1 Giant leap – what about me
Click above for what I think is an amazing film I recommend everyone watch. I say film but it’s more a concept multimedia project and having a heads-up on how it was made before you watch it only makes it more amazing in my opinion.
Two guys travelled to 50 countries with a laptop and video camera to record artist and interview people. Out of this chaos they have created a beautiful, life affirming mosaic which shows starkly how our consumer driven ego insanity does not satisfy what it is to be human.
The insights are awesome, the music and visuals beautiful and the journey fulfilling. If you are interested in any of the collaborating artist I think you will get a lot out of it. Some people involved include:
Noam Chomsky, Michael Frant, Carlos Santana, Eckhart Tolle, Baghavan Das, Alanis Morissette, Eddi Reader, Billy Connolly, Tim Robbins, K.D.Lang, Bob Geldof, Jhelisa, Maxi Jazz, Stephen Fry.
Sunday, 18 March 2012
Supersense by Bruce Hood
It took me ages to read this. Puzzling as it’s a fascinating subject and an argument I agree with but the book was really hard to read.
The book is basically about how our minds have developed to be primed to believe in supernatural phenomenon to explain the world around us. This leads on to the idea that religions are just fit this already existing structure rather than are imposed brain washing forced on the young. This way of thinking goes a long way to explaining why religion persists and is believed by intelligent people despite evidence that it is not logical. It showed me the debate about god / atheism will not be resolved as belief is, although illogical, intuitively correct.
Most of that summary is actually gleamed from the New Scientist special edition on God I’ve just read. This condensed all the best ideas I read in the book to eight easy pages without reference to supersense. Clearly lots of people are working in this area and I was unfortunate to find the one book I found hard to get along with.
To me the book was just a jumbled mess of anecdotal evidence with a hotchpotch of well-known experiments, conjecture and ramblings. I was hard pressed to follow any narrative even though there were summaries at the end of each chapter. I found a few gens of wisdom but it was a hard slog to get to the end.
My advice would be to save time and read New Scientist 17 March 2012 issue as that, to me, is the best way to engage with these new ideas.
The book is basically about how our minds have developed to be primed to believe in supernatural phenomenon to explain the world around us. This leads on to the idea that religions are just fit this already existing structure rather than are imposed brain washing forced on the young. This way of thinking goes a long way to explaining why religion persists and is believed by intelligent people despite evidence that it is not logical. It showed me the debate about god / atheism will not be resolved as belief is, although illogical, intuitively correct.
Most of that summary is actually gleamed from the New Scientist special edition on God I’ve just read. This condensed all the best ideas I read in the book to eight easy pages without reference to supersense. Clearly lots of people are working in this area and I was unfortunate to find the one book I found hard to get along with.
To me the book was just a jumbled mess of anecdotal evidence with a hotchpotch of well-known experiments, conjecture and ramblings. I was hard pressed to follow any narrative even though there were summaries at the end of each chapter. I found a few gens of wisdom but it was a hard slog to get to the end.
My advice would be to save time and read New Scientist 17 March 2012 issue as that, to me, is the best way to engage with these new ideas.
Sunday, 4 March 2012
Science fact or science fiction?
I’ve been aware of Libet's 1979 experiments for some time where he showed the brain has activated movement before a person is consciously aware of the decision. It’s one of those science facts I understood theoretically but the other day when I was reading the explanation of it in my new Sci-Fi read ‘mindscan’(another Robert Sawyer novel) it clicked on a practical level. The explanation used was:
“you're lying in bed, quite mellow, and you look over at the clock, and you think to yourself, I really should get up, it's time to get up, I've got to go to work. You may think this a half-dozen times or more, and then, suddenly, you are getting up — the action has begun, without you being consciously aware that you've finally, really made the decision to get out of bed. And that's because you haven't consciously made that decision; your unconscious has made it for you. It — not the conscious you — has concluded once and for all that it really is time to get out of bed."
I've had that for sure. This rekindled my interest in the scientific evidence for this explanation, especially to check out if the sci-fi description below is correct:
“The action begins 550 milliseconds prior to the first physical movement. Two hundred milliseconds later, the action that's already been started comes to the attention of your conscious self — and your conscious self has 350 milliseconds to put on the brakes before anything happens. The conscious brain doesn't initiate so-called voluntary acts, although it can step in and stop them.”
You see I hadn’t picked up on the 350 millisecond veto before and it does make sense so did some web searching and read this:
http://www.blutner.de/philom/consc/consc.html
It’s a nice easy to digest summary which does verify the sci-fi and concludes:
“Consciousness is not a high level authority that gives orders to subordinated instances. Instead, its main role is a selective one: make a decision between the bulk of possibilities that are proposed by unconscious processes.”
So there’s all kinds of possibilities already happened in my brain at 550 milliseconds and at 350 milliseconds I can veto the action or carry it out. Explains how indecision happens so much especially in now that we have more and more choices and freedoms. It's exactingly as I read in Incognito.
“Your conscious brain takes ownership of the action, and fools itself into thinking it started the action, but really it's just a spectator, watching what your body is doing.”
(Mindscan again) Thought provoking fiction – love it :)
“you're lying in bed, quite mellow, and you look over at the clock, and you think to yourself, I really should get up, it's time to get up, I've got to go to work. You may think this a half-dozen times or more, and then, suddenly, you are getting up — the action has begun, without you being consciously aware that you've finally, really made the decision to get out of bed. And that's because you haven't consciously made that decision; your unconscious has made it for you. It — not the conscious you — has concluded once and for all that it really is time to get out of bed."
I've had that for sure. This rekindled my interest in the scientific evidence for this explanation, especially to check out if the sci-fi description below is correct:
“The action begins 550 milliseconds prior to the first physical movement. Two hundred milliseconds later, the action that's already been started comes to the attention of your conscious self — and your conscious self has 350 milliseconds to put on the brakes before anything happens. The conscious brain doesn't initiate so-called voluntary acts, although it can step in and stop them.”
You see I hadn’t picked up on the 350 millisecond veto before and it does make sense so did some web searching and read this:
http://www.blutner.de/philom/consc/consc.html
It’s a nice easy to digest summary which does verify the sci-fi and concludes:
“Consciousness is not a high level authority that gives orders to subordinated instances. Instead, its main role is a selective one: make a decision between the bulk of possibilities that are proposed by unconscious processes.”
So there’s all kinds of possibilities already happened in my brain at 550 milliseconds and at 350 milliseconds I can veto the action or carry it out. Explains how indecision happens so much especially in now that we have more and more choices and freedoms. It's exactingly as I read in Incognito.
“Your conscious brain takes ownership of the action, and fools itself into thinking it started the action, but really it's just a spectator, watching what your body is doing.”
(Mindscan again) Thought provoking fiction – love it :)
Friday, 2 March 2012
Flashforward – Robert Sawyer
Strangely I was attracted to this book by negative reviews on amazon. Lots of people were saying how it was odd the TV show better than the book. Now I’ve not seen an episode of the TV show because the ads I did see gave the impression the global leap of human consciousness into the future was caused by terrorists. Frankly I’d have believed alien intervention was more probable explanation! Fortunately the book chooses neither of these scenarios and instead centres on the more plausible explanation of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider going awry.
Of course time travel would mess with the fabric of physics as we understand it (look at the fuss that was caused when neutron might have travelled faster!!) so there’s plenty of nerdy science in this version of the story. I’m guessing that’s what gave for some poor reception in those expecting a copy of the TV show. I’m the opposite – in fact the physics is central to the book and I’ve no idea how the TV show worked without it. Mainly because the underlying theme of the book is the notion of free will and whether the future is fixed or full of a multitude of alternative (parallel) futures. So in the book you get to learn about some of the new mind boggling theories from physics about the nature of reality while being pulled along by a fascinating detective story.
Giving a glimpse of the future is an excellent narrative tool to build intrigue without spoiling the end – I’ve seen loads of films recently that begin with the end then jump back. For me the balance of science and story was just right but judging by the reviews it’s not for everyone. And likewise I won’t be rushing out to grab the DVD as I believe I’ve witnessed the best execution of this story possible.
Of course time travel would mess with the fabric of physics as we understand it (look at the fuss that was caused when neutron might have travelled faster!!) so there’s plenty of nerdy science in this version of the story. I’m guessing that’s what gave for some poor reception in those expecting a copy of the TV show. I’m the opposite – in fact the physics is central to the book and I’ve no idea how the TV show worked without it. Mainly because the underlying theme of the book is the notion of free will and whether the future is fixed or full of a multitude of alternative (parallel) futures. So in the book you get to learn about some of the new mind boggling theories from physics about the nature of reality while being pulled along by a fascinating detective story.
Giving a glimpse of the future is an excellent narrative tool to build intrigue without spoiling the end – I’ve seen loads of films recently that begin with the end then jump back. For me the balance of science and story was just right but judging by the reviews it’s not for everyone. And likewise I won’t be rushing out to grab the DVD as I believe I’ve witnessed the best execution of this story possible.
Thursday, 1 March 2012
Reasons to check facebook privacy settings
Saw this the other day - great way to display data - Nov 2009 was a shocker:
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
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