Tooby and Cosmides on human frames
They note that cultural evolution is different than genetic evolution. The latter is based more on special purpose “innate human psychological mechanisms” (30). They even equate these mechanisms with the “frame problem” (34). They also said: “All normal human minds reliably develop a standard collection of reasoning and regulatory circuits that are functionally specialized and, frequently, domain-specific. These circuits organize the way we interpret our experiences, inject certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental life, and provide universal frames…
The Muppets explain phenomenology
And the practical experience of humanistic existentialism. Warning: Deep philosophy and brain science involved.
Interplanetary Festival June 7 and 8
Put on by the Santa Fe Institute. Anyone interested in car pooling? The Facebook blurb below. See the blue link for many more details: “On June 7th and 8th of 2018, the Santa Fe Institute’s first annual InterPlanetary Festival will draw space enthusiasts from around the world for a two-day celebration of human ingenuity. This free-to-attend festival will transform the Railyard District in downtown Santa Fe, with an expo showcasing innovation, open-air concerts, lectures and panel discussions, a Sci-Fi film…
White American intolerance connected to authoritarianism
Good article discussing this recent study. The threat to our democracy isn’t partisanship on both sides; it’s intolerant white Americans that are prone to authoritarianism. When the imagine that their white identity is threatened they support undemocratic, authoritarian rule. And of course Dump is the perfect authoritarian to stoke their prejudices to impose undemocratic restrictions on some of the population. Which is, of course, a “repudiation of American values and democratic commitments.” Of course this phenomenon has been going on…
JP’s strained relationship with Facebook’s algorithm
Really gets to how Facebook sucks us in deeper and deeper until…
Colbert’s update on AI
Including two AIs in a phone conversation.
Brain training doesn’t work
From this article: “Being an academic neuroscientist, I didn’t limit my research to the Google perspective, let’s call it. I leveraged an advantage that few consumers have—access to peer-reviewed research and the training to critically interpret it. […] With help from colleagues, I sifted through thousands of academic papers that investigated neurofeedback. Our main finding? At the time of our research, only nine neurofeedback studies had used an adequate control group and a double-blind design (where neither the experimenters nor…
Affective neuroscience of self-generated thought
By Fox et al. (2018), Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 12 May, pp. 1 – 27. The abstract: “Despite increasing scientific interest in self-generated thought—mental content largely independent of the immediate environment—there has yet to be any comprehensive synthesis of the subjective experience and neural correlates of affect in these forms of thinking. Here, we aim to develop an integrated affective neuroscience encompassing many forms of self-generated thought—normal and pathological, moderate and excessive, in waking and in…
How much can we know?
Good article in Nature on the limitations of science and epistemology. Still, science is an indispensable, accurate and useful methodology within those limitations. Some key excerpts: “What we observe is not nature itself but nature as discerned through data we collect from machines. In consequence, the scientific worldview depends on the information we can acquire through our instruments. And given that our tools are limited, our view of the world is necessarily myopic. We can see only so far into…