Bruce Hannon’s Complexity Digest #6
Excerpts from Complexity Digest 2010.10 (5/11) by Bruce Hannon
A telescope for spotting global crises, The Great Beyond
Excerpt: The good news is that your future can be predicted. The bad news is that it’ll cost a billion euros. That, at least, is what a team of scientists led by Dirk Helbing of the ETH in Switzerland believes. And as they point out, a billion euros is small fare compared with the bill for the current financial crisis” which might conceivably have been anticipated with the massive social-science simulations they want to establish.
- Source: A telescope for spotting global crises, Philip Ball, The Great Beyond [Nature blog], 2010/04/30
Meaning-Making Neurons, Science
Excerpt: In The Brain and the Meaning of Life, philosopher, psychologist, and computer scientist Paul Thagard (University of Waterloo) has elegantly employed the pithiness principle. He offers a tightly reasoned, often humorous, and original contribution to the emerging practice of applying science to areas heretofore the province of philosophers, theologians, ethicists, and politicians: What is reality and how can we know it? Are mind and brain one or two? What is the source of the sense of self? What is love? What is the difference between right and wrong, and how can we know it? What is the most legitimate form of government? What is the meaning of life, and how can we find happiness in it?
- Source: Meaning-Making Neurons, Michael Shermer, DOI: 10.1126/science.1189752, Science Vol. 328. no. 5979, pp. 693 – 694, 2010/05/07
