neuroimaging as the new alchemy

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-06/mf_neurohacks

This article presents a refreshingly skeptical view of recent brain imaging science, but I think it doesn't go far enough to indict much of what's called "science" in our culture today.

While all sciences were little more than vague insights and philosophical speculation at one point, it's clear that mathematics, chemistry, and physics, have moved beyond con-games and become realities in their own right - dogmas shared by large groups of people who may well never realize that other people don't see the world the way they do. (Did you know some people neither know about nor believe in integrals, quazars, valence bonds, or heaven?)

Never the less, I support the softer sciences, like social sciences and economics, brain sciences, psychology. They have the potential to traverse the same path as the hard sciences by eventually achieving some amazing, powerful, and mysterious description of the world. When they can suck in believers by the thousands with a brief, intense flash of epiphany, they will be productive outlets for some of the insanity and eccentricity that the process of evolution has bred into us.

On religion...

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that
certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him.
Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other
over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything --
anything -- be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous
than the world we are living in. -Sam Harris, author (1967- )

(thanks to Word A Day for sending the quote)

design as hypnosis

The fundamental focus of the academic program here at ID is communication. Using numbers, words, and pictures to convey ideas to other humans happens at the intersection of graphic design, marketing, business thinking, and - of course - art. Is it exaggerating to say that communication is the central activity of every human organization?

I've been learning to make foam-core models, posters, books, movies, sound clips, and photos all towards the end of showing somebody what I'm talking about. At least half of the genius behind any idea is how well it's represented and how convincingly it is presented. Whereas the struggle of an artist is to represent something exactly and precisely as he sees it, the struggle of a designer is to get somebody else - or better yet a large group of people - to see what he sees, whether or not that requires actually building a detailed, precise instantiation.

The logical conclusion of this conception of design is that the ideal designer can induce mass hallucinations.

The best place to learn about hallucinations is religion, though there are important things to learn from theater and magic as well.
1) Set aside a meeting time regular intervals, a few days apart so that the message we're repeating gets rejuvenated just as it's about to be forgotten.
2) Bring a bunch of people together physically, and use some passionate rhetoric, interpersonal drama, or other means to bind them emotionally so they'll all trust each other and feel as a community.
3) After a few weeks of meetings, have an extra-long meeting - maybe two days straight? - and pump up the energy and the abstraction of the message so that not everybody is quite following and they're struggling to imagine what you might be getting at.
4) Once everybody is out in dream-land, jump back down to a more concrete level and give a few specifics (but not as finalized or closed as a model, more like just a few attributes) so they will all be able to agree on something when discussing later.



(photos from last night's end of year show)

intelligence

From the new york times today:

The benefits of learning must have been enormous for evolution to have overcome those costs, Dr. Kawecki argues. For many animals, learning mainly offers a benefit in finding food or a mate. But humans also live in complex societies where learning has benefits, as well.

“If you’re using your intelligence to outsmart your group, then there’s an arms race,” Dr. Kawecki said. “So there’s no absolute optimal level. You just have to be smarter than the others.”

As is said of biologists earlier in this article, I've often asked myself why humans are so damn intelligent. This gives the most poignant answer I've seen so far: not to outsmart the environment so much as to outsmart each other.