Cruel Bombs

source: Vsauce 2013年10月30日

Love is the Product of Lousy Neurons

source: Big Think 2013年10月22日
Why are humans so aberrant - that is to say - why do all human cultures have marriage-like institutions while 90 percent of mammalian species are promiscuous?

The neuroscientist David Linden points to our "jellyfish-like or coral-like" neurons, which are pretty crummy parts if you are trying to create "clever us."

These ancient, inefficient neurons "signal probabilistically, they are unreliable, they leak signals to their neighbors and they're slow," Linden says. And so, in order to be clever humans, we need an extraordinarily large number of neurons and a huge brain to store them all. And that, in turn, means that it takes humans, as opposed to orangutans, an extraordinary amount of time to develop.

This long post-natal maturation - the longest childhood of any animal - means that "single moms aren't very effective in keeping their children alive in hunter/gatherer societies," Linden says. And that is why love is so important for human survival.

Directed / Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton

Transcript -- So our brains are built out of neurons and those neurons are fundamentally similar to the very first evolved neurons in jellyfish-like or coral-like animals that first emerged about 600 million years ago. And it turns out that neurons are not that efficient at all. They signal probabilistically, they are unreliable, they leak signals to their neighbors and they're slow. So then the question becomes, well we're really clever, we humans. How do we build clever us out of such crummy parts?

And the answer is that, in order to build clever us, we need huge brains. We need an extraordinarily large number of neurons and to have massive interconnection between those neurons. So we have something on the order of 500 billion neurons in the human brain each neuron receiving about 10,000 connections from its neighbors. Now this turns out actually to be really crucial to our humanity because our adult human brain is 1,200 cubic centimeters in volume. That's about three-fold larger than an adult chimpanzee. A newborn human has a brain of volume 400 cubic cm. And it turns out, as women well know that that barely fits through the birth canal as it is. It turns out that death during childbirth is a uniquely human phenomenon. You don't see it in other animals. So you've got a newborn with a 400 cc brain and an adult with a 1,200cc brain. Well, it turns out that if you look at the development of the brain postnatally, there is furious brain development from birth to age five and then much slower brain development from age five to 20, and the brain isn't mature until about the age 20.

What does this mean? It means that humans have by far, the longest childhood of any animal. Now, what are the sequelae of that? Well, what it means is that an Orangutan mom can take care of her offspring without any paternal contribution at all, just fine. But it turns out, if you look at humans in hunter/gatherer societies, which is what we were up until the last blink in evolutionary time, single motherhood is not a very viable endeavor. So, single moms aren't very effective in keeping their children alive in hunter/gatherer societies.

So that's why we have cross-culturally, marriage or marriage-like institutions. There isn't a single culture that has ever been found that doesn't have something like marriage. The details of the rules can vary, be we all have it. Why do we have this when 90 percent of mammalian species are promiscuous, where both male and female have many sexual partners within a given reproductive cycle where paternity is not well-established and where the male does not contribute in any way in the rearing of offspring? Why are we so aberrant? It's because our neurons are lousy processors, so we need big, fat brains to make clever us. By putting many of these lousy processors together, we can only get 400 cc's worth of these neurons through the birth canal, so we have to have very long post-natal maturation, a long childhood and consequently, that's what creates love. That's what creates our cross-cultural human mating system. It comes from the fact that neurons are lousy processors.

留十八分鐘給自己：蔣勳 (Chiang Hsun) at TEDxTaipei 2012

source: TEDxTaipei 2012年11月29日
蔣勳是詮釋文學與美學的發言者，1947年生於西安，福建長樂人。畢業於中國文化大學­史學系、藝術研究所。現任《聯合文學》社長。其文筆清麗流暢，兼具感性與理性之美，1­972年負笈法國巴黎大學藝術研究所，在人文思潮的起源地巴黎，孕育出其更從容率性的­生活態度。其作品涉略極廣，在藝術體系中灌注人文感性，用文字線條拉出豐富的視覺意象­，其將生活經驗及美學背景重組融會成令人驚豔的美。著有小說、散文、藝術論述等作品數­十種，並多次舉辦畫展，深獲各界好評。最愛的創作是寫詩。

Chiang Hsun is an influential contemporary poet and author. He was born in Xian in 1947 and grew up in Taiwan. He graduated from the Department of History and Graduate Institute of Art at Chinese Culture University. In 1972, he started his new phase of life as a student at the Institute of Art in the University of Paris.

During his stay in Paris, he immersed himself in art . He incorporated and emphasized the value of humanity in his work. Chiang has published numerous novels, poems, prose and art criticism. He enjoys composing poems the most among all. He has held several painting exhibitions which also received great remarks.

我願是滿山的杜鵑　只願一次無憾的春天 我願是繁星　捨給一個夏天的夜晚 我願是千萬調江河　流向唯一的海洋 我願是那月　為妳再一次圓滿 如果你是島嶼　我願是環抱你的海洋 如果你張起了船帆　我願是輕輕吹動的風浪 如果你遠行　我願是那路　準備了平坦　隨你去到遠方 當你走累了　我願是夜晚 是路旁的客棧　有安靜的枕席　供你睡眠 眠中有夢　我就是你枕上的淚痕 我願是手臂讓你依靠　雖然白髮蒼蒼 我仍願是你腳邊的爐火　與你共化回憶的老年 你是笑　我是應和你的歌聲 你是淚　我是陪伴你的星光 當你埋葬土中　我願是依伴你的青草 你成灰　我變成塵 如果 如果 如果你對此生還有眷戀 我就再許一願 與你結來世的因緣

Judith Butler. Benjamin and Kafka. 2011

source: egsvideo  2012年02月23日
http://www.egs.edu/ Judith Butler, philosopher and author, talking about Walter Benjamin's notion of the gesture in Franz Kafka's parables. In this lecture, Judith Butler discusses Benjamin's background, Kafka's elliptical literary style, the relationship between image and gesture, the possibility of completed action, theology and the Event of language in relationship to Jacques Derrida, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, Samuel Weber and Karl Marx focusing on messianic time, commodity fetishism, Christianity, the antichrist, the structure of time and space, the Frankfurt School, Kabbalah, the trace, the enigmatic remainder and interruption. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Judith Butler.

Judith Butler. Benjamin and The Philosophy of History. 2011

source: egsvideo  2012年02月11日
http://www.egs.edu/ Judith Butler, philosopher and author, talking about Walter Benjamin's Theses On The Philosophy of History. In this lecture, Judith Butler discusses historical materialism crossed with the messianic, crystallization as the imagistic form of the past, homogenous time, the loss of remembrance and the singularity of catastrophe in relationship to Franz Kafka, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Michel Foucault focusing on memory, progress, empty time, the relation of the past and present, happening versus action and dialectics. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Judith Butler.

Avital Ronell. Walter Benjamin the sequel. 2013

source: egsvideo  2013年10月13日
http://www.egs.edu/ Avital Ronell, philosopher and author, talking about the Walter Benjamin, philosophy, doctorate, and failure. In the lecture Avital Ronell discusses the concepts of transparency, translation, melancholia, sequel, in relationship to sovereignty, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Socrates, Nietzsche, Lyotard, Marx, focusing on task, struggle, and mission. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe Year Avital Ronell.

Judith Butler. One time traverses another, Benjamin's Theologico-Politic...

source: egsvideo  2013年09月12日
http://www.egs.edu/ Judith Butler, philosopher and author, talking about the imminence, transience, messianic, and rhythm. In the lecture Judith Butler discusses the concepts of happiness, downfall, eternal, nature, in relationship to Walter Benjamin, worldliness, sacred, recurrence, loss, focusing on Kafka, and Theologico-Political Fragment. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe Year Judith Butler.

Judith Butler, Ph.D., Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, attended Bennington College and then Yale University, where she received her B.A., and her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984. Her first training in philosophy took place at the synagogue in her hometown of Cleveland. She taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities before becoming Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2012 she will join Columbia University's English and Comparative Literature departments.

Judith Butler is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (Verso Press, 2004), Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005), Frames of War (Verso, 2009) and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011).