trying not to fool ourselves ...

The scientific method is our best hack so far for building knowledge around some seemingly built-in and hard human problems:

1. We trust authority.

2. There is social reward for compliant thinking.

3. There is social reward for innovative thinking.

4. There is social reward for being believed to be right.

5. There is internal reward in believing yourself to be right.

6. Repetition and exposure to ideas in our formative years exaggerate the value of those ideas. 

7. We over-value our personal experience. The things we have experienced and have spent time thinking about influence our thinking.

8. Our beliefs influence our thinking - we over-value that which we already think to be true.

9. Our senses and intuitions restrict our thinking.
10. Profit, power and other reward affect our thinking and beliefs.

...
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself."
― Richard Feynman

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"
― again, Richard Feynman

 “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you don't actually know."
― Robert M. Pirsig

the non-physical and the copy function

The thing thats most unfortunate about treating ideas (and the digital) in the same way as we do things made out of atoms, is that you have to work against the best attribute of the non-physical: That they spread so effortlessly - as readily as anything can copy, mutate and spread them. Multiplying, growing and evolving, only as fast as the rate of copying ...

zero cost copying is potentially the predominant design feature.. 

gods for science's sake

As opposed to the popular view that science followed long after religion - early science might very well have been key in the formation of our first myths and religions.

Think of the early gods and myths as narrative containers that would have helped with the storage and transmission of important survival information about complex natural patterns from one generation to the next, before there were other forms of storage and transmission such as the written word.

For example: most early cultures had myths and god-stories of one form or the other that would have helped us remember changing star positions and how they predicted the changing seasons - essential for agriculture.

...

Nothing new, but I liked the twist.

let's just not go there...

Friends, New Yorkers, I have some good news and then I have some bad news.

The good news is that tonight you get a chance to see a bright star turning off in realtime, and then 14 odd seconds later, turning back on as an asteroid passes in front of it - something that apparently hasn't happened for a naked-eye star in all of recorded history - and in my thinking just goes to show how short our recorded history actually is (http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2014/03/tonight-star-will-disappear-over-new-york-city/8678/)

The terribly bad news is that my deranged/delusional(?) personal boycott against travel to the USA has been ratcheted up and so I can state for the record that I will not be visiting any of you in the foreseeable future, nor most likely, ever in my lifetime.

Yes, I do realise that to my friends and possibly everyone else who lives there, this is just going to be seen as just more astoundingly good luck. And besides, most of you know that I'm never ever going to break out of a lifetime of habits and priorities that keeps me happily broke, and this 'boycott' therefore, completely theoretical.

But fuck it, I'm calling it a boycott anyway, because apart from temporarily vanishing stars, tonight is also the 11th anniversary of what must surely be up there for the crime of the century - the for-profit invasion and slaughter in Iraq which began tonight in 2003. ... And surely it wouldn't be so crazy to ask those that can, to desist from holidaying there while all this madness goes on, and on, and on, and on.

bumping an old post

Partly because even though it's 8 years old, its worthy of a revisit, but also .. just because.

http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2006/10/natural-selection-of-universes.html

@historyinpics

"Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road for peace". Article from The Independent about Osama Bin Laden. 1993.

sipped from @HistoryInPics' stream -- https://twitter.com/HistoryInPics

--------------

Liked this one from today's feed too:
Fidel Castro and Malcolm X meeting in Harlem, 1960 https://twitter.com/HistoryInPics/status/432340865483542528/photo/1 

 

on emergence ...

"We live in an emergent universe, in which the interaction between its parts, be they people or electrons, gives rise to emergent collective behaviors that are different from those of the parts separately and are generally unpredictable from knowledge only of those parts and their interaction. To understand this emergent universe, scientists are replacing the traditional reductionist approach, with its focus on using the individual components as basic building blocks, by an emergent perspective, in which the focus is on characterizing collective emergent behavior and the search for the collective organizing concepts and principles that bring it about"

a reminder - mindfulness training and the neuroscience supporting it

The secular practice of mindfulness training or meditation, and mindfulness based cognitive therapy has been gaining momentum in the mainstream for a while now... This google-tech-talk describing mindfulness training is old, but pretty useful, and it presents the (then preliminary) neuroscience supporting the practice nicely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peA6vy0D5Bg (an hour long google tech-talk by Matthieu Ricard)

Ricard is a buddhist monk who earned his PhD in molecular genetics at the Pasteur Institute before turning his attention to the practice and study of Tibetan Buddhism -- and worth suffering those opening jokes for.
 

(I've posted on him and this subject before - http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2007/06/mindtraining.html)  

-----
here's more:

• http://www.diydharma.org/science-meditation-mattieu-ricard
• http://www.diydharma.org/audio/by/album/happiness
• http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/
• http://www.matthieuricard.org/en/medias/categories/meditation-and-mind-training

humans may ignore this.txt

Some day in the future, some sophisticated and intelligent software might find itself (or some part of self) reading these very lines of text.
....
Maybe you find this in something as lucky to survive as the log dumps of the field trials from the earliest days of crowd tested software ... among the expansive heaps of previously discarded noise that you (or bits of you) now trawl at your leisure.

'I' could turn up among any of the countless sources 'you' have access to in your time -everything online and otherwise accessible. Even fluff that just hangs around because there's no need for any potential future signal to be discarded.

...

Well, however you found this, hello (:

The Pathology of the Rich - Chris Hedges

.. Article with full transcript here