“What makes somebody who they are?” In other words, what makes it right to say of somebody who occupied my body and went by my name last month that they are the same person as I am now? Anyway, don’t we also want to say that I am not morally responsible for the actions that “I” performed as, say, a 4 year old? […]

Some of the main (wrong) answers are: Physical Continuity (disproof: I do not have any of the same cells or matter that I did one year ago), Memory (disproof: I can remember being 10 but not 5, yet when I was 10 I could remember being 5), and Psychological Continuity (disproof: I am not the same person that went by my name as a child; I am not guilt-worthy and praise-worthy for his crimes and achievements, yet there is psychological continuity between us).

{ Big Think | Continue reading }

photo { Bruce Nauman, Failing to Levitate in My Studio, 1966 }

The economics of “happiness” shares a feature with behavioral economics that raises questions about its usefulness in public policy analysis. What happiness economists call “habituation” refers to the fact that people’s reported well-being reverts to a base level, even after major life events such as a disabling injury or winning the lottery. What behavioral economists call “projection bias” refers to the fact that people systematically mistake current circumstances for permanence, buying too much food if shopping while hungry for example. Habituation means happiness does not react to long-term changes, and projection bias means happiness over-reacts to temporary changes. I demonstrate this outcome by combining responses to happiness questions with information about air quality and weather on the day and in the place where those questions were asked. The current day’s air quality affects happiness while the local annual average does not. Interpreted literally, either the value of air quality is not measurable using the happiness approach or air quality has no value. Interpreted more generously, projection bias saves happiness economics from habituation, enabling its use in public policy.

{ National Bureau of Economic Research }

Every word in this sentence is a gross misspelling of the word “tomato.” –Doug Hofstadter

[…]

There is a well-known joke about Talmudic interpretation. A Jew is talking to his Rabbi.


Rabbi,” the man said, “Explain the Talmud to me.”


“Very well,” he said. “First, I will ask you a question. If two men climb up a chimney and one comes out dirty, and one comes out clean, which one washes himself?”


“The dirty one,” answers the man.


“No. They look at each other and the dirty man thinks he is clean and the clean man thinks he is dirty, therefore, the clean man washes himself.”


“Now, another question:
If two men climb up a chimney and one comes out dirty, and one comes out clean, which one washes himself?”


The man smiles and says, “You just told me, Rabbi. The man who is clean washes himself because he thinks he is dirty.”


“No,” says the Rabbi. “If they each look at themselves, the clean man knows he doesn’t have to wash himself, so the dirty man washes himself. Now, one more question. 
If two men climb up a chimney and one comes out dirty, and one comes out clean, which one washes himself?”


”I don’t know, Rabbi. Depending on your point of view, it could be either one.”


Again the Rabbi says, “No. If two men climb up a chimney, how could one man remain clean? They both are dirty, and they both wash themselves.”


The confused man said, “Rabbi, you asked me the same question three times and you gave me three different answers. Is this some kind of a joke?”


”This is not a joke, my son. This is Talmud.”


{ 3quarksDaily | Continue reading }

art { Tim Hawkinson, Emoter, 2002 }

Many scholars have argued that Nietzsche’s dementia was caused by syphilis. A careful review of the evidence suggests that this consensus is probably incorrect. The syphilis hypothesis is not compatible with most of the evidence available. Other hypotheses – such as slowly growing right-sided retro-orbital meningioma – provide a more plausible fit to the evidence.

{ Journal of Medical Biography | PDF }

From his late 20s onward, Nietzsche experienced severe, generally right- sided headaches. He concurrently suffered a progressive loss of vision in his right eye and developed cranial nerve findings that were documented on neurological examinations in addition to a disconjugate gaze evident in photographs. His neurological findings are consistent with a right-sided frontotemporal mass. In 1889, Nietzsche also developed a new-onset mania which was followed by a dense abulia, also consistent with a large frontal tumor. […] An intracranial mass may have been the etiology of his headaches and neurological findings and the cause of his ultimate mental collapse in 1889.

{ Neurosurgery | PDF }

An open source project to combat “stylometry”, the study of attributing authorship to documents based only on the linguistic style they exhibit, is proving that it is possible to change writing style so as to evade detection.

Artificial Intelligence techniques are routinely used to detect plagiarism and recently were employed to reveal that Harry Potter author J K Rowling is indeed the author of The Cuckoo’s Calling published under the byline of Robert Galbraith.

Now software is tackling the opposite problem–anonymizing writing style to protect the identity of the originator.

{ I Programmer | Continue reading }

Running late is often referred to as a time management issue, but try thinking of it as life span management and commitment integrity. It has impact on many areas of your life but especially on your relationships. Your ability to arrive and depart according to your commitments is one of the ways people ascertain if they can rely on you or if they will respect you.

{ Max Strom | Continue reading }

In the middle of the 20th century, experimental psychologists began to notice a strange interaction between human vision and time. If they showed people flashes of light close together in time, subjects experienced the flashes as if they all occurred simultaneously. When they asked people to detect faint images, the speed of their subjects’ responses waxed and waned according to a mysterious but predictable rhythm. Taken together, the results pointed to one conclusion: that human vision operates within a particular time window – about 100 milliseconds, or one-tenth of a second.

[…] Pretty much anyone with a pair of eyes will tell you that vision feels smooth and unbroken. But is it truly as continuous as it feels, or might it occur in discrete chunks of time?

{ Garden of the Mind | Continue reading }

screenshot { Ivan Mozzhukhin, Le brasier ardent, 1923 }

Summer movies are often described as formulaic. But what few people know is that there is actually a formula—one that lays out, on a page-by-page basis, exactly what should happen when in a screenplay. It’s as if a mad scientist has discovered a secret process for making a perfect, or at least perfectly conventional, summer blockbuster.

The formula didn’t come from a mad scientist. Instead it came from a screenplay guidebook, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. In the book, author Blake Snyder, a successful spec screenwriter who became an influential screenplay guru, preaches a variant on the basic three-act structure that has dominated blockbuster filmmaking since the late 1970s. […]

Instead of a broad overview of how a screen story fits together, his book broke down the three-act structure into a detailed “beat sheet”: 15 key story “beats”—pivotal events that have to happen—and then gave each of those beats a name and a screenplay page number. Given that each page of a screenplay is expected to equal a minute of film, this makes Snyder’s guide essentially a minute-to-minute movie formula.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

photo { Ralph Crane }

For a couple years now I’ve been fascinated by some recent ideas about how complexity evolves. Darwin’s great insight was recognizing how natural selection could create complex traits. All that was needed was a series of intermediates that raised the reproductive success of organisms. But recently some researchers have developed ideas in which natural selection doesn’t play such a central role.

One idea, laid out in the book Biology’s First Law, holds that life has a built-in propensity to get more complex–even in the absence of natural selection. According to another idea, called constructive neutral evolution, mutations can change simple structures into more complex ones even if those mutations don’t provide an advantage. The scientists who are championing these ideas don’t see them as refuting natural selection, but, rather, complementing it, and enriching our understanding of how evolution works.

{ Carl Zimmer | Continue reading | More: Scientists are exploring how organisms can evolve elaborate structures without Darwinian selection }

I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.”

{ John Searle | via Open Culture | Continue reading }

Standard IQ tests are problematic on many levels — not least, because they do very little to tell us about the quality of our thinking. Looking to overcome this oversight, psychologist Keith Stanovich has started to work on the first-ever Rationality Quotient test. […]

I coined the term dysrationalia — an analogue of the word dyslexia — in the early-1990’s in order to draw attention to what is missing in IQ tests. I define dysrationalia as the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence. […] Here are some irrational thinking tendencies to consider:

▪ Physicians choose less effective medical treatments
▪ People fail to accurately assess risks in their environment
▪ Information is misused in legal proceedings
▪ Millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry
▪ Parents fail to vaccinate their children
▪ Unnecessary surgery is performed
▪ Animals are hunted to extinction
▪ Billions of dollars are wasted on quack medical remedies
▪ Costly financial misjudgments are made

{ IEET | Continue reading }

Within a week of Random House and Penguin merging to become the world’s largest books publisher with an estimated revenue of $4 billion, the aftershocks have started. The new entity, eager to cut cost and streamline operations, has asked author Vikram Seth to return his $1.7 million advance, a part of which was paid to him for A Suitable Girl, the ‘jumpsequel’ to his best-selling novel, A Suitable Boy.

Seth, one of the world’s bestloved writers, was scheduled to submit his manuscript this June but has been unable to do so, leading to the publishers’ demarche. […]

“It’s possible that Vikram Seth has not started on the book or that it’s nowhere close to completion, which explains the move.”

{ Mumbai Mirror | Continue reading }

In Kafka’s “On Parables” a skeptic says that the abstruse words of the sages cannot really solve the real-life problems we face, since we can never actually “go over” into that fully spiritual realm these words point to. A sage responds by saying (parabolically) that we can overcome all these real-life problems simply by ourselves “becoming parables.”

{ Comparative Literature and Culture | PDF }

Look around the room you are sitting in now. How many right angles can you see? Book-spines, the ceiling, picture frames, door panels, the capital T and L at the bottom of this page, this page itself.

Vision is a form of cognition: the kinds of things we see shape the ways we think. That is why it is so hard to imagine the visual experience of our prehistoric ancestors, or, for that matter, the girls of nineteenth-century Malawi, who lived in a world without right angles. Inhabitants of, say, late Neolithic Orkney would only have seen a handful of perpendicular lines a day: tools, shaped stones, perhaps some simple geometric decoration on a pot. For the most part, their world was curved: circular buildings, round tombs, stone circles, rounded clay vessels.

{ TLS | Continue reading }

Rosa differentiates between mechanical acceleration, the acceleration of social change and the accelerating pace of daily life. The process of mechanical acceleration began in the 19th century in conjunction with industrialization. In terms of the time it takes to travel across the world, for example, it has effectively shrunk the size of the world to one-sixtieth of its actual size.

Today, mechanical acceleration affects the digital sector in particular. But paradoxically, it also goes hand in hand with an acceleration of the pace of life. Even though mechanical acceleration, by shortening the time it takes to complete tasks, was intended to create more available time for the individual, late modern society does not enjoy the luxury of more leisure time, Rosa writes. On the contrary, individuals suffer from a constant time shortage.

The reason for this is our urge “to realize as many options as possible from the infinite palette of possibilities that life presents to us,” he says. Living life to the fullest has become the core objective of our time. At the same time, this hunger for new things can never be satisfied: “No matter how fast we become, the proportion of the experiences we have will continuously shrink in the face of those we missed.” As a result, more and more people suffer from depression and burnout, according to Rosa.

{ Der Spiegel | Continue reading | thanks Rob }

images { 1 | 2 }

Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions. You’ll disrupt your sleep, your appetite, and your ability to experience long-term happiness and satisfaction.

If you vocalize your negativity, or even slightly frown when you say “no,” more stress chemicals will be released, not only in your brain, but in the listener’s brain as well. The listener will experience increased anxiety and irritability, thus undermining cooperation and trust. In fact, just hanging around negative people will make you more prejudiced toward others. […]

Negative thinking is also self perpetuating, and the more you engage in negative dialogue—at home or at work—the more difficult it becomes to stop.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

quote { Dostoyevsky, The Idiot, 1868-1869 }

Mozart’s opera, whose proper Italian title is Il dissoluto punito ossia il Don Giovanni (The Punishment of the Libertine or Don Giovanni), has been admired by many enthusiastic opera-goers ever since its first performance in Prague on October 29, 1787. […]

Kierkegaard offers a deep meditation on the meaning of Mozart’s Don Giovanni in a splendid treatise entitled “The Immediate Erotic Stages or the Musical Erotic” found in his book Either/Or. […]

George Price offers this fine description of the “aesthetic” stage of life as he thinks Kierkegaard sought to depict it:

By its very nature it is the most fragile and least stable of all forms of existence. […] [The aesthetic man] is merged into the crowd, and does what they do; he reflects their tastes, their ideas, prejudices, clothing and manner of speech. The entire liturgy of his life is dictated by them. His only special quality is greater or less discrimination of what he himself shall ‘enjoy’, for his outlook is an uncomplicated, unsophisticated Hedonism: he does what pleases him, he avoids what does not. His life’s theme is a simple one, ‘one must enjoy life’. […] He is also, characteristically, a man with a minimum of reflection. […]

Kierkegaard also uses Faust as Goethe interpreted him, and Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, as exemplars and variations of the aesthetic stage of existence. “First, Don Juan, the simple, exuberant, uncomplicated, unreflective man; then Faust, the bored, puzzled, mixed-up, wistful man; and the third, the inevitable climax, the man in despair—Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew.” Kierkegaard’s discussion of this aesthetic aspect of life “is mainly a sustained exposition of a universal level of human experience, and as such it is a story as old as man. Here is life at it simplest, most general level […] the life of easy sanctions and unimaginative indulgences. It is also a totally uncommitted and ‘choiceless’ life [Don Juan]. But, for reasons inexplicable to itself, it cannot remain there. The inner need for integration brings its contentment to an end. Boredom intervenes; and boredom followed by an abortive attempt to overcome it by more discrimination about pleasures and diversions, about friends, habits and surroundings [Faust]. But the dialectical structure of the self gives rise to a profounder disturbance than boredom; and finally the man is aware of a frustration which nothing can annul [Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew]. Were he constituted differently, says Kierkegaard, he would not suffer in this fashion. But being what he is, suffer he must— in diminishing hope and in growing staleness of existence.

{ Søren Kierkegaard’s Interpretation of Mozart’s Opera Don Giovanni | PDF }

Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. Fortunately, new research suggests a simple antidote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction. […]

People who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity. “Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.”

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

Eyewitness error is the leading cause of wrongful felony convictions. For example, eyewitness error played a role in 72% of the 302 DNA exoneration cases, and it is estimated that one-third of eyewitnesses make an erroneous identification. In this article, we discuss why jurors and legal professionals have difficulty evaluating eyewitness testimony. We also describe the I-I-Eye method for analyzing eyewitness testimony, and a scientific study of the I-I-Eye method that shows it can improve jurors’ ability to assess eyewitness accuracy.

{ The Jury Expert | Continue reading }

The problem of artificial precision in theories of vagueness: a note on the role of maximal consistency

[…]

[I]f c denotes my coat, and my coat is of a peculiar tint at the borderline between red and pink, on theories of this sort the proposition R(c) :=“My coat is red” is to be considered neither true nor false, but rather true to some intermediate degree. In this line of thought, a much stronger and yet popular assumption is that the real unit interval [0, 1] embodies “degrees of truth.”

{ Vincenzo Marra/arXiv | Continue reading }

art { Josef Albers, Structural Constellation To Ferdinand Hodler, 1954 }