Today, Dr. Kaku addresses a question posed by Corey McClure: "Previously, you have addressed the question about downloading our brains onto a separate device. What about uploading information into our brains like in 'The Matrix'?"
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Could We Learn Skills "Matrix"-Style?
http://bigthink.com/ideas/38112
Today, Dr. Kaku addresses a question posed by Corey McClure: "Previously, you have addressed the question about downloading our brains onto a separate device. What about uploading information into our brains like in 'The Matrix'?"
Today, Dr. Kaku addresses a question posed by Corey McClure: "Previously, you have addressed the question about downloading our brains onto a separate device. What about uploading information into our brains like in 'The Matrix'?"
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Why we all need a 'To Don't' List
Two management leaders reveal a simple but powerful idea for achieving high performance – deciding what not to do
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/8469638/Think-Tank-Why-we-all-need-a-To-Dont-List-just-like-Moses.html
The to-do lists are insufficient – we should also create "to-don't" lists.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/8469638/Think-Tank-Why-we-all-need-a-To-Dont-List-just-like-Moses.html
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Faith, Philosophy, & Mystery in Film
http://groups.google.com/group/philosophy-updates/browse_thread/thread/1f2ae8ff113396e3/77457f63b3934967?show_docid=77457f63b3934967
Possible topics for seminar papers include the following, though proposals on related topics are welcome and encouraged.
Mystery and epistemology, or how the detective comes to know
whodunit?
• Mystery and moral or political philosophy: the author or detective’s
assumptions about justice, the natural law, or the lack thereof.
• Mystery and Christianity from Fr. Brown to the Name of the Rose: how
might religious faith impede or accelerate the solving of crimes?
• Mystery and the mystery of being: do mystery stories eventually lead
to nihilism or to optimism? Or are there no metaphysical implications
to mystery?
• Mysteries and faith: do the faith commitments of mystery writers
affect the types of mysteries they write and do any such effects show
up on the screen?
• Science and mystery, or the CSI factor: the role of forensics and
technology
• Drawing the line, or how to separate Sherlock Holmes from James
Bond: what makes a mystery different from action adventure? From
horror?
• The use and abuse of history for mystery: the character and purpose
of period mystery films
• Signs of the times: portrayals of religion in mystery films
• Pulp and projector: why do so many mystery novels make their way to
the big screen, and what is lost or gained in the process?
• Juvenile mystery (Nancy Drew, etc.)
• The changing faces of mystery from the Golden Age of Hollywood to
the present
• Dames and mystery, from femmes fatales to Miss Marple
• Open versus closed mysteries: the art and philosophy behind telling
the audience who the culprit is
earlier in the film (open) or waiting until the end
(closed)
• Famous detectives vis-à-vis any of the topics mentioned above
• Directors, producers, or screenwriters vis-à-vis any of the topics
mentioned above
Ideally, most of the films discussed in the seminar should be less
than thirty years old; if an author wishes to discuss a wider span of
film history (e.g., the changing depictions of Sherlock Holmes from
the 1930s on), weight should be given to the more recent or at least
to relatively well-known examples. Obscure films, which one would not
reasonably expect the seminar audience to have seen, should be
generally avoided.
Possible topics for seminar papers include the following, though proposals on related topics are welcome and encouraged.
Mystery and epistemology, or how the detective comes to know
whodunit?
• Mystery and moral or political philosophy: the author or detective’s
assumptions about justice, the natural law, or the lack thereof.
• Mystery and Christianity from Fr. Brown to the Name of the Rose: how
might religious faith impede or accelerate the solving of crimes?
• Mystery and the mystery of being: do mystery stories eventually lead
to nihilism or to optimism? Or are there no metaphysical implications
to mystery?
• Mysteries and faith: do the faith commitments of mystery writers
affect the types of mysteries they write and do any such effects show
up on the screen?
• Science and mystery, or the CSI factor: the role of forensics and
technology
• Drawing the line, or how to separate Sherlock Holmes from James
Bond: what makes a mystery different from action adventure? From
horror?
• The use and abuse of history for mystery: the character and purpose
of period mystery films
• Signs of the times: portrayals of religion in mystery films
• Pulp and projector: why do so many mystery novels make their way to
the big screen, and what is lost or gained in the process?
• Juvenile mystery (Nancy Drew, etc.)
• The changing faces of mystery from the Golden Age of Hollywood to
the present
• Dames and mystery, from femmes fatales to Miss Marple
• Open versus closed mysteries: the art and philosophy behind telling
the audience who the culprit is
earlier in the film (open) or waiting until the end
(closed)
• Famous detectives vis-à-vis any of the topics mentioned above
• Directors, producers, or screenwriters vis-à-vis any of the topics
mentioned above
Ideally, most of the films discussed in the seminar should be less
than thirty years old; if an author wishes to discuss a wider span of
film history (e.g., the changing depictions of Sherlock Holmes from
the 1930s on), weight should be given to the more recent or at least
to relatively well-known examples. Obscure films, which one would not
reasonably expect the seminar audience to have seen, should be
generally avoided.
Friday, April 22, 2011
Why Quantum Physics Ends the Free Will Debate
Why does Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle prove that humans have free will?
Quotes by Sir Peter B. Medawar
Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.
For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.
Heredity proposes and development disposes.
I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.
If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.
If the task of scientific methodology is to piece together an account of what scientists actually do, then the testimony of biologists should be heard with specially close attention. Biologists work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding.
Biology is complex, messy and richly various, like real life; it travels faster nowadays than physics or chemistry (which is just as well, since it has so much farther to go), and it travels nearer to the ground. It should therefore give us a specially direct and immediate insight into science in the making.
Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?
It is a common failing–and one that I have myself suffered from–to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.
Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well—something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.
Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case.
Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poets–scientists and philosopher–scientists and even a few mystics. ... and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.
The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.
The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said–has been said–that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
For a scientist must indeed be freely imaginative and yet skeptical, creative and yet a critic. There is a sense in which he must be free, but another in which his thought must be very preceisely regimented; there is poetry in science, but also a lot of bookkeeping.
Heredity proposes and development disposes.
I cannot give any scientist of any age better advice than this: the intensity of the conviction that a hypothesis is true has no bearing on whether it is true or not.
If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.
If the task of scientific methodology is to piece together an account of what scientists actually do, then the testimony of biologists should be heard with specially close attention. Biologists work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding.
Biology is complex, messy and richly various, like real life; it travels faster nowadays than physics or chemistry (which is just as well, since it has so much farther to go), and it travels nearer to the ground. It should therefore give us a specially direct and immediate insight into science in the making.
Is the Scientific Paper a Fraud?
It is a common failing–and one that I have myself suffered from–to fall in love with a hypothesis and to be unwilling to take no for an answer. A love affair with a pet hypothesis can waste years of precious time. There is very often no finally decisive yes, though quite often there can be a decisive no.
Psychoanalytic theory is the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century and a terminal product as well—something akin to a dinosaur or zeppelin in the history of ideas, a vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.
Scientific reasoning is a kind of dialogue between the possible and the actual, between what might be and what is in fact the case.
Scientists are people of very dissimilar temperaments doing different things in very different ways. Among scientists are collectors, classifiers and compulsive tidiers-up; many are detectives by temperament and many are explorers; some are artists and others artisans. There are poets–scientists and philosopher–scientists and even a few mystics. ... and most people who are in fact scientists could easily have been something else instead.
The art of research [is] the art of making difficult problems soluble by devising means of getting at them.
The fact that scientists do not consciously practice a formal methodology is very poor evidence that no such methodology exists. It could be said–has been said–that there is a distinctive methodology of science which scientists practice unwittingly, like the chap in Moliere who found that all his life, unknowingly, he had been speaking prose.
The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it.
Lectures : Some Practical Tips
Every lecture should make only one main point.
The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel wrote that any philosopher who uses the word "and" too often cannot be a good philosopher. I think he was right, at least insofar as lecturing goes. Every lecture should state one main point and repeat it over and over, like a theme with variations. An audience is like a herd of cows, moving slowly in the direction they are being driven towards. If we make one point, we have a good chance that the audience will take the right direction; if we make several points, then the cows will scatter all over the field. The audience will lose interest and everyone will go back to the thoughts they interrupted in order to come to our lecture.
Never run overtime.
Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere even if we are trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis. One minute overtime can destroy the best of lectures.
Relate to your audience.
As you enter the lecture hall, try to spot someone in the audience with whose work you have some familiarity. Quickly rearrange your presentation so as to manage to mention some of that person's work. In this way, you will guarantee that at least one person will follow with rapt attention, and you will make a friend to boot.
Everyone in the audience has come to listen to your lecture with the secret hope of hearing their work mentioned.
Give them something to take home.
It is not easy to follow this advice. It is easier to state what features of a lecture the audience will always remember, and the answer is not pretty.
I often meet, in airports, in the street, and occasionally in embarrassing situations, MIT alumni who have taken one or more courses from me. Most of the time they admit that they have forgotten the subject of the course and all the mathematics I thought I had taught them. However, they will gladly recall some joke, some anecdote, some quirk, some side remark, or some mistake I made.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/advice.html
The German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel wrote that any philosopher who uses the word "and" too often cannot be a good philosopher. I think he was right, at least insofar as lecturing goes. Every lecture should state one main point and repeat it over and over, like a theme with variations. An audience is like a herd of cows, moving slowly in the direction they are being driven towards. If we make one point, we have a good chance that the audience will take the right direction; if we make several points, then the cows will scatter all over the field. The audience will lose interest and everyone will go back to the thoughts they interrupted in order to come to our lecture.
Never run overtime.
Running overtime is the one unforgivable error a lecturer can make. After fifty minutes (one microcentury as von Neumann used to say) everybody's attention will turn elsewhere even if we are trying to prove the Riemann hypothesis. One minute overtime can destroy the best of lectures.
Relate to your audience.
As you enter the lecture hall, try to spot someone in the audience with whose work you have some familiarity. Quickly rearrange your presentation so as to manage to mention some of that person's work. In this way, you will guarantee that at least one person will follow with rapt attention, and you will make a friend to boot.
Everyone in the audience has come to listen to your lecture with the secret hope of hearing their work mentioned.
Give them something to take home.
It is not easy to follow this advice. It is easier to state what features of a lecture the audience will always remember, and the answer is not pretty.
I often meet, in airports, in the street, and occasionally in embarrassing situations, MIT alumni who have taken one or more courses from me. Most of the time they admit that they have forgotten the subject of the course and all the mathematics I thought I had taught them. However, they will gladly recall some joke, some anecdote, some quirk, some side remark, or some mistake I made.
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/advice.html
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Top 10 Common Faults In Human Thought
Gambler’s Fallacy
Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed. In the 1920s, Hawthorne Works (a manufacturing facility) commissioned a study to see if different levels of light influenced worker productivity. What they found was incredible, changing the light caused productivity to soar! Unfortunately, when the study was finished, productivity levels decreased to their regular levels. This was because the change in productivity was not due to the light levels, but to the workers being watched. This demonstrated a form of reactivity; when individuals know they are being watched, they are motivated to change their behavior, generally to make themselves look better. Reactivity is a serious problem in research, and has to be controlled in blind experiments (“Blind” is when individuals involved in a research study are purposely withheld information so as not to influence the outcomes).
Pareidolia
Reactivity is the tendency of people to act or appear differently when they know that they are being observed. In the 1920s, Hawthorne Works (a manufacturing facility) commissioned a study to see if different levels of light influenced worker productivity. What they found was incredible, changing the light caused productivity to soar! Unfortunately, when the study was finished, productivity levels decreased to their regular levels. This was because the change in productivity was not due to the light levels, but to the workers being watched. This demonstrated a form of reactivity; when individuals know they are being watched, they are motivated to change their behavior, generally to make themselves look better. Reactivity is a serious problem in research, and has to be controlled in blind experiments (“Blind” is when individuals involved in a research study are purposely withheld information so as not to influence the outcomes).
Pareidolia
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Belief in Conspiracies Linked to Machiavellian Mindset
New research suggests people are more likely to endorse conspiracy theories if they would be willing to personally participate in such a conspiracy.
Extended Mind Hypothesis
Three Views on the Extended Mind Hypothesis
Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind
Monday, April 18, 2011
what’s your intent today?
Do You REALLY WANT What You Want?
Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans. " -John Lennon
Why Letting Yourself Make Mistakes Means Making Fewer of Them
Think back to the last time your boss assigned you a new project or task at work, or the last time you tried to tackle something really difficult in your personal life. How did it feel? I'm guessing scary, right?
While some people seem eager to tackle new challenges, many of us are really just trying to survive without committing any major screw-ups. Taking on something totally new and unfamiliar is understandably frightening, since the odds of making a mistake are good when you are inexperienced. Small wonder that we greet new challenges with so little enthusiasm.
How can we learn to see things differently? How can we shift our thinking, and approach new responsibilities and challenges with more confidence and energy?
The answer is simple, though perhaps a little surprising:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heidi-grant-halvorson-phd/making-mistakes_b_841390.html
While some people seem eager to tackle new challenges, many of us are really just trying to survive without committing any major screw-ups. Taking on something totally new and unfamiliar is understandably frightening, since the odds of making a mistake are good when you are inexperienced. Small wonder that we greet new challenges with so little enthusiasm.
How can we learn to see things differently? How can we shift our thinking, and approach new responsibilities and challenges with more confidence and energy?
The answer is simple, though perhaps a little surprising:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/heidi-grant-halvorson-phd/making-mistakes_b_841390.html
Saturday, April 16, 2011
What exactly is philosophy of science – and why does it matter?
There’s a quote attributed to Richard Feynman, and repeated by Steven Weinberg, which one could interpret in a couple different ways: “Philosophy of physics is about as useful to physicists as ornithology is to birds.” What do you make of this comment?
David Christian: Big history
Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.
David Christian teaches an ambitious world history course that tells the tale of the entire universe -- from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to present day. Full bio and more links
First, a video. Yes, it is a scrambled egg. But as you look at it, I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy. Because you may notice that what's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself. And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated. And now they're going to be poured back into the egg. And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works. A scrambled egg is mush, tasty mush, but it's mush. An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure -- in fact, to mush. And that's why that video feels a bit strange.
And yet, look around us. What we see around us is staggering complexity. Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone there are some 10 billion skus, or distinct commodities, being traded. that's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth. And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity.
So here's a great puzzle: In a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described -- the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center? Well the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls "Goldilocks conditions" -- not too hot, not too cold; just right for the creation of complexity. And slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage. Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable, the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity.
Now we as extremely complex creatures desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity, despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility. And that's the story that we tell in big history. But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible. You have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it. (Laughter) Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years to the beginning of time.
Around us there's nothing. There's not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we've crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. It's incredibly hot. It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting, and it's expanding at incredible speed. And at first it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical, it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second.
Now we move forward 380,000 years. That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet. And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium. Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage. We know above all that it was extremely simple. It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and they have no structure. They're really a sort of cosmic mush. But that's not completely true. Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background. What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas. These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity.
And this is how it works. Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff. So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds. And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then at the center of each cloud, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there's a huge release of energy, and, bang! We have our first stars. From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them. And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex.
Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds. When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. So now the universe is chemically more complex. And in a chemically more complex universe, it's possible to make more things. And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually they form planets and moons. And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago. Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials. So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.
Now, the going gets tougher. The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity. I'm talking, of course, about living organisms. Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals. So chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force. That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than the stars or planets. Now what are the ideal conditions for chemistry? What are the Goldilocks conditions? Well the first, you need energy, but not too much. In the center of a star, there's so much energy, that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again. But not too little. In intergalactic space, there's so little energy that atoms can't combine. What you want is just the right amount, and planets, it turns out, are just right, because they're close to stars, but not too close.
You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquid such as water. Why? Well in gasses, atoms move past each other so fast that they can't hitch up. In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move. In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules. Now where do you find such Goldilocks conditions? Well planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect. It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of open water. And deep beneath those oceans at cracks in the Earth's crust, you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you've got a great diversity of elements. So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.
But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry. How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable? Well it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick. You don't stabilize the individual; you stabilize the template, the thing that carries information, and you allow the template to copy itself. And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information. You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA. Each rung contains information. So DNA contains information about how to make living organisms. And DNA also copies itself. So it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean. So the information spreads. Notice that information has become part of our story. The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections. As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error. And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning. It's accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work. So DNA's learning and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity. And we can see this happening over the last four billion years.
For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple -- single cells. But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity. Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear. You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs. And occasionally, there are disasters. 65 million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out. Terrible news for the dinosaurs. But great news for our mammalian ancestors who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs. And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid.
Humans appears about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. Let me explain why. We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow. DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning; it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them. Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift.
I call this ability collective learning. It's what makes us different. We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments -- into desert lands, into jungles, into the ice age tundra of Siberia -- tough, tough environment -- into the Americas, into Australasia. Each migration involved learning -- learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings.
Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, human's learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. And that brain is learning at warp speed. And in the last 200 years, something else has happened: we've stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us.
So, here we are back at the convention center. We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. I hope you agree that this is a powerful story. And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. But it also contains warnings. Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it. I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us. We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years. So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.
And now, finally, this is what I want. I want my grandson Daniel and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us. And that's why a group of us are building a free online syllabus in big history for high school students throughout the world. We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet.
I thank you for your attention.
David Christian teaches an ambitious world history course that tells the tale of the entire universe -- from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to present day. Full bio and more links
First, a video. Yes, it is a scrambled egg. But as you look at it, I hope you'll begin to feel just slightly uneasy. Because you may notice that what's actually happening is that the egg is unscrambling itself. And you'll now see the yolk and the white have separated. And now they're going to be poured back into the egg. And we all know in our heart of hearts that this is not the way the universe works. A scrambled egg is mush, tasty mush, but it's mush. An egg is a beautiful, sophisticated thing that can create even more sophisticated things, such as chickens. And we know in our heart of hearts that the universe does not travel from mush to complexity. In fact, this gut instinct is reflected in one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, or the law of entropy. What that says basically is that the general tendency of the universe is to move from order and structure to lack of order, lack of structure -- in fact, to mush. And that's why that video feels a bit strange.
And yet, look around us. What we see around us is staggering complexity. Eric Beinhocker estimates that in New York City alone there are some 10 billion skus, or distinct commodities, being traded. that's hundreds of times as many species as there are on Earth. And they're being traded by a species of almost seven billion individuals who are linked by trade, travel, and the Internet into a global system of stupendous complexity.
So here's a great puzzle: In a universe ruled by the second law of thermodynamics, how is it possible to generate the sort of complexity I've described -- the sort of complexity represented by you and me and the convention center? Well the answer seems to be, the universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty. In pockets, there appear what my colleague, Fred Spier, calls "Goldilocks conditions" -- not too hot, not too cold; just right for the creation of complexity. And slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things, you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way, complexity builds stage by stage. Each stage is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer in big history to these moments as threshold moments. And at each threshold, the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable, the Goldilocks conditions get more stringent, and it's more difficult to create complexity.
Now we as extremely complex creatures desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity, despite the second law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility. And that's the story that we tell in big history. But to do it, you have do something that may, at first sight, seem completely impossible. You have to survey the whole history of the universe. So let's do it. (Laughter) Let's begin by winding the timeline back 13.7 billion years to the beginning of time.
Around us there's nothing. There's not even time or space. Imagine the darkest, emptiest thing you can and cube it a gazillion times and that's where we are. And then suddenly, bang! A universe appears, an entire universe. And we've crossed our first threshold. The universe is tiny; it's smaller than an atom. It's incredibly hot. It contains everything that's in today's universe, so you can imagine, it's busting, and it's expanding at incredible speed. And at first it's just a blur, but very quickly distinct things begin to appear in that blur. Within the first second, energy itself shatters into distinct forces including electromagnetism and gravity. And energy does something else quite magical, it congeals to form matter -- quarks that will create protons and leptons that include electrons. And all of that happens in the first second.
Now we move forward 380,000 years. That's twice as long as humans have been on this planet. And now simple atoms appear of hydrogen and helium. Now I want to pause for a moment, 380,000 years after the origins of the universe, because we actually know quite a lot about the universe at this stage. We know above all that it was extremely simple. It consisted of huge clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms, and they have no structure. They're really a sort of cosmic mush. But that's not completely true. Recent studies by satellites such as the WMAP satellite have shown that, in fact, there are just tiny differences in that background. What you see here, the blue areas are about a thousandth of a degree cooler than the red areas. These are tiny differences, but it was enough for the universe to move on to the next stage of building complexity.
And this is how it works. Gravity is more powerful where there's more stuff. So where you get slightly denser areas, gravity starts compacting clouds of hydrogen and helium atoms. So we can imagine the early universe breaking up into a billion clouds. And each cloud is compacted, gravity gets more powerful as density increases, the temperature begins to rise at the center of each cloud, and then at the center of each cloud, the temperature crosses the threshold temperature of 10 million degrees, protons start to fuse, there's a huge release of energy, and, bang! We have our first stars. From about 200 million years after the Big Bang, stars begin to appear all through the universe, billions of them. And the universe is now significantly more interesting and more complex.
Stars will create the Goldilocks conditions for crossing two new thresholds. When very large stars die, they create temperatures so high that protons begin to fuse in all sorts of exotic combinations, to form all the elements of the periodic table. If, like me, you're wearing a gold ring, it was forged in a supernova explosion. So now the universe is chemically more complex. And in a chemically more complex universe, it's possible to make more things. And what starts happening is that, around young suns, young stars, all these elements combine, they swirl around, the energy of the star stirs them around, they form particles, they form snowflakes, they form little dust motes, they form rocks, they form asteroids, and eventually they form planets and moons. And that is how our solar system was formed, four and a half billion years ago. Rocky planets like our Earth are significantly more complex than stars because they contain a much greater diversity of materials. So we've crossed a fourth threshold of complexity.
Now, the going gets tougher. The next stage introduces entities that are significantly more fragile, significantly more vulnerable, but they're also much more creative and much more capable of generating further complexity. I'm talking, of course, about living organisms. Living organisms are created by chemistry. We are huge packages of chemicals. So chemistry is dominated by the electromagnetic force. That operates over smaller scales than gravity, which explains why you and I are smaller than the stars or planets. Now what are the ideal conditions for chemistry? What are the Goldilocks conditions? Well the first, you need energy, but not too much. In the center of a star, there's so much energy, that any atoms that combine will just get busted apart again. But not too little. In intergalactic space, there's so little energy that atoms can't combine. What you want is just the right amount, and planets, it turns out, are just right, because they're close to stars, but not too close.
You also need a great diversity of chemical elements, and you need liquid such as water. Why? Well in gasses, atoms move past each other so fast that they can't hitch up. In solids, atoms are stuck together, they can't move. In liquids, they can cruise and cuddle and link up to form molecules. Now where do you find such Goldilocks conditions? Well planets are great, and our early Earth was almost perfect. It was just the right distance from its star to contain huge oceans of open water. And deep beneath those oceans at cracks in the Earth's crust, you've got heat seeping up from inside the Earth, and you've got a great diversity of elements. So at those deep oceanic vents, fantastic chemistry began to happen, and atoms combined in all sorts of exotic combinations.
But of course, life is more than just exotic chemistry. How do you stabilize those huge molecules that seem to be viable? Well it's here that life introduces an entirely new trick. You don't stabilize the individual; you stabilize the template, the thing that carries information, and you allow the template to copy itself. And DNA, of course, is the beautiful molecule that contains that information. You'll be familiar with the double helix of DNA. Each rung contains information. So DNA contains information about how to make living organisms. And DNA also copies itself. So it copies itself and scatters the templates through the ocean. So the information spreads. Notice that information has become part of our story. The real beauty of DNA though is in its imperfections. As it copies itself, once in every billion rungs, there tends to be an error. And what that means is that DNA is, in effect, learning. It's accumulating new ways of making living organisms because some of those errors work. So DNA's learning and it's building greater diversity and greater complexity. And we can see this happening over the last four billion years.
For most of that time of life on Earth, living organisms have been relatively simple -- single cells. But they had great diversity, and, inside, great complexity. Then from about 600 to 800 million years ago, multi-celled organisms appear. You get fungi, you get fish, you get plants, you get amphibia, you get reptiles, and then, of course, you get the dinosaurs. And occasionally, there are disasters. 65 million years ago, an asteroid landed on Earth near the Yucatan Peninsula, creating conditions equivalent to those of a nuclear war, and the dinosaurs were wiped out. Terrible news for the dinosaurs. But great news for our mammalian ancestors who flourished in the niches left empty by the dinosaurs. And we human beings are part of that creative evolutionary pulse that began 65 million years ago with the landing of an asteroid.
Humans appears about 200,000 years ago. And I believe we count as a threshold in this great story. Let me explain why. We've seen that DNA learns in a sense, it accumulates information. But it is so slow. DNA accumulates information through random errors, some of which just happen to work. But DNA had actually generated a faster way of learning; it had produced organisms with brains, and those organisms can learn in real time. They accumulate information, they learn. The sad thing is, when they die, the information dies with them. Now what makes humans different is human language. We are blessed with a language, a system of communication, so powerful and so precise that we can share what we've learned with such precision that it can accumulate in the collective memory. And that means it can outlast the individuals who learned that information, and it can accumulate from generation to generation. And that's why, as a species, we're so creative and so powerful, and that's why we have a history. We seem to be the only species in four billion years to have this gift.
I call this ability collective learning. It's what makes us different. We can see it at work in the earliest stages of human history. We evolved as a species in the savanna lands of Africa, but then you see humans migrating into new environments -- into desert lands, into jungles, into the ice age tundra of Siberia -- tough, tough environment -- into the Americas, into Australasia. Each migration involved learning -- learning new ways of exploiting the environment, new ways of dealing with their surroundings.
Then 10,000 years ago, exploiting a sudden change in global climate with the end of the last ice age, human's learned to farm. Farming was an energy bonanza. And exploiting that energy, human populations multiplied. Human societies got larger, denser, more interconnected. And then from about 500 years ago, humans began to link up globally through shipping, through trains, through telegraph, through the Internet, until now we seem to form a single global brain of almost seven billion individuals. And that brain is learning at warp speed. And in the last 200 years, something else has happened: we've stumbled on another energy bonanza in fossil fuels. So fossil fuels and collective learning together explain the staggering complexity we see around us.
So, here we are back at the convention center. We've been on a journey, a return journey, of 13.7 billion years. I hope you agree that this is a powerful story. And it's a story in which humans play an astonishing and creative role. But it also contains warnings. Collective learning is a very, very powerful force, and it's not clear that we humans are in charge of it. I remember very vividly as a child growing up in England, living through the Cuban Missile Crisis. For a few days, the entire biosphere seemed to be on the verge of destruction. And the same weapons are still here, and they are still armed. If we avoid that trap, others are waiting for us. We're burning fossil fuels at such a rate that we seem to be undermining the Goldilocks conditions that made it possible for human civilizations to flourish over the last 10,000 years. So what big history can do is show us the nature of our complexity and fragility and the dangers that face us, but it can also show us our power with collective learning.
And now, finally, this is what I want. I want my grandson Daniel and his friends and his generation, throughout the world, to know the story of big history, and to know it so well that they understand both the challenges that face us and the opportunities that face us. And that's why a group of us are building a free online syllabus in big history for high school students throughout the world. We believe that big history will be a vital intellectual tool for them, as Daniel and his generation face the huge challenges and also the huge opportunities ahead of them at this threshold moment in the history of our beautiful planet.
I thank you for your attention.
Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy
Local politics -- schools, zoning, council elections -- hit us where we live. So why don't more of us actually get involved? Is it apathy? Dave Meslin says no. He identifies 7 barriers that keep us from taking part in our communities, even when we truly care.
Dave Meslin is a "professional rabble-rouser." Based in Toronto, he works to make local issues engaging and even fun to get involved in. Full bio
Dave Meslin is a "professional rabble-rouser." Based in Toronto, he works to make local issues engaging and even fun to get involved in. Full bio
Human Language Arose From Africa: Study
Human language arose in southern Africa, a new study in Science magazine claims.
Language then spread across the globe through human migration. The claim complements fossil findings that point to southern Africa as the birthplace of modern humans.
According to the Washington Post, researcher Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand conducted the study by breaking down 504 languages into their smallest components, called phonemes. As the Post explains, the words "rip" and "lip" are separated by one phoneme, "one corresponding to the letter 'r' and the other to the letter 'l.'"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/human-language-africa_n_849809.html
Language then spread across the globe through human migration. The claim complements fossil findings that point to southern Africa as the birthplace of modern humans.
According to the Washington Post, researcher Quentin Atkinson of the University of Auckland in New Zealand conducted the study by breaking down 504 languages into their smallest components, called phonemes. As the Post explains, the words "rip" and "lip" are separated by one phoneme, "one corresponding to the letter 'r' and the other to the letter 'l.'"
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/15/human-language-africa_n_849809.html
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Jesus crucifixion nails discovered, claims film-maker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/apr/12/jesus-crucifixion-nails-discovery
Crucifixion of Jesus:
Were Nails Used to Put Christ on the Cross Claimed Found in Israel?
Filmmaker Says Nails May Be Authentic, Experts Are Skeptical
Filmmaker Says Nails May Be Authentic, Experts Are Skeptical
Monday, April 11, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Famous first lines of novels
'A Tale of Two Cities' ~ Charles Dickens
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."
'Moby-Dick' ~ Herman Melville
"Call me Ishmael."
'Anna Karenina' ~ Leo Tolstoy
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
'1984' ~ George Orwell
"It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen."
'One Hundred Years of Solitude' ~ Gabriel García Márquez
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
The Catcher in the Rye' ~ J.D. Salinger
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
'Their Eyes Were Watching God' ~ Zora Neale Hurston
"Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board."
'The Sound and the Fury' ~ William Faulkner
"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."
'Slaughterhouse-Five' ~ Kurt Vonnegut
"All this happened, more or less."
'Fahrenheit 451' ~ Ray Bradbury
"It was a pleasure to burn."
'The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy' ~ Douglas Adams
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."
'The Color Purple' ~ Alice Walker
"You better not never tell nobody but God."
'Pride and Prejudice' ~ Jane Austen
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone' ~ J.K. Rowling
"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number four Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."
'A Confederacy of Dunces' ~ John Kennedy Toole
"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head."
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way."
'Moby-Dick' ~ Herman Melville
"Call me Ishmael."
'Anna Karenina' ~ Leo Tolstoy
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
'1984' ~ George Orwell
"It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen."
'One Hundred Years of Solitude' ~ Gabriel García Márquez
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice."
The Catcher in the Rye' ~ J.D. Salinger
"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
'Their Eyes Were Watching God' ~ Zora Neale Hurston
"Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board."
'The Sound and the Fury' ~ William Faulkner
"Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting."
'Slaughterhouse-Five' ~ Kurt Vonnegut
"All this happened, more or less."
'Fahrenheit 451' ~ Ray Bradbury
"It was a pleasure to burn."
'The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy' ~ Douglas Adams
"Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun."
'The Color Purple' ~ Alice Walker
"You better not never tell nobody but God."
'Pride and Prejudice' ~ Jane Austen
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife."
'Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone' ~ J.K. Rowling
"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley of Number four Privet Drive were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much."
'A Confederacy of Dunces' ~ John Kennedy Toole
"A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head."
Saturday, April 9, 2011
14 Things That Tick Us Off When Traveling
Simple errors, like picking the wrong spot or digging up the wrong thing, can sabotage hours of yard work. Expert tips show you how to keep your dream garden.
http://www.bing.com/travel/content/search?q=14+Travel+Pet+Peeves%3a+Smashed+to+Bits&cid=msn1183620&FORM=TRVCON>1=41000
Flying etiquette 101: How to survive coach
http://www.bing.com/travel/content/search?q=14+Travel+Pet+Peeves%3a+Smashed+to+Bits&cid=msn1183620&FORM=TRVCON>1=41000
What makes you grumpy when you’re traveling?
Jerks on a plane: The people you need to avoid
http://www.bing.com/travel/content/search?q=Jerks+on+a+Plane%3a+Snorers&cid=msn1160474&form=TRVCON>1=41000
http://www.bing.com/travel/content/search?q=Jerks+on+a+Plane%3a+Snorers&cid=msn1160474&form=TRVCON>1=41000
Flying etiquette 101: How to survive coach
Friday, April 8, 2011
IF YOU WANT TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS, STUDY PHILOSOPHY
The Management Myth
MOST OF MANAGEMENT THEORY IS INANE, WRITES OUR CORRESPONDENT,
MOST OF MANAGEMENT THEORY IS INANE, WRITES OUR CORRESPONDENT,
THE FOUNDER OF A CONSULTING FIRM. IF YOU WANT TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS, DON’T GET AN M.B.A. STUDY PHILOSOPHY INSTEAD
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Supreme Court Allows Religious Separatists To Claim School Tax Credit
http://bigthink.com/ideas/37743
Of all the news stories I’ve read over the last few days, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn has stuck in my mind the most. All I could see in my mind’s eye were the numerous “segregation academies” that struggled financially in South Carolina during the 70’s and 80’s as court ordered desegregation slowly began to be accepted.
Of all the news stories I’ve read over the last few days, the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn has stuck in my mind the most. All I could see in my mind’s eye were the numerous “segregation academies” that struggled financially in South Carolina during the 70’s and 80’s as court ordered desegregation slowly began to be accepted.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Sam Harris Angers Both Believers and Atheists Alike
Anti-Religion Author Argues Science, Not Faith, Should Determine Morality
'End of Faith' Author Sam Harris Angers Both Believers and Atheists Alike
Full Face-Off: Does God Exist?
Does God exist? Two sides square off in the first Nightline Face-Off.
Face-Off: The Believers Respond
Does God exist? Two sides square off in the first Nightline Face-Off.
Atheists: Who Created God?
Does God exist? Two sides square off in the first Nightline Face-Off.
Kirk on God, Growing Pains & Rebellion
Is God a Projection of Your Culture?
Face-Off: Watch Part Two of the Debate!
Atheists say morality developed without the influence of a higher power.
'End of Faith' Author Sam Harris Angers Both Believers and Atheists Alike
Full Face-Off: Does God Exist?
Does God exist? Two sides square off in the first Nightline Face-Off.
Face-Off: The Believers Respond
Does God exist? Two sides square off in the first Nightline Face-Off.
Atheists: Who Created God?
Does God exist? Two sides square off in the first Nightline Face-Off.
Kirk on God, Growing Pains & Rebellion
Is God a Projection of Your Culture?
Face-Off: Watch Part Two of the Debate!
Atheists say morality developed without the influence of a higher power.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
What People Ignore About Darwin
Question: What is Renewed Darwinian theory?
Paul Lawrence: Well, this addresses questions that have been on the minds of humans since we have had history. It is: "What are the fundamental roots of our behavior as human beings? What makes us tick?" is one way to put it. And I was lucky enough to discover that Darwin built quite a good deal about human behavior at this level of basics that has been amazingly ignored by the academics. And they focused entirely on his first book, which was "The Origin of Species" and ignored his book that I have been looking called, "The Descent of Man."
So I was very fortunate to be able to draw on his insights as well as current findings from neuroscience and how the brain works to build what is a pretty fresh theory of human behavior which I feel is necessary to underlie and pin up and base... build a better theory of leadership upon it.
What I’ve come up with is what I call the "Renewed Darwinian" [theory] because it is a renewed version of Darwin. It doesn’t have much to do with the common version in the public that Darwin is all about the survival of the meanest and the fittest... and the most ruthless to survive is the way it works. And they all use that way of thinking when they talk about living in a Darwinian world, as you will notice in print.
Anyway, I came up with the idea that we have other drives than simply a drive to gain resources, to acquire to look after our narrow self-interests. And that is the insight that has allowed me to say: "Well, what else?" So I argue that we all humans are born with four basic drives, ultimate motives, which we have because they were essential for our basic survival. These aren’t just icing on the cake, these are four drives that we have proven over the eons are necessary for our species to thrive as a whole species and they are encoded in our DNA and we sense them and feel them mostly by the emotional messages we get from our subconscious as we witness the world around us.
Question: What are these four drives?
Paul Lawrence: The first is the drive to acquire, to possess, to own things that are necessary, resources for our very survival and things that go even beyond survival, to enhance our status as individuals. The second is a drive to defend our resources, to protect them from hazards, not only... obviously we are protecting our body, but also our possessions, our loved ones, even our beliefs when they are under attack. The third is the drive to bond in long term, caring, mutual-caring relationships with other humans—this is essential to our survival as acquiring food to eat. And the fourth is the drive to "comprehend," to understand, to create, to make sense out of the world and to be able to build the, kind of knowledge that allows us to cope with out everyday life.
Question: How do these drives shape behavior?
Paul Lawrence: So think of any individual. We go through the day looking around us, seeing what’s going on, and really thinking what does this mean to me? How am I going to react to this situation? Should I run away, go forward, embrace it, think it’s terrible? We have to evaluate, we have to have criteria to judge what these events around us mean to ourselves in order to figure out how to respond. And that’s what our brain does for us. And if we can learn how to lead, to behave in ways that do justice for all four of these basic drives, we turn out to be what people consider a content, happy, satisfied, successful person who feels their life had had meaning. And we can’t do it if we only pay attention just to the drive to acquire.
If I’d see a beautiful meal but I’m going to have to knock down this nice lady in front of me to get to the meal, well, how do I do it? One, it would be nice to have, and the other is I don’t really see myself as banging people over the head in order to get what I want. So how can I find some what to do justice to both my desire to have a good meal and have a friendly relationship with this person that’s in the way.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)