The Dish

Above is a photo by Shamuel Silberman of a guppy fish Embryo forty times normal size. It was an entry in Nikon's annual Small World photomicrography competition. The winners were announced late last week. Wired shows off this year's winner and has compiled winning photographs from previous years.

Everyone needs a hobby:

One of the larger themes about the project is the sameness of the American experience, of how wherever you are in the country, you can eat the same food at the same restaurants and shop at the same stores. That for me was one of the central ideas about it. But then in the execution about it, you go and find that maybe they do serve the same steak, but in different buildings, in different neighborhoods. And all the people who work there bring their own unique experience to the place. So no two are exactly alike.

Sizzlers are like snowflakes.

Sunni terrorism.

Ari Schulman dissects the metaphor and finds it wanting:

Properly understood, the first question underlying the AI debate is: Can the properties of the mind be completely described on their own terms as an algorithm?

Recall that an algorithm has a definite start and end state and consists of a set of well-defined rules for transitioning from start state to end state. As we have already seen, it was the explicit early claim of AI proponents that the answer to this question was yes: the properties of the mind, they believed, could be expressed algorithmically (or “procedurally,” to use a more general term). But the AI project has thus far failed to prove this answer, and AI researchers seem to have understood this failure without acknowledging it. The founding goal of AI has been all but rejected, a rejection that carries great significance for the central presumption of the project but that has gone largely unremarked. As an empirical hypothesis, the question of whether the mind can be completely described procedurally remains open (as all empirical hypotheses must), but it should be acknowledged that the failure thus far to achieve this goal suggests that the answer to the question is no—and the longer such a failure persists, the greater our confidence must be in that answer.

Last week ABC radio interviewed German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinger:

The physical body certainly exists, the organism exists, but organisms are not selves. I don’t deny that there is a self-y feeling. I certainly feel like someone, but there is no such thing. There is neither a non-physical thing in a realm beyond the brain or the physical world that we could call a self, but there’s also no thing in the brain that we must necessary call a self.

Of course Buddhist philosophy had that point 2,500 years ago. So the idea that, as philosophers say, the self is not a substance, that it is something that can stay and hold itself in existence, even if the body or the brain were to perish, that’s not a very breathtaking and new idea. What I am interested in is to understand why we just cannot believe that this is so. We have the feeling there is an essence in us, a deepest, inner core. We have this feeling that there must be something that is just not right about neuro-scientific theories about self consciousness, there’s something beyond it. And I want to understand what that deepest core is because that’s the origin of the subjectivity of consciousness.

One of his more frightening thoughts:

I mean, how will our culture actually react to a naturalistic turn in our image of man, if there’s no supernatural root even in our minds anymore, and we actually have to come to terms with the fact that not only our bodies but also our minds are results of a process that had no goal, that was driven by chance events…I mean, how are we going to come to terms with this? Will we develop a culture of denial, or will we all become vulgar materialists?….I think, to put it very simply, we could do it by just thinking not only about what is a good action but what is a good state of consciousness. What states of consciousness do we want to show our children? How can neuroscience help us with optimising education? What states of consciousness are we allowed to impose, to force upon animals? Are all these experiments in, say, primate research, in consciousness research, in neuroscience ethically tenable? What states of consciousness should be illegal in our society? New drugs. What states of consciousness do we want to foster and cultivate?

It’s also a question of preserving our dignity in the face of these sometimes very sobering discussions, and in developing a cultural response to it. Can modern science help me? It’s not only about defending ourselves, it’s also about what I call riding the tiger; can all this new knowledge help us to improve our autonomy, maybe also our rationality? How can I take responsibility and charge for the way I deal with my own brain? Can it help us to die better deaths? Who knows? But I think we should all, not only philosophers and scientists but all of us, start to think about what we want to do with all these new brain/mind technologies. Just looking the other way won’t make it go away.

(Hat tip: Mind Hacks)

Tyler Cowen:

[A] way the Web has affected the human attention span is by allowing greater specialization of knowledge. It has never been easier to wrap yourself up in a long-term intellectual project without at the same time losing touch with the world around you. Some critics don’t see this possibility, charging that the Web is destroying a shared cultural experience by enabling us to follow only the specialized stories that pique our individual interests. But there are also those who argue that the Web is doing just the opposite—that we dabble in an endless variety of topics but never commit to a deeper pursuit of a specific interest. These two criticisms contradict each other. The reality is that the Internet both aids in knowledge specialization and helps specialists keep in touch with general trends.

He also explores how blogging accelerates learning.

Sundays too my father got up early 

And put his clothes on in the blueback cold, 

then with cracked hands that ached from labor 

in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. 

No one ever thanked him. 

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. 

When the rooms were warm, 

he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, 

fearing the chronic angers of that house, 

Speaking indifferently to him, 

who had driven out the cold 

and polished my good shoes as well. 

What did I know, what did I know 

of love's austere and lonely offices?

– Robert Hayden, Those Winter Sundays.

(Photo: Alexandra Beier/Getty.)

The BBC apes The Onion.

Jeremy Waldron studies what Aristotle intuited:

Virtue theorists believe that the disposition to act and react courageously or honestly is deeply entrenched in a person's character. As Appiah describes their position, a virtue is supposed to be something that "goes all the way down," enmeshing itself with other aspects of character, equally admirable, and affecting what a person wants out of life, her conception of happiness, and her views of other people. Are there such virtues? Well, the psychologists that Appiah has read report that character traits do not exhibit the "cross-situational stability" that virtue presupposes.

DiA summarizes Waldron's argument and applies his reasoning to politicians.

In 2005, a few months after the South Asian tsunami, Rev. Tom Honey dealt with several of the issues the Dish has been wrestling with recently: