grounds for resentment. But there are no white-people studies or men’s studies programs. Why this lack of equality? Not because there is nothing of value to be studied, but because the resentful forbid it. They do not want equality, they want revenge. And what gets studied in these existing programs? Why, that history of oppression of course, which serves to nurse that resentment across more generations. That in itself is a kind of revenge.
On taxation and welfare:
When something is taxed, you get less of it; and when something is subsidized, you get more of it. Presently, we place a heavy tax on achievement but subsidize the resentful, who reject the need for learning and the discipline of work. This causes a decrease in achievement and an increase in resentment, in proportion to the size of the income transfer. It is not difficult to see how to diminish resentment to very low levels: Simply stop giving free lunches to angry failures.
He also discusses the mechanisms of guilt and continual browbeating that the resentful use to try to keep achievers under their thumb. This is the sort of thing that leads to lowered educational standards, overshot political correctness and tolerance for handouts to people because of who they are, not because of any actual need for it.
What can we do about all this? Private education. Continued reward for accomplishment. Lessened reward for failure, hopefully without cutting off motivated folks who need help. Work to change our own attitudes, and by doing so influence the attitudes of others.
As achievers quicken their pace, assisted by marvelous future inventions that today [1988] are not yet even conceived, those who sit and wallow in resentment will be left farther and farther behind. Inevitably, a tremendous roar will go up, hollering that the rapid progress of technology must stop, and that the resentful must be respectfully carried along on achievers’ shoulders. When we hear this ferocious roaring, we must not bow down before it as if it were a lofty moral statement, for it is mere flatulence. Let us instead greet it with contempt and even dare to laugh courageous laughter, taunting those roaring with rage to get up out of the mud and try to run alongside us. If they try to, but stumble, let us compassionately hold out our hand to catch them and help them try to become runners like us. But should they curse us for our speed as we run by, let us give them no further thought, leaving them to fend for themselves without our handouts. They will tire of that very soon.
My opinion of Sheaffer’s overall message varies from day to day. Some days I think of the fantastic continued growth of science and technology and think he’s being a bit pessimistic about the ability of any disenfranchised group to bring that down. Other days (days when I pay attention to news) I get annoyed and depressed at watching the forces of active, hostile ignorance try to erode that progress (usually while enjoying the benefits of it) and I think he may be right.
Sheaffer also helped me debug some traces of resentful thinking in myself. Although I don’t recall my family ever expressing the attitudes Sheaffer calls “resentful”, somewhere along the way I did pick up a general mistrust for the wealthy and powerful, and an assumption that great wealth is unearned. While that is true in many visible situations in our society, it is also true that great wealth can be earned and success generally comes with effort.
The book also helped me start to solidify my uncertain position on taxation and social programs (well, that and now being employed and seeing half my pay forcibly taken by the government). Before you ask, no, I don’t have any answers. But I do know I’m less satisfied with our current solutions than I used to be.
It’s not a long book. Go read it.
A responsible afterlife
(I’ve had some ruminations of a philosophical bent rattling around in my head for a while. I’ve been trying to tie them together into a unified theme so as to write them down as a single essay, but they’re not jelling. So for now I’ll document them piecewise here and see what emerges.)
Given: There is no hard evidence to support the existence of any sort of afterlife. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but it does mean I must conduct my life based on the assumption that there is no existence after death.
Why? Firstly, if I assume there is an afterlife, then I have an excuse for not leading a fulfilling life. If there’s something I don’t get done in this life, then I can excuse it to myself by imagining that I’ll get to do it in the next one. If I assume there is no afterlife, that provides motivation to enjoy this life and do fulfilling things with it.
Secondly, the assumption of an afterlife can lead one into dangerous situations. A lot of people have been coerced into an early death or have rationalized potentially fatal risks on the promise of an eternal reward. It would really suck to find out you decided to die violently in your youth based on false promises.
Thirdly (and this is a corollary of the above point), believing our dead have gone on to another existence dulls the horror of death, and while I understand the need for some people to shy away from that horror, I really feel this is a problem because it cheapens life and also prevents us from devoting serious effort to the conquest of death – a problem I think is solvable or at least can be significantly pushed back.
Fourthly, assuming there is no afterlife is the safer bet. If I turn out to be wrong and there is an afterlife, it’s pure bonus.
I can see two possible holes in this argument:
One, if you assume there is an afterlife and there is not, you actually won’t be disappointed because you won’t exist. You need to exist to feel disappointed. This truth is not sufficient to justify belief in my opinion.
Two, suppose that (ignoring all my other sins) the act of assuming there is no afterlife is the critical sin that will condemn me to the bad kind of afterlife. I admit my response to this is emotional and not rational: if this is true, then the deity making that judgement is an asshole not deserving of my respect anyway. So again my choice unchanged.
So I’ve established that I feel I must proceed on the assumption that there is no afterlife. Contemplating the non-extistence of an afterlife turns out to be horrifying, and I can understand why people shy away from it; if there is no afterlife, then this life is all you get and there is nothingness after you die. You do not carry on in an eternal sleep. You are not reunited with lost loved ones. You do not get reincarnated as anyone or anything. You do not become a ghost. You have no awareness. Furthermore, it means that all your loved ones who have already passed away are not in a better place; they do not exist at all anymore. Your memories of them are all that remain.
All of that is pretty unpleasant to face, especially if you have lost loved ones. It’s also difficult because the human mind seems inherently unsuited to grasp the idea of not existing; I’ve pondered it quite a bit but it still tends to be a slippery concept – I can reason about the state of nonexistence but not really grok it intuitively.
But none of this changes my choice to disbelieve in an afterlife because I consider belief in one to be irresponsible; it fosters laziness with respect to managing our own lives, it encourages acceptance of impositions and restrictions on our lives, it cheapens life by masking the horror of death, and it is used as an inducement to throw away lives on causes that often look silly and insignificant if you put them in perspective against the finality of death.
One last thing: if you find the idea of dead loved ones being completely nonexistent distressing, consider that in that state they can’t feel remorse or grief, nor can they begrudge any feelings you may have on the matter. All emotion associated with their condition is yours, and you can choose to change it. I find this comforting.
