Teorema (1968) is an Italian language movie directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini and starring Terence Stamp. It was the first time Pasolini worked primarily with professional actors. (…)

Terence Stamp plays a mysterious figure who appears in the lives of a typical bourgeois Italian family. He engages in sexual affairs with all members of the household: the devoutly religious maid, the sensitive son, the sexually repressed mother, the timid daughter and, finally, the tormented father. The stranger gives unstintingly of himself, asking nothing in return. Then one day he leaves, as suddenly and mysteriously as he came.

Teorema means theorem in Italian. Its Greek root is theorima, meaning simultaneously “spectacle,” “intuition,” and “theorem.”

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

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Paraconsistent mathematics is a type of mathematics in which contradictions may be true. In such a system it is perfectly possible for a statement A and its negation not A to both be true.

How can this be, and be coherent? (…)

This statement is false.

To be true, the statement has to be false, and vice versa. Many brilliant minds have been afflicted with many agonising headaches over this problem, and there isn’t a single solution that is accepted by all. But perhaps the best-known solution (at least, among philosophers) is Tarski’s hierarchy, a consequence of Tarski’s undefinability theorem.

In a nutshell, Tarski’s hierarchy assigns semantic concepts (such as truth and falsity) a level. To discuss whether a statement is true, one has to switch into a higher level of language. Instead of merely making a statement, one is making a statement about a statement. A language may only meaningfully talk about semantic concepts from a level lower than it. Thus a sentence such as the liar’s sentence simply isn’t meaningful. By talking about itself, the sentence attempts unsuccessfully to make a claim about the truth of a sentence of its own level. (…)

How does a paraconsistent perspective address these paradoxes? The paraconsistent response to the classical paradoxes and contradictions is to say that these are interesting facts to study, instead of problems to solve.

{ +Plus | Continue reading }

According to Descartes’ model, any real understanding of the body could only come from taking it apart, just as one takes apart a machine to discover its inner workings. If we wish to understand how a clock tells time, according to this model, our job is to disassemble it. Understanding a clock means understanding its springs and gears. And the same is true of living “machines.”

This notion of the body as a machine would clear away centuries of intellectual detritus: By arguing that the body was the sum of its interacting parts, and, more importantly, by suggesting that the study of those parts would reveal the workings of the body, Descartes shifted centuries of scientific and philosophical discussion about imponderable life forces and inexplicable animist vapors. (Lest we go overboard in praising Descartes, he clearly panicked at the last moment. He exempted human beings from the ground rules he set for other living organisms. In so doing, he sowed 400 years of confusion and discord with his notion that the mind and the body were separate phenomena, governed by separate rules.) (…)

But living systems are not really clocklike in their assembly, and organisms are not really machines. (…) The number of elements that compose any living system—an ecosystem, an organism, an organ or a cell—is enormous. In living systems, the specific identities of these component parts matter. Unlike chemistry, for instance, in which an electron in a lithium atom is identical to an electron in a gold atom, all proteins in a cell are not equivalent or interchangeable. Each protein is the result of its own evolutionary trajectory. We understand and exploit their similarities, but their differences matter to us just as much. Perhaps most importantly, the relations between the components of living systems are complex, context-dependent and weak. In mechanical machines, the conversation taking place between the parts involves clear and unambiguous interactions. These interactions result in simple causes and effects: They are instructions barked down a simple chain of command.

In living systems, by contrast, virtually every interesting bit of biological machinery is embedded in a very large web of weak interactions. And this network of interactions gives rise to a discussion among the parts that is less like a chain of command and more like a complex court intrigue: ambiguous whispers against a noisy and distracting background. As a result, the same interaction between a regulatory protein and a segment of DNA can lead to different (and sometimes opposite) outcomes depending on which other proteins are present in the vicinity. The firing of a neuron can act to amplify the signal coming from other neurons or act instead to suppress it, based solely on the network in which the neuron is embedded. (…)

We have revealed the elegant workings of neurons in exquisite detail, but the material understanding of consciousness remains elusive. We have sequenced human genomes in their entirety, but the process that leads from a genome to an organism is still poorly understood. We have captured the intricacies of photosynthesis, and yet the consequences of rising carbon-dioxide levels for the future of the rain forests remain frustratingly hazy.

{ American Scientist | Continue reading }

The cataclysmic extinctions that scoured Earth 200 million years ago might have been easier to trigger than expected, with potentially troubling contemporary implications.

Rather than 600,000 years of volcanic activity choking Earth’s atmosphere with carbon dioxide, just a few thousand years apparently sufficed to raise ocean temperatures so potent greenhouse gases trapped in seafloor mud came bubbling up.

Much of everything alive on Earth was soon wiped out. Another half-million years of vulcanism were just icing on the cake. The immediate question: What lessons, if any, can be drawn?

{ Wired | Continue reading }

I’m having one of those days in which I never had a future. There is only a present, fixed and surrounded by a wall of anguish. (…)

I was abandoned in a corner where I could hear other children playing. I feel in my hands the broken toy I was given out of malicious irony.

{ Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet | Continue reading }

photo { Alexey Titarenko }

The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we’re moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it’s not really as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple’s gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it’s not really a person to person thing, it’s a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn’t really create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. (…)

Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they’ve said, ‘Well, since Moore’s law makes computation really, really cheap, let’s just give away the computation, but keep the data.’ And that’s a disaster.

If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, I mean, the world that Google wants is a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can’t be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo. (…) When you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. That’s part of why Google can exist.

{ Jaron Lanier/Edge | Continue reading }

In the history of humanity there are no civilizations or cultures which fail to manifest, in one or a thousand ways, this need for an absolute that is called heaven, freedom, a miracle, a lost paradise to be regained, peace, the going beyond History. (…)

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation. (…) Humanity has always had a nostalgia for the freedom that is only beauty, that is only real; life, plenitude, light.

{ Eugène Ionesco | Continue reading }

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.

{ Eugène Ionesco | Continue reading }

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Genes determine 50 percent of the likelihood that you will vote. Half of your altruism. One-quarter of your financial decisions. How do we know? Twin studies.

Researchers compare some behavior or trait in a set of pairs of monozygotic (identical) twins and a set of pairs of dizygotic (fraternal) twins. In theory, the siblings in each pair have been raised in the same way—i.e., they have “nurture” in common. But their “natures” might be different: Identical twins come from the same sperm and egg and are assumed to share their entire genomes; fraternal twins match up at only about half their genes. So if the pairs of monozygotic twins tend to share a trait more often than the pairs of dizygotic twins—be it the likelihood they will vote, a tendency toward altruism, or a strategy for managing their financial portfolios—the difference can be chalked up to genetics.

Some call this approach beautiful in its simplicity, but critics say it’s crude, potentially misleading, and based on an antiquated view of genetics. The implications of the studies are also just a little bit dangerous, because they suggest, for example, that some people just aren’t cut out for being nice to one another.

The idea of using twins to study the heritability of traits was the brainchild of the 19th-century British intellectual Sir Francis Galton. He’s not exactly the progenitor you might want for your scientific methods. Galton coined the term “eugenics” and was the inspiration for the push to manipulate human evolution through selective breeding. The movement eventually gave us forced sterilization and the most offensive passage in the history of the U.S. Supreme Court (and that’s really saying something): “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” (…)

Twin studies rest on two fundamental assumptions: 1) Monozygotic twins are genetically identical, and 2) the world treats monozygotic and dizygotic twins equivalently (the so-called “equal environments assumption”). The first is demonstrably and absolutely untrue, while the second has never been proven. (…)

Twin studies also rely on the false assumption that genetics are constant throughout one’s lifetime. Mutations and environmental factors cause measurable changes to the genome as life progresses. Charney cites the example of exercise, which can accelerate the formation of new neurons and potentially increase genetic variation among individual brain cells. By the time a pair of twins reaches middle age, it’s very difficult to make any assumptions whatsoever about the similarity of their genes.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

{ Emotion in Good Luck and Bad Luck: Predictions from Simplicity Theory | PDF }

The Desert of the Tartars (Il deserto dei Tartari) is a novel by Italian author Dino Buzzati, published in 1940.

The novel tells the story of a young officer, Giovanni Drogo, and his life spent guarding the Bastiani Fortress, an old, unmaintained border fortress.

The plot of the novel is Drogo’s lifelong wait for a great war in which his life and the existence of the fort can prove its usefulness. Drogo is posted to the remote outpost overlooking a desolate Tartar desert, spends his career waiting for the barbarian horde rumored to live beyond the desert.

Without noticing, Drogo finds that in his watch over the fort he has let years and decades pass and that while his old friends in the city have had children, married and lived full lives, he has come away with nothing except solidarity with his fellow soldiers in their long, patient vigil.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

screenshot { Michelangelo Antonioni, L’Avventura, 1960 }

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Historically, the two main types of obstacles to information discovery have been barriers of awareness, which encompass all the information we can’t access because we simply don’t know about its existence in the first place, and barriers of accessibility, which refer to the information we do know is out there but remains outside of our practical, infrastructural or legal reach. What the digital convergence has done is solve the latter, by bringing much previously inaccessible information into the public domain, made the former worse in the process, by increasing the net amount of information available to us and thus creating a wealth of information we can’t humanly be aware of due to our cognitive and temporal limitations, and added a third barrier — a barrier of motivation. (…)

If we somehow stumble upon an incredible archive of, say, digitized “rare” vinyl LP’s or unpublished manuscripts by a famous author, and it tickles our fancy, perhaps we bookmark it, perhaps we save it to Delicious or Instapaper, perhaps we take a quick skim, but more likely than not, we shove it into some cognitive corner and fail to spend time with it, exploring and learning, assuming that it’s just there, available and accessible anytime. The relationship between ease of access and motivation seems to be inversely proportional because, as the sheer volume of information that becomes available and accessible to us increases, we become increasingly paralyzed to actually access all but the most prominent of it — prominent by way of media coverage, prominent by way of peer recommendation, prominent by way of alignment with our existing interests. This is why information that isn’t rare in technical terms, in terms of being free and open to anyone willing to and knowledgeable about how to access it, may still remain rare in practical terms, accessed by only a handful of motivated scholars.

{ Nieman Journalism Lab | Continue reading }

I call it “Broks’s paradox”: the condition of believing that the mind is separate from the body, even though you know this belief to be untrue. (…)

Alexander Vilenkin, a physicist, believes that our universe is just one of an infinite number of similar regions. But “it follows from quantum mechanics” that the number of histories that can be played out in them is finite. The upshot of this crossplay of finitudes and infinities is that every possible history will play out in an infinite number of regions, which means there should be an infinite number of places with histories identical to our own down to the atomic level. “I find this rather depressing,” says Vilenkin, “but it is probably true.” The cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman, on the other hand, believes that “consciousness and its contents are all that exists,” the physical universe being “among the humbler contents of consciousness.” (…)

This brings us to death. The psychologist Jesse Bering believes we will never get our heads around the idea. He calls it “Unamuno’s paradox,” after the Spanish existentialist Miguel de Unamuno, who was troubled not so much by the prospect of his own death as by his inability in life to get any kind of imaginative purchase on what the state of being dead would be “like.”

{ Prospect | Continue reading }

photo { Lissy-Laricchia }

A woman who took her partner’s name or a hyphenated name was judged as more caring, more dependent, less intelligent, more emotional, less competent, and less ambitious in comparison with a woman who kept her own name. A woman with her own name, on the other hand, was judged as less caring, more independent, more ambitious, more intelligent, and more competent, which was similar to an unmarried woman living together or a man.

Finally, a job applicant who took her partner’s name, in comparison with one with her own name, was less likely to be hired for a job and her monthly salary was estimated $1,250 lower (calculated to a working life, $500,000).

{ Basic and Applied Social Psychology | Continue reading | via The Jury Room }

The first clear statement of relativism comes with the Sophist Protagoras, as quoted by Plato, “The way things appear to me, in that way they exist for me; and the way things appears to you, in that way they exist for you” (Theaetetus 152a). Thus, however I see things, that is actually true — for me. If you see things differently, then that is true — for you. There is no separate or objective truth apart from how each individual happens to see things. Consequently, Protagoras says that there is no such thing as falsehood.

Unfortunately, this would make Protagoras’s own profession meaningless, since his business is to teach people how to persuade others of their own beliefs. It would be strange to tell others that what they believe is true but that they should accept what you say nevertheless. So Protagoras qualified his doctrine: while whatever anyone believes is true, things that some people believe may be better than what others believe. (…)

Protagoras’s own way out that his view must be “better” doesn’t make any sense either: better than what? Better than opposing views? But there are no opposing views, by relativism’s own principle. And even if we can identify opposing views — taking contradiction and falsehood seriously — what is “better” supposed to mean? Saying that one thing is “better” than another is always going to involve some claim about what is actually good, desirable, worthy, beneficial, etc. What is “better” is supposed to produce more of what is a good, desirable, worthy, beneficial, etc.; but no such claims make any sense unless it is claimed that the views expressed about what is actually good, desirable, worthy, beneficial, etc. are true. If the claims about value are not supposed to be true, then it makes no difference what the claims are: they cannot exclude their opposites. (…)

Relativism turns up in many guises. Generally, we can distinguish cognitive relativism, which is about all kinds of knowledge, from moral relativism, which is just about matters of value. Protagoras’s principle is one of cognitive relativism. (…)

Another modern kind of cognitive relativism is linguistic relativism, that truth is created by the grammar and semantic system of particular language. This idea in philosophy comes from Ludwig Wittgenstein, but it turns up independently in linguistics in the theory of Benjamin Lee Whorf. On this view the world really has no structure of its own, but that structure is entirely imposed by the structure of language. Learning a different language thus means in effect creating a new world, where absolutely everything can be completely different from the world as we know it. Wittgenstein called the rules established by a particular language a “game” that we play as we speak the language. (…)

In linguistics, Whorf’s theory has mostly been superseded by the views of Noam Chomsky that there are “linguistic universals,” i.e. structures that are common to all languages. That would mean that even if language creates reality, reality is going to contain certain universal constants. In philosophy, on the other hand, Wittgenstein is still regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. But his theory cannot avoid stumbling into an obvious breach of self-referential consistency, for the nature of language would clearly be part of the structure of the world that is supposedly created by the structure of language. Wittgenstein’s theory is just a theory about the nature of language, and as such it is merely the creation of his own language game. We don’t have to play his language game if we don’t want to. By his own principles, we can play a language game where the world has an independent structure, and whatever we say will be just as true as whatever Wittgenstein says. Thus, like every kind of relativism, Wittgenstein’s theory cannot protect itself from its own contradiction. Nor can it avoid giving the impression of claiming for itself the very quality, objective truth, that it denies exists.

{ Kelley L. Ross | Continue reading }

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There’s one prediction about driverless cars that I can make with confidence: If millions of them ever roam the public highways, they will be far safer than cars driven by people. My confidence in this assertion does not derive from mere faith in technology. It’s just that if robotic drivers were as dangerous as human ones, then computer-controlled cars would never be allowed on the roads. We hold our machines to a higher standard than ourselves.

Over the past decade, the number of auto accidents in the United States—counting only those serious enough to be reported to the police—has been running at about six million a year. Those accidents kill about 40,000 people and injure well over two million more. Estimates of the economic impact are in the neighborhood of $200 billion. Much of that cost is shared among car owners through premiums for auto insurance.

This safety record certainly leaves ample room for improvement. An appropriate goal for automated vehicles might be to reduce highway carnage to the same order of magnitude experienced in other modes of transport, such as railroads and commercial aviation. That would mean bringing road fatalities down to roughly 1 percent of their current level—from 40,000 deaths per year to 400. (In terms of deaths per passenger mile, cars would then be the safest of all vehicles.)

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

The Misconception: You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view.

The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others.

{ You are not so smart | Continue reading }

{ Do you know the game called the Fifteen Puzzle? }

Academics like me are skilled users of turnitin.com. Never heard of it? Ask the nearest undergraduate and watch their cheek blanch. Turnitin is the trade’s leading ‘plagiarism detector’. You upload the student’s essay or dissertation and it’s checked against trillions of words and phrases in seconds. (…)

Take, for example, the indisputably most famous and quoted line in English literature, ‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’. Most theatregoers would think the sentence spit new. But should they also go to a performance of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus they would hear the following in the hero’s magnificent opening soliloquy, in which he resolves to sell his soul: ‘Bid Oncaymæon farewell, Galen come’. The Greek Oncaymæon transliterates as ‘being and not being’.

‘To be or not to be’ is not a deeply original thought but a hackneyed sophomoric seminar topic. Hamlet is not thinking, he’s quoting. (…)

Voltaire did not apparently say ‘I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it’. As Morson says, ‘the statement belongs to a biographer of Voltaire’. It is what he would have said - utterly Voltairean, but not ipsissima verba.

{ Literary Review | Continue reading }

oil on oak panel { Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Three Soldiers, 1568 }

If you’re not familiar with the law of diminishing returns, it states that at a certain point adding more effort will not produce significantly more gains. The challenge is knowing when you’ve reached that point.

For many managers this is an important question: How far do I keep going on a project before I declare that it’s “good enough” — and that further effort will not significantly change the outcome?

From my experience, there are two often-unconscious reasons for this unproductive quest for perfection. The first is the fear of failing. (…) The second is the anxiety about taking action.

{ Harvard Business Review | Continue reading }