Krakowski Klub Tygodnika Powszechnego zaprasza na spotkanie
"Czy wolna wola potrzebna jest tylko wierzącemu?"
Gościem spotkanie będzie Ks. prof. Józef Bremer SJ
rozmawiać z nim będą:
Katarzyna Biel, kognitywistyka, UJ
prof. Adam Walanus, AGH
Niedziela 28 czerwca 2015, godz. 18:00
Sala konferencyjna Herbewa (wejście od ul. Lubelskiej 29).
Żródła cytatów AW:
Ludwig Wittgenstein, it is said, loved cricket. Curious, perhaps,
/15-06-15
We are the little epiphenomena that occur along the way from a simple low entropy past to a simple high entropy future.
... We don't know the right quantitative description for complexity. This is very early days. This is Copernicus, not even Kepler
... existential anxiety
... My own work is that of a traditional pencil and paper theorist. I own a computer. I mostly use it for email and looking at the Internet.
... the patterns in the microwave background, .. to take these clues that the universe is giving us and turn them into quantitative theories
... Feynman's desk
... The Bayesian Second Law of Thermodynamics.
... a book on quantum field theory or particle physics, words like cause and effect appear nowhere in the book.
... why notions of cause and effect work in the macroscopic world even though they're absent in the microscopic world, no one completely understands that.
... Part of that big region becomes our universe,
... the question is a combination of science and philosophy once again.
... string theory
... inaccessible to our practical experimental abilities. Maybe even our impractical ones
... ask Karl Popper about that, he would say these theories are perfectly scientific,
.. He never said it would be easy to falsify things,
... ... Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia .. "You're a dualist" .. Descartes never found a satisfactory answer
... minds—consciousness—are not separate from the stuff out of which we are made. It is an emergent phenomenon, if you like.
/Sean Carroll/15-06-02
In modern science,
.. we've gotten used to the idea that science doesn't offer meaning in the way that institutional religions did in the past.
.. this idea that modernity puts us in a world without meaning
.. may be completely wrong.
... origin story .. It's full of meaning.
... a story that has a beginning, and of course, cosmologists are trying to look beyond that beginning.
... human language is more efficient. It's crossed a threshold beyond which information accumulates faster than it's lost.
.. That is the foundation for explaining everything that makes us different.
... And of course, Godot never turns up.
... universe which can blindly create interesting and complex things. That's the story.
... the word "scientism" is just science with a pejorative loading.
... science is like all philosophical traditions.
... for science to present itself as meaningful, to present itself as being as meaningful as any other great philosophical tradition, and, in addition, much more powerful because it sums over so much more information. And it's global.
... mismatch between the big story which they get from their churches, and the science that created the iPhone
... Chomsky's idea of a slight neurological change that gave us grammar
/David Christian/15-05-21
Neuroscience reveals the seemingly novel fact that “we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way people generally suppose”.
... the brain’s chemistry consistently determines a decision prior to our consciously making that decision.
... This is a process not dissimilar to intuition,
... Our choices may be rooted in our physiology, our genetic makeup, but out of these arises something that was once called “character”, and it is this that is the final arbiter on choice.
... Character is the complex accumulation of our history
... the absence of the idea of a free will in antiquity. In its place is the notion of the good life
/15-04-28
About 2,500 years ago something changed the way humans think.
... rise to the world's major moral religions
... morality as a necessary social stabilizer in increasingly large and volatile human communities.
... recent study published in Current Biology point to a different factor: rising affluence.
... religions abruptly emerged when members of a population could reliably source 20,000 calories of energy a day
... with a steady energy supply, we had more time to cooperate, cultivate skills and consider consequences.
/15-04-20
Debunking of Moral Realism
... Sharon Street
... The argument begins from the empirical premise that evolutionary forces have influenced our moral beliefs,
something that is plainly true, to a sceptical conclusion that our moral beliefs are unjustified.
So the argument is essentially that since moral beliefs were not caused by moral facts,
we have no reason to think that our moral beliefs could be true.
... What distinguishes the evolutionary debunker from other anti-realists is that she is not
trying to show that there are no moral facts, but rather that there is no moral knowledge.
... natural selection are driven by fitness and survival, and truth doesn't enter the picture.
... Steven Pinker's towering work The Better Angels of our Nature
/15-04-15
Are We Really Conscious?
OF the three most fundamental scientific questions about the human condition, two have been answered.
First, what is our relationship to the rest of the universe? Copernicus answered that one. We’re not at the center. We’re a speck in a large place.
Second, what is our relationship to the diversity of life? Darwin answered that one. Biologically speaking, we’re not a special act of creation. We’re a twig on the tree of evolution.
Third, what is the relationship between our minds and the physical world? Here, we don’t have a settled answer.
... We have an awareness of information we process. What is this mysterious aspect of ourselves?
... a shift from a credulous and egocentric viewpoint to a skeptical and slightly disconcerting one: namely, that we don’t actually have inner feelings in the way most of us think we do.
... Patricia S. Churchland and Daniel C. Dennett.
.. How does the brain go beyond processing information to become subjectively aware of information? The answer is: It doesn’t.
... And there is no way for the brain to determine through introspection that the story is wrong, because introspection always accesses the same incorrect information.
... Attention: a real, mechanistic phenomenon that can be programmed into a computer chip. Awareness: a cartoonish reconstruction of attention
.. awareness is not an illusion. It’s a caricature.
... a system needs at least a rough model of the thing to be controlled.
... It’s best to be skeptical of intuition.
(OCT. 10, 2014) /15-04-10
Where in your brain do you exist?
... does that awareness come from a broad network of neural activity?
... Focal theories contend there are specific areas of the brain that are critical for generating consciousness, while global theories argue consciousness arises from large-scale brain changes in activity.
... Consciousness appears to break down the modularity
... consciousness is likely a product of this widespread communication
... no one part of the brain is truly the seat of the soul
/15-03-16
Intellectual problems from antiquity are being illuminated by insights from the sciences of mind, brain, genes, and evolution.
... and worst of all, something called “scientism.”
... the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods,
... The first is that the world is intelligible.
... acquisition of knowledge is hard.
... partition plan proposed by Stephen Jay Gould
.. “non-overlapping magisteria.” Science gets the empirical universe; religion gets the questions of moral meaning and value.
... We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history.
... We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small.
.... The humanities would enjoy more of the explanatory depth of the sciences,
... urely our conceptions of politics, culture, and morality have much to learn from our best understanding of the physical universe and of our makeup as a species.
... /Steven Pinker /15-02-16
emotional memories
... She could say with absolute certainty that that’s precisely how it happened. Except, it turns out, none of what she remembered was accurate.
For now, juries tend to trust the confident witness: she knows what she saw. But that may be changing.
... the amygdala, in a sense, tell our eyes to pay closer attention
... the amygdala may also signal to the hippocampus that it needs to pay special attention to encoding this particular moment.
... The goal of memory isn’t to keep the details. It’s to be able to generalize from what you know so that you are more confident in acting on it.
... Konnikova, Phelps /15-02-10
only about 14 percent of English speaking professional philosophers are theists.
... National Academy of Sciences, composed of the most prestigious scientists in the world,
show that religious belief among them is practically nonexistent, about 7 percent.
... because of the rise of modern science
... a biological component to religious beliefs
... religion is an adaptation that provides an evolutionary advantage.
... The other explanation claims that religious beliefs and practices arose as byproducts
... strong correlation between religious belief and various measures of social dysfunction
... In general, people don’t want to know; they want to believe.
... Why, then, do some highly educated people believe religious claims?
.. for emotional reasons
... Studies also show that religious belief declines among those with higher IQs.
... Among the intelligentsia it is common and widespread to find individuals who lost childhood religious beliefs as their education in philosophy and the sciences advanced. By contrast, it is almost unheard of to find disbelievers in youth who came to belief as their education progressed.
... human beings need their childhood to end
/15-02-06
posthumanism signals the end of a certain way of .. orienting—selfhood
... Marvin Minsky argues that robots will be the next evolutionary phase
... machines gaining consciousness and then guiding themselves (and, presumably, us)
... in Lyotard’s words, “what is proper to humankind is its absence of defining property, its nothingness,
... whether there is a humanism that posthumanism can come after.
... “the end of the human,” brought on by neuromedicine, genetic engineering, and artificial intelligence,
... medieval saints’ relics that defy the life/death binary if not proto-cyborgs?
... “there is no side for nonlife”
... return of either old or new forms of domination.
... techno-apocalypse and/or -utopia
/15-01-29
‘unconscious-thought advantage’ (UTA) has been controversial.
... how clever our unconscious is
/15-01-27
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
... why on earth should all those complicated brain processes feel like anything from the inside?
... something as mysterious as the experience of being
... the problem marks the boundary not just of what we currently know, but of what science could ever explain.
... to accept the profoundly unsettling conclusion that computers or the internet might soon become conscious, too.
... OK, here, God has intervened. God created souls, and put them into people.
... he thought it wasn’t impossible that his iPhone might have feelings.
... that evolution could have produced zombies instead of conscious creatures – and it didn’t!
... what if we’re just constitutionally incapable of ever solving the Hard Problem?
... where neuroscience meets philosophy
/15-01-26
The truth about free will: Does it actually exist?
... philosophers love to talk about in the free will debates were irrelevant to anything important.
... ‘Should you regret, or would you regret not having free will?’
/14-12-28
The Shrinking World of Ideas
Marxism, Freudianism, alienation, symbolism, modernism, existentialism, nihilism, deconstruction, and postcolonialism
... Unless I am very much mistaken, the last philosopher to exert wide-ranging influence was Wittgenstein.
... Foucault concluded that man is nothing more than an Enlightenment invention
... all schools of thought become in the end variant expressions of the mind’s tendencies
... Ironically, the last great surge of ideas in the humanities was essentially antihumanist.
... what the postmodernists indirectly accomplished was to open the humanities to the sciences, particularly neuroscience.
... Our preferences, behaviors, tropes, and thoughts—the very stuff of consciousness—are byproducts of the brain’s activity.
And once we map the electrochemical impulses that shoot between our neurons,
we should be able to understand—well, everything.
So every discipline becomes implicitly a neurodiscipline, including ethics, aesthetics, musicology, theology, literature, whatever.
... all behavior is mechanical
... "emerging research in the brain sciences has set into motion fundamental questions relating to social, political, aesthetic, and scientific discoveries."
... Roger Penrose
... The not-so-wonderful irony of the postmodern program
... the mind might one day fathom the human condition.
/14-12-01
The human brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons and trillions, perhaps hundreds of trillions, of intricate interconnections among those neurons.
And exactly zero convincing theories of how it all works.
... neuroscience needs more data
... fine-grained details, like the exact locations of neural synapses on the recipient cell bodies, can be critical.
... Big data alone aren’t enough. ... missing ingredient is theory.
... cognition is modeled as a series of "production rules" that use our memories to generate our physical and mental actions.
... Neuroscience needs to welcome mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, and anthropologists into the fold.
/14-11-17
... ghost, angel or otherworldly being ... neuroscientists have figured out how to conjure those spirits—or at least the perception of them—in the lab.
/14-11-13
Brain on Metaphors ... as anti-Platonic as it’s possible to get.
It undermines the argument that human minds can reveal transcendent truths about reality in transparent language.
/14-10-16
Lady Luck ... randomness is a major component of reality
... a random event is often described as meaningless, and therefore only a source of inconvenience or tragedy.
... Perhaps the freedom of the will can be found in randomness?
Some neuroscientists seems to think so.
... And perhaps having a will requires throwing a little randomness into the mix.
... Randomness is whatever is left over when we have listed all the known patterns in the universe.
... your self is an illusion. /14-10-06
Without hesitation, Desimone replied that the mystery of consciousness was overrated.
As we learn more about the detailed mechanisms in the brain, the question of
‘What is consciousness?’ will fade away into irrelevancy and abstraction,” he said.
/14-10-03
God, Darwin ... Gould Noma
God might well have used evolution by natural selection to produce his creation.
... no literally supernatural trait has ever been found in Homo sapiens; we are perfectly good animals,
... human beings, are produced by a natural, totally amoral process,
/14-10-01
Does life play dice? ... What could be more irresistible than the idea
that two of the most mysterious subjects in science – quantum physics and life – are connected?
Indeed, you get the third big mystery – consciousness ...
Has evolution selected for quantum effects, or is their occurrence accidental?
... biology exploits quantum physics, we need to ask if its occurrence is enhanced by adaptation.
/14-09-11
Is there such a thing as the self? Most of us, when we look in the mirror, have a sense that behind the eyes looking back at us is a me-ish thing: a self.
But this, we are increasingly told, is an illusion.
... According to philosophers, there is no "Cartesian ego" unifying our consciousness, no unchanging core of identity that makes us the same person from day to day; there is only an ever-shifting bundle of thoughts, feelings and memories.
... The Self Illusion ... The Ego Trick
... "I am essentially my brain" view
... (unless you’re one of those benighted people who believe in immaterial souls)
... It is your stream of consciousness that matters, regardless of its contents. That’s what makes you you.
... Yet even the humble roundworm C elegans, with its paltry 302 neurons and 2,462 synaptic connections, has a single neuron devoted to distinguishing its body from the rest of the world. "I think it’s fair to say that C elegans has a very primitive self-representation" comments the philosopher-neuroscientist Patricia Churchland—indeed, she adds, "a self."
... If the spectrum of selfhood begins with the roundworm, surely it ends with Proust /14-07-12
Philosophy is a Bunch of Empty Ideas.
Even though Wittgeinstein is perhaps the most widely admired philosopher of the twentieth century, at least amongst mainstream philosophy, nobody really pays attention to his main conclusion: you can’t really do anything when you do this stuff, you should stop it.
/14-06-17
By abandoning the free willing self,
we are forced to re-examine the factors that are really behind our thoughts and behavior and the way they interact,
balance, over-ride and cancel out. Only then we will begin to make progress in understanding how we really operate.
(search for: Bruce Hood) /14-03-19