Can you tell the difference between gourmet liver paté and dog food?

I mean, can you tell the difference by taste?

Many of you are probably pretty sure that you could, and also that you could tell the difference between a $100 bottle of a splendid vintage and some $5 schlock, right? But can you really? In a blind taste test?

Scientists have looked into these questions and the findings are, well, they're disgusting. It turns out most people won't notice the difference between paté and dog food, so long as the latter is suitably presented with the right sort of garnish. And as for our ability to discriminate wine, even experts may confuse a white wine with a red when it is served at room temperature in a dark glass. And we'll enjoy soggy old potato chips, it turns out, if our chewing is accompanied (over head phones) by the satisfying sound of crunching.

What are we to make of this?

 

I think there is a temptation, when we learn of these studies, to feel that we have been somehow unmasked, exposed, revealed to be, well, inauthentic in our pleasures. After all, if we can't really taste the difference between cheap beer mixed with vinegar and an expensive micro-brew, then surely this means that our preference for the finer stuff is, well, a pretension. Maybe the evolutionary psychologists are right and our preferences are really complicated strategies to display wealth and win sexual partners.

And of course we're no better off when it comes to sex. We choose our sexual partners based in large measure on features that have nothing to do with the intrinsic "taste" of the sex acts themselves. If this were not the case, why would we care to have sex only with people of a given gender, or age, or appearance? Even blind men care about how women they meet look. Why? — Could you actually tell whether it is your wife's hand that you are holding, and not that of a perfect stranger, in a blind taste test, as it were? And what would it mean to you if you could not?

It's hard to avoid the conclusion that we are frauds and fakes.

But this would be exactly the wrong conclusion to draw, and it turns, I believe, on a widely accepted but misguided conception not just of pleasure, but of perception itself. It turns on the idea that perceptual qualities are qualitative atoms whose occurrence is fixed by the intrinsic quality of our internal, presumably physical (neural) states. Taste, we suppose, is in the mouth. So if we can't discriminate taste just on the basis of what is happening in our taste buds, then, well, we are making the difference up.

But this is crazy. Consider a different sort of case. The German word "Nein" and the English word "nine" sound exactly alike; the very same acoustic event can instantiate both words. And yet we experience them differently, at least if we know the relevant languages. Now this is a real difference, and it is one we genuinely perceive, but it is one that corresponds not to a qualitative atom, but to a qualitative arc. We are sensitive, in this case, to a context, to a flow, to a conversation.

And so with other perceptual qualities. Context matters, and so do our attitudes and expectations. My dad used to say that Chinese food tastes better with chop sticks. And he was right. Not because he was snob, or deluded, but because he appreciated that enjoying the food is wrapped up with a way of thinking about it, handling it, chewing it.

We can discriminate dog food and paté, red wine and white, holding hands with someone we love and holding hands with a stranger. But what we are discriminating, when we do this, is not neural events in the mouth or hand, but what we are doing. And when the wine expert, or the lover, describes what matters in the flavor, or the caress, he or she is not identifying marks or features of the intrinsic qualities in the nervous system that only the expert of the lover can discern; taste is not a kind of measurement. Rather, the expert is calling attention to features of the flavor and the action that are precisely there for us to think about and pay attention to. If we choose to. And of course we don't have to choose to. People (individuals, but also classes and cultures) differ in what they choose to care about.

The cases I mention here are discussed by Paul Bloom, a pscyhologist at Yale, in his insightful and provocative book How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like. I like this book very much, and recommend it, and will return to puzzles it raises in the coming weeks.

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You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

I've started to think of them as my three daily Valentines. Every night, shortly before dousing the bedside light, I pose myself a question: What were the three best moments of the day?

Sifting back through the hours, I make my choices and savor them. I carry them with me into drowsiness and finally to that place the brain goes at night, where it runs on silence and dream images.

My choices are Valentines to my life, in a way. In days too rushed, full of good fortune but not frustration-immune, holding these moments close turns out to be a more profound act than I'd thought possible.

 

Some examples of my Valentine recitations, from this winter:

I doze in the sunroom with a thick novel and a big heavy cat on my chest. The fading light, the words' weight, the animal connection please me.

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I discover a cache of photographs of my husband and his family from many years ago. He and I go through them together; after 23 years of marriage, out tumble fresh stories.

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Concert victory for a dedicated Jersey-girl fan: We land hard-to-get tickets for night two of Springsteen and the E Street Band's new tour!

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That hour with my memory-stricken mother, looking through the two small boxes stuffed with her old recipes. We find find my Polish grandmother's love of cooking for her family, captured on a 3x5 card.

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Glowing emails arrive from former students. The glow replicates as I allow myself to know I played a small part in their anthropological successes.

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"Write for us again": Magic words from an editor more welcome than usual, as I depart my comfort zone to write more, and teach less, for a while.

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The bread at the restaurant tonight is delicious and slightly salted. That bit of sea on my tongue brings back last summer's hot Miami evening swim with my daughter before she left home for college.

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My Valentines emerge from small moments. Are they too bounded, too self-absorbed? In fact, some nights I could choose instead, I worked for social justice this afternoon! Because I want to remember how lucky I am to be able to live as I do in this country of privilege. I want to work, side by side with others, to bring about positive changes for people and other animals.

But that's the thing about the Valentine ritual. It only works if I choose genuinely, if I select the bits of joy that pulse and beat their way into my sleep-ready mind from the day just passed. Those genuine Valentines come from the place where I am a wife, a mother, a daughter, a person who cares for animals, a reader, a writer and, yes, an anthropologist and scientist, too.

These Valentines accumulate in my head night after night. They organize themselves into a chorus: remember us! make time for us among the clamor and clang of your life! When I do remember, and do make time, I am filled with more energy and purpose to act in the world.

Having shared my own nightly ritual, I now have the anthropologist's desire to learn about, and from, others' habits and practices.

How do you gather your energy and sustain your spirit to take purposeful steps in the world? Are there small practices, perhaps acts of memory, writing, meditating, or being with nature, that serve as your daily Valentines?

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

Outer space is not the only frontier. There is also inner space, pockets of unexplored regions within our own Earth. Granted, they are becoming very scarce, at least those that are accessible by foot or by boat or by flying machine. Fortunately, there are still unexplored subsurface worlds, deep under the ocean, deep within caves, or deep under the ice. And what lurks within them may be the stuff of our wildest dreams.

 

A few days ago, a team of Russian scientists announced that they reached the surface of Antarctica's huge Lake Vostok, a fresh water lake buried under two-and-a-half miles of ice sheet. This is the same spot that in 1983 registered the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth, -89 Celsius (or -129 F). I look out of my window in wintery central New Hampshire, and wonder what would it take to dig a hole that deep into the frozen ground. My well is at a mere 504 feet below ground.

The Lake Vostok operation took over two decades, on and off. From early on, there were environmental concerns related to the drilling technique the Russians chose to use, which involved injecting kerosene (some 60 tons of it altogether) and other fluids.

Lake Vostok is probably the most pristine body of water in the planet, 160 miles by 30 miles across, about the same size as Lake Ontario but with approximately three times the volume. This is an environment sealed from the outside world for an estimated 20 million years. (It is possible that deep-ice dynamics may have changed the water. But even this process would have taken over 10,000 years.)

Here is a world left to its own devices, devoid of light, continually cold, supersaturated with oxygen and other gases. This is a place like nowhere else we've been to. The water remains liquid at -3 C due to the enormous pressure the ice sheet above exerts on it, about 360 times atmospheric pressure at sea level.

It's possible that unique life forms exist in this harsh environment, or in other of the many subglacial lakes in Antarctica (there are more than 145 of them). Microbial life has been found in ancient glacial ice and permafrost including near Lake Vostok's surface. Is it part of an indigenous ecosystem that has been living in the cold, dark waters for millions of years? And if so, what kind of life is this? If life exists there, it will have to find alternative energy sources, as nutrients are lacking. However, the remarkable resiliency of life on Earth, showing up deep under dark cold oceans near volcanic vents, and even in radioactive cooling ponds, may be ready to surprise us once again. We will have to wait until next summer in Antarctica to learn more.

Lake Vostok is the closest analogue we have to the subglacial ocean of Jupiter's moon Europa, a leading candidate for finding alien life in our solar system. If any kind of life form is found in Lake Vostok (and extreme care must be taken to rule out contamination from drilling, as well as deadly pollution), we can look up at alien worlds in outer space with renewed confidence that they may also have a few surprises in store for us.

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You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook.

The intersection of art and science gets a lot of ink these days, for good reason. Art can help us relate to and understand science.

In a culture saturated with the fruits and poisons of science, we often struggle to understand its meaning for us. This problem is compounded by the fact that we are often told that science and technology are devoid of meaning. While I think such claims are highly suspicious, few would argue that art is devoid of meaning.

Very often it's through art (dance, poetry, painting, sculpture, etc.) that we get to explore the half-recognized relationship between ourselves and the world we inhabit. We often discover meaning through art.

There are deep connections between meaning-making and object-making. Those connections are exactly where the resonances between art and science find their potency. Last week, on a trip to the sprawling beast that is Los Angeles, I received a first-hand lesson in the powerful relationship between art and science.

 

As a native of New York's metropolitan grime-hive, I was slow to warm to L.A. All that sand, all that sun and those mountain vistas seemed too pleasant. My conception of a "real city" couldn't accomodate the lovely window dressing that frames Los Angeles. I was also convinced a place like this could not foster genuine and serious artistic effort. An afternoon's trip to the astonishing Getty Center cured me of that bias.

Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA 1945-1980 is a series of exhibits that have been running across the city for a year. Exploring the movements that helped turn L.A. into a center of post-war culture, the exhibits at the Getty Center opened my eyes to artists I had never seen or was only dimly aware of. It was in one of those galleries that I discovered the work of De Wain Valentine and came face-to-face with the intersection of art and science.

Born in Colorado, Valentine's early experiences with polishing rocks awakened his sensitivity to "reflective surfaces, translucence, and industrial processes." On moving to L.A., the seemingly endless sea and skyscapes of Southern California pushed him into pioneering work with resins and industrial plastics as he sought to create sculptures that played with the region's marvelous light.

Out of necessity he developed his own a modified polyester resin called MasKast, allowing him to produce monumental objects in a single pour. What he created with his new process was nothing short of monumental.

The Getty Conservation Institute's exhibit From Start to Finish: De Wain Valentine's Gray Column (runs through March 11, 2012) details the creation of one twelve-foot high, eight-foot wide, 3,500 lb. work with the appearance of a gigantic burnished prism.

Taking in the "Gray Column" from all angles of the gallery, it's clear that Valentine's work is, essentially, a protracted experiment in the relationship between light and matter. As the artist once said, his goal was to "take a big saw and cut out a piece of sky."

This goal was a reaction to outrageous beauty of Southern California's natural gifts. To move from that inspiration to creation, from that idea to matter, however, Valentine needed to engage with the world at the level of resin chemistry.

The Getty's exhibit details how he struggled to get barrel after barrel of the resin into wooden frames without the frames bursting into flame. (The liquid resin released enormous amounts of heat as it changed phase, setting into a solid form.) In reading of these efforts I was struck by the similarity of process in art and science.

De Wain Valentine's work clearly lived at the frontiers of the chemical industry's understanding of resin polymers. That does not, however make him unique. Even with the role chemistry played in art there is not a foundational difference between Valentine's efforts and other artists.

Every painter experiments with the colors they can, or cannot, create from tubes of acrylic or oil. Every sculptor must confront the actual brittleness of their stone or the flexibility of their metal. Every dancer experiences the limits of muscle and sinew as part of the language of choreography.

Fundamentally, both art and science are about encounters with the real world — the one we live in and experience as colors, textures, shapes and sounds. Every artistic creation and every scientific study is a record of experimentation. At their best those experiments are rooted in two vital qualities: interest and attention.

As I wrote last week, interest and attention allow us to rise above stultifying boredom. Interest and attention allow us to live lives that are rich in meaning, lives that are passionate about noticing the everyday miracles right in front of us. No wonder, then, that both science and art have such power over us. No wonder that both seem to define the qualities that make us human.

One of the great ironies of human existence is that art and science are both optional costs for culture. You don't have to put any money in to them if you think they are not worth it. And yet, the only cultures we remember, the only ones that matter across the long march of history, are those who did think they mattered. From the Hellenistic Greeks to the genius of the Renaissance, art and science have forever been paired together as the lasting expressions of truly great societies.

Woe be unto those who forget that lesson.

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

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.

 

I believe there is a path to re-enchantment, for the evolution of the biosphere and human life is beyond Newton's explanatory framework in science of laws of motion, initial and boundary conditions and deduced, so entailed, trajectories of, say, billiard balls on a billiard table. The increasing grounds for this hope is elaborated on in two of my books, Investigations and Reinventing the Sacred, and in an ArXiv posted article by mathematicians Giuseppe Longo, Mael Montevil and myself, entitled, "No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere." If we are right, this is "The End Of A Physics Worldview: Heraclitus And The Watershed of Life."

The living world is not what we have thought. It is beyond Newtonian entailing law, its becoming is not fully knowable beforehand and, to borrow from Heraclitus, life bubbles forth.

In this bubbling forth beyond Newton lies a chance for the "Re-Enchantment Of Humanity." Part of this re-enchantment lies in a natural magic. In the evolution of the biosphere, with no selection achieving it, the biosphere literally creates its own future possibilities of becoming. So too does the evolution of the econosphere and human culture.

The invention of the Turing machine enabled the main frame computer, enabled the personal computer, enabled word processing, enabled the WEB, enabled selling on the Web, enabled Google, then Facebook and the Arab Spring. No one could have prestated this evolution. We live in an enabling magic that we cannot prestate.

We live in an enabling magic that we co-create. How should we live with this magic?

A few posts ago, "Living The Well Discovered Life," I tried to build on Aristotle and the great American Transcendentalists and Pragmatists, Emerson, Thoreau, Pierce James and Dewey. Emersonian "perfectionism" envisioned "Living The Well Considered Life," in which one assesses one's virtues, or strengths, and builds upon them. Yet, this feels too static, as if one knew from the outset one's virtues in a knowable world. But this vision from the last two centuries is deeply inadequate.

Often, not only do we not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen. Then reason, the highest human virtue of our Enlightenment, is an insufficient guide for living our lives forward, as Kirkegard said, into mystery. We need reason, emotion, intuition, sensation, metaphor spanning what we cannot yet say. We need all we've evolved with.

Living the well discovered life, only partially knowing, discovering as we go, points toward what we might want of a global civilization. Let our civilizations touch one another gently enough to leave the roots of each intact, but firmly enough to engender ever new and unexpected cultural and economic forms by which the diversity of well discovered lives can flourish in bursting creativity.

That civilization must recognize that our sprawling economic system, with all its virtues and vices, lives within society and society lives within the biosphere. At some stage, we must forego our dream, born of the Bronze Age Bible in the Abrahamic tradition, in which God creates All and sets humanity in dominion over all of creation to use as humanity will. Forever GDP growth is today's expression of this early Bronze Age dream.

We are millennia beyond the early Bronze Age, on a crowded planet we despoil. At some soon point we must evolve to zero GDP growth with respect to using planetary resources, at sufficient wealth, well distributed, to be "enough" in a thriving global economy enlivened by thriving global cultures.

To transform beyond modernity, we must evolve, including the power structure of our capitalist world. No one gives up power willingly. Unless? Unless: i. By necessity on a finite planet. ii. A new and commanding vision is wrought of what we can become, what magic we can co-create, altering our ethical view of our lives and what form of civilization might best serve our humanity.

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.

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

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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.

 

If we can "read off" experienced words by direct measurement of the brain, then it may be just a matter of time before we can determine by similar measurements what speech forms are being entertained in voluntary thought. The ability to do this might be the basis of new prostheses to help those who are otherwise incapacitated, stroke patients for example, communicate with those around them.

Many people find the prospect of this vaguely threatening; the BBC reporter whose interview with UC Berkeley neuroscientist Robert Knight can be downloaded here, felt the need to ask whether this sort of technology could be used nefariously to penetrate into the thoughts of others. Knight, who has been a colleague of mine at UC Berkeley, gave an amusing but unsatisfactory reply: "I think how Doctor Strangeglove might use this [technology] in the future might be slightly above my pay grade!"

Actually, these worries are entirely misguided.

A person's mind is an open book and we are excellent readers. I can tell what you are thinking and feeling just by watching you, by paying attention to what you do, by observing your facial expression and your posture (not to mention, by listening to your words!). Our ability to understand each other, our powers of empathy, sympathy, mutual anticipation and joint attention are the very basis of lives together as human beings.

I think we fear that what makes brain-reading special is that it is a way of knowing what people are thinking and feeling that by-passes the need for observing them, as if it afforded a kind of direct access to the mind itself, a look into the normally hidden backstage of human being. But this is a wrongheaded conception of the mind. You are not your brain. Mind is not inside us; it is rather, the dynamic activity of the whole, embodied, environmentally situated human being.

One last very important point: the target of this research is not neural correlates of thought. The target is the neural correlates of acts of communication (the perception and production of speech). But communication is not something that happens in the private sphere of our own interior worlds. It is something we undertake, together, in contexts of shared interests and concerns. It is more like soccer, with all of us running around together chasing the same ball, than it is like dreaming.

If this eventual research aim is achieved, we will not have succeeded in unlocking a person's thoughts and feelings; we will have succeeded in enabling a person to communicate with others.

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You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and Twitter.

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.

 

Koko, of course, being a gorilla, cannot speak; she has no specialized anatomy for speech. Yet she does control her breathing in unusually precise ways. I'm always fascinated when an animal does something that she is supposed to be unable to do. And I think Koko's abilities have something to tell us about how we too may "grow" skills that may not come naturally to us.

The Koko study was conducted by Marcus Perlman, Francine G. Patterson and Ronald H. Cohn. Lead researcher Perlman is a cognitive psychologist with a recent Ph.D. from the University of California-Santa Cruz and a research associate at The Gorilla Foundation. (Along with Joanne E. Tanner, I'm a co-author on a forthcoming paper of Perlman's on gestural patterns in a mother-infant pair of zoo gorillas.)

Using a series of specific definitions and measurements, Perlman et al. coded videotapes of Koko playing with wind instruments like recorders, harmonicas and party favor whistles. They found 38 sequences from 17 different playing bouts to work with. The key result: When Koko plays these instruments, she adopts a pattern of breathing statistically different than her normal one. In both frequency and forcefulness, she alters her breathing in a volitional way.

Though Koko is the first gorilla to demonstrate voluntary breath control, Perlman et al. don't claim she's the only nonhuman ape to do so. The zoo-living orangutan Bonnie, for instance, learned to whistle after observing her human caretakers.

These captive actions challenge conclusions reached by studying fossils of extinct human ancestors. One influential paper suggests, for instance, that only late in evolutionary history did muscles and nerves allow for fine control of breathing, and thus, speech.

Koko, though, is immersed in a human environment; when she plays with instruments, she is rewarded with praise and occasionally with food. Could her skills have any meaning in an evolutionary context?

Perlman et al. note that free-ranging orangutans produce different sounds in different groups, suggesting a role for learning and cultural transmission. Wild chimpanzees vocalize differently according to which apes are around to listen; when they stealthily patrol their territory's boundaries, they choose to go silent. Some degree of fine breath control is certainly involved in these cases.

I particularly appreciate Perlman's urging, however, that we look at this whole matter in another way: It's not as if human children show evidence of innate breath control. Rather, just like Koko does, they learn breath control through shared cultural routines with their caretakers and play partners.

These cultural routines may differ across cultures. People like me, who grew up in the United States, learned as kids how to blow out those birthday candles and blow into that trumpet — and also how to hold our breath underwater. Gradually, through traditions and games shared with others, our skilled breathing comes to feel natural.

This is an embodied, ecological perspective on skill emergence. Through it, we come to see that it's not only skills like language and tool-making that flourish via shared social practice, but also actions like skilled breathing that might at first be attributed wholly to biology.

What a great point to keep in mind as we surround our children and, yes, our adult selves too, with ever-varied physical and mental challenges that may "grow" our skills. We may surprise ourselves by what we can learn to do — against all expectations.

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

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.

 

I actually addressed the Mayan end-of-days fallacy in some detail in a past post here at 13.7 and don't want to belabor the theme.

However, while Aveni was explaining why a planetary alignment won't do anything to us — "did you know that Venus contributes only 1/500^th of an inch to earthly tides?"— ditto with solar flares or an alignment with the galactic center, common phenomena without much to fear, he also asked why do people of all ages, past and present, have such a fixation with ideas of the end, and why this is particularly acute in America.

Here we circle back to Haque's question of what makes a life meaningful, and we see that fears of the end are often related to fears of having lived a meaningless life.

Haque's focus on meaningfulness seems to rely on legacy. At the risk of oversimplifying his remarks, his point is that people spend too much of their lives in trivialities and thus feel trapped in an empty existence when, instead, they should be investing their time in generating something that "stands the test of time," "the test of excellence," and the "test of you."

We are creatures bound by time, and our awareness of this simple and ruthless truth feeds some our best and worst deeds. Most of us fear the lack of control that we have when it comes to the passage of time. So we find ways to stay on, even if we are no longer present in body. We only truly disappear when people stop remembering us.

(What do you know of your great-great-grandparents? Add extra "greats" as needed.)

However, there need not be anything elitist about the nature of this legacy. It's not all about getting a Nobel prize or composing a symphony or writing a poem that will be read hundreds of years from now. Raising a good family, creating a recipe that goes down from generation to generation, making someone's life better, inspiring young students, all should count as a legacy. I'm sure you have your own examples.

The issue that muddles this discussion is the matter of value. What has value to me may not to you and vice-versa. What is meaningful to me may not be to you, and vice-versa. So, it's quite difficult to come up with universals of meaningfulness and say this is what makes a life worth living.

To a certain extent, if we have good health, the next most important thing is probably freedom. And, in my view, to be truly free is to be able to choose to what or whom you will commit. It could be a family recipe book, a new theorem, or a life of devotion to the poor.

In any case, a life that was well-lived would never be long enough. This, perhaps, is the essence of the human predicament. We all struggle to find our own way out of it.

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You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook.

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.

 

Science certainly provides a powerful sense of meaning as an activity. Will my scientific papers be read 100 years from now? I hope so, but doubt it (sigh). Either way, the process of trying to honestly enter into a dialogue with the world establishes a context for my own life that sometimes allows me to rise above the petty day-to-day squabbles of broken washing machines and general knuckle-headedness. By entering into that dialogue with great effort and earnestness, the world ceases to be something merely "at-hand," something merely there for distraction or entertainment.

Instead, it's fully alive and fully present. The ever-opening sky, the wheeling stars and even the nightly stream of crows I watch heading to their evening roosts all become a poignant mysteries that speak of greater powers than I will ever fully understand. They surround me, whispering that there is more, so much more, to the world than my small concerns. Practicing science keeps my feet on the ground and my ear to the wind. It keeps me alert so that I might still hear that quiet call.

You don't have to be a practicing scientist to know any of that. You don't have to write papers to carry out your own research, your own fervent investigation into the texture of your own being.

The questions are always there.

They are waiting for you everyday when you open your eyes to yet another strange day in this strange world. The practice of science is just a codification of something that has always been possible for human beings. With integrity and honesty in our own investigations of what it means to be alive for these briefest of moments, we can all enrich our work, be it nursing, building, teaching or cooking.

Science always asks for excellence. In reality, life always asks for excellence, too. It asks us to give our best, to be attentive, to awake to the everyday miracle that is every day.

Nothing is more full of meaning and nothing holds out a greater hope for us all. As individuals in a culture we are forever re-inventing, this collaboration of investigation with the universe is the very essence of a meaningful life.

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

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'."

 

Kant seeks the conditions of knowing in the inner conditions of the mind, categories of perception such as space and time. He considers the phenomenal world we can know and behind it the noumenal world we can never know.

Russell brings us sense data such as "red here" and the tone, "A flat now," then sense data statements, "For Kauffman, 'red here' is true," and hopes that his recently developed predicate calculus working on sense data statements will allow philosophers to build a maximally reliable way of knowing the world, constructed out of sense data statements linked by logic, including quantifiers such as "there exists" and "for all."

To early Wittgenstein's famous "Tractatus": "The world is the collection of true facts" about that world.

On to logical positivism: "Only those statements (about the world) are meaningful which are empirically verifiable," which, ironically drove Western philosophy, yet whose founding statement just noted is not itself empirically verifiable.

The "empiricist tradition" sought and seeks to elucidate how we know the world.

What is wrong?

In the beginning, 5 billion years ago, no life existed on the forming planet. Either life started here or arrived from elsewhere. Let's assume the former. As a concrete working hypothesis let's take collectively autocatalytic sets of polymers like peptide sets, RNA sets, or DNA sets, all realized experimentally, in some bounding membrane like a liposome. For example Gonen Ashkenazi has a 9 peptide (small protein) collectively autocatalytic set reproducing happily in his Ben Gurion University lab.

So what?

So existing as a self reproducing system in a universe that is non-ergodic, (not repeating) above the level of atoms, where most complex things will never exist, is the first condition of life. "Knowing" is not yet a condition.

But that protocell typically lived in an environment with toxic and food molecules. By hook or crook, say by semipermiable membranes, the protocell "discriminated" poison from food and admitted only the latter, thanks to natural selection on evolving protocells.

We now have the rudiments of agency and knowing. The protocell evolved to do something, i.e., discriminate and admit food and block poison. This discrimination required rudimentary "knowing" and hence "semantics", without invoking consciousness.

What the empiricist tradition entirely misses is living existence and agency. Without the existence of the protocell, there is no evolutionary point in knowing. Without agency there is no use in knowing. Suppose, per contra, that the protocell could discriminate poison from food, but could not selectively block the first and admit the second. It would fail natural selection's harsh sieve.

Without being and doing, no knowing could have emerged in evolution. The empiricist tradition misses this central issue, thus is deeply inadequate.

In summary of this first point: Without being and agency, knowing is both pointless and would not arise in evolution.

Not only do we not know what will happen, we often do not even know what can happen.

But the empiricist tradition runs into a still deeper problem. In past posts I have discussed Darwinian preadaptations, where we cannot prestate their emergence in evolution. This has led my colleagues, senior mathematician, Giuseppe Longo, his post doctoral fellow, Mael Montevil, both of the Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, and myself to submit a paper also posted on ArXiv, entitled, "No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere."

This article is radical. It claims that no law entails the evolution of the biosophere. The grounds for this include the fact that we cannot prestate the ever newly emerging relevant variables in evolution that selection reveals, therefore the very phase space of evolution changes in ways we cannot know beforehand, so we can write no laws of motion for the evolving biosphere, nor, lacking knowledge of the boundary conditions, could we integrate those laws of motion even were to to have them.

These deep issues mean that often not only do we not know what will happen, as when we flip a fair coin 10,000 times and do not know how many heads will come up, but here know all the possible outcomes, so can construct a probability measure. In evolution we do not even know what can emerge in the Adjacent Possible of the becoming of evolution, so can construct no probability measure for we do not know the sample space of all the possibilities, thus not only do we not know what will happen, we do not even know what can happen.

The empiricist tradition is ignorant of this profound limitation to knowledge "beforehand" as the biosphere "becomes."

Even pragmatism, which seeks to unify knowing and doing, falls prey to this last issue: We often do not even know what can happen. Pragmatism takes no account of this feature of our living world.

Hume famously argued that one cannot deduce "ought" from "is." This is the naturalistic fallacy. But Hume is thinking only of a knowing subject, firmly in the empiricist tradition started by Descartes. Hume ignores agency.

I wrote an entire book, Investigations, attempting to define agency. My try: "A molecular autonomous agent is a self-reproducing system able to do at least one work cycle."

A bacterium swimming up a glucose gradient for food is an agent, reproduces and the rotating flagella is just one of the work cycles the bacterium does. All living cells fulfill the above definition.

But once there is agency, ought enters the universe. If the bacterium is to successfully get food, it "ought" to e.g., swim up the sugar gradient. Without attributing consciousness, one cannot have "actings" without "doing them wisely or poorly," hence ought.

In short, the empiricist tradition, in ignoring agency, wishes to block us from "ought," when we cannot have doing without "ought." The root of the issue is "doing" versus merely "happening," a topic in a near future post.

We need to rethink many problems in philosophy to take account of the issues above.

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.

 

To get a better grasp on what is known about the Amazonian past, this week I contacted William Woods, the geographer and anthropologist from the University of Kansas who is quoted in the Times article.

"Over the past 20 years," Woods told me, "overwhelming evidence has been accumulating which strongly suggests that there were more people in Amazonia 500 years ago than, outside of the major cities, there are now." Instead of small groups isolated from each other, we're talking about large political entities, he explained.

Back then, the forest was much more open than it is today, with a thriving mix of permanent settlements, fields, gardens and orchards. Palm trees and Brazil-nut trees were cultivated in those orchards. People didn't just alter their surrounding landscape, they played a major role in creating that landscape.

Woods is keenly interested in terra preta do indio, or "Indian Black Earths." Terra preta, he says, "were created by indigenous people hundreds, even thousands of years ago. They are associated with long-enduring Indian village sites and filled with ceramics, animal and fish bones, and other cultural debris."

So terra preta is the ultimate example of anthropogenic activity in the Amazonian past — and it was highly successful activity, at that. These black soils, Woods explains, "are much more fertile than the surrounding, highly weathered, reddish soils. They have generally sustained this fertility to the present, despite the tropical climate and despite frequent or periodic cultivation."

This is cool stuff. For people (like me) who hadn't been fully aware of this anthropological science, it has the potential to transform how we think about human-environment interactions in our past.

For anyone wishing a fuller picture of the pre-Columbian Americas, Woods recommends the book 1491 by Charles C. Mann. Based on Mann's excellent 2002 article in The Atlantic, I echo Woods' recommendation.

For now, I'm wondering about an issue that came up also in the Times article. How should our improved knowledge of the Amazonian past impact how we think about Amazonian forest conservation in the present?

It's time to junk the idea — stereotypical and condescending, in a "noble savage" sort of way — that hundreds of years ago, roaming tribes of people lived in harmony with nature in the Amazon forest, leaving no ecological footprint. The hard question is, where do we go from here?

We shouldn't lose sight of the fact that current deforestation in Amazonia occurs for a mix of reasons, ranging from land-clearing for cattle pastures and farms, to large-scale logging operations. But should environmentalists' goals for restoring the forests take into account the surprisingly open forests of the past?

I wonder what relationship that question has to another: What do present-day Amazonian people want, regarding the preservation of key archaeological sites in their country, including those where the geo-glyphs are located?

What balance should be sought between preserving the forests, and preserving Brazil's cultural patrimony?

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

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.

 

For the sake of argument, we can separate the way science interacts with most people into two parts. The first is by the uses of science, that is, its technological applications. The second is through questions related to more metaphysical issues, such as the origin of the universe and of life, or what exists inside a black hole, or if the universe can be described as a giant computer, or if it will end. In both cases, education, both formally — in schools — and informally — through books, TV documentaries, books, and magazine articles — plays a key role.

In both instances, technological applications and fundamental questions, something curious has happened during the 20th century: as science progressed, it moved away from our everyday perception of things, becoming progressively more abstract, even bizarre.

If you lived in the 18th century, many discoveries seemed mind-boggling (e.g., Herschel's discovery of Uranus and of hundreds of nebulae). Yet they were still palpable. People could see a new planet and stellar nebulae with telescopes.

Now, however, to "see" an electron or a DNA molecule, or even a quasar at five billion lightyears away, you need highly-specialized equipment, not available to the non-specialist. To make things worse, theories such as the theory of evolution (at least as it relates to changes in the fossil record), or the big bang model of cosmology, or plate tectonics for that matter, act on time scales so much larger than a typical life span that to understand the science you must take in a different intuition of how time can pass on non-human scales.

So, there is a growing distance between most people and the way objects of interest to scientists are seen and studied, and how results from the various observations are interpreted.

Perhaps this is why, some time ago, a reader told me that, to him, believing in an abstract God or in a claim that the universe is 13.7 billion years old was not so different. And yet, these two couldn't be more different! The same sort of difficulty arises when people doubt what scientists have to say about global warming. Without a concrete, tangible in-your-face evidence, people find it much harder to "believe," even though global warming, as any other scientific claim, has nothing to do with belief.

What to do? I don't think there is a simple answer. But surely, the more scientists engage with the general public both formally (by visiting schools and talking to students at all age groups) and informally (through blogs like this and so many other venues), the more we stand a chance of decreasing this widening gap between what is done in the labs and research centers around the world and what is discussed and understood by society as whole.

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You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook.

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.

 

Yesterday I received an email from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center. They had issued a watch for a "geomagnetic storm" associated with a bright flare on the sun Sunday evening. The expectation was that storm would arrive today "with possible impacts to navigation, the power grid and satellites." NOAA says it's the most powerful such event to hit Earth since 2005.

Space weather, as it is called, originates with solar magnetic activity. The sun is a giant spinning ball of charged particles. In addition to its spin, the heat released from the core through nuclear fusion eventually sets the upper layers of the sun into a kind of boiling motion called convection. All that motion — spin and convection — means lots of charged particles streaming this way and that. Since current (the flow of charges) produces magnetic fields, the outer domains of the sun are ruled by magnetism. Magnetic fields are the source of all those cool images of giant flares erupting in planet-spanning arcades of super-hot plasma. It's also the source of so-called Coronal Mass Ejections or CMEs, which are, essentially, the space storms that space weather is all about.

CMEs are eruptions of matter and magnetism from the sun into space. A typical CME will blow 10 billion kilograms (about 22 billion pounds) of solar plasma into space along with enough energy to represent a flotilla of 220 aircraft carriers moving at 500 km/s. The fact the CME's are quite common says a lot about the power locked up in an ordinary star like the sun.

While 1 to 3 CMEs may occur every day, we only notice the ones that slam into the Earth on their journey across the solar system. When a CME crosses the Earth it runs into our planet's own magnetic field. Charged particles from the CME get trapped by the Earth's magnetic field and stream down toward the planet's surface near the poles.

When those CME particles, running down magnetic field lines, strike atmospheric gas atoms, the collisions cause the atoms to light up like Christmas tree bulbs. That is the origin of the simmering walls of color we called aurora. There was a time when pretty lights were all there was to space weather. Those days are over.

Before we became a high-tech culture, the collision of the CME with the Earth was no cause for alarm. Now space weather poses serious risks for everyone. For astronauts, the torrent of high-energy particles pose health risks via heavy doses of ionizing radiation. Orbiting satellites used for communications, weather prediction and a 100 other purposes can feel the blow too, as CME particles destroy solar panels and sensitive electronics.

Sprawling grids of power-lines on Earth can also feel the effect of all that CME current dumped suddenly into the atmosphere. Electric grids can overload and, without warning, millions of people might be plunged into darkness (as occurred in 1989, when a severe space storm caused a system-wide power failure in Quebec).

To deal with the problem, NASA and other space agencies have begun to continually monitor the Sun. As soon as a CME is observed, powerful supercomputers are engaged to predict its path through space. If the storm of matter and magnetism appears headed toward Earth then precautions can be taken like bringing astronauts in from space walks or putting satellites into "safe-modes" where their electronics will be less likely to suffer damage.

While there is enough remarkable science related to space weather to fill 20 blog posts, I want to end this description with the briefest of thoughts which never fails to astonish me. For thousands of generations the human habitation of this planet knew nothing of space weather. We knew Earth-bound winds and even learned to use those winds to become a sea faring race. When gossamer veils of light appeared in the northern skies we watched, wondered and prayed and then went about our business.

Now we have crossed a threshold. Now we have become a high-tech, space-faring race encircling the planet's surface with power-lines and its skies with orbiting satellites. There are other winds and other storms we must now be attentive to as we go about our business. In this way, as in so many others, our long childhood as a species has ended for better or for worse.

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You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and Twitter. His new book is About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.

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.

 

But even if we don't forget how to "do X," we still fall behind in our skill base. The reason is something known as "learning by doing," where the mere act of using a skill also leads to advancements in that skill.

This is a well known economic phenomenon discovered in World War II. In a specific airplane factory, it was shown that each time the total number of bombers produced doubled, the price of production per bomber fell by a constant fraction, say 5 percent. If one plots the logarithm of total bombers produced on the X axis and logarithm of cost per bomber on the Y axis, one gets a straight line sloping down to the right, a power law. This is the "learning curve." It shows up in many industries, from cigar rolling and diamond cutting to automobile manufacture.

The general economic theory is that as more bombers are produced, cumulative micro-improvements are made in the production, so "learning" occurs.

As it happens, my colleagues and I used a model of rugged fitness landscapes — something I borrowed from physicists — called the NK model of "rugged fitness landscapes," and showed that the statistical behavior of "myopic" hill climbers climbing toward fitness peaks, or cost minima, exhibit precisely the same phenomenon of learning curves. In short, this economic learning seems to be a search on rugged multi-peaked "technology landscapes."

But when we ship offshore our production to other countries in the name of short-term competition and profit, we ship offshore our own "learning by doing." The cumulative innovations happen elsewhere. Even if we remembered where we "were" technologically, we fall behind the others who "run up the learning curve," and consequently we ourselves now can compete less well.

And that's if we don't forget our own technologies. More likely, the experts move on to other jobs; the assembled teams dissipate; we become disabled.

President Obama is instituting moves to try to talk companies into bringing production back to the U.S. He is right for all the reasons above, and perhaps learning by doing, and sustaining expertise in our workforce, hence not forgetting how to "do it" are the biggest reasons long term.

If we as consumers moved towards a preference to buy "Made in the USA," that would help a lot. That choice is up to us as consumers.