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How do mental functions map on to the brain? During the 1940's and 1950's, the brilliant Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield performed extensive brain surgeries on patients with local anaesthetic. During the operations, he stimulated specific regions of the patients' brains with an electrode and simply asked them what they felt. All kinds of sensations, images, and even memories were elicited by the electrode, and the somatosensory areas of the brain that were responsible could be mapped. Penfield concluded that memories left permanent imprints on the brain. (also called engrams) Among other things, Penfield found a narrow strip running from top to bottom down both sides of the brain where his electrode produced sensations localized in various parts of the body. This "sensory homunculus," as it is now called, forms a greatly distorted representation of the body on the surface of the brain, with the parts that are particularly important taking up disproportionately large parts. (see image below) (see also body image ) For the most part, the map is orderly but upside down. However, the map is not entirely continuous.
Read MoreCatastrophe theory is an attempt to go beyond classical physics -- the physics of structurally stable systems -- and to provide a mathematical framework for discontinuous processes. It was primarily developed by René Thom. Thom developed catastrophe theory as a mathematical way of addressing the work on morphogenesis done by C.H. Waddington in the 1950's.
Read MoreCellular Automata were invented by Stanislaw Ulam in the late 1940's and used by John von Neumann in his theoretical investigations of self- replication in machines. A cellular automaton is a lattice of finite automata that all obey transition functions defined by the local context of each cell at any given time.
Read MoreA deterministic system is one whose future states are completely fixed by its current state and its rule of dyamical motion. Determinism has historically been linked to prediction, and the laws governing planetary motion became the paradigmatic example of determinism and predictibility. (cf. clock) Thus Pierre Simon de Laplace, following Newton, believed that " Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective positions of the beings which compose it...nothing would be uncertain, and the future as the past would be present to its eyes."
Read MoreWhile genes are usually thought to entail some direct causal consequence in the expression of a character, a central tenet of genetics is that a mutant locus or the normal allele does not "control a character," but is only a differential. The production of a character involves many genes.
Read MoreAccording to the Lucretian account of chaos falling into order by the chance concourse of atoms -- Sometimes, wrote Lucretius, at uncertain times and places, the eternal, universal fall of the atoms is disturbed by a very slight deviation - the "clinamen." The resulting vortex gives rise to the world, to all natural things.
Read MoreThe clock is a particularly emblematic piece of technology.The invention of the mechanical clock in the thirteenth century inaugurated a new representation of time. For the West, the clock symbolized regularity, predictibility, and control. A clock serves to produce a correspondence between events and vertices of time moments.
Read MoreA closed system in statistical thermodynamics is one in which the number of particles as well as the total energy are fixed by boundary conditions. Closed systems systems tend towards equilibrium and to increse in entropy.
Read MoreIn traditional rhetoric and neo-classic theory, language is the "dress" of thought, and figures are the " ornaments" of language, for the sake of the pleasurable emotion which distinguishes a poetic from a merely didactic discourse. (Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, p.290)
Read MoreIn coevolutionary processes, the fitness of one organism or species depends on the characteristics of the other organisms or species with which it interacts, while all simultaneously adapt and change." At every moment natural selection is operating to change the genetic composition of populations in response to the momentary environment, but as that composition changes it forces a concommittent change in the environment itself.
Read More"Commodities can provisionally be defined as objects of economic value." (Arjun Appadurai, "Commodities and the politics of value," in The Social Life of Things, p 3)This economic value, following Simmel, is defined as a reciprocal formation in the possibilities of exchange. "The sacrifice or renunciation that is interposed between man and the object of his demand is, at the same time, the object of someone else's demand. The one has to give up possession or enjoyment that the other wants in order to persuade the latter to give up what he owns and the former wants." (The Philosophy of Money, p 78)
Read MoreThe modern awakening of interest in complexity as a science began in Vienna in 1928, with Ludwig von Bertalanffy's largely descriptive graduate thesis on living organisms as systems. A few years earlier Alfred North Whitehead had described his similar vision of a "philosopy of organism" in Science and the Modern World. Whitehead describes his theory of the organic conception of nature as based on "self-knowledge of our bodily event." This total bodily event is on the same level as all other events, except for an unusual complexity and stability of inherent pattern. (Science and the Modern World, p. 73)
Read MoreIn the 1930's logicians and mathematicians like Turing, Church, Gödel, and Post contributed to the path-breaking exploration of the mechanical computational process. They became for computers what Watson and Crick would become for biotechnology. Subsequently philosophers like Hilary Putnam and Jerry Fodor developed what is now called the computational theory of the mind, in which information and computation reside in patterns of data and in relations of logic that are independent of the physical medium that carries them.
Read More"Consciousness. The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness....When asked what consciousness is, we have no better answer than Louis Armstrong's when a reporter asked him what jazz is: "Lady, if you have to ask, you'll never know." (quoted in Pinker, How the Mind Works, p.60)
Read MoreThe term "consensual hallucination" is Gibson's (from Neuromancer), who is generally credited with coining the term Cyberspace. "What seems so alluring about the half-formed promise of VR technologies is the ideal of a world of one's own that one can share with others through consensus but that one can enter or leave at will ... that brings with it a certain guarantee of pleasure without danger." (E. Grosz, Anybody)
Read MoreFor Georges Bataille, (sexual)"Reproduction implies the existence of discontinuous beings." (Erotism, p.12) Each being is distinct from all others, including its parents, who are distinct from each other. For Bataille death means the continuity of being and is brought into play by reproduction. Death is the end of discontinuous being, of the being formed at the moment when the discontinuous entities of sperm and egg unite to form a new continuity, when two become one, and a new entity is formed from the fatal fusion. The fascination with both reproduction and death is the dominant element in Eroticism.
Read More"When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping."
Consumerism is an acceptance of consumption as a way to self-development, self-realization, and self-fulfillment. It makes a clear separation between producers and consumers. In a consumer society an individual's identity is tied to what s/he consumes. People living in consumer cultures have a tendency to satisfy social, emotional, and spiritual needs with material things.
For critics of consumerism, such as Zygmunt Bauman (Consuming Life), “the consumerist society has to rely on excess and waste” (p.38) The advent of consumerism augurs the era of ‘inbuilt obsolescence” and the insatiability of needs. New needs need new commodities; new commodities need new needs and desires, and this dynamic makes individuals wish to do what is needed for the to enable the system to reproduce itself. Thus consumption is a “hedonic treadmill” (p.45). Its promises of satisfaction remain seductive only as long as the desire stays ungratified.
Read More"Consumers are poor substitutes for citizens." Benjamin Barber
"In a nutshell, the governing impulse of the consumer is "I want". The governing impulse of the citizen is "we need".
Mutual respect does not imply uncertainty or skepticism about the good; it implies, instead, a certain higher-order good, a vision of the citizen as an active searcher for what has worth, whose sincere engagement in that search should be allowed to unfold in freedom, even if it should lead to what seems to be error -- unless it inflicts manifest harm on others." (Martha Nussbaum, in Ethics of Consumption)
In Republic.com and Republic.com 2.0, Cass Sunstein distinguishes between "consumer sovereignty" and "political sovereignty". For Sunstein, consumer sovereignty takes preferences and priorities as given, as matters of personal taste that are neither amenable to, nor in need of, public justification. The main question for consumer sovereignty is whether consumers are getting what they want, and it often draws on market research to manipulate them into thinking so. If we believe in consumer sovereignty, we are likely to think that freedom consists in the satisfaction of private preferences -- in the absence of restrictions on individual choices. (p.45)
Political sovereignty, by contrast, "does not take individual tastes as fixed or given. It prizes democratic self-government, understood as a requirement of 'government by discussion,' accompanied by reason-giving in the public domain." (p.40) Within the political sphere, decisions have impact beyond the purely individual, and decisions need to take into account the potential impact on others.
Read MoreCritics of contemporary copyright and patent laws as a propertization of ideas, see a second enclosure movement at work today. They see the extension of property rights over ideas, traditional cultures, scientific discoveries, as well current attempts at regulating content on the internet as encroachment on the commons of ideas. The push for longer-lasting rights and the extension of patents and copyrights into new areas is seen as a "land grab" by the powerful, to the detriment of cultural creativity and the contemporary "yeomanry" of independent web publishers. (such as this website).
The granting of patents on the human genome, for example, is indicative of an extension of intellectual property over areas previously thought to be the common heritage of mankind and uncommodifiable. Patents have been taken out on Yoga, on traditional herbal medicines, and away from the cultures that developed these public goods. Critics of this extension of property rights consider ideas and cultures as commons. Furthermore, they point out that ideas are non-rivalrous (as opposed to limited resources such as land). In a rivalrous resource, my use of it competes with yours. (a ham sandwich, for example) In a nonrivalrous resource, my use of it does not inhibit yours. (eg. the alphabet) This is the definition of a public good -- once it's there, everyone can use it) and a pure public good is also one that is non-excludable, that is, it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good.
Read MoreWhat is the relation between understanding and control? Ever since Francis Bacon set out the project of Western science, knowledge and power have been joined at the hip.
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