Prof Philip Zimbardo on Time Perception – a wonderful and inspiring talk.

“If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, each of us will have two ideas.”
—George Bernard Shaw

(via C. Bergstrom: “Dealing with Deception in Biology”)

Daniel Suarez, an American information technology consultant, followed up his first book “Daemon” (selfpublished 2006, published 2009 by Dutton; I wrote about it two weeks ago) with “FreedomTM”.

The first book is brilliant fiction in the sense that Suarez takes several things that exist in our world and puts them together in a way nobody else seems to have thought about before.
The second book “FreedomTM” continues with his ideas, but gains a new quality because Suarez’ ideas for a modern and truely democratic civilization are stated much more explicitly now.

Content
The Daemon, a computer program Matthew Sobol released when he died to take over the corporate world, has infested many companies. Whereas the fight between the Daemon and our world and the way the Daemon functions were portrayed in “Daemon”, now the US secret services decide to abuse the daemon for their own good, try to hack their way into it and manipulate it. One of the protagonists on this side is The Major:

“Bastards like me serve a purpose. People need order. They need to be told what to think, what to do, what to believe, or everything will fall apart. This miracle of modern civilization doesn’t just happen. It requires careful management by professionals willing to do whatever is necessary to keep things running smoothly …”

On the other side, we have farmers, hackers, our old friend Pete Sebeck and many others – members of the so-called “darknet”, a community that is hosted by the daemon. What was written between the lines in the first book is now written very explicitly in statements of characters. Suarez’ critique of the modern, globalised world starts before the book starts, with a quotation from Theodore Roosevelt (1906):

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befout the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statemanship of the day.”

The critique continues.
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“And besides, really, how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don’t collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It’s like sleeping furiously. It’s just wrong.”

AC Grayling about his new book “The Good Book – A Secular Bible”. If someone happens to read it, let me know whether you like it.

The Guardian did an interesting interview with him – the article is very well written.

“In the unholy trinity of professional atheists, AC Grayling has always tended to be regarded as the good cop. Less coldly clinical in tone than Richard Dawkins, less aggressively combative than Christopher Hitchens, Grayling approaches the God debate with a gently teasing charm that could almost – but should never – be mistaken for conciliation.”

Since I’m reading both “The God Delusion” and “God is not Great” currently (and am happy with neither of them), I’m interested whether you’ve heard of Grayling before. I haven’t.

Caspar Melville writes about Nicholas Humphrey’s new book “Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness”.

I regularly have a very hard time to write a summary of a book, and Melville does a fantastic job. The review is very plausible and precise, and makes me want to read the book, in which Humphrey seems to offer a drastically reductionistic explanation of the human soul and the human consciousness.

Melville sums up one of Humphrey’s main arguments:

[...]in principle it should be possible for science to theorise what consciousness is, because it has been “seen” by natural selection. If we have it, the evolutionary logic goes, then it must in some way be useful, or at minimum a by-product of something that is useful, to have survived and in fact have flourished in humans. If natural selection can “see” the “physical basis” of consciousness in order to prefer it, then so, if we can develop the right conceptual armoury (something he acknowledges he has not fully achieved), can we. “Everything suggests,” Humphrey says, “that consciousness in all its glory has been designed, preferred through natural selection and amplified by evolution.”

Beautifully simple. I find the problem itself very hard to comprehend and am not sure at all whether this is a viable approach, but the idea itself is great, the argument itself well constructed.

“For a phenomenally conscious creature, simply being there is a cause for celebration.”
– Nicholas Humphrey

“I suggest that organised religion is parasitic on spirituality, and in fact acts as a restraint on it.”
– Nicholas Humphrey

Amazon wishlist. Birthday present, anyone? ;)

(and once again: thanks to S.)

Ich habe heute eine wunderbar kurze, sehr prägnante Ausführung zum Thema psychologische Konzepte vs. soziologische Konzepte bei einer Diskussion zum Thema Systemtheorie gehört:

“Menschen haben Gemeinsamkeiten, und weisen auch viele Unterschiede auf. Der bias der Psychologie geht mehr in Richtung Unterschiede, der der Soziologie mehr in Richtung Gemeinsamkeiten.
Problematisch wird es dann, wenn Unterschiede und Gemeinsamkeiten anfangen, miteinander zu interagieren.”

(Danke, Seargent Tatendrang)

PS.: wenn es nach XKCD geht sind wir ohnehin am … traurigen Ende des Spektrums

(1) Medicine
I went to the pharmacy today to get something for my eyes (hay fever). Now, we know for many decades that this is an autoimmunity, and we understand the majority of the underlying mechanisms.

Without going into the medical details here, the women offered me two choices. First, a drug which would do something against the hay fever, but I’d have to take it a couple of days regularly until it would work. She was correct there (if you’re interested in the details, google “anti-histamines”). The second choice she offered me, a compound I forgot the name of, worked, as she said, directly against the problems and would solve my issues within 10 minutes of taking it, and recommended me to take this over the first offer.

I inspected the package of the second choice, and found it to be a homeopathic drug (“antroposophic drug” it said on the package). I told her she should inform herself about the roots of antroposophy, about Rudolf Steiner and his famous work “The Philosophy of Freedom”, in which he tells people that after the death the soul wonders through the different planets in our solar system (there are also dwarves and elves in the book, high fantasy at its best!).

I also informed her that I would never come back to the pharmacy, because they had repeatedly (that was not the first time) offered me compounds that do not have any significant medical effect above placebo level, for money. I do not go to the pharmacy for high fantasy, I go there to solve a medical issue that decreases my quality of life. Offering me non-working compounds for money should in my opinion considered to be a crime.

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“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
— Isaac Asimov

via Iggy

“We are meant to die. That’s what makes anything about us matter.”

– Aeon Flux

I want to recommend the movie Aeon Flux to you guys. The story is amazing, the effects were awesome in 2005, and although I agree that Charlize Theron does play an important part in the film, it would be still a good movie without her (breasts).

Or maybe not. Anyway, go and check it out if you haven’t seen it already.