"Evolutionary Psychology" Among other things, has nothing to do with "evolution". Misses evolution post-supermind, including the evolution of "Evolutionary Psychology" Tends to assume a fantasy version of the past and "adaptive" explanation of all that is Ignores how elastic "our" imagination turns out to be Regards our current environment as a kind of strange, miracle that we are somehow adapted to Sam Harris - What Is And What Matters

We are constantly getting into trouble by mixing up our mental models (mathematical or not) with "actual reality". One obvious example was our assumption that space is "Euclidean". We really hit the wall with this in Quantum Mechanics, which seems to defy human logic itself (The EPR Paradox). I see it all the time when respectable physicists fail to grasp the idea that the Universe may actually be infinite or disallow actual singularities. My favorite example of this is the canard that someplace in an infinite universe there "must" be another version of me typing an identical e-mail to another version of you. Although the analogy is far from exact, I enjoy thinking about this in the same way I enjoy the proof that there is an infinite number of prime numbers. In my imagination at least, an infinite universe implies an infinite number of "situations" at every scale. The idea that two "situations" are identical is a construct of the h...

Perhaps the only positive thing Trump has done for the world is to raise awareness of the "Fake News" phenomenon. If the Republicans had run someone less visibly insane or if the Russians had not blatantly put their thumbs on the scale, this topic may have raised the alarms it has. The Brexit referendum raised similar issues on the other side of the Atlantic, but the two crises together have enlivened the debate considerably. The same goes for analysis of the 2008 financial crisis, which didn't just happen in America. On a personal note, we "information junkies" need to be aware of the forces that pollute our access to information and silence those voices who are attempting to make their voices heard over the deafening sound of the misinformed crowd. An excellent overview of this problem is from the London School of Economics . This report provides a comprehensive overview of the issue, along with quite a few specific recommendations. For the moment, I will...

An excellent CBC Ideas episode is a nuanced treatment of how we tend to become more "conservative" as we grow older. I felt that the entire discussion was missing the point, or at least the "lefties" and "conservatives" were talking past each other. We have lost sight of the real world around us and have grown to depend on utterly unreliable ways of thinking about it. There is a lot to unpack here. For one thing, words such as "liberal" and "conservative" suffer from " reification " - slipping into thinking that something is a "thing" just because we use a name. "Socialists" have famously never agreed on what "real" socialism is - they are always accusing each other of not being "real" socialists" The idea of "conservatism" is just as amorphous, as illustrated by its defenders in the CBC episode. Why, for example, is Trump "conservative". Of course, conserv...

(A note to Len) Our mathematical models (or our ability, in general, to predict or "understand" a system) must always be bound by an artificial "carving out" of the application domain of understanding specification of scale - including the applicability of our tools to the scale we are working with recognition of the precision we expect or the precision that is even theoretically possible. This visualizes a "fractal" nature of reality (or our models of reality) up to a point, where models at one scale fail at a different one. In "Road To Reality" Penrose attempted to construct a framework for a smooth transition from one model to another (Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, for example). I'm afraid I remained unconvinced but partly because I'm too lazy or too stupid to follow his arguments in detail. In a hypothetical University curriculum in this field (which still needs to be named), I think that scale, chaos, non-linear systems a...

Religion is (and still is) a means whereby cultural norms are enforced through means of authority derived from "off planet". Zero-cost credits for carrots and sticks are offered to be cashed in in that alternate universe. Religion justifies the infliction of terrible punishments in the here-and-now and has sponsored genocidal wars. Religions that we generally regard as "peaceful" seldom live up to their own reputation. Good Christian folk brought their kids to watch lynchings in the US South. Buddhism is playing a key part in the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar and a similar role in the violent suppression of the Hindu minority in Ceylon. Religious authority is behind the rape of thousands of children and the coverup of these crimes. Religious authority enthusiastically participated in the attempted genocide of indigenous people in Canada in the residential school system. If these are the benefits of religion, we can clearly do without them. Rational human being sho...

It's natural to ask whether all this speculation matters. Asking this, it is easy to slip into the trap of making general conclusions and offering general advice for those who may agree with me on the issues raised here. That's a mistake. All I can do is say what it means to me  Others may draw their own conclusions. Basically, I can ignore religion's claims of authority (derived from beyond the observable Universe) as well as its claims that its insights trump observation reality. If I compare my life and priorities with others who allow religion to totally dominate, the advantage is huge. Millions are willing to die for their particular religious fantasy. Millions of others willingly surrender their right to chose for themselves in matters of great personal impact. It matters. This blog recognizes that I am embedded in a culture that is strongly influenced by "Christian" values and mythology. Many of us are broadly familiar with the stories in the Bible. However...

I have lately become impressed with the what's going on in the brain. Learning more about the small details, I wind up asking myself about the "big picture" that these details reveal. I'm a visual kind of guy, so I'm thinking about a picture something like this: Neural network in the brain That picture is showing main connections only - myelinated "high speed" connections. The actual picture would be a packed tangle of axons and dendrites - for example, the massive wad of connections that make up the "white matter" in the brain, connecting (on average) each neuron in the neocortex with 1,000 other neurons. White Matter in the Brain is a Wad of Connections Where else do we see something like that? Roots in the Forest Floor There is a tangle of roots under our feet in the forest floor. We usually see the big ones that manage to break the surface and threaten to trip us up, but the network is much more extensive, especially in a thriving "old...

For the moment, let me talk about the world of human experience as "E". The world that Science investigates is assumed to exist a part from human experience , although we can only know it through human experience. Without really thinking about it, we imagine the "real world" to be about the shared experience: verifiable, consistent and augmented by what we call "reason". But we have long admitted that Universe, which I will call U, is not the same as "E". In fact, we assume that we can never know "U" entirely, directly or completely. We all know that "E" is not the same for each of us. In fact, it is quite remarkably different between different cultures and different times or even for a single individual throughout his or her lifetime. The question at hand is, is there anything "out there" apart from E and U? In most religious traditions the answer is "yes".  Most religions postulate a universe in ...