Does It Matter What Evangelion's Creator Says? | Idea Channel | PBS Digi...

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source: pbsideachannel·2013-08-05

Hideaki Anno says Neon Genesis Evangelion is meaningless. For #GeekWeek we ask if we should listen to him.

Neon Genesis Evangelion may be the MOST ultimate work of anime ever! More than just Mecha, NGE is dark and emotional, taking on serious topics such as depression, free will and a host of other intense stuff. But the creator, Hideaki Anno, says that we're all reading way too much into it. Are his words the final say on this piece of media? OR are the author's ideas of his own work EQUAL TO the interpretations of anyone else?! Watch the episode and find out!

Lawrence Krauss: The Flavors of Nothing (YouTube Geek Week!)

source: Big Think 2013-08-06
Theoretical Physicist Lawrence Krauss explains the different types of nothing. Or something.
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Krauss' latest book is "A Universe from Nothing" -http://goo.gl/76IWnO

Transcript--
when you think about nothing you have to be a little more careful than you normally are because, in fact, nothing is a physical concept because it's the absence of something, and something is a physical concept. And what we've learned over the last hundred years is that nothing is much more complicated than we would've imagined otherwise.

For example, the simplest kind of nothing is the kind of nothing of the Bible. Say an infinite empty space, an infinite dark void of the Bible. You know, nothing in it, no particles, no radiation, nothing. Well, that kind of nothing turns out to be full of stuff in a way or at least much more complicated than you might have imagined because due to the laws of quantum mechanics and relativity, we now know that empty space is a boiling bubbling brew of virtual particles that are popping in and out of existence at every moment.

And in fact, for that kind of nothing, if you wait long enough, you're guaranteed by the laws of quantum mechanics to produce something. So the difference between empty space with stuff in it and empty space with nothing in it is not that great anymore. In fact, they're different versions of the same thing. So the transition from nothing to something is not so surprising. Now you might say well that's not good enough because you have space. Where did the space come from? Well, a more demanding definition of nothing is no space, but, in fact, once you apply the laws of quantum mechanics to gravity itself, then space itself becomes a quantum mechanical variable and fluctuates in and out of existence and you can literally, by the laws of quantum mechanics, create universes.

Create spaces and times, where there was no space and time before. So now you got no particles, no radiation, no space, no time, that sounds like nothing. But then you might say, well, you know what, you got the laws of physics. You got the laws of nature. The laws themselves are somehow something; although, I would argue in fact that that is not at all obvious or clear or necessary. But even there, it turns out physics potentially has an answer because we now have good reason to believe that even the laws of physics themselves are kind of arbitrary.

There may be an infinite number of universes, and in each universe that's been created, the laws of physics are different. It's completely random. And the laws themselves come into existence when the universe comes into existence. So there's no pre-existing fundamental law. Anything that can happen, does happen. And therefore, you got no laws, no space, no time, no particles, no radiation. That's a pretty good definition of nothing.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

David Eagleman: Your Time-Bending Brain (YouTube Geek Week!)

source: Big Think 2013-08-06

Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains how your brain perceives time (retrospectively).

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Transcript--
So this is an area of interest to me and my lab's been studying this for a while, is why time is rubbery and can speed up or slow down. And it turns out, when I looked into the literature on this, the experiment had never been done about why time seems to move in slow motion when you're in a life threatening situation. But I talked to so many people and I'd experienced it myself that I wanted to study that. So I found a way to study it by dropping people from 150 foot tall tower and measuring their time perception on the way down. And that, plus several other experiments we did in my lab, led me to understand that people don't actually see time in slow motion during an event. Instead, it's a completely retrospective assessment. In other words, when you're in a life threatening situation, your brain writes down memory much more densely, and then retrospectively, when you look at that, you have so many details that you don't normally have that it seems as though it must have lasted a very long time. That's the only interpretation your brain can make. So time, your assessment of how long something took, has a lot to do with how much energy your brain has to burn during the event and how much footage you have of the event.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

Paul Root Wolpe: Kurzweil's Singularity Prediction is Wrong (YouTube Gee...

source: Big Think 2013-08-06

Bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe argues that the Singularity envisioned by Ray Kurzweil isn't quite right.

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Transcript-- Ray Kurzweil has argued that we're on our way to a singularity, that is that if you look at the change and the interaction of scientific fields over the course of the last century or so and you project it forward, what you see is not a linear progression, but an exponential progression, which means that as things change they're going to change more rapidly so that the curve will mean that over a very short period of time we will make giant leaps in scientific sophistication.

What he's argued about that is that that is going to reach kind of critical mass, which will mean that at some point, and there are different dates that have been projected, but it's not that far in the future; a couple of decades. We are going to be able to so manipulate human form and function, so change the nature of life that it's impossible on this side of that moment that he calls a singularity, to predict what life will be like on the other side of that singularity.

I happen to think he's wrong. I think that things will change. I think things will change dramatically, but I don't think that moment's going to come anything like in the way that he thinks it's going to come. Society is too complex for that, our interactions with different scientific fields -- look. One of the things that we have found out over and over and over again when we talk about biology and biotechnology is that things are much more complex than we think they are. First, we were going to decode the human genome and that was going to open up everything we needed to know about the nature of life. And then we said, oh no, we just finished the human genome, but we don't really understand the proteins that these genes code for, so we have to map the proteome and then we have to get all of these proteins together. And then people said, oh no, that's not going to be enough because now we've kind of discovered epigenetics and we realize that the genome is mediated by all kinds of cellular mechanisms that decide what gets expressed and how it gets expressed. And that's how things go.

The same things happen in the brain sciences where a lot of our assumptions about the way the brain worked and synaptic relationships and midlevel brain organization turned out to be much more simplistic than we thought it was. And we still don't really understand how the brain works.

And I think what we're going to find over time is that rather than convergence leading us to some sort of unified idea is that there will constantly be this kind of complexity fallout. As we learn about things more deeply and more deeply, we will discover that in fact, there's all kinds of peripheral work to be done that we couldn't have even imagined looking forward. And what that means is you're not going to have a convergence towards a singularity, but you're going to have a very complex set of moments where things will change in a lot of different ways. And I think the singularity is actually a very simplistic idea and it misunderstands the complex nature of biological life and physical life. And physics also thought it was going to find its grand unified theory a long time ago. And now we're just beginning to discover that maybe the universe isn't exactly organized the way we thought it was with dark matter and String Theory and all of that, which we still don't really understand the nature of it and we can't agree about it.

So, I'm not a big singularity fan. I think that Ray Kurzweil's basic insight that science is increasing in a very rapid rate, more rapidly than people recognize and that there is a convergence of fields. The classic 19th century fields of biology and chemistry, they don't make any sense anymore. Everything is interdisciplinary. Universities have to change their structure now because we're still -- I spent my life in universities and we're still functioning on a 19th century model of what a university should be with these departments that have somehow gotten so petrified in their place that we are petrified of changing them.

But I also think that part of the nature of understanding that move towards complexity is recognizing that even as we get more and more sophisticated about it, part of that sophistication will be discovering new complex phenomenon that right now we can't even imagine exists. And that suggesting that it's all going to be tied up in a moment where we're just going to understand everything well enough to transform the world is, I think, a fairly naive and simplistic view of how things are going to change.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

Jonathon Keats: The Honeybee Ballet (YouTube Geek Week!)

source: Big Think 2013-08-06

Experimental Philosopher Jonathon Keats explains how he choreographed his Honeybee Ballet

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Transcript - Several years ago I got to be very interested in honeybees and the extraordinary talent that they have for dancing. They're better dancers than us, they've been doing it a lot longer and they certainly seem to have dance as their culture to a greater extent than probably any other species. So I got to thinking about whether there was a way to work with honeybees collaboratively, making use of their dance in a way that would choreograph it as we do amongst ourselves for human audiences.

So what I did was I studied extensively the language of bees, the language by which they indicate to others where flowers are to be found so that others can then go and find those flowers and, in the process of pollinating them, bring back more nectar or more pollen for the hive. I worked out where hives were in the city of San Francisco relative to places that I might plant flowers. And then mapped out specifically where the flowers should be planted as a way of choreographing, of marking in their own language what sorts of moves might follow others in a way that aesthetically speaking to me at least seemed like it might appeal to them.

All of this was done with total freedom as far as the bees were concerned to follow my suggestions or not and also without any sort of obligation to perform for us. That is to say that I mapped it out and then working with some collaborators went and planted flowers and I made a map, which was available for human audiences if they were interested in seeing what the bees were up to. But there were no cameras in the hives; there was no way in which we would be able to watch what they were doing. It wasn't some sort of minstrel show; it wasn't some sort of a performance for us. It was a performance that was offered to the bees for their own amusement, for their own interest, their own edification such that then they might find the aesthetic in their dance and move beyond simply using dance in a utilitarian way for finding where flowers were to making that an integral part of their culture at the level in our culture.

I often start any project by asking a naïve question. So naïve that most likely you ask these sorts of questions when you were a child but at a certain age you learned that these were not appropriate. Or even if you ask them to yourself you never really followed through to try to see what would happen if you were to do something that was kind of patently absurd. In the case of the Honeybee Ballet I had the question of whether I could choreograph a ballet for another species. Communicating across species in a way that might facilitate a greater deeper relationship between us. Especially at a time where colony collapse disorder was, effectively through our use of pesticides, destroying their habitat. Was there a way in which we can find some sort of a common ground? And dance is such an essential part of what we do as humans that I thought that perhaps I could offer that to the bees as something that they could participate in as well.

So asking that question, could I choreograph a ballet for another species for honeybees? I don't know any of them. I've never talked to them. I know only about them as much as I've ever read. But realizing that their language is incredibly sophisticated, arguably as sophisticated as ours according to their culture, according to their needs, that I could find that common ground. And once I had figured out the basic way in which to try to communicate with them using their own language, using flowers, I realized that there was a way in which I could pursue this rather naïve question. Not for the sake of reaching an answer, a solution that would resolve this in some definitive way but rather as a way of continuing my exploration, that we could continue to think about what sort of relationship we have with other species. How our culture and theirs have commonalities because we all come from the same place and we all need to get to the same place. So how do we do that?

The bigger question of how we live within a world that is as complex as ours in harmony with other species is one that gets addressed through this much smaller more naïve question of asking what would it mean, what would it take to choreograph a ballet for honeybees.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

Lee Smolin: Cosmological Natural Selection (YouTube Geek Week!)

source: Big Think 2013-08-06

Theoretical Physicist Lee Smolin argues that the fundamental laws of physics are subject to evolutionary pressures akin to natural selection.

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Transcript -- Physics is about discovering what the laws of nature are. And we've gone some distance towards that. We're not done but we've gone some good distance towards that at the present time. But once you know what the laws of nature are, another kind of question unfolds itself which is why are those the laws and not other laws.

For example, the laws that we understand -- the standard model of particle physics describes all the fundamental particles and their interactions -- has about 30 numbers which you just have to put in as the result of measuring them by experiment. The masses of the different particles, the quarks, the electrons, the neutrinos, the strengths of the fundamental force -- various numbers like that. And the model works dramatically well as the recent experiments the Large Hadron Collider show. Why are those numbers what they are in our universe? Why is the mass of the electron what it is and not 12 times larger or half the size? There are dozens of questions like this.

So I developed cosmological natural selection to try to give an evolutionary account of this so that there would be a history back before the Big Bang in which these numbers could change and evolve through a series of events like the Big Bang. And there could be an explanation akin to natural selection. Just like you want to know why do people have two legs and not three legs or five legs or four legs or six legs. There's an evolutionary reason for that. A certain kind of fitness has been improved over many, many generations and similarly there could be a notion of fitness of the laws of nature through approval of many generations. And cosmological natural selection was an example of the theory of that kind.

I realized that the only methodology we had in science, or the best methodology we had in science for explaining how choices have been made in the system to all lead to a lot of structure because one of the mysteries is why our universe is so structured as it is on so many scales from organic molecules and biomolecules up to vast arrays of clusters of galaxies. There's enormous structure on such a wide range of scales. And that turns out to be tied to the values of these constants of the standard model of particle physics.

And so why is that? And I realized that the only methodology that was really successful for explaining how choices were made in nature such as to lead to an improbable amount of structure is natural selection. So for natural selection we need reproduction. And there was a hypothesis lying around that universes reproduce through Black Holes, that inside Black Holes rather than there being singularities where time ends, there were basically the births of new regions of space and time which could become new universes. And I took over that hypothesis and took over the hypothesis that maybe the laws of nature changed slightly which has been made by Johnny Wheeler in the 1960s, and just added a little bit which is that those changes should be very small so that there can be an accumulation of fitness.

Which leads to a prediction or an observation that after many, many generations the population of the universes should be fine-tuned to maximize the production of Black Holes. And that has further implications for things that we can actually try to measure and disprove experimentally. So that's, very briefly, the idea of cosmological natural selection.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd