“I argue that despite impressions, the long-term trend, though certainly halting and incomplete, is that violence of all kinds is decreasing. This calls for a rehabilitation of a concept of modernity and progress, and for a sense of gratitude for the institutions of civilization and enlightenment that have made it possible.”

Via Edge

Pinker reviews and extrapolates from persuasive data, and discusses six historical trends toward diminution of violence as civilization has progressed. If he is right I find this a significant antidote to despair in the big picture.

Have you been asking:

• How do I know I exist? Could you be living inside a simulation created by a more advanced intelligence? Where does your unerring belief that you are not come from?
• What is consciousness? How does something as physical as the brain create something as immaterial as your sense of self? It could all just be one big trick of the mind
• Why is there something rather than nothing? In part because nothing is not what you think it is. Also don’t forget the multiverse
• What is the meaning of life? Your life may feel important to you, but does it have meaning? It’s the biggest of all questions – and it has more than one answer
• Where do good and evil come from? We all have a sense of morality, and most of us agree on what is good. But in truth, good may not be all that different to pure evil
• Do we have free will? Biology suggests we might not have free will, but everything changes when you get down to the quantum level
• What is reality made of? Molecules are made of atoms, atoms of particles, and particles are quantum fluctuations. But where do consciousness, dark matter and mathematics fit in?
• Is time an illusion? We are born, time passes and we die. So time must exist, right? The trouble is, it’s tricky to pin down what time actually is
• Can we ever know if God exists? No one has proved that God exists, but then no one has proved there is no God. Is working out the truth a supernatural feat?

Via New Scientist

“For the past twelve years”, says [Stanislas] Dehaene, “my research team has been using every available brain research tool, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness. I am now happy to report that we have acquired a good working hypothesis. In experiment after experiment, we have seen the same signatures of consciousness: physiological markers that all, simultaneously, show a massive change when a person reports becoming aware of a piece of information (say a word, a digit or a sound).

“Furthermore, when we render the same information non-conscious or “subliminal”, all the signatures disappear. We have a theory about why these signatures occur, called the global neuronal workspace theory. Realistic computer simulations of neurons reproduce our main experimental findings: when the information processed exceeds a threshold for large-scale communication across many brain areas, the network ignites into a large-scale synchronous state, and all our signatures suddenly appear.

“But this is already more than a theory. We are now applying our ideas to non-communicating patients in coma, vegetative state, or locked-in syndromes. The test that we have designed with Tristan Bekinschtein, Lionel Naccache, and Laurent Cohen, based on our past experiments and theory, seems to reliably sort out which patients retain some residual conscious life and which do not…”

Via Edge

‘Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. …’

Via Microsoft Research