Tag: humans

Aeon

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Now feels like a good time to plug a favourite website of mine. Aeon is all about ideas and when you read though the titles of the different articles they publish, the mind illuminates with excitement. They generally publish essays and short videos. The essays are usually three to four thousand words and of a high enough level not to be considered light reading. For this reason I can get a bit lazy as I know it will involve a certain amount of mind effort to read one. It is things like this that allow me to realise that my use of the internet doesn’t go much further than looking at football, politics, buying things and generally killing time and shutting off my brain. The internet is the greatest invention and has the potential to revolutionise society on scale not obvious since the printing press and I use it to kill time and shut my brain off. I know I’m not alone in this. Humans are ridiculous.

Aeon then involves a little effort, if you’re me, but it is well worth it. They used to also publish Ideas that were usually around the one thousand word mark which my short attention span was more suited to but they unfortunately seem to have done away with them recently. They publish essays on philosophy, science, history, psychology, law, nature, education and every sub category within.

For example this is an article on Ashoka Maurya who was an Indian Emperor over two thousand years ago. Seeing first hand the horror of warfare he creating ‘an infrastructure of goodness’ which also included the spread of the teachings of Siddhattha Gotama – the Buddha – and changed the face of the Indian continent in the process.

This is an article on the spread of pathogens throughout history, from The Black Death to polio, and how they’re generally spread silently by the seemingly healthy.

This article discusses free will and determinism, using our understanding of the sometime random actions of molecules to give some answers to this age old argument.

This is an essay on the concept of ‘hysterical women’, how women’s pain is often medically overlooked and undertreated but that ‘believing all women’ is not necessarily the answer and oversimplifies the issue.

This discusses how not only is privatising public services bad economics but also how it undermines our social and political bonds as a community.

And finally this is an article about how fish are nothing at all like us but that they are sentient beings and that they finally deserve a real place in our moral community.

Ultimately these are just a few examples of articles they publish and even then they’re only the ones I’m drawn to. There’s a little of everything for everyone. I mention Aeon because they’re not a massive publishing or news company, they don’t have adverts all over their website and they produce really interesting work. It’s online magazines like this that people need to be made aware of in these times of sensationalism and factual inaccuracy.

Just because I can I’m attaching a video of sea life in the Ningaloo Canyons off Western Australia. The video is on YouTube but is from Aeon, or at least that’s were I found it. There is also a video on the creation of the police force by Robert Peel in 1829 and what that has meant for society up to the present day. Enjoy the fish for now though.

Rogan, Musk, Brainchips & Simulated Reality

Hamar Williams1 Comment

Joe Rogan is it appears a divisive character. Certainly before I had listened to him for the first time about a year ago I believed he was some alt-right fanboy conspiracy buff. Having listened to him quite a few times now it is clear that while he is still capable of going in that direction, he also rejects it and even in the last year has become far more mainstream. I do wince a little when he has All American Heroes on as guests and he gets a little American and excitable, but at other times he seems to be a very likely man. Ultimately his appeal is that he is a guy, a man in the truest sense, but also one open to listening to and trying to understand all perspectives. It’s what makes him so popular but also leads to him being so readily rejected too. He recently had Elon Musk on for the second time, the first had been about eighteen months ago and Musk smoked a joint which was a big thing although I never bothered listening to it. This recent appearance was incredibly interesting though because for one Musk appears to be a highly intelligent man, and one who also seems to know an awful lot about what is going on in the world, especially from a technological standpoint.

As I listened to this about twelve hours ago I can’t remember exact details but some of the things they discussed, especially regarding AI, how advanced it is and is going to get, makes you realise humans in our present form are going to become redundant in the near future, certainly in my lifetime. What this will mean for the human race mentally and physically is more than a game changer, it could arguably be an evolutionary leap. Don’t think Terminator, think more those sci-fi films in which people develop incredible powers. While making me realise I will be redundant one day it was also a liberating experience because it made me realise any achievement benefitting mankind in my lifetime would become outdated one day on a scale of incomprehensibility. I’m not necessarily saying I will make any groundbreaking discoveries but I think somewhere within me I would like to, at the very least because I’m hoping that might be something that gives an understanding to my meaning of life and gives it a tangible measurable point.

They were discussing being able to put chips in brains at one point and suggesting the technology was in best case scenario only five years away. There was all sorts of potential for this but one of them was being able to relive and re-experience memories. They discussed about how these memories could potentially be so exact it was as if we were living them now. It was then related to the idea of life being a simulation. Just imagine though, who’s to say this isn’t just a simulation you’re experiencing. I doubt there’s many ways of finding out. I was reading an article earlier and a doctor friend messaged me. I wondered how they were getting on in regard PPE since I last spoke to them as that had been a big thing and still is, but before reading the message I looked back at the article and the next line in this article on something completely unrelated mentioned PPE out of the blue. It was one of those wonderful moments in which you enjoy coincidence and after listening to Elon Musk discuss reality, one of those moments in which you start to question whether this is in fact a simulation and that we can in fact manipulate our environment and what comes into it. It’s like when you start thinking about someone and all of a sudden they send you a text message.

I’ve had a good feel but can’t seem to locate my brain chip. I also don’t seem to have any remarkable magical powers but then I wouldn’t, I guess they would be reserved for whatever humanoid is currently running this programme I call life. You’d think they would want to experience something more excitable than me quarantined by the seaside, selling pizzas and dreaming of adventures. But maybe that’s the whole point, they bought the mundane package because their lives are so full of wondrous thoughts and experience. I’ve tried pinching myself though and still nothing so I’m none the wiser.

Humane Rats

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Today has been a day of discovery, I learnt a little about rats. These little critters seem to provoke the most remarkable terror and fear in people. Understandably this probably dates back to a time when we died of bubonic plague, or for those unfamiliar, think of a coronavirus that wiped people out, gave you boils and was spread by rats. However now the chances of catching anything from a rat are rare and you’ve got more chance of being eaten by your cat. Saying that I do remember as a fifteen years old opening the bin in the dark and one jumping out at me, I’m not ashamed to admit I screamed and ran away. Doesn’t make it any less irrational though.

It appears though rats are pretty cool once you get over yourself and get to know them. They laugh when tickled which comes out as a type of ultrasonic chirp. Apparently they bond with their ticklers and search them out to continue playing with, they’ve even taught them how to play hide and seek. They enjoy themselves. They’re capable of reliving past memories and planning routes for future use. They reciprocally trade goods with each other and have a system of favours in which the favour need not necessarily be repaid in the same currency. They respond with something close to regret when they make the wrong choice, have been taught how to use tools to access out of reach food and have been able to outperform humans in some learning tasks.

Remarkably they have shown signs of empathy too. They refused to press levers to access food if it resulted in another rat getting an electric shock, as well as walk down certain tunnels in a maze if the result was an electric shock to another, this became extra prevalent had the mouse experienced the shock themselves already and knew what was coming for the other rat. Similarly if they themselves have experienced being drenched in water they’re more likely to rescue another rat from drowning and will rescue a trapped rat when they themselves can escape to safety. Even humans don’t do that, maybe we need to readdress this word humane we seem to have elevated onto a pedestal. Rats seem to care about each other more than we do.

In a time long past now, we as a species used to commit the most heinous of experiments on chimpanzees until we realised they are incredibly similar to us. There are now laws protecting them but there are still none protecting the rat. They have decided they didn’t learn enough from experimenting on chimpanzees and have now replicated many psychological experiments on rats too. They have raised some rats away from their mothers and in social isolation, the result being a shrinkage in the area of the brain responsible for emotion and affiliation. They managed to create mentally ill, traumatised and emotionally suffering rats. While we admit they’re close enough for us to use as models for human psychopathologies, the accepted wisdom is that they’re far enough away for us to relate to them and empathise, unlike chimpanzees and other primates who remind us of humans.

The rat genome has been fully sequenced for fifteen years now which has led to major advances in our understanding of how genomes work. We have made breakthroughs in our understanding of cardiovascular disease and obesity, and because their social nature mimics our own, behavioural and psychological studies too. Researching on rats clearly has benefits and many people would use this as justification for the continuation of such work. We understand the moral argument otherwise we would just do this testing on humans, we don’t even use chimpanzees anymore. We may have learnt to fear rats and I’m in no rush to cuddle one but they’ve been shown to be sentient beings with rich emotional lives. If we are such an advanced species why do we continue to suppress our own emotional bond with other sentient beings. Maybe that’s what advanced is, the ability to switch it on and off when it suits us. Perhaps it’s time for a new and updated definition of humane.