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Through the Looking Glass
20 March 2011
And, speaking of empathy, here is a strange article about mirror-touch synesthesia, one of the many weird conditions that are emerging from our studies of the brain. In this case, the sufferer hyper-empathises with other to the point where, when she sees somebody punched, she falls into unconsciousness. Here a pyschologist suggests empathy may be a survival mechanism – feeling the suffering of others and prepares us to alleviate our own. … More
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Passing Turing
20 March 2011
Brian Christian, a poet, philosopher and computer scientist, has written a book about his attempts to be the ‘Most Human Human’ by always passing the Turing Test. This, all Thought Experiment readers ought to know, was devised by Alan Turing as a test of machine intelligence. If, in conversation, a human could not tell the difference between a machine and another human, then we would we not be obliged to credit the machine with intelligence? Few … More
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Getting Gaddafi
18 March 2011
The awful thing about going for Gaddafi is we really have to get Gaddafi and his moronic son Saif. In power, and perhaps even out of power, they could make our lives miserable with the threat of terrorist atrocities and yet further security at airports. But, if Benghazi is to be Rwanda, it seems we are now locked into the logic of intervention. What makes me uneasy is that ‘we’ – why us? Why not … More
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Conrad-Hazzard-Miller
18 March 2011
David Miller, my illustrious agent, first put me on to Shirley Hazzard. It is good, therefore, see read him raving – very lucidly – about her in The Independent today. I think he originally said The Transit of Venus was the greatest novel since Conrad. As he knows more about Conrad than Mrs Conrad ever did, you should at once read David’s moving novel about his hero’s death – Today.
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Midgley Annihilates Atkins
17 March 2011
Mary Midgley is a distinguished, humane and subtle philosopher. Peter Atkins is not. He has a hard, scientistic mind and he is one of those alarming people who does not know what he does not know. The two clashed this morning on the Today programme. Midgley pointed out, quite correctly, that the language he was using was largely meaningless and, in any case, not science. He emitted supercilious nonsense - the … More
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A New Japan
17 March 2011
Andrew Sullivan has been running a series of posts asking why there is no looting in Japan. On Channel 4 News, Jon Snow did a payoff the other night paying tribute to the dignity and politeness of the Japanese. A similar theme has run through most of the news coverage I have seen or read – how can they be so nice, so calm? One reason, I suspect, may lie in … More
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Ayn Rand 2
16 March 2011
I posted about the strange phenomenon of the Ayn Rand cult some time ago. Now I have just been watching a film by a friend of mine which includes some startling material about Rand, all of which confirmed my dismal judgment of this ‘thinker’ as a dud novelist, a terrible philosopher and a political theorist of staggering and dangerous naivete. Hearing about her life with her circle of infatuated admirers, it suddenly came to me who she … More
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Grounds for Suspicion?
16 March 2011
Great line of the day:
‘Once at the scene in Willow Park, at Beck Row, they found a man dead on the ground from apparent gunshot wounds. A second body was found in a burning car.
‘Police said the deaths were being treated as suspicious.’
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London Life 1: Mad Women in Minis
16 March 2011
The Mini is a car that induces unjustified confidence in the driver. In London it seems to be driven by rich, fashionable women, one of whom nearly killed a cyclist and a scooterist yesterday. I was safe in a big-arsed saloon. I had paused to allow the indecisive cyclist to make up his mind – he had the right of way but was not in his right mind – and the scooterist to arrive at some sort of clear analysis. … More
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Libya Becomes Rwanda
16 March 2011
When Gaddafi wins, Libya is likely to stop being Iraq – a cruel, oil-based dictatorship – and become Rwanda – a scene of uncontrolled massacre. I have no idea whether the West should try to intervene. A no-fly zone is probably now irrelevant – here is a lucid guide to the pros and cons – because it would prevent neither a Gaddafi victory nor the ensuing massacres. That means the only remaining intervention would be on land. This … More
- Mr Watson Will See You Now
- Save the Game
- Sat Nav
- Anti-Warmists
- More Mad Glory Dies
- Cocos Will Kill
- Incompetence and Evil
- We Are Weaker Than Our Fathers, Dupree
- Atypical
- Koudelka
- Jacobean Blood
- The Soul of Ron Mueck
- Extremophiles: Life on the Edge
- The Opposite of Faith is not Doubt, it is Certainty
- David Hare’s Rattigan
- Planet Hunting
- The Once and Future Tee-Mo
- The Truth of Islam
- Soul Searching
- Overthrowing Chomsky
