I am Tpain

downhill mtb POV tour of a favela

Animal metacognition/consciousness

Thought this was pretty interesting:

A psychologist called David Smith, who works at the University of Buffalo in New York state, has been working for some years with a bottlenose dolphin called Natua in a harbour in Florida. He trained the animal to press buttons depending upon the frequency of the sounds it was hearing.

When the differences between the sounds was obvious, the dolphin had no problem (a snack was the reward for getting the right answer). But as the sounds to be compared got closer in frequency, to the point where even the dolphin’s impressive hearing apparatus is unable to distinguish between them, Natua learned to press a third button, effectively a ‘don’t know’ or ‘pass’ button, that moved the test on to the next ‘question.’ Similar results were found with rhesus monkeys, this time using symbols in a computer game.The tests have been refined to determine the level of confidence that the animal feels that it has the ‘right’ answer.

Smith told New Scientist in 2006: ‘I can’t claim these monkeys show fully-fledged consciousness, but I have shown the exact cognitive analogy to what we have in humans, and for us it is consciousness’.

From: "10 Questions Science Can’t Answer (Yet)" (p. 31)

The Age of Empathy

emergent adulthood & childman apologetics

In an economic marketplace (at least in theory), the prices of goods and services are emergent.

Market forces determine the relative worth of a product or service through a larger conversation about value, scarcity, transaction costs...

This recent piece in the New York Times (written by a woman) on why 'guys' have more relationship value than 'men' really has me thinking:

Guys are often in between things like jobs and houses, which means they’re more likely to stay up with you all night, drinking wine and playing gin rummy. They’ll rub your belly. They’ll lick chocolate off it. They’ll like your cute little dog. A guy is never going to shoot Old Yeller in the woods.

Then again, guys don’t remember to tell you the doctor’s office called. They don’t check your tires before your big trip. They don’t say, “Call me when you get there.” They say, “Love you, have fun,” because they can’t imagine anything bad happening to you.

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Jeffrey Arnett, a developmental psychologist at Clark University, coined the term "emerging adult" to describe folks who straddle an extended adolescence.

I'm starting to wonder if it's useful to consider adulthood an emergent aspect of the cultural marketplace.

I think all the buzz about childmen after this article dropped speaks to that possiblity.

As both economic and cultural institutional currency drops and we move into a more networked-entrepreneurial economic (and eventually cultural) paradigm, I'm curious how much traction an apologetic for the childman might have...how popular 'guys' may become.

I don't think they're (we're?) going anywhere.

At the edge of chaos: the neuroscience of Bruce Lee

We know a lot about Bruce Lee.

We know he began learning Wing Chun under Yip Man at age 13. We know he pulled from fencing, boxing and bodybuilding to develop his insane training regimen. We know he developed  a system called Jeet Kune Do which he himself was very reluctant to name.

We know a lot.

As a fan of Bruce Lee, however, I am impatiently waiting for a neuroscientist to tell us what was going on inside the brain of the world's most influential martial artist. (If anybody has written the book/post,  let me know).

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In Bruce Lee's own words:

As long as I can remember I feel I have had this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence, greater than determination, greater than vision. It is all these combined. My brain becomes magnetized with this dominating force which I hold in my hand.

What is this force he speaks of? What is going on in this dude's brain?

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In his book Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer explores creative thinkers and their ability to map out the wiring of the mind well before scientists catch up with the scientific method.

Lehrer traces the work of 8 writers and discusses their work as intuitive glimpses into the workings of the human brain:

This book is about artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience. It is about writers and painters and composers who discovered truths about the human mind -- real, tangible truths -- that science is only now rediscovering. Their imaginations foretold the facts of the future.

I believe Bruce Lee is part of this same class of creatives and that his writings are a glimpse into the nature of the driven, adapting human mind.

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In his own words:

“All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.”

“Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.”

These Bruce Lee quotes resonate with a scientific concept called 'self-organized criticality,' an important discovery within complexity studies which helps explain natural phenomena like earthquakes and avalanches.

New Scientist explains:

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

The quintessential example of self-organised criticality is a growing sand pile. As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These "sand avalanches" occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising.

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Some scientists think forces similar to those that cause sand piles to shift or 'avalanche' are  active in our brains and that these forces drive us to adapt and optimize problem solving:

It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems. "Lying at the critical point allows the brain to rapidly adapt to new circumstances," says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

While his language is different, I think Bruce Lee's writings reflect an awareness of conditions involved in achieving self-organized criticality.

“If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.”

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Is it possible that Bruce Lee rewired his own nervous system for radical adaptation by cultivating forces similar to those behind avalanches and earthquakes?

I'm starting to think he may have learned to leverage the logic of  self-organised criticality and turned the edge of chaos into a productive, even necessary, workspace.

5 things cities can learn from Burning Man

To recap:

1. Get rid of cars
2. Encourage self reliance
3. Rethink commerce
4. Foster virtue (w/ shame)
5. Encourage Art

the ridding of betweens

Between the perceiving mind and the perceived world, is there nothing in common? We call them disparate and incommensurable. Nature in evolving us makes them two parts of one mind, and that one mind is our own. We are the tie between them. Perhaps that is why we exist.

Sir Charles Sherrington, 1935

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Via Zann Gill Google talk, "Designing Innovation Networks Modeled on Life's Origins & Evolution"

David Bohm on the problem of thought

David Bohm was a U.S.-born British quantum physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Evidently, Bohm hung out w/ one of my  favorite thinkers: Krishnamurti.

(Reading the below passage, I can see why this dude was drawn to Krishnamurti.)

From Bohm's Thought as a System:

A corporation is organized as a system - it has this department, that department, that department. They don't have any meaning separately; they only can function together. And also the body is a system. Society is a system in some sense. And so on.

Similarly, thought is a system. That system not only includes thoughts, "felts" and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society - as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times.

A system is constantly engaged in a process of development, change, evolution and structure changes...although there are certain features of the system which become relatively fixed. We call this the structure.... Thought has been constantly evolving and we can't say when that structure began. But with the growth of civilization it has developed a great deal.

It was probably very simple thought before civilization, and now it has become very complex and ramified and has much more incoherence than before. Now, I say that this system has a fault in it - a "systematic fault". It is not a fault here, there or here, but it is a fault that is all throughout the system. Can you picture that? It is everywhere and nowhere.

You may say "I see a problem here, so I will bring my thoughts to bear on this problem". But "my" thought is part of the system. It has the same fault as the fault I'm trying to look at, or a similar fault. Thought is constantly creating problems that way and then trying to solve them. But as it tries to solve them it makes it worse because it doesn’t notice that it's creating them, and the more it thinks, the more problems it creates. (P. 18-19)

(I am kinda curious if he wrote this after he met Krishnamurti.)

Campbell's law, evolutionary epistemology

The notion that measurement can directly affect the phenomena being examined is a major issue arising out of quantum mechanics with the problematized measurer/observer.

Kinda fascinated by the law named after this dude:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

(Ex. high stakes testing advocated in No Child Left Behind.)

It would seem the act of applying quantitative measurement is laden with contingencies in a number of contexts.

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A social scientist, Campbell is also known for coining the term 'evolutionary epistemology,' an approach which applies the concepts of biological evolution to the growth of human knowledge.

That knowledge collapses onto ever evoloving cognitive abilities (based on ultimately biological thought organs) makes sense to me.

The idea that any epistemology could have an unchanging ground strikes me as stupid. There is no static ground for knowledge (unless we were to grow a knowledge organ and/or tap knowledge beyond the biological realm).