The question is, what happens to your ideas about computational architecture when you think of individual neurons not as dutiful slaves or as simple machines but as agents that have to be kept in line and that have to be properly rewarded and that can form coalitions and cabals and organizations and alliances?  This vision of the brain as a sort of social arena of politically warring forces seems like sort of an amusing fantasy at first, but is now becoming something that I take more and more seriously, and it’s fed by a lot of different currents.
 
Evolutionary biologist David Haig has some lovely papers on intrapersonal conflicts where he’s talking about how even at the level of the genetics, even at the level of the conflict between the genes you get from your mother and the genes you get from your father, the so-called madumnal and padumnal genes, those are in opponent relations and if they get out of whack, serious imbalances can happen that show up as particular psychological anomalies.

We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth.

You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state, something that is only achieved when all is going well, but still, in the general realm of humanity, most of us are pretty well put together most of the time. This gives a very different vision of what the architecture is like, and I’m just trying to get my head around how to think about that.

{ Daniel C. Dennett/Edge | Continue reading }

photo { Robert Heinecken }

{ Taryn Simon, Black Square IV. The Blaster, Invented by Charl Fourie as an Anti-Hijacking system, installed on a Toyota Corolla, one of the most frequently carjacked vehicles in South Africa }

{ Pierpaolo Ferrari/Maurizio Cattelan }

{ Original photo for Windowlicker cover }

{ A spectrogram of “Windowlicker” reveals a spiral at the end of the song. This spiral is more impressive when viewed with an X-Y scatter graph, X and Y being the amplitudes of the L and R channels, which shows expanding and contracting concentric circles and spirals. The effect was achieved through use of the Mac-based program MetaSynth. This program allows the user to insert a digital image as the spectrogram. MetaSynth will then convert the spectrogram to digital sound and “play” the picture. | Wikipedia }

Take the biggest question of all, for example: what is the ultimate nature of reality? We used to think the answer was atoms. Then we learned about the electron and then about the atomic nucleus. Then it became clear that this nucleus was composed of protons and neutrons. Then these particles were discovered to be composed of quarks held together by gluons. And now we’re in trouble. We know these particles follow those strange quantum laws, and the consequences of this lead us towards an extraordinary answer to our very ordinary question.

At heart, quantum theory is about probabilities. No particle has a real existence that we can speak of; we can only express the probability of finding it somewhere. In fact, quantum theory is really about getting access to information.

Information is not an abstract entity. It is always encoded in something physical: a computer’s hard disk, say, or molecules of ink on a page. So if quantum theory is leading us towards the idea that information lies at the heart of reality, this information must be stored somehow in the physical universe.

Faced with such a staggering notion, scientists began to seek out the supporting evidence. And, though it’s very early days, it seems there is some.

{ New Humanist | Continue reading }

photo { Danny Lyon }

{ Don James, Jack Quigg and Ed Fearon, Bel Air Bay Club Jetty, 1939 }

The mystery of the art market is that some people would rather possess an object of marginal utility than the ultra-usable money they exchange for it. This is the mystery of all markets in which taste is transformed into appetite by a nonpecuniary cloud of discourse that surrounds the negotiation. There is always a tipping point at which one’s taste for Picasso or freedom or pinot noir becomes a necessity, or at least something one would rather not do without. The exact nature of this “something” is effervescent and indistinct.

{ Dave Hickey | Continue reading }

photo { Shelby Lee Adams }

Estimates of the relative mortality risks associated with normal weight, overweight, and obesity. […]

97 studies were retained for analysis, providing a combined sample size of more than 2.88 million individuals and more than 270 000 deaths. […]

Grade 1 obesity overall was not associated with higher mortality, and overweight was associated with significantly lower all-cause mortality.

{ Overweight linked to lower risk of death | Jama }

photo { Bill Brandt, Nude, Belgravia, London, 1951 }

{ 1 | 2. Richard Avedon }

{ Enrique Metinides }

{ John Kacere | Aaron McElroy }

{ Hugh Crawford | Jen Trausch & Eli Fernald }