If we thought together, what would we want for a world civilization?

Right now it seems we are being driven into a world civilization pell mell by the vast engine of late-capitalist successes. This engine already links much of the globe, bringing higher standards of living, jobs for most, even in today's tough times. It also results in a web of corruption and inequality spanning the globe.

If we, together, envisioned something else: What? And how might we get there?

Max Weber, said that with Newton we became disenchanted and entered modernity. He was right. I think many of us sense that we are at some transition point, but do not know "transition to what"? I suspect that we are, inarticulately, lost in modernity and must find our way beyond it.

Then perhaps we need to be re-enchanted.

On Thursday, I wrote about the gorilla Koko's ability for fine breath control as she plays with musical instruments such as the recorder and the harmonica. Quite a few readers have asked to view Koko in action, and today the Gorilla Foundation provided the short video you see here.

As you watch, keep in mind that the activity under discussion is how Koko voluntarily deploys her breathing with fine control- not her musical talent! Koko toots on the instruments, and I notice in the final scene with her harmonica, she even plays different tones. As some of the helpful comments offered by musicians who wrote in to my original post explain, these skills are harder to accomplish than it may first appear.

You can keep up with more of what Barbara is thinking on Twitter.

Enlarge Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images

Readers of 13.7 may have noticed headlines this past week trumpeting the latest "brain reading" breakthroughs coming out of UC Berkeley's neuroscience laboratories. I've written about related work before, here, here, and here. This latest research is dazzling. Direct measurement of neural activity in higher areas of auditory cortex allows scientists to determine what continuous speech sounds (words, sentences) a person is currently hearing. It's hard to overstate the daunting character of this achievement.

The relation of speech to its physical substrate is mysterious at best. One and the same acoustic event can be experienced as different speech sounds, and different acoustic events can be experienced as the same speech sound. The perception of speech, such a commonplace event in our lives, is surely one of our most impressive and, from a scientific perspective, baffling cognitive achievments.

Enlarge Ronald H. Cohn/The Gorilla Foundation

Koko with a recorder

Ronald H. Cohn/The Gorilla Foundation

Koko with a recorder

Koko the gorilla is world-famous for her ability to communicate with humans using phrases in American Sign Language, and for her gentle play with pet cats. Now, a new study on Koko's play with wind instruments shows that she skillfully controls how she breathes.

That's a knockout conclusion because scientists have thought that humans alone, out of all the primates, can gain skillful, voluntary control over the act of breathing.

Think of blowing out candles on a birthday cake, or powerfully pushing air through a trumpet to play music. It's usually argued that skilled breathing like this originated only in the primate lineage at the point when specialized anatomy made speech possible.

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When you reach the end of your journey, will you be able to look back on a life well lived?

Raymond Roig/AFP/Getty Images

When you reach the end of your journey, will you be able to look back on a life well lived?

Since Adam wrote here yesterday of science as a meaningful pursuit, or better, of how a science-inspired way of quenching our unquenchable thirst for knowledge about ourselves and the world will add meaning to one's life, I'd like to take off on a tangent also springing from Umair Haque's recent blog post in the Harvard Business Review.

Two days ago I listened to a lecture on the Mayan "prediction" of the apocalypse, which millions believe will take place on 21 December 2012. The lecturer was one of the world's foremost experts in archaeoastronomy, Prof. Anthony Aveni, from Colgate University.

According to Aveni, the scant Mayan documentation that can be interpreted as saying anything about the end of the world should be seen not as predicting an apocalyptic end but a rebirth, which always happens at the end of a calendric cycle. Although to most people it will either be a blow up or a bliss out, the reality is much tamer than that.

Enlarge Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images

What makes a life meaningful? When that eventual moment comes and we prepare to slough off this mortal coil, will we be able to look at our years on the planet and feel that we created real meaning for ourselves and those around us? Umair Haque, a blogger for the Harvard Business Review, thinks we aren't reaching our potential:

"Maybe the real depression we've got to contend with isn't merely one of how much economic output we're generating — but what we're putting out there, and why. Call it a depression of human potential, a tale of human significance being willfully squandered (on, for example, stuff like this)."

Looking at much of our cultural output, Haque asks:

"If that's the best we can do, no wonder our economy is falling short of its potential — and no wonder our lives occasionally feel empty, even meaningless. (Even star quarterbacks married to Brazilian supermodels occasionally say to themselves, there's got to be more than this.)"

Haque's essay raises a number of thoughtful points about our overheated culture, its legacy and our own roles within it. In response I wanted to reflect on what science brings to the table. Some of what I have to say relates to the practice of science. I also think it's important to consider what science asks of us, and what it gives back as an approach to life.

I find myself beginning to realize that the philosophy that I studied, from Descartes to Hume to Kant to Russell to logical positivism and the early Wittgenstein, and perhaps the late Wittgenstein of the Investigations, is seriously inadequate.

It starts with Descartes who conceived of his task to be a lone mind who would doubt all that could be doubted to find that which could not be doubted about what that single mind can know about the world. The emphasis is on "knowing."

Then we come to Hume of the Scottish Enlightenment, essaying to understand "Human Understanding." How can we know the world? By sense impressions, welded together in "bundles," in which the "self," or "I," itself disappears as just a bundle of perceptions: roughly, "all I am aware of is a jumble of sequential awareness," I am aware of no 'I'."

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Should our growing understanding of pre-Columbian settlements in the Amazon have any bearing on the debate over the region's development today?

Antonio Scorza/AFP/Getty Images

Should our growing understanding of pre-Columbian settlements in the Amazon have any bearing on the debate over the region's development today?

Sometime between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago, people living in the Amazon region of what is now Brazil constructed huge land carvings: geo-glyphs in the shape of squares, circles, ovals, rectangles and octagons.

The New York Times reported on these geo-glyphs last week. These ceremonial symbols — if indeed, as some archaeologists suspect, that's what they are — have been known for some time. As deforestation in the Amazon accelerates, however, more of these earthworks are coming to light. With them comes increased certainty that past Amazonian peoples carried out intensive agriculture and lived in large-scale geo-polities.

These facts have crashed up against my stubbornly implanted, but false, mental images of pre-Columbian Amazonia: huge swaths of emerald and unbroken forest teeming with monkeys, jaguars, birds, and insects — but housing only a few, small, scattered groups of human hunter-gatherers.

Of course, to many readers of 13.7 my question is self-evident. They are reading the blog because they not only do care about science but also want to share their views on whatever topics we bring up. But this is not the case for most people.

If you don't believe me, just go to a bookstore and look for the science section. Or check the best-selling lists from The New York Times or Amazon. Yes, once in a while a science title climbs the list and hovers there a while. But often, unless there is a mix with religion or politics, science books attract mostly science buffs.

It would be unrealistic to expect that the whole population of the United States would be interested in the latest scientific advancements. But what seems alarming to me, and to many of my professional colleagues, is the level of disconnect between the science people use and consume and the science they know. To this we may add the more fundamental questions related to science and its impact on culture and, by extension, on our view of the world. If you read my post last week on evolution you know what I mean.

Enlarge NASA

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory keeps an eye on the sun's massively energetic surface. It provides advance warning of events that threaten the Earth.

NASA

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory keeps an eye on the sun's massively energetic surface. It provides advance warning of events that threaten the Earth.

It begins on the sun's surface: a broad, hellish plain of boiling 5,700 degree gas. Powerful magnetic fields arc upwards from the surface, rising high into the solar atmosphere to form giant, twisting arcades of energy. Matter streams up these arches to be gripped in a magnetic vise a million miles above the surface. Then something happens. Something shifts. Magnetic lines of force in the arcade snap like steel cables on the bridge to heaven. Billions of tons of solar gas are suddenly blown outward, exploding across interplanetary space. Three days later the shimmering ball of energy smashes head-on into the unsuspecting Earth.

While the paragraph above might sound like the beginning of a bad science fiction movie it's really nothing more than a slightly hyperbolic description of the last three days. The only error in my description of the solar storm that struck us today is that we were not caught unawares. We have been watching the whole time. In that fact lays a deeper truth speaking to much more than solar activity.

In the past several decades, American companies have famously outsourced much of their manufacturing activities to other countries. Once this process started, to make use of cheaper labor abroad, each competing company was essentially forced to follow suit to lower costs and maintain their profit margins. The process accelerated.

This has three important effects, two obvious, the third, however, may be of deeper import. First, in the United States, we lose the jobs outsourced. Second, people and economies abroad gain jobs and expertise. This raises their living standards, in the best cases.

The third consequence is twofold and may be the largest in the long run. First, we in the U.S. lose our expertise. We forget how to "do X." Think not? The Tasmanians, according to Jared Diamond, forgot how to fish.

I just wanted to turn folks on to a really interesting project in which I recently participated. It's called Frequencies: A Collaborative Genealogy of Spirituality. The idea is simple: ask scholars, writers, and artists what they think of when they think of the word spirituality. The response is a collection of wonderful, eloquent and thought-provoking essays (except mine of course) on topics ranging from Star Wars to William Blake.

From the project statement:

"Frequencies seeks to commence a genealogy of spirituality. This project approaches spirituality as a cultural technology, as a diverse reverberation, as a frequency in the ether of experience. We begin in a moment when novelists wonder about the divine, psychological counselors advertise as spiritual advisers, and scholars seek to capture spirituality's ephemeral nature through survey research. Spirituality abounds, even as it is unclear what it is. Whatever it is, it seems hard to capture. Spirituality takes hold beneath the skin and permeates below the radar of statistical surveys. It resists classification even as it classifies its evaluators and its believers as subjects of its sway. Frequencies will focus this profusion into an epic anthology of wide-ranging analysis."

The project is run by Kathryn Lofton of Yale University and John Lardas Modern of Franklin & Marshall College. They deserve a great deal of credit for getting this wonderful experiment started.

Warner Brothers

Hero Boy — played by Tom Hanks — in The Polar Express

Many an animated character wouldn't seem so unreal and dead if it didn't seem so real and alive!

This is a puzzle that has long troubled animators. If you saw Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express, you know what I'm talking about. Remember the dead eyes of the characters, their zombie-like vacancy?

Animators do an excellent job bringing the nonhuman to life on the screen — think of WALL-E, or the enchanted broomsticks in Fantasia, not to mention Mickey Mouse himself — but they falter with the more realistically human. And isn't hard to see why.

Enlarge http://www.flickr.com/photos/79262083@N00/34144569/

University of Rochester owns one of the highest energy lasers for inertial confinement fusion research, the OMEGA laser. The school has been central to the development of new technologies.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/79262083@N00/34144569/

University of Rochester owns one of the highest energy lasers for inertial confinement fusion research, the OMEGA laser. The school has been central to the development of new technologies.

Like many winter days in upstate New York, it's cold and gray in Rochester. But today feels darker than usual because when we woke up this morning, we learned that Eastman Kodak was filing for bankruptcy. We could all feel it coming, but it was still a shock. There is no conversation in Rochester today that won't include the decline of Kodak. Even in the line at the coffee shop this morning everyone here is talking about it.

Enlarge Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images

Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images

Day by day, I'm grappling with animal love.

As the coldest part of winter sets in, I'm hunkered down, writing my book on animal emotion. But I'm stuck in a section on animal love. So today, instead of conveying some new bit of news in anthropology, animal behavior, or evolution, I want to invite some crowd-sourcing on a topic that brings together all three.

Here's the central question I'm wrestling with: How can we tell, by careful observation alone (no hormonal analysis, brain scans or other invasive research allowed), whether nonhuman animals feel love for others of their own kind?