Comment

Comment by Dallas the Phallus on April 24, 2012 at 9:56am

Chris, I've read about that study before. Interesting stuff. Though I do need to point out that that video is clearly a dramatization of the study, which this clip does not mention. Without that clarification, it does look like the actions are a bit forced.

 

Glad to learn those new terms: informational conformity and normative conformity.

 

I always get such a laugh out of people who claim that they are in control of their lives and decisions. That they values they've chosen to accept were based on their own decisions. That their success is due to their own hard work and nothing else. That they are in complete control of their emotions, and that they direct the path of their life. (No thanks to Ayn Rand.)  

 

 

Comment by Chris on April 23, 2012 at 3:37am

That's a good article on the Tyranny of the Many. The influence of the many can have horrible social effects and reminded me of this study

Comment by Adriana on April 22, 2012 at 12:02pm

Yep, I had to look up that word too :-)

Comment by Neal on April 22, 2012 at 12:00pm

Great article, and a new word for Neal; quidnunc.

Comment by Adriana on April 22, 2012 at 11:08am

That is a good article, doone. Food for thought. I've always convinced of that.

Comment by doone on April 22, 2012 at 10:46am

THE TYRANNY OF THE MANY IS (PERHAPS) AS BAD AS THE TYRANNY OF ONE

Tauriq Moosa in Big Think:

A society that forces its citizens to be shaped into the mould of whatever prevailing opinion thinks true or good, by virtue only and through the use of majority viewpoints, is as dangerous as any oppressive regime. Just because the weapon is prevailing opinion doesn’t mean it is any less oppressive of those who happen to dissent.  Instead of a powerful individual throttling the freedom of the many, it is now the many who, by virtue of number, become powerful enough to throttle the freedom of the individual.

The reason we ought to be on our guard, then, rests in the incredible power tyranny fueled by prevailing opinion has. It rivals any of the great tyrants and tyrannies of history and today: it’s a tyranny that has built into it a watchdog alertness to individual activities, requiring no cameras or bugged houses, only paternalistic quidnuncs with idle hands, assertive self-righteousness and morally sensitive personalities; it’s a communication device with a thousand tongues, willingly able to turn into a vengeful arm of enforcement through coercion and ostracism; it sustains itself in, for example, media outlets that are twisted to take its form, as these are businesses who do not want to lose their clients and so will feed what most of them, being the majority, want to hear and see.

More here.

Posted by Abbas Raza at 08:04 AM | Permalink 

Comment by doone on April 16, 2012 at 9:00pm

What Is Consciousness Made Of?

Tim Parks grabs a beer with philosopher Riccardo Manzotti, who believes that consciousness is a process:

His favorite example is the rainbow. For the rainbow experience to happen we need sunshine, raindrops, and a spectator. It is not that the sun and the raindrops cease to exist if there is no one there to see them. Manzotti is not a Bishop Berkeley. But unless someone is present at a particular point no colored arch can appear. The rainbow is hence a process requiring various elements, one of which happens to be an instrument of sense perception. It doesn’t exist whole and separate in the world nor does it exist as an acquired image in the head separated from what is perceived (the view held by the "internalists" who account for the majority of neuroscientists); rather, consciousness is spread between sunlight, raindrops, and visual cortex, creating a unique, transitory new whole, the rainbow experience. Or again: the viewer doesn’t see the world; he is part of a world process.

(Street art by Pablo S. Herrero and David de la Mano in Montevideo, Uruguay, viaColossal)

Comment by Adriana on April 15, 2012 at 5:14pm

Yes, it is very likely that compassion and empathy, and thus ultimately, morality, originated from maternal love. Altruism over predatory instinct....hmmm...not so much, I think.

Comment by doone on April 14, 2012 at 9:58pm

Prehistoric Compassion

by Zoë Pollock

On a panel with Roger Ebert, Michael Fink, the man behind the CGI dinosaurs in Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, confirmed what we all believed:

The premise of the four-shot scene was to depict the birth of consciousness (what some have called the "birth of compassion") -- the first moment in which a living creature made a conscious decision to choose what Michael described as "right from wrong, good from evil." Or, perhaps, a form of altruism over predatory instinct. Here's the relevant passage from a 2007 draft of Malick's screenplay:

Reptiles emerge from the amphibians, and dinosaurs in turn from the reptiles. Among the dinosaurs we discover the first signs of maternal love, as the creatures learn to care for each other. Is not love, too, a work of the creation? What should we have been without it? How had things been then? Silent as a shadow, consciousness has slipped into the world.

Previous Dish on the film here and here.

Comment by doone on April 12, 2012 at 8:40pm

BOTH OF US DISGUSTED IN MY INSULA

It is often said by scientists that our understanding of the neural basis of empathy is in its infancy, the suggestion being that it is only a matter of time before problems will be solved, as if the difficulties facing the research field are merely technical. But the implication of my paper is that the issues confronting empathy theorists are as much theoretical or, say, philosophical, as they are technical or scientific. Adam Smith’s name is today routinely evoked in introductory remarks on the nature of empathy. But how many people realize that for Smith empathy (or sympathy) was not a natural phenomenon or an automatic process of resonance with the feelings of another? Rather, according to him sympathy was conditioned by an inherent theatricality that, by making persons into actors and spectators who distance themselves from each other and even from themselves, forestalls the possibility (the dream) of complete sympathetic merger or identification.43 Freud expressed the same difficulty, indeed impossibility, in his own way when he made psychical ambivalence—the constitutive impossibility of separating Eros and Thanatos, love and hate, immersion and distance—central to his understanding of the sympathetic-identificatory phenomenon. According to Freud, rivalry with the other is as inherent in human nature as is love, and indeed is inseparable from love: the taming of these emotions is the necessary but endless task of civilization.44 For such thinkers, then, our knowledge of other minds cannot be explained by an appeal to a simple mechanism of mutual resonance or mutual attunement of the sort I have analyzed here. A further implication of my paper is that the problem of emotional empathy can only be rendered the more intractable if investigators persist in adopting the theoretical assumptions and experimental methods associated with the Basic Emotions View and the mirror neuron hypothesis.

more from Ruth Leys at nonsite here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:56 AM | Permalink

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