Designing Your Mind - an essay from This Will Make You Smarter

For Christmas I received the book This Will Make You Smarter.  Published in 2012, it consists of about 150 responses to the question “What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?”  The responders are scientists, doctors, journalists and other interesting people with a connection to science.  The essays are short, three or four pages on average.  All of them had a valuable point.  Several jumped out at me, particularly this one.

Designing Your Mind – Donald Tapscott

I only discovered this person in the past year.  Donald Tapscott is a Canadian business person, about my age, who has followed, examined, and written about how the digital world is changing us, affecting how we do business and what will come about in our world because of it.  He and his son are now exploring and publicizing about the blockchain and alternative digital currencies.  In my opinion, 2017 will be the year that everyone becomes aware that this will revolutionize our financial transactions and in addition that it will affect our lives in ways not yet  conceived.  I’ve enjoyed several YouTube Videos by him.

His short essay is titled “Designing Your Mind”.  He states that

“Given recent research about brain plasticity and the dangers of cognitive load, the most powerful tool in our cognitive arsenal may well be design.  Specifically, we can use design principles and discipline to shape our minds.”

In brief, he provides evidence that our brains are sufficiently plastic that we can, by how we use our brains, effect physiological changes for our benefit.  We can re-wire our brains. 

“Results from studies like these support the notion that even among adults the persistent, concentrated use of one neighborhood of the brain really can increase its size and presumably its capacity.”

He cites Stan Kutcher that

“There is emerging evidence suggesting that exposure to new technologies may push the Net Generation [teenagers and young adults] brain past conventional capacity limitations.”

But not just the young can do this, even an oldster like myself can do it too.  Ways to accomplish this include mental rehearsal, memorizing, and practice.  By doing these things, we are taking an active role in designing our minds.  This is especially pertinent to me because at 66 I recognize my mind is not as sharp and quick as it used to be. This gives me hope that there is still a chance for improvement in certain ways and that I can remain useful to my loved ones and society.  

This Will Make You Smarter, J. Brockman ed;     ISBN-13:  9780062109392

Scientists of Other Faiths and No Faith

Interesting and beautiful sentiment expressed in this quote by Stacy Transacos in an interview over at the Biologos website.

When I worked as a scientist, I collaborated with people in labs around the world, many of whom I never met face to face and most of whom were people of other faiths or no faith. That’s the beautiful thing about science. It can unite us like a good meal can unite diverse people around a table. 

I feel the same way.  I've always enjoyed meeting other scientists and engineers from here and abroad.  Am thankful for the people I've met and from whom I've learned.

See more at: http://biologos.org/blogs/brad-kramer-the-evolving-evangelical/science-on-the-wings-of-faith-an-interview-with-stacy-trasancos#sthash.Mz60HCBw.dpuf

Hraach - Dle Yaman

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPQmEHIlZMI

Cool Music

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0r0CZamqK4

Bulrushes - The Bongos

 One of my favorite eighties groups.  They were kind of like American punk, softer and more melodic than the British version.  This particular song to me has a sixties feel like a combination of the Beatles and the Shadows of Night.  It was filmed purposely to emphasize that.

Regarding: Drink Bad Coffee and Change the World

Jonathan Storment posted this article titled Drink Bad Coffee and Change the World.  Jonathan is describing and honoring a book by Richard Beck titled Reviving Old Scratch: Demons and the Devil for  Doubters Disenchanted


I particularly liked this quote.

"The church is a laboratory of love, a place where material care, sharing, hospitality, and mutual honoring are practiced and lived out…."

Living with Doubt and Uncertainty

Thanks for Relevancy 22 for posting this quotation from Richard Feynman .  See the entire post.

Thought for July 7, 2016

From my Kindle copy of Meditation As Contemplative Inquiry: When Knowing Becomes Love
- Highlight Loc. 46-48 | Added on Sunday, May 15, 2016, 03:01 PM Arthur Zajonc quotes:

Simone Weil put it well when she wrote,“To love truth means to endure the void and, as a result, to accept death.Truth is on the side of death.”* Something dies in us every time we change.To make space for the true, familiar well-worn habits must give way.

* Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. E. Crawford and M. von der Ruhr (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 11.

Thoughts on the Nature of Consciousness Summer 1978

Some notes I found in the attic from the aged 27 me.  It was the summer of 1978.  I've wrestled with the nature of consciousness for a long time.  Also note the opening three lines I'm writing for myself three lines of a piece of music by Yes- Starship Trooper.

"Does consciousness begin?

Does it have an end?

What is feeling?  What is sensation? What is sight?

How can they exist where there is nothing to feel, see, or hear?

If there are no objects to touch, no sound waves for the ear, no light for the eyes, what would there be to be conscious of?

Is it possible to be conscious without these?  Is consciousness involved only in this existence?

Conscience exists now, does it have to end?  

Why does feeling, like sensation have to end?  Why death?

What is soul?

( knowledge

  sensation)       Whats the relation between them?

Is it possible to think without thinking in worldly terms?

Is that why we're here?  To experience, feel, touch?  Perhaps these don't exist on the other side?  Perhaps the structure of language will not permit talk of the other side.  The other side is untranslateable."

Bret Victor's Personal View of "What Can A Technologist Do About Climate Change?

I've just discovered a remarkable blogger, Bret Victor.  Plan to spend some time going back through his work.  A late 2015 article discussed what can be done technologically for addressing climate change. I highly recommend this.  A careful once-through reading is not enough, there are so many links, graphs, and models for the reader to come back to for further understanding and depth.  I'm learning a lot from it.

Save the World by Using the Blockchain

Skype founder Jaan Tallinn proposes saving the world using Blockchain technoloy

http://bravenewcoin.com/news/skype-founder-jaan-tallinn-proposes-saving-the-world-using-blockchain-technology/

In an interview with the Telegraph, Tallinn says that he is “compiling a research paper on ways of using blockchain to create more co-ordination mechanisms,” that can be used to save humanity from possible resource-based problems, “from crime and corruption to deforestation and over-fishing.”

“The interesting thing about blockchain is that it has made it possible for humanity to reach a consensus about a piece of data without having any authority to dictate it,”

 - Jaan Tallinn

The Coming Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Revolution 1

This is the first of intended posts about Alternative Currencies and the Blockchain.  This will change our lives, yet again, as much or more than the coming of the internet.

Tutorial  

                                                               

1. The Human Blockchain Explained

This is one simple article from the online magazine Cointelegraph

2.  Khan Academy introduction to Bitcoin

This is a series of YouTube videos.   This will get you started.  From there you can start googling it yourself.  Please do yourself a favor and do so.

More to come.

Being and Self: Disclosed Not By Instrumental Reason but Poetry, Music ..Art

Another fascinating post at Jack's After the Future blog.  It is titled "The Meaning of History in 25 Theses." The theses could easily generate a book length commentary.  Among the very many things that could be discussed, the first to jump out at me is a snippet from his second comment to his post which is below, (I chose to bold).  

"............... Language and culture provide a kind of raft on which the self floats on the abyss. Language and culture filter the reality of Being as well as disclose it. Some language is more disclosive some more rigid in its filtering. Poetry, music, and other artistic forms are more disclosive, and abstract instrumental reason more controlling and rigidly filtering. 

Modernity especially in the period after the Industrial Revolution has become dominated by an ethos of instrumental reason that has created a group mind for which the depths of Being have been largely filtered out. Even religious language and poetry has lost its capability to disclose depths of the Being of the World that were accessible to our ancestors. Most poets and religious thinkers don't even try to disclose it because it has become so inaccessible. The ones who do go unread because nobody knows (or cares about) what they're talking about. 

This is a theme that Jack often expresses.  It is that the modern project is coming to an end.  In the late modern era as he says, we have lost our ability to express and perceive the depths of being.  Instrumental reason has overcome and bulldozed all in its path.  In its place it is a good thing in my opinion.  (Ironically, I say this as a Fellow of a technical society with the former title of the Instrumentation Society of America.)  I wrestled with this for many years until the postmodernists, as crazy as they sometimes are and write, were able to explain to me that the age of Enlightenment was not all encompassing and the final explanation for everything.  The age of print brought about the Reformation, the rise of Science, Capitalism, and the Industrial Age.  In my lifetime we've gone from the age of print to the age of Radio and Television broadcast, to the Digital Age.  The Visual is or will overcome the flatland of dry linear flatland Enlightenment.  Beauty, Music, Art, and Poetry with digital help should aid us for the next step.  The visual proves the error of the logical, sometimes.

What do the images in this post mean?  It is difficult for me to express but someting attracted me to them..

Viewing Decay Time versus Temperature

Also see:  http://www.emergingmeasurements.com/

The Narrative of Evolution, Consciousness, and the Christ

 

==============================================================

Life from its origins is hardwired for the emergence

            of some kind of reflective consciousness.
===============================================

That is a quotation lifted from an article in Christian Century Headed Toward Christ: The Grand Narrative of Evolution.  In the article, Ian Curran reviews a new book by Simon Conway Morris, The Runes of Evolution. Curran relates that 

Evolution, to be sure, proceeds by fits and starts. Species arise and then disappear, and the history of life on earth is marked by far more failures than successes. Species can be destroyed by predators, disease, climate change, or, as in the case of the dinosaurs, a wandering comet. But despite the elements of chance and contingency in evolution, Conway Morris perceives an intelligent, law-like process at work, a deep structure unfolding in the emergence of living beings who eventually come to apprehend the very mathematical forms which made possible their evolution. The dawn of self-awareness in the universe, manifest in human intellectual reflection, moral action, and spiritual experience, is a promise woven into the fabric of life from the beginning.

I am satisfied that this is true.  Conway Morris worked on the Burgess Shale with Stephen Jay Gould.  Gould was convinced that evolution was random.  There is no direction to evolution and that humans and the development of consciousness an accident.  Morris believes differently from this.  As do I, now.  

For many years, the trial and error approach of evolution depressed me and produced skepticism that meaning could be found in it.  Of course, being from a very conservative religious background, I had been taught that if evolution is true, we are an accident.  No different from an animal.  It is one reason many, no doubt, hang on to their anti-Darwinism.  They and I, for a while, thought that if evolution is true, then there can be no meaning to the universe.  Now I'm happy to learn this need not be the case.  Books by Morris, John Haught, and others are teaching me a more optimistic view of evolution.

Northrup Frye and the Nature of Man Quote

Thought I'd grab something to read in bed last night before dropping off.  At random picked from long ago The Great Code:  The Bible and Literature by Northrup Frye.  To my surprise it turns out I'd signed it exactly twenty years ago to the day.  In the introduction I came across this pithy quotation:

Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.