

The Normal Well-tempered Mind - jamesbritt
http://www.edge.org/conversation/normal-well-tempered-mind

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stephengillie
I like the idea of individual neurons as competing for resources. I wonder how
economic supply and demand will be applied. Will marketers start using
demographics like "People with a 55% to 80% neuron-approval of using our
product instead of the leading competitor"?

The "cultural treasures" model seems to be analogous to our physical
"treasures", where few families pass down anything because all our treasures
are easily replaceable. Also, it seems ripe for a contrast to Sturgeon's Law
[1].

I don't understand the part about free will at all, probably because I've
never really been interested in philosophy. Any illumination would be
appreciated.

In watching my friends' Facebook posts, most involving "god", "Jesus", or
religion in some way are using it as a simplification of: probability,
specific friends and family, high-level abstract concepts, or other parts of
reality which are difficulty to process or hard to enumerate. Additionally, a
non-real person, such as Mickey Mouse, is guaranteed a certain level of
respectability, as he'll never be arrested for driving drunk home from the
club.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeons_Law>

~~~
naner
Some of Dennet's science buddies have set their sights on tackling the
apparent lack of evidence for 'free will' and this appears to cause problems
with the philosopher in Dennet. There's a (probably biased) summary of
Dennet's position on free will at the top:

<http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/free-will-and-free-will>

If you want to get the gist of Harris's argument, this review might suffice:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-
by-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/books/review/free-will-by-sam-
harris.html?pagewanted=all)

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IsaacL
This has to be one of the most fascinating articles I've read in a long time.

