"Moving onto science, Weinberger sets out examples of the amazing possibilities for amassing and synthesizing facts individually and as a group, citing huge scientific datasets like ProteomeCommons, run by a single grad student and comprising 13 million data files. He examines what it means to reach scientific conclusions when there is so much data, and what this means for the scientific method and the idea of falsifiability. If you can use data-mining to arrive at equations describing the relationships between different phenomena in the physical world, and if those equations reliably predict future actions, does it matter if you don’t know why the equation works? And if it does, should you exclude that equation from the realm of science, especially if there’s nothing else quite so useful to take its place?"
Too Big to Know: David Weinberger explains how knowledge works in the Internet age - Boing Boing
"What the meaning of human life may be I don’t know: I incline to suspect that it has none. All I know about it is that, to me at least, it is very amusing while it lasts. Even its troubles, indeed, can be amusing. Moreover, they tend to foster the human qualities that I admire most—courage and its analogues. The noblest man, I think, is that one who fights God, and triumphs over Him. I have had little of this to do. When I die I shall be content to vanish into nothingness. No show, however good, could conceivably be good for ever."
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On a cold night, most people consider a well-tended fire to be one of the more wholesome pleasures that humanity has produced. A fire, burning safely within the confines of a fireplace or a woodstove, is a visible and tangible source of comfort to us. We love everything about it: the warmth, the beauty of its flames, and—unless one is allergic to smoke—the smell that it imparts to the surrounding air.
I am sorry to say that if you feel this way about a wood fire, you are not only wrong but dangerously misguided. I mean to seriously convince you of this—so you can consider it in part a public service announcement—but please keep in mind that I am drawing an analogy. I want you to be sensitive to how you feel, and to notice the resistance you begin to muster as you consider what I have to say.
""Instead of being overwhelmed by the universe, I think that perhaps one of the deepest experiences a scientist can have, almost approaching a religious awakening, is to realize that we are children of the stars, and that our minds are capable of understanding the universal laws that they obey. The atoms within our bodies were forged on the anvil of nucleosynthesis within an exploding star eons before the birth of the solar system. Our atoms are older than the mountains. We are literally made of star dust. Now these atoms, in turn, have coalesced into intelligent beings capable of understanding the universal laws governing that event."
Michio Kaku (via alnator)
(via just-breezy)
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While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.
Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.
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If you think of life, of intelligent life, it is, among other things, a physical phenomenon — it occurs when the physical conditions are right. And so the question of how likely it is that life will emerge, and how frequently it will emerge, does connect up to physics, and does connect up to cosmology, because when you’re asking how likely it is that somewhere there’s life, you’re talking about the broad scope of the physical universe. And philosophers do tend to be pretty well schooled in certain kinds of probabilistic analysis, and so it may come up. I wouldn’t rule it in or rule it out.
I will make one comment about these kinds of arguments which seems to me to somehow have eluded everyone. When people make these probabilistic equations, like the Drake Equation, which you’re familiar with — they introduce variables for the frequency of earth-like planets, for the evolution of life on those planets, and so on. The question remains as to how often, after life evolves, you’ll have intelligent life capable of making technology. What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true. Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence. There is just too much we don’t know.
"What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology - Technology - The Atlantic
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Even more fundamentally, there is no such thing as creativity that doesn’t rely on the past. Sometimes the links are very subtle and hidden; sometimes they’re out in the open, and we don’t notice them only because we’ve declared Bach and Beethoven “great composers” and forgotten the popular music of their day. Our peculiar post-Romantic notion that all real artists somehow create their works out of nothing is partly to blame. Nothing could be further from the truth. And it’s not just art. In a very rare moment of humility, Isaac Newton said “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
So the notion that creativity can be owned, and that any use of someone else’s ideas requires compensation, is nothing but an attempt to steal all of creativity. Whoever can pay their lawyers the most wins. Anyone smell pirates in the room? I am not willing to sacrifice this generation’s great artists on the altar of Hollywood. I’m not willing to have the next Bach, Beethoven, or Shakespeare post their work online, only to have it taken down because they haven’t paid off a bunch of executives who think they own creativity.
The Constitution of the United States provides a legal basis for copyright and patent, but it’s for a specific purpose: it’s “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” We’ve gone way beyond that now, with patent and copyright piracy: our notion of intellectual property is now hindering both science and art.
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