Crazy Wisdom: Daniel Dennett on Reductio ad Absurdum

source: Big Think· 2013-07-12
With his new book "Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking," (http://goo.gl/FtKWl) philosopher Daniel Dennett offers a kind of self-help book for deep thinkers -- a series of thought experiments designed as a workout for the deliberative mind. Here he discusses reductio ad absurdum, "the workhorse of philosophical argumentation", wherewith thinkers test the validity of an opponent's argument by taking it to its most illogical extreme.

Transcript -- One of the reasons I wrote this book is because oddly enough, philosophers who are famous -- notorious for being naval gazers, for being reflective. I think, in fact, philosophers are often remarkably unreflective about their own methodology. I wanted to draw attention to how philosophers actually go about their business and get them thinking more self-consciously about the tools they use and how they use them.

A tool that everybody should be familiar with and, in fact, people use it all the time is reductio ad absurdum arguments. It's the sort of general purpose crowbar of rational argument where you take your opponents premises and deduce something absurd from them. That is, you deduce a contradiction officially. We use it all the time without paying much attention to it. If you say something like -- if he gets here in time for supper, he'll have to fly like Superman. Which is absurd -- nobody can fly that fast. You don't bother spelling it out, you just say -- you point out that something that somebody imagined or proposed has a ridiculous consequence.

Well, let's look at one of the great granddaddy reductio ad absurdum arguments of all times. And that's Galileo's proof that heavy things don't fall faster than light things leaving friction aside. He argued as follows. Okay, suppose you take the premise that you're gonna show is false. Suppose heavier things do fall faster than light things. Now, take a stone A which is heavier than another stone B. That means if we tied B to A with a string, B should act as a drag on A when we drop it because A will fall faster, B will fall slower and so A tied to B should fall slower than A by itself.

But A-B tied together is heavier than A by itself so it should fall faster. It should fall both faster and slower than A by itself. That's a manifest contradiction. So we know that our premise with which we began has to be false. That's a classic reductio ad absurdum. That's been known and named for several millennia I guess. And, as I say, it's the workhorse of philosophical argumentation.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

Are We Ready For Aliens?

source: Vsauce 2013-07-12

The interspecies Internet? An idea in progress...

source: TEDtalksDirector
Apes, dolphins and elephants are animals with remarkable communication skills. Could the Internet be expanded to include sentient species like them? A new and developing idea from a panel of four great thinkers -- dolphin researcher Diana Reiss, musician Peter Gabriel, internet of things visionary Neil Gershenfeld and Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet.

Jack Andraka: A promising test for pancreatic cancer ... from a teenager

source: TEDtalksDirector 2013-07-11

Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than two percent chance of survival. How could this be? Jack Andraka talks about how he developed a promising early detection test for pancreatic cancer that's super cheap, effective and non-invasive -- all before his 16th birthday.

20130501蔣勳講座：女性與花－雷諾瓦、馬諦斯、畢卡索(一)

source: ishow2010

Ramez Naam on Idea Sex and the Evolutionary Logic of Knowledge Transfer

source: Big Think 2013-07-08
Why do certain ideas succeed? Ideas have to pass a kind of Darwinian fitness test, argues the computer scientist Ramez Naam, who is the author of "More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement." (http://goo.gl/7lBWl) It turns out the most useful ideas are the ones that spread, like the wheel that was invented in Egypt and was improved upon in Sumaria by going from a solid disk to spokes.

Passing the usefulness test crucially involves the ability of ideas to propagate themselves, just as biologically successful humans are able to pass on their genes. In the case of the wheel, two ideas met, and reproduced. In other words, the wheel was carried by humans to another place where it was then improved upon by other people.

So everything we're doing in society today, such as expanding access to education and research tools, Naam says, "is accelerating this process of the Darwinian evolution of ideas."

Transcript - Ideas spread for lots of reasons. It might be a catchy tune or a funny joke that you've heard that sticks in the brain and makes you want to propagate it, to tell others. But one reason that we know that ideas stick and spread is because they're useful. The useful ones propagate. So an example is the wheel. The wheel was invented in Egypt but it was improved upon hundreds of years later in Sumaria by going from a solid disk to spokes. How did it get to Sumaria? Well, merchants used it to travel and spread their goods from point A to point B. So that utility to them, the fact that it was a useful invention helped the invention itself spread from place to place. It was carried by humans to other places where then it was improved upon by other people.

A very important factor is that there's an evolution happening of ideas. Lots of ideas are tried. Lots of ideas are proposed. Many of them don't work out for whatever reason. They're not true or they're not a good innovation. But then ideas pop up that do pass sort of the Darwinian fitness test, if you will. And they go on to thrive and they spread. And then they meet other ideas. And those ideas combine. Matt Ridley talks about that as idea sex -- when two ideas meet. And then they can give birth to new ideas.

Any technique that develops new diversity of ideas helps that Darwinian evolution. So Thomas Edison, for example, experimented with thousands of different filaments for the light bulb before he got to one that worked. So it's another way the Darwinian evolution can happen. Lots of creational diversity and then a filter that picks just the ones that people want to pass on for whatever reason.

So this process of innovation of spreading ideas from person to person, one of the things we've been doing, some of the ideas we've been creating, are accelerators of that process. When we invented writing maybe five to seven thousand years ago, that accelerated the spread of ideas. When we went from writing on scrolls to the printing press that could print things thousands of times faster than monks could transcribe them by hand, that accelerated the spread of ideas and helped launch the scientific revolution and helped accelerate the Renaissance. And now with the Internet ideas can spread very, very rapidly. Funny cat pictures, of course, utilize that but so do scientific papers. So do dialogue between researchers or scholars in all sorts of fields.

So everything we're doing in society both increasing the number of people who are educated, giving them access to more tools to do their research and giving them more ways to communicate more quickly is all accelerating this process of Darwinian evolution of ideas.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd

The Path to Discovering Your Talents and Passions, with Sir Ken Robinson...

source: Big Think 2013-06-30
In How to Find Your Element, his 7-session workshop for Big Think Mentor (http://goo.gl/06gYu), creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson tackles the epidemic of dissatisfaction with work and life. In this introduction, he outlines the path to "finding your element" -- the environment and set of activities that will activate your unique abilities, sustain your happiness, and enable you to live your best possible life.