The referendum question – Charlie’s Diary “And it seems to me that something goes badly wrong with representative democracy in polities that grow beyond somewhere in the range 5-15 million people; direct accountability vanishes and we end up with what I’ve termed the beige dictatorship….My feeling is that we’d be better served by a group […]
The Family That Couldn’t Say Hippopotamus – Issue 17: Big Bangs – Nautilus ‘Dunn doesn’t think that a language-specific brain module evolved and gave rise to predictable language structures. Instead, he believes language—in all its messy complexity—emerged once humans reached a certain level of cognitive capacity. “The module thing started with the computer metaphor for […]
The Nature of Stateless Societies from: September 20, 2014 at 01:44PM
Every technology has a prejudice. Like language itself, it predisposes us to favor and value certain perspectives and accomplishments. In a culture without writing, human memory is of the greatest importance, as are the proverbs, sayings and songs which contain the accumulated oral wisdom of centuries. That is why Solomon was thought to be the […]
Perhaps every science must start with metaphor and end with algebra; and perhaps without the metaphor there would never have been any algebra. Max Black kenarneson.tumblr.com
Masters of Earth, Alone in the Universe E.O. Wilson: “The products of the opposing two vectors in natural selection are hardwired in our emotions and reasoning, and cannot be erased. Internal conflict is not a personal irregularity but a timeless human quality. No such conflict exists or can exist in an eagle, fox or spider, […]
Can we lead spiritually fulfilling lives without religion? – The Week “…a long series of philosophers and psychologists from the 17th century down to the present day have developed a range of concepts for understanding selfhood. At their most elaborate, they combine at least three dimensions: a range of desires rooted in the body; a […]
Cellular Forms : an artistic exploration of morphogenesis Andy Lomas
I think I’ve approached it rather imaginatively, rather than intellectually. I don’t believe in having a reason for everything. I think the dove should descend. And sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn’t. Ernest Milton kenarneson.tumblr.com
Orson Welles and Peter O’Toole on Hamlet TextundBuehne
Ghostbusting Lovecraft “This, then, is the world-view Ghostbusters offers in place of the Cthonic duality. As in Lovecraft we have a surface world of institutions, with a horror zone beneath—which, if you read human history, is not far from the truth. Many bodies lie buried beneath our marble facades. But if you press through the […]
Awe, With And Without The Gods “In an influential 2003 paper, psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt argued that awe is characterized by two central features: vastness and accommodation. Vastness describes the experience of something larger than the self, whether that vastness is a matter of physical size or of metaphorical size, such as great […]
Why I Just Asked My Students To Put Their Laptops Away… — Medium “After reading Haidt, I’ve stopped thinking of students as people who simply make choices about whether to pay attention, and started thinking of them as people _trying_ to pay attention but having to compete with various influences, the largest of which is […]
How the Internet, Dopamine and your Brain are Working Together to Screw Your Potential. “For the purpose of this exercise lets say there are two types of creators which will follow later with the two types of cognitive functions involved in each: Replication Creators (RC) and Skilled Creators (SC).”
The American Scholar: Instant Gratification – Paul Roberts “But this new efficiency has had serious downsides—not least in the mismatch between the self-gratifying power available to consumers and consumers’ ability to manage it all. Humans, it’s safe to say, were not designed for a world of such easy gratification. Decades of research suggest that our […]
WAND S WANDER GOBELINS pro
Why I Have Stopped Tweeting from Ken Arneson