http://www.theguardian.com/science/brain...nce-satire

EXCERPT: A lot of major scientific stories broke in 2014; some good, some not so good. However, outside of the focus of the official science channels, things tend to get quite strange. Many questionable, surreal and downright bizarre scientific claims were given media attention, but under the guise of news about politics, technology, economics and so on; anything that wasn’t science, really.

Thankfully, this blog was there to keep an eye on the less obvious science stories, at the request of nobody. But still, here are some of the highlights from 2014, given that it’s almost over....

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-na...all&no-ist

EXCERPT: Evidence that the universe is made of strings has been elusive for 30 years, but the theory's mathematical insights continue to have an alluring pull.

[...] Experimental evidence is the final arbiter of right and wrong, but a theory’s value is also assessed by the depth of influence it has on allied fields. By this measure, string theory is off the charts. Decades of analysis filling thousands of articles have had a dramatic impact on a broad swath of research cutting across physics and mathematics. Take black holes, for example. String theory has resolved a vexing puzzle by identifying the microscopic carriers of their internal disorder, a feature discovered in the 1970s by Stephen Hawking.

Looking back, I’m gratified at how far we’ve come but disappointed that a connection to experiment continues to elude us. While my own research has migrated from highly mathematical forays into extra-dimensional arcana to more applied studies of string theory’s cosmological insights, I [Brian Greene] now hold only modest hope that the theory will confront data during my lifetime.

Even so, string theory’s pull remains strong. Its ability to seamlessly meld general relativity and quantum mechanics remains a primary achievement, but the allure goes deeper still. Within its majestic mathematical structure, a diligent researcher would find all of the best ideas physicists have carefully developed over the past few hundred years. It’s hard to believe such depth of insight is accidental.

I like to think that Einstein would look at string theory’s journey and smile, enjoying the theory’s remarkable geometrical features while feeling kinship with fellow travelers on the long and winding road toward unification. All the same, science is powerfully self-correcting. Should decades drift by without experimental support, I imagine that string theory will be absorbed by other areas of science and mathematics, and slowly shed a unique identity. In the interim, vigorous research and a large dose of patience are surely warranted. If experimental confirmation of string theory is in the offing, future generations will look back on our era as transformative, a time when science had the fortitude to nurture a remarkable and challenging theory, resulting in one of the most profound steps toward understanding reality....

link--> Eternalism and accidents without a subject

ALEXANDER PRUSS: "A classic objection to transubstatiation, famously pressed by Wycliffe, is that according to the Catholic understanding of the doctrine, the accidents of bread and wine persist even though the substance of bread and wine no longer exists. But in Aristotelian metaphysics, accidents are essentially dependent on their substance.

"Eternalism—the view that past and future and present things all exist—provides a neat way for the Catholic to respond to Wycliffe. One can, if one so wishes, hold on to the idea that it is metaphysically necessary that a subject exists if an accident exists. But one denies that it is metaphysically necessary that the subject exists at the same time as the accident. The eternalist then holds that even if the bread and wine have perished at a time t1 after transubstantation, nonetheless it is true at t1 that the bread and wine exist, where the 'exist' is tenseless. On this view, every accident has a subject in the same world but not always at the same time."

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link--> Are parts modes?

EXCERPT: There are two variations on Aristotelian ontology. On the sparser version there are substances and their modes (accidents and essences). On the more bloated version there are substances, modes and (proper) parts. I want to argue that the more bloated version should be reduced to the sparser one.

Parts in an Aristotelian ontology are unlike the parts of typical contemporary ontologies. They are not substances, but rather they are objects that depend on the substance they are parts of. At least normally when a part, say a finger, comes to be detached from the substance it is a part of, it ceases to exist—a detached finger is a finger in name only, as Aristotle insists.

This makes the parts of Aristotelian ontology mode-like in their dependence on the whole....

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link--> Being is grounded in fundamental being, and presentism

EXCERPT: Assume a bloated ontology, on which there are events, chairs, holes, waves, etc. In defending such a bloated ontology, we should sensibly say that these beings are grounded in what the fundamental beings are and how they are, and so the bloat does not infect fundamental reality.

So far so good. But what if we add presentism into the mix?...

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_p...ingle.html

EXCERPT: Never mind the headlines. We’ve never lived in such peaceful times.

[...] How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. [...] The only sound way to appraise the state of the world is to count. How many violent acts has the world seen compared with the number of opportunities? And is that number going up or down?

[...] To be sure, adding up corpses and comparing the tallies across different times and places can seem callous, as if it minimized the tragedy of the victims in less violent decades and regions. But a quantitative mindset is in fact the morally enlightened one. It treats every human life as having equal value, rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of violence and thereby implement the measures that are most likely to reduce it. Let’s examine the major categories in turn. [...statistics accordingly follow...]

[...conclusion...] The world is not falling apart. The kinds of violence to which most people are vulnerable—homicide, rape, battering, child abuse—have been in steady decline in most of the world. Autocracy is giving way to democracy. Wars between states—by far the most destructive of all conflicts—are all but obsolete. The increase in the number and deadliness of civil wars since 2010 is circumscribed, puny in comparison with the decline that preceded it, and unlikely to escalate.

[...] Why is the world always “more dangerous than it has ever been”—even as a greater and greater majority of humanity lives in peace and dies of old age?

Too much of our impression of the world comes from a misleading formula of journalistic narration. Reporters give lavish coverage to gun bursts, explosions, and viral videos, oblivious to how representative they are and apparently innocent of the fact that many were contrived as journalist bait. Then come sound bites from “experts” with vested interests in maximizing the impression of mayhem: generals, politicians, security officials, moral activists. The talking heads on cable news filibuster about the event, desperately hoping to avoid dead air. Newspaper columnists instruct their readers on what emotions to feel.

There is a better way to understand the world. Commentators can brush up their history—not by rummaging through Bartlett’s for a quote from Clausewitz, but by recounting the events of the recent past that put the events of the present in an intelligible context. And they could consult the analyses of quantitative datasets on violence that are now just a few clicks away.

An evidence-based mindset on the state of the world would bring many benefits. It would calibrate our national and international responses to the magnitude of the dangers that face us. It would limit the influence of terrorists, school shooters, decapitation cinematographers, and other violence impresarios. It might even dispel foreboding and embody, again, the hope of the world....

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/blogs/...-the-brain

EXCERPT: We’re surely now in the Age of the Brain. In the United States, the BRAIN Initiative, announced in 2013 and with a projected cost of $3bn, aims to map the activity of every neuron in the brain—first, those of mice and other animals, then of humans. The European Union has assigned €1bn to the ten-year Human Brain Project, which intends to deduce the brain’s wiring circuit in order to build a complete computer simulation of it. And now Japan has launched its own ten-year initiative, called Brain/MINDS, with a focus on understanding brain diseases and malfunctions such as Parkinson’s, schizophrenia and autism.

Of all these projects, the Japanese effort is the most modest, and likely to be the most useful. It will use a combination of brain imaging and genetics to try to figure out what goes wrong and why, in particular using marmosets as a model for humans. The European project, meanwhile, has already run into serious problems.

[...] One of the most striking features of the neuroscience literature is the contrast between the image of “thinking” presented there and our everyday experience. The emphasis in neuroscience is on how the brain does things: how we process visual information, how we record memories, how we move our limbs and comprehend language. It’s true of course that most of us are capable of all these impressive feats—but rarely with anything approaching computer-like efficiency. We make bad judgements, we misunderstand, and most of all, we live in mental turmoil. The mind feels like a battleground of clamouring voices, not a sleek and efficient circuit: “I’m bored with this task, but I have to finish it. Or perhaps tomorrow? Shall I just make a cup of tea?”

[...] Another danger that the big brain projects will have to navigate is the temptation to consider the brain in isolation. This has been a prevalent tendency ever since the brain became established as the “seat of the mind:” as the popular view has it, all that we are and all that we experience takes place within this wobbly mass of grey tissue. But of course, it doesn’t. To put it bluntly, no one has ever existed without a body around their brain. In a real (and an evolutionary) sense, the brain is an outgrowth of the central nervous system, which extends throughout the body. Without sensory input, the brain has nothing to do: it is just jelly. (That is of course different from saying that a brain deprived of sensory input goes blank.) The Human Brain Project acknowledges this, which is why it includes a “neurorobotics platform” that aims to create a simulated body for its simulated brain.

[...] But the challenges for the American and European brain projects in particular run deeper than all this. They are data-gathering exercises akin to the Human Genome Project. We can now see what that latter project got us: a load of data. That’s no criticism; data is good. It is already extremely useful to our understanding of genomics advances. But now that we have the “genome book,” all three billion letters of it bound and housed in the Wellcome Trust, we are like English speakers who have learnt to recite Russian poems fluently without knowing what they mean.

[...] Without doubt, formulating a “theory of the brain” is an immense challenge, probably one of the major challenges for science right now. You might imagine that it would be one of the key concerns of neuroscientists—after all, isn’t science supposed to be all about devising theories and then testing them with data? But the weird thing—I find it positively bizarre—is how much theory and hypothesis has been resisted in this field. Until recently it was given short shrift, and the one promising concept that was developed—so-called neural networks, which “learn” by reinforcing connections among its web of neurons—has turned out to be more valuable for artificial intelligence and “machine learning” than as a way to understand the human brain....

http://nationalinterest.org/feature/athe...?page=show

EXCERPT: [Philosopher] Leo Strauss is often depicted as a sinister neocon guru whose ideas led directly to endless wars in the Middle East. Robert Howse’s worthy, academic 'Leo Strauss: Man of Peace' correctly argues that this is bunk.

[...] The caricature of Strauss as neocon impresario has even achieved a certain resonance in the wider culture. In Jonathan Franzen’s acclaimed novel Freedom, written in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, an impressionable college student finds himself at a Thanksgiving table with “the founder and luminary president of a think tank devoted to advocating the unilateral exercise of American military supremacy to make the world freer and safer.” The creepy blowhard tells the young man that “we have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts. Our modern media are very blurry shadows on the wall, and the philosopher has to be prepared to manipulate these shadows in the service of a greater truth.”

The first thing to say about such fantasies is prophylactic: don’t believe a word of them. Not because there aren’t Straussian neocons (Wolfowitz and William Kristol are the most prominent) or because there isn’t some degree of overlap in the characteristic obsessions of the two groups (the sixties weren’t as groovy as everyone thinks, moral relativism is both dangerous and incoherent, the West has grown complacent, military virtue is neither a joke nor a scandal, and so on).

The real problem is that Straussianism and neoconservatism are distinct frames of mind, with idiosyncratic histories of their own. The Venn diagram of their relationship is interesting less for the area of intersection than for the obvious examples of non-Straussian neocons (Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, David Frum, Max Boot) and the considerable group of thinkers whose ideas have been shaped by Strauss but who reject the neoconservative credo (Francis Fukuyama, Mark Lilla, William Galston, Steven Smith, Nathan Tarcov) or seem largely indifferent to it (the vast majority of Straussian academics, busy going about their scholarly work).

For those intent on influence tracing, there is, too, the obvious problem of establishing some connection between Straussian thought and the actual development of major policies. In Howse’s book, whose focus is setting the record straight about Strauss himself rather than showing the real-world impact of his ideas, we find this typical summary of the indictment with respect to the George W. Bush administration’s “Iraq adventure”:

"It got going with a New Yorker piece by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, who claimed that Strauss had taught the art of tyrannical rule, deception in politics, and the merits of a bellicose foreign policy to Paul Wolfowitz, Assistant Secretary of Defense and a leading advocate and planner of the Iraq intervention. James Atlas, writing in the New York Times, asserted that Strauss endorsed 'the natural right of the stronger.' In a book published by Yale University Press . . . Anne Norton wrote that Strauss and his disciples were 'proponents of war without limits.'"

[...] WHAT [...] makes [the real] Strauss so compelling? What explains the allure of Straussian teachers and teaching? Many of the same things, I suspect, that have made Strauss and the Straussians so inviting a target for their critics inside and outside the academy. There is, among Straussians, the sense of initiation into an elite, an elect few whose distinction lies in seeing what others fail to see, in knowing truths that others lack the courage to confront. Among the graduate students in political theory in my own day, Straussian and non-Straussian alike, the imposing doorstop-size History of Political Philosophy that Strauss edited with Joseph Cropsey was popularly referred to by combining the color of its cover with the authority of its pretensions: it was, simply, the Purple Bible.

That all of this amounts to some flavor of cultural conservatism is obvious, but it is hard to detect in it a particular conservative politics. In my own experience of the “cult,” such as it is, dogmatism is considered gauche, intellectually and politically shallow. There are Straussians, but there is no telling, even at this late date, what Straussianism might be. The books of Strauss and of my own teacher, Harvey Mansfield, are tough going, so even from a straightforward careerist point of view, graduate students of a Straussian bent must struggle to figure out how to distill and reformulate the ideas of the teachers whom they wish to please and follow.

[...] Straussians are certainly excluded and disdained in much of the academy, but the sentiments are mutual. Dismissing colleagues or thinkers as benighted or politically correct becomes a ready excuse not to engage with them, inducing a certain lazy complacency in thought. And there is, finally, something jarring, especially in today’s academy, about the insistent, sometimes intentionally provocative delight that Straussians take in holding out the possibility that Plato or Machiavelli or Nietzsche might be not just interesting but, in some way, right—while at the same time hesitating to acknowledge what modernity has achieved by “lowering its sights” (another Straussian term of art) from the noble to the merely humane. This is not a program calculated to make nice with today’s fashionable advocates of “inclusiveness” (a notion that Strauss would have treated with contempt).

For me, at any rate, what continues to fascinate about the Straussian “cult” is the combination of such pretentious, high-minded universalism with an appreciation for the real work of political life, for the accommodation of interests and prejudices without losing sight of grander aims and possibilities. As Strauss wrote, in a much-repeated line, “Moderation will protect us against the twin dangers of visionary expectations from politics and unmanly contempt for politics.” Howse cites this Straussian motto in his own admirable effort to save Strauss from his more intemperate critics....

Never seen this before. The creature is literally halved right down the middle! It's called a gynandromorph. Imagine a human gynandromorph. (shades of old Star Trek episode..)

"This bird might look like a holiday ornament, but it is actually a rare half-female, half-male northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, pictured with female plumage on the left and male plumage on the right) spotted a few years ago in Rock Island, Illinois. Researchers have long known such split-sex “gynandromorphs” exist in insects, crustaceans, and birds. But scientists rarely get to extensively study a gynandromorph in the wild; most published observations cover just a day or so. Observers got to follow this bird, however, for more than 40 days between December 2008 and March 2010. They documented how it interacted with other birds and even how it responded to recorded calls. The results suggest being half-and-half carries consequences: The cardinal didn’t appear to have a mate, and observers never heard it sing, the researchers report this month in The Wilson Journal of Ornithology. On the other hand, it wasn’t “subjected to any unusual agonistic behaviors from other cardinals,” according to the paper. Intriguingly, another gynandromorph cardinal sighted briefly in 1969 had the opposite plumage, they note: the male’s bright red plumes on the right, the drabber female feathers on the left."=====http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/...rough-life

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc...304&cn=394

Review - Virtues of Thought; Essays on Plato and Aristotle, by Aryeh Kosman

Review by Diana Soeiro

EXCERPT: This book presents us a collection of essays on Aristotle and Plato, having no particular thematic unity. Two immediate questions arise: Why is it relevant to publish a book on Aristotle and Plato in 2014? Does such a book only interest scholars, particularly ancient philosophy scholars, or is it able to grasp a more general audience?

In his Introduction, Aryeh Kosman (John Whitehead Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus at Haverford College/ US), states that what all essays have in common is the intent of exploring "modes of human thought"). Though to start with, it may seem an abstract goal, he continues, highlighting the importance of reading Aristotle and Plato in order to understand Descartes' 'cogito', Gödel's incompleteness theorem, or to clarify the puzzling concept of 'consciousness' -- and much more, I would add. Ancient philosophy is actually the key to understand contemporary philosophy and if anyone who attempts to do a serious study on contemporary philosophy knows this, Kosman's essays for sure confirm it. Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Ricoeur, and Deleuze, frequently come to mind. Particularly Husserl's phenomenology (and also Heidegger), have unequivocally set his roots on ancient philosophy and reading Kosman's essays, that explore in detail Aristotle and Plato's works and concepts, become that very clear (though they're seldom referred to).

In that sense, Kosman's book is relevant, not only for those who take interest in ancient philosophy, but also, for those who take interest in understanding the roots of most contemporary philosophy. Therefore, the first question we posed, finds its answer: a book featuring essays on Plato and Aristotle is significant in 2014 and to scholars in general. All the more so, because it is a very good book....