Pensive Reason

"….in a post-Singularity society the key concern becomes the protection of individual identity,..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 23:08:40 -0400

“….in a post-Singularity society the key concern becomes the protection of individual identity, because infinite access to information tends to make everything bleed into everything else.”

- The robot threat: In the long run, we are telepathic androids | The Economist (via wildcat2030)

philotical: Neil deGrasse Tyson: Want Scientifically Literate...

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:49:59 -0400

philotical: Neil deGrasse Tyson: Want Scientifically Literate Children? Get Out of Their Way.

We spend the first year teaching children to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

Transcript— I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice. Get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don’t care about your economic background. I don’t care what town you’re born in, what city, what country. If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.

And so then so what do adults do? They say, “Don’t pluck the petals off the flowers. I just spent money on that. Don’t play with the egg. It might break. Don’t….” Everything is a don’t. We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

So you get out of their way. And you know what you do? You put things in their midst that help them explore. Help ‘em explore. Why don’t you get a pair of binoculars, just leave it there one day? Watch ‘em pick it up. And watch ‘em look around. They’ll do all kinds of things with it.

For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn’t just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive. Not the full moon because there are no shadows cast when the moon is full; got to wait for it to be half moon or crescent moon, and look at the edge between light and dark with a simple pair of binoculars.

I was transformed by picking up a pair of binoculars and looking up, and that’s hard to do for a city kid because when you look up you just see buildings — and really your first thought is to look in people’s windows. So to look out of the space — out of living space — and look up to the sky, binoculars go far, literally and figuratively. That’s what got me started on the universe. It might get some kids you know started the same way.

—Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler & Elizabeth Rodd—

A Momentary Flow: Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong-The philosopher's critique of evolution wasn't shocking. So why is he being raked over the...

Tue, 14 May 2013 23:37:57 -0400

A Momentary Flow: Where Thomas Nagel Went Wrong-The philosopher's critique of evolution wasn't shocking. So why is he being raked over the...:

wildcat2030 See on Scoop.it - Philosophy everywhere everywhen

The philosopher’s critique of evolution wasn’t shocking. So why have his colleagues raked him over the coals?

Thomas Nagel is a leading figure in philosophy, now enjoying the title of university professor at New York University, a…

neuromorphogenesis: What does it mean to be...

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:47:46 -0400

neuromorphogenesis: What does it mean to be posthuman?

Bioscience and medical technology are propelling us beyond the old human limits. Are Extremes and The Posthuman good guides to this frontier?

HOW would you like to be a posthuman? You know, a person who has gone beyond the “maximum attainable capacities by any current human being without recourse to new technological means”, as philosopher Nick Bostrum of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford so carefully described it in a recent paper.

In other words, a superbeing by today’s standards. If this sounds like hyperbole, bear with me. Behind the jargon lies a fascinating, troubling idea. We’re not just talking about someone like Olympic runner Oscar Pistorius, who is augmented with technology to compensate for his disabilities and thus can outrun many able-bodied Olympians.

No, we mean people who, through genetic manipulation, the use of stem cells, or other biointervention, have had their ability to remain healthy and active extended beyond what we would consider normal. Their cognitive powers (memory, deductive thought and other intellectual capabilities, as well as their artistic and creative powers) would far outstrip our own.

Is it possible to imagine such humans without recourse to science fiction clichés? And if we can, how would they affect how we see ourselves – and each other? Would they change how we treat each other? Or create a society you would actually want to live in?

If this seems a stretch, consider this: preimplantation genetic diagnosis already lets us screen out some genetic abnormalities in our IVF offspring. And as evidence mounts for genetic components to the physical and cognitive traits we consider desirable, “designer” babies are surely plausible.

Then again, imagine if you were alive 150 years ago, and someone described life as it is today. Life expectancy then was a mere 40 years on average, with a few lucky individuals making it to 75 or more, though they would likely have succumbed to the first harsh illness they faced. Today, average life expectancy in rich countries hovers around 80; death and disease have all but disappeared from view, mostly into hospitals and hospices.

Our expectations of our bodies, their functional capacity and their term of service, are profoundly different from those of people living in the mid-19th century and, in the great scheme of things, that is a mere blink of an eye.

Have we reached a natural limit, or is there further to go? In his new book,Extremes, Kevin Fong, anaesthetist, part-time TV presenter and science cheerleader, recounts how maverick doctors exploring the extremes of our physiology have produced some amazing medical advances, giving us powers to suspend, control and augment life in ways that would have looked miraculous to our 19th-century counterparts.

Take one of Fong’s examples, the practice of controlled cooling of core body temperature before certain types of surgery. In heart surgery, it prolongs the time surgeons have to operate before brain damage is irreversible. The patient’s heart is stopped, they are not breathing: to all intents and purposes, they are dead. Yet if reheated in the right way, with appropriate life support, they will awake as if from a deep sleep.

Just a few decades ago, a cold, pulseless, breathless body would be considered dead immediately, let alone after 45 minutes of suspended animation. Yet now we can snatch the patient back from the brink, blurring the line between life and death.

Advances in intensive care medicine, too, have endowed doctors with spectacular powers that effectively allow them to take complete control of the most fundamental parts of a patient’s physiology: their breathing, heart function and the chemical composition of their blood. Fong eloquently outlines the history of such advances, reminding us how experiments by plastic surgeons on second world war burns victims effectively paved the way for the first full-face transplants earlier this century.

He ends by devoting a couple of chapters to his other love, space exploration and the fate of the body out there. Astronauts, for example, lose muscle bulk and bone density in the gravity-free environment, and protecting them against this is no mean feat. Then there’s the even greater problem of protecting the body from cosmic radiation – a role Earth’s natural magnetic field does for us quite nicely.

The book is a heady ride through a cherry-picked crop of impressive discoveries in science and medicine, all of them made when the human body was pushed to what we now think of as its limits. And Fong weaves in his own personal experiences so that in places it feels like a thinly veiled autobiography. He’s had an impressive career so far (he’s only just 42), working for NASA on space medicine, and as medic to a diving expedition. But you do occasionally wonder if some of this was written to impress his mates from university: it can all seem very Boy’s Own.

He does admit, however, that most of the improvements in life expectancy have been due to public health measures rather than high-tech medicine. His claim that the war between bugs and humans is won seems premature, especially in view of the growing disquiet among experts in infectious diseases that epidemics caused by antibiotic-resistant bugs are imminent: in the case of gonorrhoea it may already have begun.

Extremes is entertaining, informative, but intellectually lightweight. While Fong does attempt to draw together some of the threads in his book, instead of deep analysis of these undeniably revolutionary changes, we find trite comments about the human imperative to explore both outer space, and the inner space of our bodies “because we must”.

At the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum is The Posthuman, by philosopher and cultural theorist Rosi Braidotti. She could never be accused of triteness: her charge is one of incomprehensibility, since her language is dense and littered with allusions that make sense only to social science cognoscenti. It can sometimes sap the life out of what should have been a fascinating read.

Bodies remade

That said, when clear, Braidotti is bracing. Her central argument is that medical science and biotechnology are fast remaking how we view our bodies, that they are becoming commodities to be traded. This matters greatly because it affects what we think is possible and reasonable to do to a person/body, and therefore has deep consequences for the moral and ethical dimensions of our choices in life. Poor women in India who rent their wombs out to rich families from developed countries are one manifestation; egg and sperm donors another.

Whatever your views on this, these practices can only increase. If you accept that our moral codes reflect to a fair degree the depth of our knowledge of contemporary issues at any one time, then just as our view of homosexuality morphed from repugnance to acceptance in under a century, so the multiple ways in which we can meddle with the body are likely to become the norm in the near future.

But there’s an important proviso: these changes are happening dangerously fast, and will revolutionise all our lives, for good or ill. From Fong’s “extreme bodies” to Braidotti’s “bodies in extremis”, the discussion is too important to be left to academics. To get the right briefing for this new frontier, we need someone with Fong’s communication skills and Braidotti’s intellectual insight and gravitas to write a book to enlighten the rest of us.

This article appeared in print under the headline “What’s death got to do with it?”

The Case for Evolution

Tue, 14 May 2013 09:41:32 -0400

The Case for Evolution:

evilzezao: Roger Darlington argues about evolution and why it’s a evident FACT. Creationists should just accept reality and start to contribute to the knowledge gathered after so many years of evidence gathering and analisys.

Even if there may be some shady points in this huge and complex scientific theory, one can contribute do debunk still unnacurate data and boost areas in need of this revealing theory, such as medicine, pharmacy, physiotherapy and so on.

raw-r-evolution: neurosciencestuff: The Man Behind the Google...

Tue, 14 May 2013 00:52:36 -0400

raw-r-evolution: neurosciencestuff:

The Man Behind the Google Brain: Andrew Ng and the Quest for the New AI

There’s a theory that human intelligence stems from a single algorithm.

The idea arises from experiments suggesting that the portion of your brain dedicated to processing sound from your ears could also handle sight for your eyes. This is possible only while your brain is in the earliest stages of development, but it implies that the brain is — at its core — a general-purpose machine that can be tuned to specific tasks.

About seven years ago, Stanford computer science professor Andrew Ng stumbled across this theory, and it changed the course of his career, reigniting a passion for artificial intelligence, or AI. “For the first time in my life,” Ng says, “it made me feel like it might be possible to make some progress on a small part of the AI dream within our lifetime.”

In the early days of artificial intelligence, Ng says, the prevailing opinion was that human intelligence derived from thousands of simple agents working in concert, what MIT’s Marvin Minsky called “The Society of Mind.” To achieve AI, engineers believed, they would have to build and combine thousands of individual computing modules. One agent, or algorithm, would mimic language. Another would handle speech. And so on. It seemed an insurmountable feat.

When he was a kid, Andrew Ng dreamed of building machines that could think like people, but when he got to college and came face-to-face with the AI research of the day, he gave up. Later, as a professor, he would actively discourage his students from pursuing the same dream. But then he ran into the “one algorithm” hypothesis, popularized by Jeff Hawkins, an AI entrepreneur who’d dabbled in neuroscience research. And the dream returned.

It was a shift that would change much more than Ng’s career. Ng now leads a new field of computer science research known as Deep Learning, which seeks to build machines that can process data in much the same way the brain does, and this movement has extended well beyond academia, into big-name corporations like Google and Apple. In tandem with other researchers at Google, Ng is building one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date, the so-called Google Brain.

This movement seeks to meld computer science with neuroscience — something that never quite happened in the world of artificial intelligence. “I’ve seen a surprisingly large gulf between the engineers and the scientists,” Ng says. Engineers wanted to build AI systems that just worked, he says, but scientists were still struggling to understand the intricacies of the brain. For a long time, neuroscience just didn’t have the information needed to help improve the intelligent machines engineers wanted to build.

What’s more, scientists often felt they “owned” the brain, so there was little collaboration with researchers in other fields, says Bruno Olshausen, a computational neuroscientist and the director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley.

The end result is that engineers started building AI systems that didn’t necessarily mimic the way the brain operated. They focused on building pseudo-smart systems that turned out to be more like a Roomba vacuum cleaner than Rosie the robot maid from the Jetsons.

But, now, thanks to Ng and others, this is starting to change. “There is a sense from many places that whoever figures out how the brain computes will come up with the next generation of computers,” says Dr. Thomas Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health.

Read more

awe man, I knew it. Make an AI and make the internet its brain o.O

ikenbot: The Super Massive Black Hole of Sagittarius...

Mon, 13 May 2013 23:05:56 -0400

ikenbot: The Super Massive Black Hole of Sagittarius A*

Astronomers using Herschel have spotted a cloud of incredibly hot gas very close to the supermassive black hole that lies at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.

The supermassive black hole goes by the name of Sagittarius A*, and weighs in at 4 million times the mass of our Sun. It is nearly 30,000 light years away at the very centre of our galaxy, but is still hundreds of times closer than other such black holes, which are usually found at the centres of large galaxies.

Its relative proximity makes it the ideal target for studying these extreme environments in detail, though our view is often obscured by dense clouds of dust draped throughout the Milky Way. By studying it in far-infrared light, Herschel can see through this dust and examine the surroundings of the black hole itself. The black hole is surrounded by a ring of gas around 30 light years across, but right in the centre is a mini spiral of gas flowing inwards.

Herschel observations taken in 2011 and 2012 allowed astronomers to examine the region within around a light year of the black hole itself. The data showed the presence of elements such as carbon, nitrogen and oxygen, as well as simple molecules including water, carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide.

"By and large, we accept the use of animals as objects and tools. Sixty-two percent of Americans..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 22:08:08 -0400

“

By and large, we accept the use of animals as objects and tools. Sixty-two percent of Americans surveyed in a Gallup poll, for example, deemed it “morally acceptable” to use animals for medical research, and despite the growth of the animal rights movement, there aren’t many vegetarians. And what does a T-bone steak represent if not a reduction of an animal to parts, to its instrumental value? There are issues with farming, of course, especially the industrial-scale factory farming that is the norm today. But whatever our objection to the system itself, the truth is that most of us accept the idea that we can use an animal’s body to nourish our own.

For most of us, then, the real ethical question surrounding [genetically engineered] pharm animals comes down to the genetic engineering itself. Is there something about editing DNA and remixing biological material that is just inherently wrong? …critics of biotechnology worry that breaching species barriers violates the rules of God or nature or both.

…These interspecies combinations can raise unfortunate existential questions, threatening our sense of uniqueness. If we can make our cells spring to life in a sheep or make a piece of our biological code work in a beady-eyed little rodent, what is it, exactly, that separates man from beast?

”

- Emily Anthes, pondering several questions about what really bothers people about genetic engineering. We live in a world where we can make goats that can produce antimicrobial milk, clone farm animals and pets, buy aquarium fish that are part jellyfish, and raise genetically-mutated mice to model our own medicine.

If you’re interested in the technology, ethics or future questions and answers surrounding genetically engineering animals, I highly recommend checking out Emily’s new book, Frankenstein’s Cat.

(via jtotheizzoe)

A Momentary Flow: Complexes: New Paper: The Dynamically Extended Mind -- A Minimal Modeling Case Study

Sat, 11 May 2013 00:43:45 -0400

A Momentary Flow: Complexes: New Paper: The Dynamically Extended Mind -- A Minimal Modeling Case Study:

wildcat2030: spaceweaver: See on Scoop.it - Global Brain

See on complexes.blogspot.mx

The extended mind hypothesis has stimulated much interest in cognitive science. However, its core claim, i.e. that the process of cognition can extend beyond the brain via the body and into the…

Photo

Fri, 10 May 2013 22:02:35 -0400

spaceplasma: Planck and the Cosmic microwave background The...

Fri, 10 May 2013 22:00:33 -0400

spaceplasma: Planck and the Cosmic microwave background

The anisotropies of the Cosmic microwave background (CMB) as observed by Planck. The CMB is a snapshot of the oldest light in our Universe, imprinted on the sky when the Universe was just 380 000 years old. It shows tiny temperature fluctuations that correspond to regions of slightly different densities, representing the seeds of all future structure: the stars and galaxies of today.

Credit: ESA

spaceplasma: Cosmos Will Get a Sequel Hosted by Neil deGrasse...

Fri, 10 May 2013 19:12:41 -0400

spaceplasma: Cosmos Will Get a Sequel Hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson

More than three decades after it aired, Carl Sagan’s groundbreaking, brilliant 13-part TV series Cosmos:A Personal Voyage will finally get a sequel.

Cosmos, which originally ran in 1980 and was rerun many times over the following decade, is widely regarded as one of the first, and best, TV shows to make science accessible to everyone. You can watch the show now on Hulu, but despite its brilliance it is still a show from more than 30 years ago, and you can tell — the special effects are primitive by today’s standards, but more importantly some of the content has been superseded by discoveries in the intervening years.

So, it’s high time someone made a sequel to it, and now someone is! In partnership with Sagan’s colleagues Ann Druyan (who is also his widow) and Steven Soter, Seth MacFarlane — yes, that Seth MacFarlane — is going to produce a new 13-part series to serve as a sequel and modern update to Sagan’s masterpiece.

Taking over the hosting duties will be none other than well-known astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has served as host of NOVA ScienceNOW on PBS for the past five years, so he has plenty of experience making science accessible to the general public. It would be difficult to think of anyone who would be better able to succeed the late, great Carl Sagan.

The folks working on it will take their time and do it right — it’s not scheduled to air until sometime in 2014.

The producers of the show say the new series will tell “the story of how human beings began to comprehend the laws of nature and find our place in space and time.” They go on to boast: “It will take viewers to other worlds and travel across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience.”

That’s the good news. The bad — or at least, potentially bad — news is that, because of MacFarlane’s involvement, the series will air in prime time, and on Fox.

Now, in one way I’m all for showing it in prime time on a major network, because it’ll be that much more likely that people who routinely ignore the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel and, yes, PBS will actually see it.

I’m less thrilled, though, that it will have to compete with other, more mainstream prime-time shows — and it’ll be on Fox, which doesn’t have the greatest track record for giving shows a chance to pull their ratings up once they go down.

Now, maybe the fact that MacFarlane is involved — and Joss Whedon isn’t — will help. I certainly hope so.

You can find out more about the plans for the series.

laboratoryequipment: Exotic Atoms Shed Light on Physics Puzzle...

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:41:45 -0400

laboratoryequipment:

Exotic Atoms Shed Light on Physics Puzzle from Dawn of Universe

An international team of physicists has found the first direct evidence of pear shaped nuclei in exotic atoms.

The findings could advance the search for a new fundamental force in nature that could explain why the Big Bang created more matter than antimatter—a pivotal imbalance in the history of everything.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/05/exotic-atoms-shed-light-physics-puzzle-dawn-universe

A meditation on what we’d live for if we could live forever,...

Thu, 09 May 2013 01:04:22 -0400

A meditation on what we’d live for if we could live forever, from Neil deGrasse Tyson (via explore-blog):

Be like the mayfly – in this short and lovely meditation on life and longevity, the one and only Neil deGrasse Tyson adds to other famous reflections on the meaning of life.

Also see Tolstoy’s Calendar of Wisdom.

(↬ swissmiss)

Like the Avett Brothers sing, “we only get so many days…”

So make ‘em count.

Bonus points for connecting my favorite band to my favorite astrophysicist!!

internet Rising: documentary film { edu-info-tainment }

Wed, 08 May 2013 14:19:55 -0400

internet Rising: documentary film { edu-info-tainment }

Opabinia (Opabinia regalis) another unique arthropod from the...

Wed, 08 May 2013 01:33:59 -0400

Opabinia (Opabinia regalis) another unique arthropod from the Cambrian period, noted for its five eyes and proboscis.

From David Attenbrough’s First Life watch it like right now!

"When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in..."

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:40:22 -0400

“When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.”

- Jonathan Swift, Abolishing Christianity and Other Essays (via dearscience)

When science goes silent: With the muzzling of scientists,...

Wed, 08 May 2013 00:32:37 -0400

When science goes silent: With the muzzling of scientists, Harper’s obsession with controlling the message verges on the Orwellian @ Macleans

Morality, Religion and Science - He studies where morals come from

Tue, 07 May 2013 13:20:00 -0400

By Kelly Murray, CNN

updated 10:25 AM EDT, Tue May 7, 2013 [source]

Click HERE for video.

(CNN) — Being nice to others and cooperating with them aren’t uniquely human traits. Frans de Waal, director of Emory University’s Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Lawrenceville, Georgia, studies how our close primate relatives also demonstrate behaviors suggestive of a sense of morality.

De Waal recently published a book called “The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates,” which synthesizes evidence that there are biological roots in human fairness, and explores what that means for the role of religion in human societies. CNN’s Kelly Murray recently spoke with De Waal about the book.

More about de Waal’s research

CNN’s Kelly Murray: Tell us about the title of your book.

Frans de Waal: Well, the reason I chose that title is, when I bring up the origins of morality, it revolves around God, or comes from religion, and I want to address the issue that I think morality is actually older than religion. So I’m getting into the religion question, and how important is religion for morality. I think it plays a role, but it’s a secondary role. Instead of being the source of morality, religion came later, maybe to fortify morality.

CNN: How would you say that ethics or morality is separate from religion?

De Waal: Well, I think that morality is older. In the sense that I find it very hard to believe that 100,000 or 200,000 years ago, our ancestors did not believe in right and wrong, and did not punish bad behavior, did not care about fairness. Very long ago our ancestors had moral systems. Our current institutions are only a couple of thousand years old, which is really not old in the eyes of a biologist. So I think religion came after morality. Religion may have become a codification of morality, and it may fortify it, but it’s not the origin of it.

CNN: Why do people need religion?

De Waal: Well, that’s a good question. I’m struggling with that. I’m personally a nonbeliever, so I’m struggling with if we really need religion. … I’m from the Netherlands, where 60% of the people are nonbelievers. So in northern Europe, there are actually experiments going on now with societies that are more secular, to see if we can maintain a moral society that way, and for the moment I would say that experiment is going pretty well. … Personally I think it is possible to build a society that is moral on a nonreligious basis, but the jury is still out on that.

CNN: So do you believe that people are generally good?

De Waal: Yeah, my view is that you have two (kinds of) people in the world. You have people who think that we are inherently bad and evil and selfish, but with a lot of hard work we can be good, and you have other people like myself who believe that we are inherently good. There’s a lot of evidence on the primates that I can use to support that idea that we are inherently good, but on occasion when we get too competitive or frustrated, we turn bad.

CNN: So when the stakes are higher for survival, we’re more individualistic than group-oriented?

De Waal: Oh no, we very much survive by group life. Humans are not able to survive alone. For example, solitary confinement is one of the worst punishments we can give. We are not really made to live alone, we would not survive, and so when things get tough we would actually come together more and be more social when things get tough.

CNN: Can you talk about how being nice to another individual helps you?

De Waal: Sometimes people put that in a very narrow sense, and they say that everything that humans do or that animals do needs to have a payoff, but that’s not true. The example … of adoption of children, I basically think it’s a costly act with no payoff, and these things happen in animals also.

Animals sometimes help each other even between species. Dolphins may help human swimmers, and I don’t think the dolphins get much out of it. So individual acts don’t necessarily need to have a payoff. So they are not selfishly motivated.

They are really altruistic, but you have the tendency to help, and to have empathy for others in general, on the average, is beneficial. Because you live in a group, you depend on these others, so you need to care about these others also because your survival depends on group life, and so there is some sort of general payoff, but people often think in terms of each individual act needs to (reap) some benefit but that’s not necessarily true.

CNN: Tell us more about the origins of empathy.

De Waal: We think that the origin of empathy, in the mammals at least, has to do with maternal care. So a female, whether you’re a mouse or an elephant, you need to pay attention to your offspring, you need to react to their emotions when they’re cold, or in danger, or hungry, and that’s where we think the sensitivity to others’ emotions come from.

That also explains why empathy is more developed in females than males, which is true in many animals, and it’s true for humans, and it explains the role of oxytocin. Oxytocin is a maternal hormone. If you spray oxytocin into the nostrils of men and women, you get more empathic (empathetic) reactions from them, and so the general thinking about empathy is that it started in the mammals with maternal care, and then from there it spread to other relationships. So men can definitely have empathy, but they on average have a little bit less of it than women.

CNN: By empathy, you mean that they feel each others’ pain?

De Waal: Well, feeling someone else’s joy is also empathy. Being affected by the laugh, as humans are, is a form of empathy. So empathy basically says that you’re sensitive to the emotions of others and react to the emotions of others.

Sympathy is a bit more complicated. Sympathy is that you want to take action. You want to help somebody else who’s in trouble. So sympathy is a bit more specific, it’s a bit more action-oriented. Empathy is just a sensitivity. Empathy is not necessarily positive. If someone wants to sell you a bad car for a high price, he also needs to empathize with you in order to get you to buy it. So empathy can be used for good purposes; I think most of the time it is, but it is not always used for good purposes.

CNN: In your book, you talk about a female primate who is crouching down giving birth while the rest of the group gathers around, and one of the other females is crouching and acting like the one giving birth. Would that be an example of empathy?

De Waal: Yeah, that’s an act of mimicry and synchronization, which is the first form of empathy. If you talk with a sad person, you’re going to have a sad expression on your face. You’re going to feel sad very soon. That is the body channel of empathy. You synchronize with the other, and that female in the birthing scenario was synchronizing with the other. It’s a very early form of empathy; we call it “modes of mimicry,” when you do the same thing as somebody else. The body channel of empathy is very important to us and we rely on it every day. If you talk with people and you adopt their facial expressions, they will be laughing, you will be laughing, and so on.

CNN: Different cultures of humans have different ideas about morality. Is it the same way in primates? Do different groups of primates have different cultures and ways of interacting with each other?

De Waal: We do think that primates have different cultures. One group behaves quite differently from another one. I’m not sure that I would say they have different moralities, but they may have different styles of interacting. But (with) the human variation in morality, one society may have different moral rules than another one.

In our current society in the U.S. we have debates about gay marriage, abortion - we have a lot of moral debates going on, and years from now we will believe different things from what we believe now, and so morality changes as a result of society, and that means you should not look for specifics of your morality in biology.

Biology provides some of the general primate psychology that we have, like pro-social tendencies, sense of fairness, following rules. Our primate background provides that kind of thing, but the specific rules that our society adopts are not contained in biology, and sometimes people confuse that when I say that morality is contained in our biology, that every rule we follow has to come out of biology. I don’t think it works that way. I think that we have general tendencies that come from our primate ancestors, and we turn that into our moral system that is suitable to our way of living.

CNN: Is there anything we can learn from animals about how to live a good life?

De Waal: I don’t think I can give you specific lessons for your life out of my animal studies, but I do think the animal studies have some sort of general message that is important.

Instead of looking at human morality as something we design in our heads — the philosophers want us to believe that by logic and reasoning we arrive at moral principles — I think it works very differently. We have a lot of feelings and tendencies that drive us to moral solutions, and yes, we often then later try to justify these solutions and come up with reasons for them, but that’s often secondarily.

In primate behavior we can see they have a sense of fairness. They have empathy: they enforce rules among themselves, they can delay gratification and they can control their impulses. So many of these tendencies that go into our moralities can be found in other animals, but instead of them coming from logic and reasoning, they actually come from our primate psychology most of the time.

[source]

Try to explain any philosophical “ism” to your friend or...

Tue, 07 May 2013 04:33:30 -0400

Try to explain any philosophical “ism” to your friend or colleague. Unless you’re both scholars, you probably can’t do so easily. London-based graphic designer Genís Carreras wants to make it easier for us to talk philosophy, so he’s removing words all together and replacing them with pictures in his postcard and book project Philographics.

Carreras takes larger-than-life ideas and visualizes them, reducing the coursework of collegiate studies into basic colors and shapes. What’s left are minimal yet clever illustrations, like two overlapping circles (dualism), two different colored heart shapes on a yellow background (existentialism), and layered blue circles with a white dot in the middle (deductionism), that help your brain fill in the rest of the concept after reading the short description.

Philographics started out with 26 posters and has since grown to 95 designs and a highly funded Kickstarter campaign that still has two weeks until its end. His first illustration was for determinism, done when he had the idea to show the theory using cascading dominoes. That sparked the idea to make the project into a journal to explain philosophy to a younger, more visually literate audience. While Carreras is a philosophy buff, he realizes many people now see the theories as archaic ideas only uttered in lecture halls.

“I wanted to make philosophy look better, to feel more contemporary and relevant,” Carreras says. “For me shapes and colors are a way to communicate, a way that can break through language and age barriers. As a graphic designer, this is the only way I knew.” (via Explaining Complicated Philosophies With Gorgeously Simple Postcards | Wired Design | Wired.com)