The future of humanity is often viewed as a topic for idle speculation. Yet our beliefs and assumptions on this subject matter shape decisions in both our personal lives and public policy – decisions that have very real and sometimes unfortunate consequences. It is therefore practically important to try to develop a realistic mode of futuristic thought about big picture questions for humanity.

This paper sketches an overview of some recent attempts in this direction, and it offers a brief discussion of four families of scenarios for humanity’s future: extinction, recurrent collapse, plateau, and posthumanity. (…)

Predictability does not necessarily fall off with temporal distance. It may be highly unpredictable where a traveler will be one hour after the start of her journey, yet predictable that after five hours she will be at her destination. The very long-term future of humanity may be relatively easy to predict, being a matter amenable to study by the natural sciences, particularly cosmology (physical eschatology). And for there to be a degree of predictability, it is not necessary that it be possible to identify one specific scenario as what will definitely happen. If there is at least some scenario that can be ruled out, that is also a degree of predictability. (…)

Most differences between our lives and the lives of our hunter-gatherer forebears are ultimately tied to technology, especially if we understand “technology” in its broadest sense, to include not only gadgets and machines but also techniques, processes, and institutions. In this wide sense we could say that technology is the sum total of instrumentally useful culturally-transmissible information. Language is a technology in this sense, along with tractors, machine guns, sorting algorithms, double-entry bookkeeping, and Robert’s Rules of Order. (…)

Supposing that some perceptive observer in the past had noticed some instance of directionality – be it a technological, cultural, or social trend – the question would have remained whether the detected directionality was a global feature or a mere local pattern. In a cyclical view of history, for example, there can be long stretches of steady cumulative development of technology or other factors. Within a period, there is clear directionality; yet each flood of growth is followed by an ebb of decay, returning things to where they stood at the beginning of the cycle. Strong local directionality is thus compatible with the view that, globally, history moves in circles and never really gets anywhere. If the periodicity is assumed to go on forever, a form of eternal recurrence would follow.

{ Nick Bostrom, The Future of Humanity, 2007 | Continue reading | Related: How unlikely is a doomsday catastrophe? }

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Neil deGrasse Tyson’s talk was called either “Adventures in Science Illiteracy” or “Brain Droppings of a Skeptic” (a title cribbed from George Carlin). He began by saying that he had something to do with Pluto’s demotion from being a planet, and that anybody who didn’t like it should “get over it.” The rest of his talk wandered over a large range of topics. (…)

Jury Duty I: Tyson described being called for jury duty. He was asked what he did, he said that he was an astrophysicist. When asked what he teaches, he said “a course on evaluating evidence and the unreliability of eyewitness testimony,” at which point he was promptly dismissed.

Jury Duty II: Tyson was called for jury duty again, and made the first cut of jurors. The facts of the case were described–the defendant was charged with the possession of “2000 mg” of cocaine. When the jurors were asked if they had any questions, Tyson asked, “why did you describe it as 2000 mg instead of 2 g, about the weight of a postage stamp? Aren’t you trying to bias the jury by making it sound like a large quantity of drugs?” At which point he was promptly dismissed. (…)

Inept Aliens: They travel trillions of miles to get here, then crash.

Conspiracy Theory: They tend to tacitly admit insufficient data. If an argument lasts more than five minutes, both sides are wrong.

{ The Amazing Meeting 6 | The Lippard blog | Continue reading }

{ Scott Adams }

{ Jorge Luis Borges, Lectures at Harvard University, 1967-1968 | more }

{ Corinne Day, Georgina, Brixton, 1995 | Fashion photographer Corinne Day died last saturday at the age of 45 after having fought for long against a brain cancer. | Vogue Italy | Continue reading }

Former Lower East Side hipster owes IRS $172 million in back taxes.

A Bronx judge has thrown out a summons issued against a Bronx man for wearing saggy pants, finding that “the Constitution still leaves some opportunity for people to be foolish if they so desire.”

Police in New York say a woman had a sneezing fit that caused her to drive off a road, crash into several trees and plow through a fence.

One couple who left their car parked in a long-term lot near Kennedy Airport during a trip to California is trying to figure out what their car has been doing without them.

The owners of the Empire State Building and their supporters say their tower’s international status and New York City’s skyline are in mortal danger of an assault from a “monstrosity.” Their rival: a proposed tower on Seventh Avenue, two blocks to the west, that, according to its developers, will help the city grow and prosper, provide thousands of jobs and improve the quality of life for tens of thousands of New Yorkers. [Read more]

MTA says the cost of unlimited cards would soar to $130 next month.

NY bicycle news roundup: bike share, Unicycle Fest, new path.

NYC subway, late 70s.

Why is New York called the Big Apple?

{ Pierre Huyghe, Third Memory, 1999 | Third Memory takes as its point of departure a bank robbery committed by John Woytowicz in Brooklyn in 1972; three years later the crime became the subject of Sidney Lumet’s film Dog Day Afternoon, starring Al Pacino. Huyghe tracked down Woytowicz and asked him to retell the story. Using a two-channel video projection, a television interview, and posters, Huyghe builds from a “first memory” of the original crime to a “second memory” with the film’s recreation of that crime, to arrive at a “third memory,” a rich blurring of the documented and the imagined. | San Francisco Museum of Modern Art | University of Virginia | Art Museum }

When, well after Spinoza, Nietzsche will launch the concept of will to power… (…)

We cannot understand anything in Nietzsche if we believe that it is the operation by which each of us would tend towards power.

Power is not what I want, by definition, it is what I have. I have this or that power and it is this that situates me in the quantitative scale of Beings.

Making power the object of the will is a misunderstanding, it is just the opposite. It is according to power that I have, that I want this or that.

{ Deleuze on Spinoza | Continue reading }

{ Two glasses of water before meals the one true key to weight loss, say scientists. | Full story }

photo { Imp Kerr }

It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas. (…)

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

…modern career theories (…) importance of personal meaning within career choice.

But what about meaninglessness?

Shouldn’t we be looking at that too? (…)

‘The Four-Roomed Apartment of Change’ is used to capture some of the things that happen to people and organisations when they experience change.

The four rooms represent four frames of mind that an individual may pass through as they encounter a change in their lives. (…)

The room of Contentment. In this room people feel relaxed and free from threat. (…)

When people do begin to perceive change they might  fall down the trapdoor into the Denial room. (…)

When they get there, they will find the room of Confusion. (…)

Eventually, the fog may clear and they will find the ladder which leads to the Renewal room. (…)

What room are you in at the moment?

{ Careers – in Theory | Continue reading }

What is a healthy mind? Is it simply the absence of symptoms and dysfunctions, or is there something more to a life well lived? How can we embrace the diversity of behavior, temperament, values, and orientation across a wide range of cultures and still come up with a coherent definition of health? Just as some scientists are reluctant to define the mind, some people say that we shouldn’t define mental health at all, because it is authoritarian to do so—we shouldn’t tell others how to be healthy. But how do we account for the universal striving for happiness?

Positive psychology has offered an important corrective to the disease model by identifying the characteristics of happy people, such as gratitude, compassion, open-mindedness, and curiosity, but is there some unnamed quality that underlies all of these individual strengths?

Over the last twenty years, I’ve come to believe that integration is the key mechanism beneath both the absence of illness and the presence of well-being.

Integration—the linkage of differentiated elements of a system—illuminates a direct pathway toward health. It’s the way we avoid a life of dull, boring rigidity on the one hand, or explosive chaos on the other. We can learn to detect when integration is absent or insufficient and develop effective strategies to promote differentiation and then linkage. The key to this transformation is cultivating the capacity for mindsight.

{ Daniel SiegelPsychotherapyNetworker | Continue reading }

photo { Scarlett Hooft Graafland }

We’re sure to disagree on many points today, but I think that we here all agree on a number of things. We all agree that, to understand morality, you’ve got to think about evolution and culture. You’ve got to know something about chimpanzees and bonobos and babies and psychopaths. You’ve got to know the differences between them. You’ve got to study the brain and the mind, and you’ve got to put it all together. (…)

We need metaphors and analogies to think about difficult topics, such as morality.  An analogy that Marc Hauser and John Mikhail have developed in recent years is that morality is like language. And I think it’s a very, very good metaphor. It illuminates many aspects of morality. It’s particularly good, I think, for sequences of actions that occur in time with varying aspects of intentionality.

But, once we expand the moral domain beyond harm, I find that metaphors drawn from perception become more illuminating, more useful. I’m not trying to say that the language analogy is wrong or deficient. I’m just saying, let’s think of another analogy, a perceptual analogy.

So if you think about vision, touch, and taste, for all three senses, our bodies are built with a small number of specialized receptors. So, in the eye, we’ve got  four kinds of cells in the retina to detect different frequencies of light. In our skin, we’ve got three kinds of receptors for temperature and pressure and tissue damage or pain. And on our tongues, we have these five kinds of taste receptor.

I think taste offers the closest, the richest, source domain for understanding morality. First, the links between taste, affect, and behavior are as clear as could be. Tastes are either good or bad. The good tastes, sweet and savory, and salt to some extent, these make us feel “I want more.”  They make us want to approach. They say, “this is good.”  Whereas, sour and bitter tell us, “whoa, pull back, stop.”

Second, the taste metaphor fits with our intuitive morality so well that we often use it in our everyday moral language. We refer to acts as “tasteless,” as “leaving a bad taste” in our mouths. We make disgust faces in response to certain violations.

Third, every culture constructs its own particular cuisine, its own way of pleasing those taste receptors. The taste analogy gets at what’s universal—that is, the taste receptors of the moral mind—while it leaves plenty of room for cultural variation. Each culture comes up with its own particular way of pleasing these receptors, using local ingredients, drawing on historical traditions.

And fourth, the metaphor has an excellent pedigree. It was used 2,300 years ago in China by Mencius, who wrote, “Moral principles please our minds as beef and mutton and pork please our mouths.”  It was also a favorite of David Hume, but I’ll come back to that.

So, my goal in this talk is to develop the idea that moral psychology is like the psychology of taste in some important ways.

{ Jonathan Haidt/Edge | Continue reading }

Contrary to the Machiavellian cliché, nice people are more likely to rise to power. Then something strange happens: The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude.

Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power.

{ Wall Street Journal | Continue reading }

It made me wonder if genius can be defined by the degree to which something intellectual can be felt as a physical experience.

For example, most people feel something when they listen to music. But I suspect gifted musicians feel it in an entirely different way than I do. I could never memorize all the notes in a song because for me it would be an exercise in rote memorization. For someone gifted in music, memorizing a song is easier because such a person would remember how each part felt. Feelings create memories more easily than intellectual experiences. The stronger the feeling, the easier the memory.

{ Scott Adams | Continue reading }

photo { Romain B. James, Rental Elvis in Las Vegas }

The Norse god Loki, as a typical trickster god, works both with and against the other gods.

However, when he engineers the death of the god Baldr, the gods finally decide he has gone too far, and bind him to a rock with a serpent dripping venom above him.

His wife Sigyn stayed with him and tried to catch the venom in a bowl, but when she left to empty it, as here, his writhing from the pain of the venom created earthquakes.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Psychologists and philosophers have long debated whether language shapes the way we think. While the most drastic viewpoint – that thought can’t exist without language — has fallen out of favor, psychologists still study more subtle effects.

The first study has to do with gender in language. Many languages assign genders to words. For example, in Spanish, the word for “key” is feminine, while the German word for” key” is masculine. Gender for the most part is arbitrary and varies from language to language, which allows for some interesting experiments. (…) German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful, while Spanish speakers described them as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and shiny. (…)

In a second experiment, Boroditsky looked at language and the conception of time. English speakers primarily speak of time in horizontal terms. For example, we talk about moving meetings forward, or pushing deadlines back. Mandarin speakers, on the other hand, use up/down metaphors as well. So a Mandarin speaker would refer to the previous week as “up week” and next week as “down week.”

{ Livia Blackburne | Continue reading }

Y a-t-il un sentiment que tu aies eu qui soit disparu ? Non, tout reste, n’est-ce pas ? Tout. Les momies que l’on a dans le coeur ne tombent jamais en poussière et, quand on penche la tête par le soupirail, on les voit en bas, qui vous regardent avec leurs yeux ouverts, immobiles.

{ Gustave Flaubert, Lettre à Louise Colet, 16 janvier 1852 | Continue reading }