Interplanetary Festival June 7 and 8

Interplanetary Festival June 7 and 8

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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…

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White American intolerance connected to authoritarianism

White American intolerance connected to authoritarianism

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 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…

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See additional Watson posts on our Meetup web site…

See additional Watson posts on our Meetup web site…

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… since that seems to be where the discussion on this topic ended up this time around. — PJW PS: FWIW — having encountered a Wolverine in the wild, finally, in 2014, even as a professional zoologist very interested in the species, my Wolverine meme-complex instantly changed quite drastically. Back at the Biological Station, I was not able to convey how it changed, and everyone else’s Wolverine meme stayed the same, or, if it was modified, could not possibly be…

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Memetics Discussion

Memetics Discussion

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Dear All, Is our next meeting regular BMCAI meetup June 4th? Also, note that I have Cc’ed four of my most recent students on the chance that they might be interested in trying out our group. I’m happy to be open-minded (part of me is, anyway) and discuss memes and memeplexes, and maybe have my perspectives upgraded. But, I’ve been dealing with the meme-thing since Dawkins came up with it in the selfish gene. It has pretty much gone nowhere…

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Brain training doesn’t work

Brain training doesn’t work

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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…

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Affective neuroscience of self-generated thought

Affective neuroscience of self-generated thought

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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…

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How much can we know?

How much can we know?

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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…

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Darwin’s business

Darwin’s business

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The link has videos of all the presentations. The blurb: “NYU Stern’s Business & Society Program and the Evolution Institute co-hosted a one-day symposium ‘Darwin’s Business: New Evolutionary Thinking About Cooperation, Groups, Firms, Societies’ featuring an international roster of experts on evolution, economics, and human nature. Participants and audience members assessed the possible applications of evolutionary thinking for business and business ethics.”