http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/12/freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker//freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker-prospect-magazine John Gray on Freud (the last great Enlightenment thinker?) http://t.co/cKMdkDWl ]]> Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:07:00 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/12/freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker//freud-the-last-great-enlightenment-thinker-prospect-magazine http://www.next-gen.biz/opinion/opinion-games-cant-tell-stories Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator. There is no inevitability or sense of being powerless. And the story cannot have the player’s full attention. So a videogame Hamlet is just a guy running around a castle flipping switches and collecting items to kill his uncle, the big boss at the end. All those speeches just get in the way. The player is not treading the boards at the Old Vic. He’s solving problems, taking action, creating… ]]> Thu, 24 Nov 2011 03:53:57 -0700 http://www.next-gen.biz/opinion/opinion-games-cant-tell-stories http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us. Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The… ]]> Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:32:53 -0700 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review//untitled John Gray vs Steven Pinker : Evolutionary psychology is mere speculation http://t.co/tfJcvHD5 #fb ]]> Thu, 06 Oct 2011 02:37:06 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2011/09/john-gray-steven-pinker-violence-review//untitled http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/blame-it-on-andy/ Being human offers homo sapiens variety, or some elasticity, in social life, though sociologists claim that people’s personalities disappear with no one else around. Imagining this evacuation, I see a person alone in a self-chosen shelter, motionless on a chair, like a houseplant with prehensile thumbs. ]]> Thu, 29 Sep 2011 03:55:48 -0700 http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/blame-it-on-andy/ http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/10416268270/steven-pinker-on-the-history-and-decline-of Some of the evidence has been under our nose all along. Conventional history has long shown that, in many ways, we have been getting kinder and gentler. Cruelty as entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, conquest as the mission statement of government, genocide as a means of acquiring real estate, torture and mutilation as routine punishment, the death penalty for misdemeanors and differences of opinion, assassination as the mechanism of political succession, rape as the spoils of war, pogroms as outlets for frustration, homicide as the major form of conflict resolution—all were unexceptionable features of… ]]> Tue, 20 Sep 2011 03:05:16 -0700 http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/10416268270/steven-pinker-on-the-history-and-decline-of http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/?pagination=false Most of the time Google does not actually have the answers. When people say, “I looked it up on Google,” they are committing a solecism. When they try to erase their embarrassing personal histories “on Google,” they are barking up the wrong tree. It is seldom right to say that anything is true “according to Google.” Google is the oracle of redirection. Go there for “hamadryad,” and it points you to Wikipedia. Or the Free Online Dictionary. Or the Official Hamadryad Web Site (it’s a rock band, too, wouldn’t you know). Google defines its mission as “to organize the world’s… ]]> Sun, 31 Jul 2011 18:17:11 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/aug/18/how-google-dominates-us/?pagination=false http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/are-artists-liars Shortly before his death, Marlon Brando was working on a series of instructional videos about acting, to be called “Lying for a Living”. On the surviving footage, Brando can be seen dispensing gnomic advice on his craft to a group of enthusiastic, if somewhat bemused, Hollywood stars, including Leonardo Di Caprio and Sean Penn. Brando also recruited random people from the Los Angeles street and persuaded them to improvise (the footage is said to include a memorable scene featuring two dwarves and a giant Samoan). “If you can lie, you can act,” Brando told Jod Kaftan, a writer for Rolling… ]]> Thu, 02 Jun 2011 03:55:27 -0700 http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/are-artists-liars http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-illusion-of-being-observed-can-make-you-better-person A group of scientists at Newcastle University, headed by Melissa Bateson and Daniel Nettle of the Center for Behavior and Evolution, conducted a field experiment demonstrating that merely hanging up posters of staring human eyes is enough to significantly change people’s behavior. Over the course of 32 days, the scientists spent many hours recording customer’s “littering behavior” in their university’s main cafeteria, counting the number of people that cleaned up after themselves after they had finished their meals. In their study, the researchers determined the effect of the eyes on individual behavior by controlling for several conditions (e.g. posters with… ]]> Wed, 11 May 2011 03:14:15 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-the-illusion-of-being-observed-can-make-you-better-person http://huffduffer.com/jshield/40206 Eleanor Longden started to hear voices in her head when she was at university and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic - a label she totally rejects. Now she is a high achieving academic. What started the voices and how did she get to a point where she not only lives happily with the voices that still exist but also works with others who have the same experience? With contributions from writer Graham Linehan and comedian Josie Long. ]]> Sun, 01 May 2011 11:43:38 -0700 http://huffduffer.com/jshield/40206 http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/death-anxiety-shapes-views-on-evolution-29580/ It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this knowledge gap, newly published research suggests the key factor isn’t faith per se but rather a benefit it provides that Darwin does not: A sense that our all-too-short lives have meaning.
A Canadian study just published in the journal PLoS ONE finds a strong link between existential angst and reluctance to embrace the theory of evolution. A team of researchers led by University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica… ]]> Thu, 07 Apr 2011 03:39:19 -0700 http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/death-anxiety-shapes-views-on-evolution-29580/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/24/can-brain-explain-your-mind/?pagination=false Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on—are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of… ]]> Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:30:37 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/24/can-brain-explain-your-mind/?pagination=false http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/humans_version_3.0 This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep respect for our powers is sometimes lacking in the sciences, where many are taught to believe that our brains and bodies are taped-together, far-from-optimal kluges. In this view, natural selection is so riddled by accidents and saddled with developmental constraints that the resultant biological hardware and software should be described as a “just good enough” solution rather than as a “fine-tuned machine.” So it is no wonder that, when many… ]]> Sat, 05 Mar 2011 05:01:30 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/humans_version_3.0 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/100216 Swimming around in a mixture of language and matter, humans occupy a particular evolutionary niche mediated by something we call 'consciousness'. To Professor Nicholas Humphrey we're made up of "soul dust": "a kind of theatre... an entertainment which we put on for ourselves inside our own heads." But just as that theatre is directed by the relationship between language and matter, it is also undermined by it. It all depends how you think it. ]]> Fri, 04 Feb 2011 03:46:10 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/100216 http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9373000/9373317.stm Neuroscientists have yet to find anything in the brain they are happy calling consciousness, and philosophers are far from agreement over a way of talking about what happens after we wake up.
Undaunted by history, one psychologist believes he has the answer. The problem, says Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, is that people have been looking in the wrong place.

"Scientists and philosophers have assumed all along that consciousness is somehow helping us think better, somehow improving our intelligence or our cognitive skills," he says.
Consciousness, he argues in his… ]]> Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:59:51 -0700 http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9373000/9373317.stm http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks?currentPage=all We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.
]]> Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:17:38 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks?currentPage=all http://www.slate.com/id/2280097 The number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the public's fascination with them. "It does seem the golden age of serial murderers is probably past," says Harold Schechter, a professor at Queens College of the City University of New York who studies crime.
Statistics on serial murder are hard to come by—the FBI doesn't keep numbers, according to a spokeswoman—but the data we do have suggests serial murders peaked in the 1980s and have been declining ever since. James Alan Fox, a criminology professor at Northeastern University and co-author of Extreme Killing: Understanding Serial and Mass… ]]> Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:55:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2280097 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in either an oxygenated, clear state or an algae-dominated, murky one. A financial market can float on a housing bubble or settle into a basin of recession. Conventionally, we’ve tended to view the transition between such states as gradual. But there is increasing evidence that systems often don’t respond to change in a smooth way: The clear lake seems hardly affected by fertilizer runoff until a critical threshold is passed,… ]]> Thu, 16 Dec 2010 04:09:00 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience/ http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html We're hard-wired to turn our lives into stories - how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating

"We are our narratives" has become a popular slogan. "We" refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. "Narratives" refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in that constant little inner voice. The full collection of one's… ]]> Thu, 25 Nov 2010 09:29:00 -0700 http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/culturelab/2010/11/storytelling-20-when-new-narratives-meet-old-brains.html http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man's first baby steps into the universe -- a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there's a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.

When the surviving astronaut, Bowman,… ]]> Fri, 19 Nov 2010 03:29:00 -0700 http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0069.html