“Every evening our eyes tell us that the sun sets, while we know that, in fact, the Earth is turning us away from it. Astronomy taught us centuries ago that common sense is not a reliable guide to reality. Today it is neuroscience that is forcing us to readjust our intuitions. People naturally believe in the Ghost in the Machine: that we have bodies made of matter and spirits made of an ethereal something. Yes, people acknowledge that the brain is involved in mental life. But they still think of it as a pocket PC for the soul, managing information at the behest of a ghostly user. Modern neuroscience has shown that there is no user. ‘The soul’ is, in fact, the information-processing activity of the brain. New imaging techniques have tied every thought and emotion to neural activity. And any change to the brain—from strokes, drugs, electricity or surgery—will literally change your mind.” – Steven Pinker, “How to think about the mind”
Category: Science
“Though visible signs of the ability to prevail in a fight are the most salient advertisements of authority, they are not necessarily the qualifications that earned the authority in the first place. Dominance in humans is tied up with status: the possession of assets like talent, beauty, intelligence, skill, and wisdom. And in the end, dominance and status are social constructions that depend crucially on the perception of others and of oneself. How much authority one possesses depends on how much authority one is prepared to claim, and on how much authority others are willing to cede to you.” – Steven Pinker, “The evolutionary social psychology of off-record indirect speech acts”
“In most times, places, and stages of development, people’s abilities in arithmetic consist of the exact quantities ‘one,’ ‘two,’ and ‘many,’ and an ability to estimate larger amounts approximately. Their intuitive physics corresponds to the medieval theory of impetus rather than to Newtonian mechanics (to say nothing of relativity or quantum theory). Their intuitive biology consists of creationism, not evolution, of essentialism, not population genetics, and of vitalism, not mechanistic physiology. Their intuitive psychology is mindbody dualism, not neurobiological reductionism. Their political philosophy is based on kin, clan, tribe, and vendetta, not on the theory of the social contract. Their economics is based on tit-for-tat back-scratching and barter, not on money, interest, rent, and profit. And their morality is a mixture of intuitions of purity, authority, loyalty, conformity, and reciprocity, not the generalized notions of fairness and justice that we identify with moral reasoning.” – Steven Pinker, “The cognitive niche: Coevolution of intelligence, sociality, and language”
“Roads are not passive; they have instrumentality and agency because they direct us – they give us our limits – even when we stray from them.” – Mary Carruthers, “The concept of ductus”
“Children are not invariably conservative, but show conservative tendencies.” – Jess Gropen, et al., “The Learnability and Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in English”
“I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. I was also surprised to find many intelligent and wide awake people who lived (as far as one could make out) as if they had never learned to use their sense organs: They did not see the things before their eyes, hear the words sounding in their ears, or notice the things they touched or tasted. Some lived without being aware of the state of their own bodies. There were others who seemed to live in a most curious condition of consciousness, as if the state they had arrived at today were final, with no possibility of change, or as if the world and the psyche were static and would remain so forever. They seemed devoid of all imagination, and they entirely and exclusively depended upon their sense-perception. Chances and possibilities did not exist in their world, and in ‘today’ there was no real ‘tomorrow.’ The future was just the repetition of the past.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”
“A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”
“The attitude of modern civilized man sometimes reminds me of a psychotic patient in my clinic who was himself a doctor. One morning I asked him how he was. He replied that he had had a wonderful night disinfecting the whole of heaven with mercuric chloride, but that in the course of this thoroughgoing sanitary process he had found no trace of God.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”
“The two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these: First, the dream should be treated as a fact, about which one must make no previous assumption except that it somehow makes sense; and second, the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness”
“The main problem facing any kind of studies on solifuges is the keeping of these animals in captivity. So far, nobody has successfully reared them in a laboratory. It is even difficult to keep them a short time (e.g., two weeks) in captivity. Most of the Namibian species died after a couple of days after they had been captured. The Argentinean species survived a maximum of about two weeks in captivity. The eremobatid species, captured in Arizona (USA) survived in general for about a week. The galeodid species from Kazakhstan survived a slightly longer period up to a couple of months, which could implicate, that these animals are less susceptive regarding e.g., differences in temperature. All solifuges independent the country where they were collected became lethargic after a couple of days and did not show any kind of a natural behavior any more.” – Anja Elisabeth Klann, Histology and Ultrastructure of Solifuges
“As one passes through the levels of incarceration—from the minimum to the moderate to the maximum security institutions, and then to the solitary confinement section of these institutions—one does not pass deeper and deeper into a subpopulation of the most ruthlessly calculating criminals. Instead, ironically and tragically, one comes full circle back to those who are emotionally fragile and, often, severely mentally ill.” – Stuart Grassian, “Psychiatric Effects of Solitary Confinement”
“One of saddest lessons in history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.” – Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World
“Should a mouse that a cat just swallowed be considered as a part of the cat? The concept of a ‘definite position’ is also only approximately defined: how far should a cat be displaced in order for it to be considered to be in a different position? If the displacement is much smaller than the quantum uncertainty, it must be considered to be in the same place, because in this case the quantum state of the cat is almost the same and the displacement is undetectable in principle. But this is only an absolute bound, because our ability to distinguish various locations of the cat is far from this quantum limit. Furthermore, the state of an object (e.g. alive or dead) is meaningful only if the object is considered for a period of time.” – Lev Vaidman, “Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics”
“It is consoling to think that the emotions that music arouses in us have something to do with the makeup of the universe.” – David P. Goldman, “The Divine Music of Mathematics”
“It is evident that there is considerable operator bias introduced in designing fuzzy networks. This may not be satisfactory for complex problems where the actual relationships are not understood to begin with.” – H. K. D. H. Bhadeshia, “Neural Networks in Materials Science”
“A glass is a nonequilibrium state of matter between that of a solid and a liquid. It is a non-crystalline amorphous solid that has a nanoscopically and microscopically disordered structure but many of the mechanical properties of a solid. Glass is a nonequilibrium, non-crystalline state of matter that appears solid on a short time scale but continuously relaxes towards the liquid state . . . . a nonequilibrium, non-crystalline condensed state of matter that exhibits a glass transition. The structure of glasses is similar to that of their parent supercooled liquids, and they spontaneously relax toward the supercooled liquid state. Their ultimate fate, in the limit of infinite time, is to crystallize. In the glassy state, the viscosity is exceptionally high, conformational changes are severely inhibited, and the material is metastably trapped in a solid but microscopically disordered state. A glass is rigid and brittle.” – Martin Chaplin, Water Structure and Science (internal quotes and citations omitted)
“Solid ice is stable to over 200 GPa and 4400 K in a body-centered cubic structure, near the melt boundary in water-rich Neptune-like planets. This may be responsible for the increased electrical conductivity that may promote the generation of multipolar magnetic fields. Due to the fluidity of the protons in Ice XVIII, and in contrast to the low-pressure ices, this ice is likely to be black. The oxygen ions form a close-packed structure with 12 nearest neighbors to each side, filling 74% of the space. This ice may be considered as a new state of matter, solid and liquid, at the same time, similar to a metallic structure but with free protons rather than electrons. It has been suggested that suitable conditions for Ice XVIII lie deep inside the watery giants Uranus and Neptune and may be common throughout the Universe.” – Martin Chaplin, Water Structure and Science
“Although the cosmological constant cold dark matter model is very successful in explaining almost all observations, it has some theoretical issues within its backbone structure. These include the mysterious physical origin of the two largest contributions to the energy content of the late-time Universe: cold dark matter and the cosmological constant, together with the unsatisfactory predictability and test-ability of the inflation theory. Therefore, it is important to explore alternative explanations for the late-time acceleration of the Universe. There have been several proposals . . . hints remain from the Dark Energy Survey and several previous galaxy surveys that the Universe today is a few percent less clumpy than predicted. . . . On the other hand, massive binary black holes as standard sirens have the disadvantage that the redshift needs to be measured independently of the gravitational wave observations. If we identify the host galaxy then it should be possible to determine with joint events whether long-wavelength gravitational wave and short-wavelength electromagnetic radiation have the same number of spacetime dimensions. . . . Also, there have been studies considering the propagation from the inspiraling of compact binary systems within the context of teleparallel gravity theories . . . meanwhile it is important to mention that these studies are in the context of a scenario where the general relativity cosmological model is considered as an effective fluid in the standard perturbations equations.” – Sebastian Bahamonde, et al., “Teleparallel Gravity: From Theory to Cosmology”
“Although representations of traumatic events (such as flashbulb memories) are not wholly immune to error and distortion, evidence suggests that negative and stressful experiences lead to a reduction of the structural plasticity. This may support the idea that the normal function of memory is to form constructive, plastic memories since, in cases of traumatic memories, the memory system as a whole loses plasticity and is, as a result, far less efficient. If our memories would not be modified according to the present or prospective future, a discrepancy would emerge. If memories were to represent the past exactly, representation of the past would not let us absorb changes. Since the present itself is in perpetual change, the memory of the past must have the same dynamic nature.” – Tzofit Ofengenden, “Memory Formation and Belief”
“The fact that episodic memory is fragmentary and fragile suggests that its adaptiveness may derive less from its role as an accurate record of personal history than from providing a ‘vocabulary’ from which to construct planned future events (and perhaps to embellish events of the past). It may be part of a more general toolbox that allowed us to escape from the present and develop foresight, and perhaps create a sense of personal identity. Indeed, our ability to revisit the past may be only a design feature of our ability to conceive of the future.” – Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis, “The evolution of foresight: what is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?”
“Memory is not only about the past, but is also about the future. Indeed, while memory serves as the ability to recall previous experiences, recall itself is not solely directed toward the past, but is guided by the present for the service of the future.” – Tzofit Ofengenden, “Memory Formation and Belief”
“The fact that memory involves a constructive process of piecing together fragmentary information (rather than something more akin to a direct replay of the past) raises the hypothesis that a veridical representation of the past is not the optimal functioning of human memory system. This raises further questions about whether memory may have other roles as well. Does memory’s flexibility give us benefits at the expense of accuracy and trustfulness? What is the function of memory if it does not store and retrieve exact experiential replicas? Accuracy is far from the only functional goal of memory. Recollecting meets other needs, such as reconstructing the past in a desirable way, fostering self-consistency, and remembering information so as to give a good impression in social settings. The reconstructive mechanism of episodic memory fulfills such needs.” – Tzofit Ofengenden, “Memory Formation and Belief”
“Memory, especially autobiographical memory, is a dynamic entity that perpetually changes. Autobiographical memories are vulnerable to multiple influences and prone to distortions and deceptions; they are never constant and never result in fully accurate representations. At the same time, however, these changes occur without us being aware of them. Even so, we still attribute belief to memories and view them as accurate representations of our past.” – Tzofit Ofengenden, “Memory Formation and Belief”
“The findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.” – Stephen Pinker, “Science Is Not Your Enemy”
“Only in a vague way can we conceive the character of ant-society, and the nature of ant-morality; and to do even this we must try to imagine some yet impossible state of human society and human morals. Let us, then, imagine a world full of people incessantly and furiously working,—all of whom seem to be women. No one of these women could be persuaded or deluded into taking a single atom of food more than is needful to maintain her strength; and no one of them ever sleeps a second longer than is necessary to keep her nervous system in good working-order. And all of them are so peculiarly constituted that the least unnecessary indulgence would result in some derangement of function. The work daily performed by these female laborers comprises road-making, bridge-building, timber-cutting, architectural construction of numberless kinds, horticulture and agriculture, the feeding and sheltering of a hundred varieties of domestic animals, the manufacture of sundry chemical products, the storage and conservation of countless foodstuffs, and the care of the children of the race. All this labor is done for the commonwealth—no citizen of which is capable even of thinking about ‘property,’ except as a res publica;—and the sole object of the commonwealth is the nurture and training of its young,—nearly all of whom are girls. The period of infancy is long: the children remain for a great while, not only helpless, but shapeless, and withal so delicate that they must be very carefully guarded against the least change of temperature. Fortunately their nurses understand the laws of health: each thoroughly knows all that she ought to know in regard to ventilation, disinfection, drainage, moisture, and the danger of germs,—germs being as visible, perhaps, to her myopic sight as they become to our own eyes under the microscope. Indeed, all matters of hygiene are so well comprehended that no nurse ever makes a mistake about the sanitary conditions of her neighborhood. In spite of this perpetual labor no worker remains unkempt: each is scrupulously neat, making her toilet many times a day. But as every worker is born with the most beautiful of combs and brushes attached to her wrists, no time is wasted in the toilet-room. Besides keeping themselves strictly clean, the workers must also keep their houses and gardens in faultless order, for the sake of the children. Nothing less than an earthquake, an eruption, an inundation, or a desperate war, is allowed to interrupt the daily routine of dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, and disinfecting.” – Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things
“Mathematics cannot be defined without acknowledging its most obvious feature: namely, that it is interesting.” – Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy
“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.” – Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”
“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” – Bertrand Russell, Study of Mathematics
“A blind musician once claimed that he could detect a hundred different sounds made by cats. Scientists, studying many hours of tape recordings, also insist that the feline vocal repertoire is huge—the most complex of any animal except Homo sapiens.” – Desmond Morris, Catlore
“There is no finer sight on green Earth than a defeated bully.” – Edward O. Wilson, “A Magic Kingdom”