The end is nigh...for real

Oh my fucking god, they finally made a robot with a living brain. Seriously, it's a physical robot attached to a living brain, that grows new neural connections and learns about its environment, built by Kevin Warwick, who is apparently totally insane. Once again, we should have seen it coming.

The Pope is not a scientist

Overall, I would say the science of public health is probably not the Catholic Church's strong suit:
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2009/03/20093183550676229.html

Wisdom in the Age of Schizophrenia

I apologize for the delay in posts for those 3 or 4 of you devoted readers there are. This is a post I've had stewing in my head for a while and am finally getting around to writing down a few preliminary words about.

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about, or more precisely being vexed by, what I perceive to be the shifting and kind of unsteady landscape of knowledge in our modern world. I'm thinking about things kind of across the smorgasbord, from facebook, twitter, and the blogosphere overloading us on connectivity, to cheaper and faster genome sequencing and biotechnology, to the impossibly complex abyss of the financial system. As I immerse myself more and more in this world (for better or for worse), I have a deeply ambiguous feeling about its effects on me, and by extension our modern society. On the one hand, it seems incredibly cool and also incredibly important that knowledge is being democratized. On the flipside, though, I can't help but feel that something, some element of depth of understanding, is being lost in the face of all of this complexity, and this is what I'm trying to wrap my mind around. As a beginning to what I intend on making a series of posts, I just want to bring up a few issues I've been thinking about as of late.

1. Is wisdom a meaningful idea anymore? It seems to me that one of the classical distinctions between wisdom and simple knowledge was that wisdom entailed some sort of intuitive understanding, where knowledge implied simply learning or retaining a piece of information in your brain. Does this have any meaning for us when the things that we are trying to "intuit" are multi-dimensional, microscopic, or beyond the scope of our senses? Is evolutionary computation, which I've talked about a bit before, an example of how we can incorporate the "wisdom" of our decision making into much smarter thinking machines than our own minds?

2. What should be the role of emotion in our decision making? Without going in too deep into details of emotional decision-making theory, it seems pretty clear to me that developing emotions is really important in our ability to cleave through the complexity of the world and ignore some decisions that don't really need to be made. If nothing else, it's a useful filter. In the face of so much information, how is the role of emotions going to change, since in my experience, emotions (at least those involved in decision making) develop slowly, something which seems to be at odds with the current pace of information processing and gathering.

So, just stew on those for a while, and I'll be back with more thoughts soon!