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biolexicon's review against another edition
4.0
Wonderful. Some essays weren't, but most were. It makes me wish I knew more about physics, some of the cosmology ideas were way over my head. Still, I was able to get the gist of most of them. Very thought provoking, I marked some to re-read and consider more fully.
qwertyatty's review against another edition
4.0
A mix of serious discussions and funny anecdotes. Really had to skip entries that were too technical. But there are a few things here that either confirmed by beliefs or changed it. Insightful book.
icywaterfall's review against another edition
3.0
Many authors are asked what things they have changed their mind on recently and why. The following are a couple of, what I deemed to be, the most important articles.
- Tor Nørretranders, What is Constant in You is not Material; I used to think of my body as the hardware on which ran the software of my mental life. Now I see it as the opposite; the body is the software. This is because the physical constituents of the body are being constantly replaced; this doesn’t validate views of the some immaterial soul since there has to be material continuity for permanent reincarnation to be possible. It simply states that the thing that remains the same is not your body but your ‘self’ or ‘personality’.
- Lee Silver, Irrationality and Human Nature; I was convinced that scientific facts and rational argument alone could win the day with people who were sufficiently intelligent and educated. But I no longer believe this; while its mode of expression may change over cultures and time, irrationality and mysticism seem to be an integral part of normal human nature, even among highly educated people. I now doubt that supernatural beliefs will ever be eradicated from the human species.
- Stephen Kosslyn, The Environment Sets up the Brain; I used to believe that we could understand psychology at different levels of analysis, and events at any one of the levels could be studied independently of events at the other levels. I’m now convinced that at least some aspects of the structure and function of the brain can be understood only by situating the brain in a specific cultural context. To understand how any specific brain functions, we need to understand how that person was raised, and currently functions, in the surrounding culture. Young children have more connections among neurons than do adults; and whichever neurons are reinforced are the ones that are kept; the rest are pruned. The genes can’t ‘know’ in advance how to create the body; so they allow lots of neuronal connections and prune the unneeded ones. The notion is that a variety of factors in our environment, including our social environment, configure our brains. The world comes into our head, configuring us.
- Ernst Pöppel, The Wittgenstein Straitjacket; most neuronal information-processing remains in mental darkness (subconscious), it is in my view impossible to make a clear statement as to why somebody changed his mind about something. Wittgenstein once said that “the limits of my language signify the limits of my world.” I no longer think this is true; we can know things that are beyond the level of conscious language awareness, and I don’t know why I reached this conclusion.
- Scott Atran, Friendship and Faith; If human cognitive capacity has been the same for the past 200,000 years (roughly), how come humans did nothing that was culturally human for most of human existence? His guess is that there was very little competition between human bands that created a critical need to cooperate in order to compete. This is how friendship and teamwork with non-kin developed. People, still to this day, don’t kill and die simply for a cause; they do it for friends or ‘fictive kin’. For Americans bred on a diet of individualism, this is a revelation that is difficult to realise.
- Alison Gopnik, Making the Imaginary Real; I’ve changed my mind about the nature of knowledge. This is because children pretend all the time. Why? For human beings, the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds. Every object in a room started life out in the imagination of its creator; pencils, pens, computers, carpets, etc. That’s what human imagination is for; for taking the imaginary and making it real. I think now that cognition is also a way we impose our minds on the world. Finding the truth and creating new worlds are two sides of the same coin. theories don’t just tell us what’s true, they tell us what’s possible and how to get to those possibilities from where we are. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. Fiction and Science are the same thing.
- Tor Nørretranders, What is Constant in You is not Material; I used to think of my body as the hardware on which ran the software of my mental life. Now I see it as the opposite; the body is the software. This is because the physical constituents of the body are being constantly replaced; this doesn’t validate views of the some immaterial soul since there has to be material continuity for permanent reincarnation to be possible. It simply states that the thing that remains the same is not your body but your ‘self’ or ‘personality’.
- Lee Silver, Irrationality and Human Nature; I was convinced that scientific facts and rational argument alone could win the day with people who were sufficiently intelligent and educated. But I no longer believe this; while its mode of expression may change over cultures and time, irrationality and mysticism seem to be an integral part of normal human nature, even among highly educated people. I now doubt that supernatural beliefs will ever be eradicated from the human species.
- Stephen Kosslyn, The Environment Sets up the Brain; I used to believe that we could understand psychology at different levels of analysis, and events at any one of the levels could be studied independently of events at the other levels. I’m now convinced that at least some aspects of the structure and function of the brain can be understood only by situating the brain in a specific cultural context. To understand how any specific brain functions, we need to understand how that person was raised, and currently functions, in the surrounding culture. Young children have more connections among neurons than do adults; and whichever neurons are reinforced are the ones that are kept; the rest are pruned. The genes can’t ‘know’ in advance how to create the body; so they allow lots of neuronal connections and prune the unneeded ones. The notion is that a variety of factors in our environment, including our social environment, configure our brains. The world comes into our head, configuring us.
- Ernst Pöppel, The Wittgenstein Straitjacket; most neuronal information-processing remains in mental darkness (subconscious), it is in my view impossible to make a clear statement as to why somebody changed his mind about something. Wittgenstein once said that “the limits of my language signify the limits of my world.” I no longer think this is true; we can know things that are beyond the level of conscious language awareness, and I don’t know why I reached this conclusion.
- Scott Atran, Friendship and Faith; If human cognitive capacity has been the same for the past 200,000 years (roughly), how come humans did nothing that was culturally human for most of human existence? His guess is that there was very little competition between human bands that created a critical need to cooperate in order to compete. This is how friendship and teamwork with non-kin developed. People, still to this day, don’t kill and die simply for a cause; they do it for friends or ‘fictive kin’. For Americans bred on a diet of individualism, this is a revelation that is difficult to realise.
- Alison Gopnik, Making the Imaginary Real; I’ve changed my mind about the nature of knowledge. This is because children pretend all the time. Why? For human beings, the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds. Every object in a room started life out in the imagination of its creator; pencils, pens, computers, carpets, etc. That’s what human imagination is for; for taking the imaginary and making it real. I think now that cognition is also a way we impose our minds on the world. Finding the truth and creating new worlds are two sides of the same coin. theories don’t just tell us what’s true, they tell us what’s possible and how to get to those possibilities from where we are. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. Fiction and Science are the same thing.
kevinwkelsey's review
4.0
A collection of ~150 essays covering the topic of minds changing, and specifically what the essayists themselves have changed their mind about in their own lives or field of study. There is a lot of terrific, thought provoking writing on display here. Of course, some of the authors chose to sidestep the question entirely and instead got preachy on some specific idea or another. Those few subpar essays aside, it's a killer collection covering a massive range of topics from Astrophysics to Neurology, Statistics to Biology, Theology to Physiology. It's been a fascinating read, and I found that I specifically enjoyed the essays which covered topics that I had little prior knowledge in.
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