Re: Books
Dear Jeffrey,
I wanted to explain the books that should have arrived at your house today.
They both can up in our discussion in responses to questions you had.
- iWoz: I immediately identified with Steve Wozniak's thinking within the first few pages (honesty, truth, sense of discovery, building). The reason I sent it is that he does an excellent job of articulating why and how he feels a desire to be useful and helpful to others, as a framing philosophy in life. Personally, I find this discourse fascinating. Here's a quote from the book:
"I felt these were really mighty goals in life: looking consciously at the sort of person you want to be, the sort of life you want to live, the sort of society you want to help build."
- Atomic Bomb: You asked the question this book is trying to answer - how did they pull together such a project? You also mentioned Szilard. This book makes an effort to tell Szilard's story and even starts with his perspective - I hope you'll glance at the first few pages. You can get a glimpse of his underlying goals, one based on HG Wells' The Open Conspiracy: Szilard's "deepest ambition, more profound even than his commitment to science, was somehow to save the world. ... The Open Conspiracy was to be a public collusion of science-minded industrialists and financiers to establish a world republic. Thus to save the world. Szilard appropriated Wells' term and used it off and on for the rest of his life."
Crazy! And so fascinating.
thank you„ i will do so this weekend.. however, my view is they like most others suffer from the socializaition gene. The behavior dictated by what benefits the group, and then rationalized in the individual mind. this is much more exciting.
But your hypothesis isn't falsifiable: we can't tell whether one's internal decision making occurs before or after the decision, If we assume the thinker always believes it to be before regardless of the truth.
It seems like the free will controversy - if it feels like free will, does it really matter if it isn't?
no true„ for example subliminal experminets. showed a strong bias toward info without a concious recognition. . predisposition towards certain outcomes based on faster than cognizable inputs.. , and just think that if statisically, a large numbner of people are doing the same thing , but have wildly different rationales. , wouldn;t we be able to discount their explanaitons.
Love to read those studies. They sound interesting. Even if ex-post rationalization occurs, as you suggest, I'm not sure what's game changing about that discovery. Under that theory it would be impossible for people to "wake up" - ie. how can they improve their reasoning if such a change is undetectable? Extensive subliminal reconditioning?
Here's a cool story: http://blogs.zdnet.com./ForemskiPp=760 Not sure why we like helping others. (this guy seems to go in the "really helping others" category, not the "get social acceptance and mollify my sense of worthlessness" category)