elegation’s posterous

[E]nergies we create with our minds as well as our bodies.  These thought waves can be measured electronically so we admit that there is actual use of energy with each thought.  In our society, as in most social structures, we are carefully programmed to accept certain thoughts as correct, simply because they are repeated over an over in action as well as words.  Ideas are as contagious as the common cold, and when they are accompanied by fear and worry, many mistaken ideas are accepted as truths.  These thoughts become deeply rooted in our minds, our bodies and our future.  When I stated in a previous column that today we are creating our tomorrows, I was referring to just that.

Liken your mind to a television set. Now turn off the old obsolete ideas of dreading and fearing the future and change the channel to ones called hope, anticipation and wanted plans for the future.  What you will be doing is directing your energies to the things you want instead of what you don’t want. Fear, dread and worry burn up precious body energies that could be converted and used to kindle the fires of creativity, love and joy.  How about adding your kindly thoughts to our wonderful bonfire called LIVING.

A map of knowledge

Why Do We Cheat?

Listener Chris Boehm dropped this treat into the comments for the latest podcast. It's a video of a TED Conference talk about how social pressures tighten or loosen morality around the idea of cheating. Chris writes:

Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, gave a TED talk that was just posted on YouTube about "cheating."

He talked about experiments he did, where people were given tokens that they could exchange for money, and how their behavior was different than those who were paid money directly.

He then applied this to the stock market: "What happens when you remove things from money?

"Could it be that people would cheat even more? And what happened to the social environment [sic] where people see other people behave around them?"

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Knowledge about how we know changes everything.

In the past ten years, research in cognitive science has started uncovering the neural and psychological substrates of abstract thought, tracing the acquisition and consolidation of information from motor movements to abstract notions like mathematics and time. These studies have discovered that human cognition, even in its most abstract and sophisticated form, is deeply embodied, deeply dependent on the processes and representations underlying perception and motor action. We invent all kinds of complex abstract ideas, but we have to do it with old hardware: machinery that evolved for moving around, eating, and mating, not for playing chess, composing symphonies, inventing particle colliders, or engaging in epistemology for that matter. Being able to re-use this old machinery for new purposes has allowed us to build tremendously rich knowledge repertoires. But it also means that the evolutionary adaptations made for basic perception and motor action have inadvertently shaped and constrained even our most sophisticated mental efforts. Understanding how our evolved machinery both helps and constrains us in creating knowledge, will allow us to create new knowledge, either by using our old mental machinery in yet new ways, or by using new and different machinery for knowledge-making, augmenting our normal cognition.

So why will knowing more about how we know change everything? Because everything in our world is based on knowledge. Humans, leaps and bounds beyond any other creatures, acquire, create, share, and pass on vast quantities of knowledge. All scientific advances, inventions, and discoveries are acts of knowledge creation. We owe civilization, culture, science, art, and technology all to our ability to acquire and create knowledge. When we study the mechanics of knowledge building, we are approaching an understanding of what it means to be human—the very nature of the human essence. Understanding the building blocks and the limitations of the normal human knowledge building mechanisms will allow us to get beyond them. And what lies beyond is, well, yet unknown...