Articles
Aeon Article
Excerpts
“Life is not ‘one thing’ – rather, it has many potentially separable
aspects.
Importantly, conscious level is not the same as wakefulness.
Rather, consciousness seems to depend on how different parts of the brain
speak to each other, in specific ways.
‘To measure is to know.’
Tononi, who pioneered this approach, argues that consciousness simply is
integrated information. This is an intriguing and powerful proposal, but it
comes at the cost of admitting that consciousness could be present everywhere
and in everything, a philosophical view known as panpsychism.
The classical view of perception is that the brain processes sensory
information in a bottom-up or ‘outside-in’ direction. .
The
Helmholtzian view inverts this framework, proposing that signals flowing into
the brain from the outside world convey only prediction errors – the
differences between what the brain expects and what it receives. .. A number of experiments are now indicating
that consciousness depends more on perceptual predictions, than on prediction
errors.
But just as consciousness is not just one thing, conscious selfhood is
also best understood as a complex construction generated by the brain.
Our experiences of being and having a body are ‘controlled
hallucinations’ of a very distinctive kind. It now seems to
me that fundamental aspects of our experiences of conscious selfhood might
depend on control-oriented predictive perception of our messy physiology, of
our animal blood and guts. We are conscious selves because we too are beast
machines – self-sustaining flesh-bags that care about their own persistence.”
https://aeon.co/essays/the-hard-problem-of-consciousness-is-a-distraction-from-the-real-one
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The good life is the simple life.
Through much of human history, frugal simplicity was not a
choice but a necessity – and since necessary, it was also deemed a moral
virtue. But with the advent of industrial capitalism and a consumer society, a
system arose that was committed to relentless growth, and with it grew a
population (aka ‘the market’) that was enabled and encouraged to buy lots of
stuff that, by traditional standards, was surplus to requirements. As a result,
there’s a disconnect between the traditional values we have inherited and the
consumerist imperatives instilled in us by contemporary culture. ..
Living simply now strikes many people as simply boring.(It
becomes imperative from environmentalism also now.)
But if our current methods of making, getting, spending and
discarding prove unsustainable, then there could come a time – and it might
come quite soon – when we are forced towards simplicity. In which case, a
venerable tradition will turn out to contain the philosophy of the
future.
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It would be one thing to concede that science may never be
able to explain, say, the subjective experiences of the human mind. But the
standard take on quantum mechanics suggests something far more surprising: that
a complete understanding of even the objective, physical world is beyond science’s
reach, since it’s impossible to translate into words how the theory’s math
relates to the world we live in.
The theory only predicts what scientists may see at the
instant of observation — when all the wave function’s latent possibilities
appear to collapse to one definitive outcome — and provides no narrative at all
for what particles actually do before or after that, or even how much the word
“particle” is apropos to the unobserved world. The act of observation
itself is then posited to somehow convert this nonsensical situation into the
world we see, of objects having definite locations and other properties.
“Success is nothing,” his father taught him. “Proper work
is what counts.” (Bassi's)“Yes, it is like that,” he said. “The idea that there
is truth and simplicity behind phenomena, if you wish, you can relate it
directly to a faith in God that is a unity that gives rise to everything.”“The
simple things in life are the more genuine ones,” he explained. “When a person
is simple, he’s a better person.”“Even if the world is ultimately not
understandable, there is no reason to believe we have hit the bottom with
quantum mechanics.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/magazine/angelo-bassi-quantum-mechanic.html?referringSource=articleShare
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The article from Aeon on evolution discusses how it is not
just about adaptation, the species shapes the environment too, not only
sapiens, others too. Some detailed research material on earthworms (6000
varieties) is also discussed.
Some excerpts:
"‘[T]he organism influences its own
evolution, by being both the object of natural selection and the creator of the
conditions of that selection,’ as the evolutionary biologists Richard Levins
and Richard Lewontin put it."
"Researchers need to understand not just
how niche construction evolves through natural selection, but how the
environmental sources of natural selection are themselves transformed by niche
construction."
*
The discovery of Higgs Boson and
gravitational waves were no ordinary triumph of physics and confirmation
of scientific predictions made rather speculatively. The laws of physics hold
true and explain natural phenomena rather consistently.But, there are riddles
that daunt physicists. ".. we have no idea what actually
happened at the beginning of the Universe; if it was inflation, what was
driving it; how it came about; and how it ended. If what happened at the
beginning of the Universe is a mystery, what’s happening now is no less
puzzling."We know little about dark matter which outnumbers ordinary
matter by a factor of six to one. So with dark energy that accelerates the
expansion of the universe. "These three puzzles – how the Universe
began, what dark matter is, and what dark energy consists of – make a
compelling science case for future. .. there remains a possibility
that all we’ll attain is yet more confidence that there’s some form
of dark matter, some form of dark energy, and that the beginning of the
Universe did undergo inflation. But we still won’t know what the dark matter or
dark energy is, or what drove inflation. We’ll have a much more precise
statement about our ignorance but nothing more."
In this field, scientists work 'not
pushed by experiments but pulled by imagination.’ "They come up with
possibilities – such as a huge family of new particles, or the notion that
space-time should have more than four dimensions. Or even more exotic proposals
– eg, that space-time doesn’t really exist as such, and instead emerges from
the relationship between the quantum building blocks of the Universe.""While
the hardcore theorists are driven by lofty ideals,
the phenomenologists are more practical and crave a more immediate
connection with the observed Universe."
".. there’s no clear guide,
apart from personal or aesthetic inclinations about how to choose the correct
solution."" there’s a limit to how much of the whole sky we can
observe, and how far we can look back in time."".. a sound
principle is to keep your eyes on the fundamentals, being careful not to
jettison the things we know to be true.""There’s a glorious history
of research in fundamental physics driving technological change – forcing
researchers to come up with ingenious new devices and experiments that allow
them to measure elusive phenomena."Einstein: ‘Let the people know that a
new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward
higher levels.’
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