Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Cognition Switch #2
    Cognition Switch #2
    Cognition Switch #2
    Ebook86 pages1 hour

    Cognition Switch #2

    By Martin Rees, Michael Shermer, Peter Staudenmaier and

    4/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Cognition Switch: An Artefact for the Transmission of New Ideas

    Issue #2: January 2019
    Featuring Ideas by: 
    Michael Shermer, Peter Staudenmaier, Sabine Hossenfelder, Kate Raworth, Benjamin G Martin, Noah Charney, David Wengrow, Kimberley Brownlee, Tali Sharot, Robert Simpson, Thea Bechshoft, Martin Rees, Jon Butterworth, Bill Nye, Huw Price, and Henry Cowles
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCognition Switch
    Release dateDec 1, 2018
    ISBN9788829559343
    Cognition Switch #2

    Related to Cognition Switch #2

    Titles in the series (8)

    View More
    View More

    Related ebooks

    Philosophy For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Chaos Makes the Multiverse Unnecessary

      Nov 29, 2018

      Scientists look around the universe and see amazing structure. There are objects and processes of fantastic complexity. Every action in our universe follows exact laws of nature that are perfectly expressed in a mathematical language. These laws of n

      17 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Kekulé Problem

      Apr 20, 2017

      Cormac McCarthy is best known to the world as a writer of novels. These include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men, and The Road. At the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) he is a research colleague and thought of in complementary te

      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How Tycoons Created the Dinosaur

      Oct 20, 2021

      The dinosaur is a chimera. Some parts of this complex assemblage are the result of biological evolution. But others are products of human ingenuity, constructed by artists, scientists, and technicians in a laborious process that stretches from the di

      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Spiritual Consciousness of Christof Koch

      Oct 13, 2021

      Consciousness is a thriving industry. It’s not just the meditation retreats and ayahuasca shamans. Or the conferences with a heady mix of philosophers, quantum physicists, and Buddhist monks. Consciousness is a buzzing business in neuroscience labs a

      16 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      This Philosopher Helped Ensure There Was No Nobel for Relativity: Henri Bergson’s debate with Albert Einstein reached and swayed the 1921 Nobel committee.

      Apr 21, 2016

      On April 6, 1922, Einstein met a man he would never forget. He was one of the most celebrated philosophers of the century, widely known for espousing a theory of time that explained what clocks did not: memories, premonitions, expectations, and antic

      12 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Long Story Short

      Oct 25, 2021

      Long Story Short
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      On Certainty and On Doubt

      Sep 1, 2020

      On Certainty and On Doubt
      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Do I Have Buddhanature?

      Mar 24, 2020

      Do I Have Buddhanature?
      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Physics For The Feeble-Minded

      Jun 1, 2021

      Review by Jethro K. Lieberman HELGOLAND: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution BY CARLO ROVELLI (Translated from the Italian by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell) Riverhead, 256 pp., $20 CARLO ROVELLI’S newest book, Helgoland: Making Sense of the Qua

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Metaphysical Baggage of Physics: Lee Smolin argues that time is more fundamental than physical laws.

      Jan 30, 2014

      An issue on time would not be complete without a conversation with Lee Smolin. High school dropout, theoretical physicist, and founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, Smolin’s life and work reflect many

      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Admiral of the String Theory Wars: After a decade, Peter Woit still thinks string theory is a gory mess.

      May 7, 2015

      Watching Peter Woit lecture on quantum mechanics to a class at Columbia University—speaking softly, tapping out equations on a blackboard—it’s hard to imagine why a Harvard physicist once publicly compared him to a terrorist and called for his death.

      8 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      When Einstein Tilted at Windmills

      Nov 18, 2020

      When they met, Einstein wasn’t Einstein yet. He was just Albert Einstein, a kid, about 17, with a dark cloud of teenage angst and a violin. Michele Besso was older, 23, but a kindred spirit. Growing up in Trieste, Italy he had shown an impressive kna

      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      When Einstein Tilted at Windmills: The young physicist’s quest to prove the theories of Ernst Mach.

      Dec 1, 2016

      When they met, Einstein wasn’t Einstein yet. He was just Albert Einstein, a kid, about 17, with a dark cloud of teenage angst and a violin. Michele Besso was older, 23, but a kindred spirit. Growing up in Trieste, Italy he had shown an impressive kna

      14 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Book No One Read: Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.

      Oct 2, 2014

      I remember well the first time my certainty of a bright future evaporated, when my confidence in the panacea of technological progress was shaken. It was in 2007, on a warm September evening in San Francisco, where I was relaxing in a cheap motel roo

      11 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Impossible Mathematics of the Real World

      Feb 21, 2019

      Using stiff paper and transparent tape, Craig Kaplan assembles a beautiful roundish shape that looks like a Buckminster Fuller creation or a fancy new kind of soccer ball. It consists of four regular dodecagons (12-sided polygons with all angles and

      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Cognition Switch #2

    4/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Cognition Switch #2 - Martin Rees

      COGNITION SWITCH #2

      Featuring Ideas by:

      Michael Shermer, Peter Staudenmaier, Sabine Hossenfelder, Kate Raworth, Benjamin G Martin, Noah Charney, David Wengrow, Kimberley Brownlee, Tali Sharot, Robert Simpson, Thea Bechshoft, Martin Rees, Jon Butterworth, Bill Nye, Huw Price, and Henry Cowles

      This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

      Originally published by Aeon

      Published 2019 by Cognition Switch

      ISBN: 9788829559343

      Thank you for your purchase. If you enjoyed this work, please leave us a comment.

      1 2 3 4 10 8 7 6 5 00 000

      CONTENTS

      I. Utopia is a dangerous ideal: we should aim for ‘protopia’

      II. The Nazis as occult masters? It’s a good story but not history

      III. Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, and other lies of physics

      IV. Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism

      V. ‘European culture’ is an invented tradition

      VI. Does technological analysis destroy the romance of art history?

      VII. A history of true civilisation is not one of monuments

      VIII. The self-reliant individual is a myth that needs updating

      IX. How your mind, under stress, gets better at processing bad news

      X. ‘Free speech’ is a blunt instrument. Let’s break it up

      XI. Polar bears need to be fat, and they can’t be without sea ice

      XII. Black holes are simpler than forests and science has its limits

      XIII. To think like scientists, students should work like scientists

      XIV. If NASCAR embraced electric cars it could change the world

      XV. Is the cold fusion egg about to hatch?

      XVI. Orwell knew: we willingly buy the screens that are used against us

      I. Utopia is a dangerous ideal: we should aim for ‘protopia’

      Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, and a presidential fellow at Chapman University in California. His most recent book is Heavens on Earth: The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia(2018).

      https://aeon.co/ideas/utopia-is-a-dangerous-ideal-we-should-aim-for-protopia

      Utopias are idealised visions of a perfect society. Utopianisms are those ideas put into practice. This is where the trouble begins. Thomas More coined the neologism utopia for his 1516 work that launched the modern genre for a good reason. The word means ‘no place’ because when imperfect humans attempt perfectibility – personal, political, economic and social – they fail. Thus, the dark mirror of utopias are dystopias – failed social experiments, repressive political regimes, and overbearing economic systems that result from utopian dreams put into practice.

      The belief that humans are perfectible leads, inevitably, to mistakes when ‘a perfect society’ is designed for an imperfect species. There is no best way to live because there is so much variation in how people want to live. Therefore, there is no best society, only multiple variations on a handful of themes as dictated by our nature.

      For example, utopias are especially vulnerable when a social theory based on collective ownership, communal work, authoritarian rule and a command-and-control economy collides with our natural-born desire for autonomy, individual freedom and choice. Moreover, the natural differences in ability, interests and preferences within any group of people leads to inequalities of outcomes and imperfect living and working conditions that utopias committed to equality of outcome cannot tolerate. As one of the original citizens of Robert Owen’s 19th-century New Harmony community in Indiana explained it:

      We had tried every conceivable form of organisation and government. We had a world in miniature. We had enacted the French revolution over again with despairing hearts instead of corpses as a result. … It appeared that it was nature’s own inherent law of diversity that had conquered us … our ‘united interests’ were directly at war with the individualities of persons and circumstances and the instinct of self-preservation.

      Most of these 19th-century utopian experiments were relatively harmless because, without large numbers of members, they lacked political and economic power. But add those factors, and utopian dreamers can turn into dystopian murderers. People act on their beliefs, and if you believe that the only thing preventing you and/or your family, clan, tribe, race or religion from going to heaven (or achieving heaven on Earth) is someone else or some other group, then actions know no bounds. From homicide to genocide, the murder of others in the name of some religious or ideological belief accounts for the high body counts in history’s conflicts, from the Crusades, Inquisition, witch crazes and religious wars of centuries gone to the religious cults, world wars, pogroms and genocides of the past century.

      We can see that calculus behind the utopian logic in the now famous ‘trolley problem’ in which most people say they would be willing to kill one person in order to save five. Here’s the set-up: you are standing next to a fork in a railroad line with a switch to divert a trolley car that is about to kill five workers on the track. If you pull the switch, it will divert the trolley down a side track where it will kill one worker. If you do nothing, the trolley kills the five. What would you do? Most people say that they would pull the switch. If even people in Western enlightened countries today agree that it is morally permissible to kill one person to save five, imagine how easy it is to convince people living in autocratic states with utopian aspirations to kill 1,000 to save 5,000, or to exterminate 1,000,000 so that 5,000,000 might prosper. What’s a few zeros when we’re talking about infinite happiness and eternal bliss?

      The fatal flaw in utilitarian utopianism is found in another thought experiment: you are a healthy bystander in a hospital waiting room in which an ER physician has five patients dying from different conditions, all of which can be saved by sacrificing you and harvesting your organs. Would anyone want to live in a society in which they might be that innocent bystander? Of course not, which is why any doctor who attempted such an atrocity would be tried and convicted for murder.

      Yet this is precisely what happened with the grand 20th-century experiments in utopian socialist ideologies

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1
      pFad - Phonifier reborn

      Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

      Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


      Alternative Proxies:

      Alternative Proxy

      pFad Proxy

      pFad v3 Proxy

      pFad v4 Proxy