https://medium.com/european-politics/why...31f5867100

EXCERPT (Mathijs Koenraadt): After the 9/11 attacks, President Bush assured the world that America was not at war with Islam. But the Paris shootings showed that Islamic terrorism is at war with the world. Rooted in traditionalism, Islam despises freedom, stifles progress and buries critical thought. Islamic doctrine rejects everything that Europe and the West have built up over the past three thousand years. Islam is not a religion, but an oppressive ideology posing as one. We owe it to history to defend the future of the West.

[...] Islam’s terrorists don’t hate the West for its perceived wrongdoings, but because the West’s technological advancement and economic success make Islamic civilization look bad. According to the World Values Survey, Islamic nations value traditionalism over rational thought, and survivalist attitudes over self-expression. Thus Islam diagonally opposes everything that Europe and the West stand for. While many Westerners mistakenly believe that “the desire for free choice and autonomy is a universal human aspiration”, the collectivist peoples of Islam in fact reject freedom. Muslims renounce their own equality for they consider equality to non-Muslims an insult to their prophet, the perfect Muslim whose life they wish to imitate.

Unsurprisingly, all of over fifty nations that suffer a majority Islamic population have failed to produce a single democracy. Turkey, at one time being the only exception under the secular rule of Atatürk, has fallen victim to Islamists who swiftly reversed progress. Traditionalist Islam effectively hates modernity. For example, the name of Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram literally means ‘to forbid Western education’. But then how do Islamists, who reject Western knowledge, acquire Western levels of wealth? Conquest.

Who are we to submit our lives to barbarism? We have no alternative but to defend a culture of rational thought and self-expression. In the name of life, we must fight traditionalism wherever it robs children of their future....

On Edgar Allan Poe
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives...allan-poe/

EXCERPT: [...] Poe’s mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry....

"Researchers have figured out how to make people aware of themselves during a dream: by zapping their sleeping brains with a weak electric current.

The sensation of "Hey, this is a dream!" is known as lucid dreaming. Those who naturally become lucid while dreaming, probably a small segment of the population, also report adventures that are impossible in the real world, such as flying, that feel completely real. Some can even change a dream's narrative twists and turns to make it less scary—or even more exhilarating. (Related: "Why Do We Dream? To Ease Painful Memories, Study Hints.")

Lucid dreaming is exciting not only for dreamers but also for neuroscientists, who consider it a window into the study of consciousness. But until now, researchers have been hampered by how hard it is to provoke lucid dreaming in people who don't do it naturally. A new method published today in Nature Neuroscience might get around this difficulty, making it easier to stimulate lucid dreaming at will.

"We can really quite easily change conscious awareness in dreams," said lead investigator Ursula Voss, a clinical psychologist at Frankfurt University in Germany. She does this, she said, by delivering mild electrical stimulation to the sleeping person's brain. (Related: "Electric Jolt to Brain Boosts Math Skills.")

Zapping While Napping

In this study, Voss and her team recruited 27 healthy young adults who had never experienced lucid dreaming. Each participant slept overnight in the lab on several occasions. Two minutes after reaching the REM (rapid eye movement) stage of sleep, which is when dreaming happens, the subjects received a weak electrical current (2 to 100 Hertz) to the frontal lobe for 30 seconds, or a sham current with no electricity.

The sweet spot was 40 Hertz. Zapping sleeping volunteers at this frequency, part of the so-called gamma wave band, led their brains to produce brain waves of the same frequency, the researchers found, which triggered lucidity 77 percent of the time, as determined by self-reports from the dreamers after they were awoken. (Related: "Dreams Make You Smarter, More Creative, Studies Suggest.")

Stimulations of 25 Hertz, at the low end of the gamma wave band, also sparked lucidity 58 percent of the time. In contrast, subjects who received sham or low-frequency stimulations never became lucid.

Voss had previously identified the 40-Hertz currents as the possible key to lucidity. In a 2009 study, she and her colleagues studied six individuals who were trained lucid dreamers, and found that during episodes of lucidity they produced brain waves in the brain's frontal area of around 30 to 40 Hertz—much higher than is found in typical REM sleep. But the scientists did not know if the gamma waves were a cause of the lucidity or a consequence of it. The new study suggests the former.

Gamma Wave of the Future?

"I'm really impressed, particularly since the effects are so specific for these frequencies," said Martin Dresler, a neuroscientist at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who was not involved in the new work.

Gamma frequencies are especially intriguing, he added, because other studies have linked them to consciousness during wakefulness.

The study might have clinical implications for treating conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder and nightmares, said Tore Nielsen, a dream and nightmare researcher at the University of Montreal. Once a nightmare has begun, for instance, the dreamer could be zapped with gamma waves, become lucid, and potentially change the circumstances of the dream to make it less frightening. "That would be remarkable," Nielsen said. (Related: "Can Phobias Be Cured in Our Sleep?")

Nielsen also envisions a coming bonanza of brain-stimulation gizmos that allow people to become lucid-dreaming adventurers. "People are going to be scrambling to put together home lucid dreaming induction devices based on this 40-Hertz stimulation procedure," he said. "I wouldn't be surprised if we see products fairly quickly."

Whether or not DIY lucidity becomes a reality, Voss said what's great about lucid dreams is that they help illuminate the human condition. "Being able to reflect upon yourself, to think about your past and plan your future—this is something that only we humans can do."====http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/...ess-brain/

John Brockman’s Edge question for 2015 asks 182 intellectuals: "What do you think about machines that think?"

http://edge.org/responses/q2015

EXCERPT (Intro, Brockman): For more than fifty years, I've watched the ebb and flow of public opinion about artificial intelligence: it's impossible and can't be done; it's horrendous, and will destroy the human race; it's significant; it's negligible; it's a joke; it will never be strongly intelligent, only weakly so; it will bring on another Holocaust. These extremes have lately given way to an acknowledgment that AI is an epochal scientific, technological, and social—human—event. We've developed a new mind, to live side by side with ours. If we handle it wisely, it can bring immense benefits, from the planetary to the personal.

[...] Since we can't seem to stop, since our literature tells us we've imagined, yearned for, an extra-human intelligence for as long as we have records, the enterprise must be impelled by the deepest, most persistent of human drives. These beg for explanation. After all, this isn't exactly the joy of sex.

Any scientist will say it's the search to know. "It's foundational," an AI researcher told me recently. "It's us looking out at the world, and how we do it." He's right. But there's more.

Some say we do it because it's there, an Everest of the mind. Others, more mystical, say we're propelled by teleology: we're a mere step in the evolution of intelligence in the universe, attractive even in our imperfections, but hardly the last word.

Entrepreneurs will say that this is the future of making things—the dark factory, with unflagging, unsalaried, uncomplaining robot workers—though what currency post-employed humans will use to acquire those robot products, no matter how cheap, is a puzzle to be solved.

Here's my belief: We long to save and preserve ourselves as a species. For all the imaginary deities throughout history we've petitioned, which failed to save and protect us—from nature, from each other, from ourselves—we're finally ready to call on our own enhanced, augmented minds instead. It's a sign of social maturity that we take responsibility for ourselves. We are as gods, Stewart Brand famously said, and we may as well get good at it.

We're trying. We could fail....

http://nautil.us/issue/20/creativity/the...-evolution

EXCERPT: Is the natural world creative? Just take a look around it. Look at the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the diverse pattern and shape of leaves, the cunning stratagems of microbes, the dazzling profusion of climbing, crawling, flying, swimming things. Look at the “grandeur” of life, the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin put it. Isn’t that enough to persuade you?

Ah, but isn’t all this wonder simply the product of the blind fumbling of Darwinian evolution, that mindless machine which takes random variation and sieves it by natural selection? Well, not quite. You don’t have to be a benighted creationist, nor even a believer in divine providence, to argue that Darwin’s astonishing theory doesn’t fully explain why nature is so marvelously, endlessly inventive. “Darwin’s theory surely is the most important intellectual achievement of his time, perhaps of all time,” says evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner of the University of Zurich. “But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded his theory. And he couldn’t even get close to solving it.”

What Wagner is talking about is how evolution innovates: as he puts it, “how the living world creates.” Natural selection supplies an incredibly powerful way of pruning variation into effective solutions to the challenges of the environment. But it can’t explain where all that variation came from. As the biologist Hugo de Vries wrote in 1905, “natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.” Over the past several years, Wagner and a handful of others have been starting to understand the origins of evolutionary innovation. Thanks to their findings so far, we can now see not only how Darwinian evolution works but why it works: what makes it possible.

A popular misconception is that all it takes for evolution to do something new is a random mutation of a gene—a mistake made as the gene is copied from one generation to the next, say. Most such mutations make things worse—the trait encoded by the gene is less effective for survival—and some are simply fatal. But once in a blue moon (the argument goes) a mutation will enhance the trait, and the greater survival prospects of the lucky recipient will spread that beneficial mutation through the population.

The trouble is that traits don’t in general map so neatly onto genes: They arise from interactions between many genes that regulate one another’s activity in complex networks, or “gene circuits.” No matter, you might think: Evolution has plenty of time, and it will find the “good” gene circuits eventually. But the math says otherwise....

Cass Sunstein and the modern regulatory state
http://harvardmagazine.com/2015/01/the-legal-olympian

EXCERPT: [...] Believers in conspiracy theories, [Cass] Sunstein emphasizes, are often ill informed: they believe what they hear—and they hear only from people with extreme views. The scholar Russell Hardin named this problem “a crippled epistemology,” the kind of two-word moniker that Sunstein favors. People who move in and out of such groups make the problem worse. Those who leave tend to be skeptics: when they go, so does their moderating influence. Those who join and stay tend to become fanatics. When a theory attracts fanatics who act on their views, like terrorists, one possible governmental response could be what Sunstein calls “cognitive infiltration”: i.e., challenging the theory’s counterfactual foundations. Some civil libertarians ignored the “cognitive,” read “infiltration” literally, and went crazy denouncing the idea.

The dangerous ideas that most concern him are errors in thinking akin to crippled epistemology that lead to foolish or damaging behavior. They include misfearing, “when people are afraid of trivial risks and neglectful of serious ones,” so public funding is misallocated to combat the former instead of the latter, and the availability heuristic, a mental shortcut in thinking about risk that is influenced by heavily publicized events (floods, forest fires) so people worry about the wrong perils....

http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas-kyle...hris-walsh

EXCERPT: Cowardice once had something to do with the obligations of community. We used the word when courage faltered and duties were left undone. But now we rarely use or hear it outside of the politics of national security. It is the term of choice for political responses to acts of violence. Consider the diction of President Obama when he called the Boston Marathon bombing a “heinous and cowardly act.” Joining him were the governor of Massachusetts and the Boston Red Sox, among others. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 103 sponsored a billboard that simply read“#COWARDS,” which overlooked an expressway leading into the city. By that time, commuters had no need of further context. We all understood: terrorists are cowards.

[...] In his new book, Cowardice: A Brief History, Chris Walsh offers the following definition: “A coward is someone who, because of excessive fear, fails to do what he is supposed to do.” The term is loaded with moral assumptions. First there is an assumed notion of duty. A person may have certain duties because of her position in life, as a mother or a soldier, or because of other circumstances, such as happening upon someone in physical danger. But in those situations, duty’s call is typically accompanied by fear. When someone forsakes duties for a reason other than fear, we might call him capricious or negligent—or maybe a follower of his own heart—but we would not call him a coward. Fear also constrains a person from recklessness. Without fear, one might thoughtlessly rush into dangerous circumstances. But that would not count as courage. Courage, then, is the virtue that allows a person to remain dutiful even in the face of fear. Cowardice, by contrast, is the vice that makes someone falter.

Walsh offers a few reasons why we have taken up the word to describe terrorists. The first and perhaps most visceral is that, short of obscenities, it is one of the nastiest words that can be wielded against someone—and has been for a long time. [...] Walsh also suggests that the term provides comfort to Americans. Believing that terrorists are cowardly may assuage the fear of terrorism.

But these uses—to comfort and to condemn—are shorn from the context in which the word was traditionally used, Walsh argues. As he demonstrates in this thoughtful and engaging book, we have witnessed a semantic shift. Gone is the thick moral grammar and the shared language of expectation by which communities judged cowardice or courage. The word no longer connotes the failure to perform one’s duty either in moments of extreme fear or even in the mundane routine of everyday life. It now describes a “rare and monstrous thing,” an act of violence against unarmed civilians, an existential threat to civil society.

One of Walsh’s achievements is to reintroduce us to an earlier time in American history when the epithet had a common currency and circulated quickly in times of fear and war...

Certainly a fast and easy way to familiarize oneself with the debate as compared to the actual facts and data..One is certainly impressed by the vigor of those who deny climate change to come up with just about any reason whatsoever. What's at stake for them? Is controlling CO2 emissions really such a bad idea anyway? I think we'd be doing it even if there wasn't global warming.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php