IMHO: THIS IS MY LAW by Allison Hernandez

THIS IS MY LAW

CONTENTS

1 LAW OF THE MIND

2 LAW OF SCIENCE

3 LAW OF COMMUNICATION

4 LAW OF TECHNOLOGY

5 LAW OF HUMANITY

6 INDEX

LAW OF THE MIND

GERD GIGERENZER Psychologist; Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Author, Gut Feelings

GIGERENZER’S LAW OF INDISPENSABLE IGNORANCE The world cannot function without partially ignorant people. The ideal of omniscience fuels the many disciplines and theories that envision godlike humans. Much of cognitive science, and Homo economics as well, assume the superiority of a mind with complete, veridical representations of the outside world that remain stable and available throughout a lifetime. The Law of Indispensable Ignorance, in contrast, says that complete information is neither realistic nor generally desirable. What is desirable are partially (not totally) ignorant people.

Justice is blindfolded; jurors are not supposed to know the criminal record of the defendant; trial consultants hunt for “virgin minds” rather than academics as jurors. Academics in turn review papers anonymously under the veil of ignorance about the authors; trust in experiments demands double-blind procedures; economic fairness encourages sealed bids. The efficient market hypothesis implies that knowledge of future stock prices is impossible, and the Greek skeptics.

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When watching a pre-recorded football game, we do not want to know the result in advance; knowledge would destroy suspense. The estimated 5 to 10% of children and their fathers who falsely believe that they are related might not lead a happier life by becoming less ignorant; knowledge can destroy families. And few of us would want to know the day we will die; knowledge can destroy hope.

Zero-intelligence traders who submitted random bids and offers in double auctions performed as well as experts. Pedestrians who chose stocks by mere name recognition outperformed market experts and the Fidelity Growth Fund — and even more successfully when they were from abroad and more ignorant of the stock names. Expert ball players made better decisions about where to pass the ball when they had less time. Recreational tennis players who had only heard of half of the professional players in Wimbledon 2003 and simply bet that those they had not heard of would lose predicted the outcomes of the matches better than the official ATP-rankings and the seeding. Adam Smith’s invisible hand is a metaphor for how collective wisdom emerges from the uninformed masses.

We can prove that situations exist in which a group does best by following its most ignorant member rather than the consensus of their informed majority, and we can prove that a heuristic that ignores all information except for one reason will make better predictions than a multiple regression with a dozen reasons. Mnemonists, who have virtually unlimited memory, are swamped by details and find it difficult to abstract and reason, while ordinary people’s working memory limitations maximize the ability to detect correlations in the world. Limited memory facilitates acquisition of language, in infants and computers alike; the more complex the species, the longer the period of infancy.

Theories that respect the Law of Indispensable Ignorance incorporate a more realistic picture of people as being partially ignorant. Omniscience is dispensable.

ROBERT PROVINE Psychologist and Neuroscientist, University of Maryland;

Author, Curious Behavior

(act before they react).

This principle of neurobehavioral development and evolution describes the tendency of the nervous system to produce motor output before it receives sensory input. Because motor systems often evolve and develop before sensory systems, sensory input cannot have the dominant influence on neural structure and function predicted by some psychological and neurological theories.

The evolutionary precocity of motor relative to sensory systems also argues against the classical reflex as a primal step in neurobehavioral evolution. Spontaneously active motor processes are adaptive and can emerge through natural selection unlike sensory processes that are not adaptive without a behavior to guide. Sensory systems evolved to control already existing movement.

Another argument against the primacy of reflexes is that they require the unlikely simultaneous evolution of a sensory and a motor process. The tendency of organisms to “spond before they respond” requires the re-evaluation of many other traditional neurobehavioral concepts and processes.

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PROVINE’S MOTOR PRECOCITY PRINCIPLE Organisms spond before they respond

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PROVINE’S SELF/OTHER EXCLUSIONARY The “self,” the most basic sense of personhood, is defined as that which is not “other.” “Other,” the most primitive level of social entity, is defined as a non-self, animate stimulus on the surface of your skin.

Self is distinguished from other by a neurological cancellation process. These definitions are attractive because they permit a neurologically and computationally based approach to problems that are traditionally mired in personality and social theory. Although our sense of identity involves more than self/non-self discrimination, such a mechanism may be at its foundation and a first step toward the evolution of personhood and the neurological computation of its boundaries. For a demonstration of this mechanism, consider your inability to tickle yourself. Tickle requires stimulation by a non-self animate entity on the surface of your skin. Similar, self-produced stimulation is canceled and is not ticklish.

Without such a self/non-self discriminator, we would be constantly be tickling ourselves by accident, and the world would be filled with goosey people lurching their way through life in a chain reaction filled with tactile false alarms. Developing a similar machine algorithm may lead to “ticklish” robots whose performance is enhanced by their capacity to distinguish touching from being touched, and, provocatively, a computationally based construct of machine personhood.

DAVID G. MYERS Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Author, Psychology,

10th Edition

ism, someone has said, offers two simple axioms: 1) There is a God. 2) It’s not you. Knowing that we are fallible humans underlies the humility and openness that inspires science, and democracy. As Madeline L’Engle noted, “The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument.”

MYER’S LAW OF SELF-PERCEPTION Most people see themselves as better than average. Nine in ten managers rate themselves to be superior than the average manager. Whereas, nine in ten college professors rated themselves as superior to their average colleague. And six in ten high school seniors rate their “ability to get along with others” as in the top 10 percent. Most drivers, even most drivers who have been hospitalized after accidents, believe themselves more skilled than the average driver. “The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background,” observes Dave Barry, “is that deep down inside, we all believe that we are above average drivers.” Excess humility is an uncommon flaw.

MYER’S LAW OF WRITING Anything that can be misunderstood will be.

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MYER’S LAW OF TRUTH The surest truth is that some of our beliefs err. Monothe-

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BRIAN GOODWIN Professor of Biology, Schumacher College

GOODWIN’S LIMITED LAW The truth has as many faces as there are beings that express it. So no-one is ever wrong. Everyone is right, though in limited ways. Wisdom lies in spotting the limitation while being grateful for the insight.

ARNOLD TREHUB Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain

TREHUB’S LAW For any experience, thought, question, or solution there is a corresponding analog in the biophysical state of the brain.

DANIEL GILBERT Professor of Psychology, Harvard University

GILBERT’S LAW Happy people are those who do not pass up an opportunity to laugh at themselves or to make love with someone else. Unhappy people are those who are getting this backwards.

STUART HAMEROFF Professor, Anesthesiology; Psychology Associate Director,

Center for Consciousness Studies, The University of Arizona Tucson

world is to the classical world.

The vast majority of brain activity is non-conscious; consciousness is “the tip of an iceberg” of neural activity. Yet the threshold for transition from pre-, non-, or sub-conscious processes into conscious awareness is unknown. The sub-conscious mind as revealed in dreams has been described by Matte Blanco as a place where “paradox reigns, and opposites merge to sameness”. Reality is seemingly described by two separate sets of laws. In our everyday classical world, Newton’s laws and Maxwell’s equations accurately portray reality. However at small scales, the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics rule: particles are distorted in space and time (uncertainty), exist in multiple states or locations simultaneously (superposition) and remain connected in opposite states over distance. In the quantum world “paradox reigns and opposites merge to sameness”.

The boundary, or threshold between the quantum and classical worlds (i.e. quantum state reduction, collapse of the wave function, measurement, decoherence) remains mysterious. Early quantum theorists attributed reduction/collapse to observation: “consciousness collapses the wave function”. Modern physics attributes reduction or collapse to any interaction with the classical environment (“decoherence”). Neither solves the problem of isolated quantum superpositions which are nonetheless useful in quantum computation.

In quantum computation, information may be represented as isolated superpositions (e.g. as quantum bits — ”qubits” — of both 1 AND 0) which interact/compute by nonlocal entanglement, and eventually reduce/collapse to classical solutions.

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HAMEROFF’S LAW The sub-conscious mind is to consciousness what the quantum

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Based on a 1989 suggestion by Sir Roger Penrose, he and I have put forth a specific model of consciousness involving quantum computation in microtubules within the brain’s neurons. Superpositions of multiple possible pre-/sub-conscious perceptions or choices reach threshold for self-collapse (by Roger’s “objective reduction” due to properties of fundamental spacetime geometry), and select/reduce to particular classical perceptions or choices. Each reduction is a conscious event, a series of which gives a “stream of consciousness”.

The main scientific objection to our proposal has been that the brain is too warm for quantum computation which in the technological realm seems to require ultra cold temperatures to avoid thermal decoherence. However recent evidence shows that quantum processes in biological molecules are enhanced by increased temperature. Evolution has had billion of years to solve the problem of decoherence. Consciousness may be a particular form of quantum state reduction: a process on the edge between the quantum and classical worlds.

ROGER SCHANK Psychologist and Computer Scientist; Engines for Education Inc.; Author, Teaching Minds: How Cognitive Science Can Save Our Schools

SCHANK’S LAW Since people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized their thought. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.

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STEVEN R. QUARTZ Neuroscientist; Associate Professor of Philosophy, Caltech; Coauthor, Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are

QUARTZ’S LAW OF THE PRIMACY OF FEELING In everyday life, one’s anticipated emotions regarding a decision is a better guide than rational deliberation. Brain science is increasingly appreciating the centrality of emotions as guides to life, and emotions are typically more in line with one’s wishes than rational deliberation, which can be easily disconnected from one’s desires and goals. The upshot: deliberation is cheap, emotions are honest.

QUARTZ’S LAW OF LATENT PLASTICITY Failure to alter thought, mood, personality, or other facets of ourselves through environmental means is not a demonstration that these are hard-wired. Rather, such failure should be taken merely as an indication that we have not yet discovered the appropriate regime of experience. New experience-based approaches to brain change are rapidly emerging, and overturn the dogma of the inflexible brain. We can now utilize the brain’s latent capacity for change to treat mood disorders through experience-based brain change. Learning how to utilize the brain’s latent plasticity, or capacity for change, will produce revolutions in physical, cognitive, and mental health remediation.

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DAVID M. BUSS Professor of Psychology, University of Texas; Coauthor, Why Women Have Sex; Author, The Dangerous Passion

BUSS’S THIRD LAW OF HUMAN MATING For every mating adaptation in one sex, there exists at least one co-evolved adaptation in the other sex designed to manipulate and exploit it.

BUSS’S FOURTH LAW OF HUMAN MATING For every co-evolved exploitative mating adaptation, there exists at least one co-co-evolved defensive adaptation designed to circumvent being manipulated and exploited.

BUSS’S SEVENTH LAW OF HUMAN MATING Never reveal your first two laws of mating, lest they be used to manipulate and exploit you.

RANDOLPH NESSE Professor of Psychiatry, University of Michigan Medical

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School; Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Coauthor, Why We Get Sick

NESSE’S LAWS FOR DECIDING WHEN IT IS SAFE TO USE DRUGS TO BLOCK EVOLVED PROTECTIVE RESPONSES Aversive responses, such as pain, fever, vomiting and panic, were shaped by natural selection because they gave selective advantages in the face of various dangers. Optimal decisions about when to use our growing pharmacological powers to block these responses will require signal-detection models of how defenses are regulated.

NESSE’S FIRST LAW An optimal mechanism to regulate an all-or-none defensive response such as vomiting or panic will express the response whenever CD< ∑(pH x CH w/o defense) – ∑(pH x CH w/defense). That is, expressing a defense is worth it whenever the cost of the defense (CD) is less than the estimated reduction in harm, based the probability (pH) and cost of various harmful outcomes (CH) with and without the expression of the defense. This means that optimal systems that regulate inexpensive defenses against large somewhat unpredictable potential harms will express many false alarms and that blocking these unnecessary responses can (and does) greatly relieve human suffering. Blocking responses yields a net benefit, however, only if we can anticipate when a normal response is likely to be essential to prevent catastrophe.

OPTIMUM MEC HA NISM TO REGULATE A DEF EN SE R ESP ON SE

ADMINISTER DEFENSE WHEN:

Potential Harm x Cost of Harm w/o Defense minus Potential Harm x Cost of Harm with Defense

NESSE’S SECOND LAW An optimal mechanism to regulate a continuously expressed defense, such as fever or pain, will increase the defensive response up to the point where the sum of CH and CD is minimized. At this point the marginal increase in the cost of the defense becomes greater than the marginal decrease in harm. This helps to explain why so many defenses, such as those involved in inflammation and the immune responses, so often seem excessive.

Many will recognize this analysis as a less grand and somewhat more practical variation on Pascal’s Wager. So far, however, few in the pharmaceutical industry seem to recognize the importance of routinely assessing the effects of new drugs on normal defensive responses.

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COST OF DEFENSE < ∑(pH x C H w/o defense) – ∑ ( p H x CH w/d e fe n se )

LAW OF SCIENCE

CARLO ROVELLI Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, The First Scientist: Anaximander and His Legacy

ROVELLI’S TWO PRINCIPLES Time Does Not Exist: Contrary to what generally assumed, the physical world does not exist “in time”. At the basic microscopic level, the world is better described in terms of a a-temporal theory, where physical laws do not express time evolution of physical variables, but just relations between the variables. Time emerges only thermodynamically when describing macroscopic variables. Therefore time is only a side effect of our ignorance of the microscopic state of the world. “Time is a side effect of ignorance.”

Space Does Not Exist: The physical world does not exist “in space”. The physical world is made by an ensemble of particles and fields, which do not live in an external space, but rather live “on each other”, and can be in a relation of contiguity with respect to one another. “Space” is the order implied by this relation. These two principles are implied by what we have learned about the physical world with general relativity and with quantum mechanics. The second principle is largely a return to the Pre-Newtonian relational understanding of space.

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DONALD D. HOFFMAN Cognitive Scientist, University of California, Irvine; Author, Visual Intelligence

HOFFMAN’S FIRST LAW A theory of everything starts with a theory of mind.

Quantum measurement hints that observers may create microphysical properties. Computational theories of perception hint that observers may create macrophysical properties. The history of science suggests that counterintuitive hints can lead to conceptual breakthroughs.

HOFFMAN’S SECOND LAW Physical universes are user interfaces for minds. Just as the virtual worlds experienced in VR arcades are interfaces that allow the user to interact effectively with an unseen world of computers and software, so also the physical world one experiences daily is a species user interface that allows one to survive while interacting with a world of which one may be substantially ignorant.

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PIET HUT Professor of Astrophysics, Princeton

HUT’S FIRST LAW Any attempt to define what is science is doomed to failure.

Scientists often attack what they consider irrational creeds by first defining what counts as science and then showing that those creeds don’t fit within the limits specified. While their motive is often right, their approach is totally wrong. Science has no method. It is opportunistic in the extreme, with theory adapting with agility to the most amazing experimental discoveries, no matter what previous ‘corner stones’ have to be given up: quantum mechanics is the most striking example. This opportunism is the only reason that science has remained alive and well, notwithstanding the human tendency for stagnation that is exemplified so clearly through more than a dozen successive generations of individual scientists.

HUT’S SECOND LAW In scientific software development, research = education

When writing a large software package or a whole software environment, the most efficient way to produce a robust product is to write documentation simultaneously with the computer codes, on all levels: from comment lines to manual pages to narrative that explains the reasons for the many choices made. Having to explain to yourselves and your coworkers how you choose what why when is the best guide to quickly discovering hidden flaws and better alternatives, minimizing the need to backtrack later. Therefore, the most efficient way to write a large coherent body of software as a research project is to view it as an educational project.

I have come across endorsements of documentation in various places, including Donald Knuth’s idea of literate programming, and Gerald Sussman’s advice to write with utmost clarity for humans first, and for computers as an afterthought.

ALAN ALDA Actor; Writer; Director; Host of PBS program, The Human Spark;

Author, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself

entertaining for scientists to see what passes through the head of a curious layman while trying to understand the people who try to understand Nature.

ALDA’S FIRST LAW OF LAWS All laws are local.

In other words, something is always bound to come along and make you rethink what you know by forcing you to look at it in a broader context. I’ve arrived at this notion after interviewing hundreds of scientists, and also after being married for 46 years.

I don’t mean that laws are not true and useful, especially when they have been verified by experiment. But they are likely to continue to be true only within a certain frame, once another frame is discovered. Some scientists will probably find this idea heretical and others may find it obvious. According to this law, they’ll both be right (depending on the frame they’re working in).

Another way of saying this is that no matter how much we know about something, it is just the tip of the iceberg. And most disasters occur by coming in contact with the other part of the iceberg.

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ALDA’S LAWS The following is written by a non-scientist who supposes it might be

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ALDA’S SECOND LAW OF LAWS A law does not know how local it is.

Citizens of Lawville do not realize there are city limits and are constantly surprised to find out they live in a county. When you’re operating within the frame of a law, you can’t know where the edges of the frame are — where dragons begin to show up.

I’ve just been interviewing astronomers about dark matter and dark energy in the universe. These two things make up something like 96% of the universe. The part of the universe we can see or in some way observe is only about 4%. That leaves a lot of universe that needs to be rethought. And some people speculate that dark energy may be leaking in from a whole other universe; an even bigger change of frame, if that turns out to be the case.

It’s now known that vast stretches of DNA once thought to be Junk DNA because they don’t code for proteins actually regulate or even silence conventional genes. The conventional genes — what we used to think were responsible for everything we knew about heritability — account for only 2% of our DNA. Apparently, it’s not yet known how much of the other 98% is active, but I think the frame has just shifted here.

Welcome to Lawville; you are now leaving Lawville.

JULIAN BARBOUR Theoretical Physicist; Author, The End of Time

does not exist, space does not exist. He argues that the universe is a network of relations and not a game played out on some invisible arena of absolute space and time such as Newton postulated. I agree but believe it is important to formulate precisely the manner in which the universe is relational.

BARBOUR’S FIRST LAW The change of a physical field at a given point is not measured by time but by the changes of all the other physical fields at the same point. To determine a rate of change, one does not divide an infinitesimal change by an infinitesimal time interval but by the weighted average of all the other changes at the same point. This ensures that an invisible time can play no role in the dynamics of the universe.

BARBOUR’S SECOND LAW Geometry is founded on congruence, dynamics on minimisation of incongruence.

This requires amplification. Suppose just three particles in space. Newton defined their motions relative to absolute space. In relational dynamics, this is not allowed. Instead, the motions (changes) between two instantaneous states of the three particles are completely determined by the intrinsic changes of the triangles that they form. Real change will happen when a triangle becomes incongruent with itself. To determine the intrinsic change between one triangle and another ever so slightly incongruent with it, move one relative to each other until the position of best matching, in which they coincide more closely than in any other possible relative positioning, is achieved. The corresponding displacements (changes) determined by this minimisation of incongruence are the true physical displacements. The notion of best matching can be applied universally to both particles and fields.

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BARBOUR’S LAW My laws make more precise Carlo Rovelli’s two principles: time

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BARBOUR’S THIRD LAW Space is Riemannian.

Spelled out in the appropriate mathematical detail, these three laws seem to explain the structure of all currently known physical fields as well as the existence of the universal light cone of Einstein’s special relativity and gauge theory.

MICHAEL SHERMER Publisher, Skeptic Magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific

American; Author, The Believing Brain

indistinguishable from God.

Any ETI that we might encounter would not be at our level of culture, science, and technology, nor would they be behind us. How far ahead of us would they be? If they were only a little ahead of us on an evolutionary time scale, they would be light years ahead of us technologically, because cultural evolution is much more rapid than biological evolution. God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Since we are far from the mark on these traits, how could we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely, from an ETI who has them in relatively (to us) copious amounts? Thus, we would be unable to distinguish between absolute and relative omniscience and omnipotence. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than us, then by definition it would be an ETI!

SHERMER’S THREE PRINCIPLES OF PROVISIONAL MORALITY AND EVOLUTIONARY ETHIC 1) The ask-first principle: to find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first. 2) The happiness principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else’s happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else’s unhappiness. 3) The liberty principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else’s liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else’s loss of liberty.

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SHERMER’S LAST LAW Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is

AL SECKEL Cognitive Neuroscientist; Author, Optical Illusions: The Science of

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Visual Perception

SECKEL’S FIRST LAW Visual perception is essentially an ambiguity solving process.

Most of us take vision for granted. After all, it comes to us so easily. With normal vision we are able to navigate quickly and efficiently through a visually rich three-dimensional world of light, shading, texture, and color — a complex world in motion, with objects of different sizes at differing distances. Looking about we have a definite sense of the “real world”.

In fact, our visual system is so successful at building an accurate representation of the real world (our perception) that most of us do not realize what a difficult task our brain is performing. Without conscious thought, our visual system gathers and interprets complex information, providing us with a seamless perception of our environment. The complexities of how we perceive are cleverly concealed by a successful visual system.

It might seem reasonable for us to assume that there is a one-to-one mapping between the real world and what you perceive — that your visual system “sees” the retinal image, in much the way that a digital camera records what it “sees.”

Although it seems like a useful analogy, there is no real comparison between our visual system and a camera beyond a strictly surface level. Furthermore, this comparison trivializes the accomplishments of our visual system. This is because a camera records incoming information, but our brain interprets incoming information. Furthermore, it feels to us as if a photograph reproduces a three-dimensional world, but it doesn’t. It only suggests one. The same visual system that interprets the world around us also interprets the photograph to make it appear as a threedimensional scene.

31 Our perceptions are not always perfect. Sometimes our brain will interpret a static cube, is a classic example of a single image that is interpreted in more than one way. If you fixate on this cube for any length of time, it will spontaneously reverse in depth, even though the image on the retina remains constant. Our brain interprets this image differently because of conflicting depth cues.

The great 19th century German physicist and physiologist Hermann Von Helmholtz first discovered the basic problem of perception over one hundred years ago. He correctly reasoned that the visual information from our world that is projected onto the back of the retina is spatially ambiguous. Helmholtz reasoned that there can be an infinite variety of shapes that can give rise to the same retinal image, as long as they subtend the same visual angle to the eye.

However, the concept of visual ambiguity is far deeper than what Helmholtz originally proposed, because it turns out that any one aspect of visual information, such as brightness, color, motion, etc, could have arisen from infinitely many different conditions. It is very hard to appreciate this fact at first, because what we perceive in a normal viewing environment is not at all ambiguous.

If all visual stimuli are inherently ambiguous, how does our visual/perceptual system discard the infinite variety of possible conditions to settle on the correct interpretation almost all the time, and in such a quick and efficient manner? The problem basically stated is, how does the visual system â&#x20AC;&#x153;retrieveâ&#x20AC;? all of the visual information about the 3D world from the very limited information contained in the 2D retinal image? This is a basic and central question of perception.

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image on the retina in more than one way. A skeleton cube, known as a Necker

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Studying the visual system only at one level will never result in a full understanding of visual perception. Many of the underlying mechanisms that mediate vision may be even “messier” than previously thought, with cross-feedback from more than one level of visual processing contributing to processing at another level. UCSD vision scientist V.S. Ramachandran is correct when he believes that it is time to “open the black box in order to study the responses of nerve cells,” but he is also probably right to promote his Utilitarian Theory of Perception, which argues for a clever “bag of tricks” that the human visual system has evolved over millions of years of evolution to resolve the inherent ambiguities in the visual image. Visual perception is largely an ambiguity-solving process.

The task of vision scientists, therefore, is to uncover these hidden and underlying constraints, rather than to attribute to the visual system a degree of simplicity that it simply does not possess.

33 SECKEL’S SECOND LAW Our visual/perceptual system is highly constrained.

illusions, dismissed by many as failures of the visual system, quirky exceptions to normal vision. If illusions are not failures of the visual system, then, what are they? After all, we do categorize a number of different perceptual experiences as “illusions”. What makes them fundamentally different than those we perceive to be normal?

One difference is a noticeable split between your perception and conception. With an illusion, your perception is fooled but your conception is correct — you’re seeing something wrong (your misperception), but you know it’s wrong (your correct conception). Initially, your conception may be fooled too, but at that point you are unaware that you are encountering an illusion. It is only when your conception is at odds with your perception that you are aware that you have encountered an illusion.

Furthermore, in almost all pictorial illusions (where the meaning of the image is not ambiguous), your perceptions will continue to be fooled, even though your conception is fine, no matter how many times you view the illusion. It does not matter how old you are, how smart you are, how cultured you are, or how artistic you are, you will continue to be fooled by these illusions over and over again. In fact, you cannot “undo” your incorrect perceptions, even with extended experiences, worldly knowledge, or training. It is more important for your visual system to adhere to these constraints than to violate them because it has encountered something unusual, inconsistent, or paradoxical. This indicates that your visual/ perceptual system is highly constrained on how it interprets the world.

It is not my intention to cause the reader to think that visual perception is unreliable and untrustworthy. This would be a mistake as our perceptions of the world are veridical. However, how we perceive the world is not a mirror image of reality, but an actively and intelligently constructed one that allows us to have the best chances for survival in a complicated environment.

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Sometimes our perceptions are wrong. Often these errors have been classified as

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LEE SMOLIN Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Time Reborn

SMOLIN’S FIRST LAW Genuine advances are rarely made by accident; in fact, the outcome of a scientific investigation is usually less dramatic than originally hoped for. Therefore, if you want to do something really significant in science, you must aim high and you must take genuine risks.

SMOLIN’S SECOND LAW In every period and every community there is something that everybody believes, but cannot justify. If you want to understand anything, you have to start by ignoring what everyone believes, and thinking for yourself. Feynman said something very similar: “Science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.”

SMOLIN’S THIRD LAW Time does exist.

SMOLIN’S ZEROTH LAW A measure of our ignorance about nature is the extent to which our theories depend on background structures, which are entities necessary to define the quantities in the theory, that do not themselves refer to anything which evolves dynamically in time. Our understanding can always be deepened by bringing such fixed, background structures into the domain of dynamical law. By doing so, we convert absolute properties, defined with respect to background structures, into relational properties, defined in terms of relationships among dynamical degrees of freedom.

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ERNST PÖPPEL Neuroscientist; Chairman, Board of Directors Human Science Center; Professor, Department of Medical Psychology, Munich University; Author, Mindworks

ERNST LAW I refer to my “laws” as “Pöppel’s Paradox”, and “Pöppel’s Universal”. Actually the names have been invented by others.

PÖPPEL’S PARADOX Not to see, but to see. Some years ago (1973) we described a phenomenon that patients with a certain brain injury show some residual vision although they do not have a conscious representation of their remained visual capacity. They can orient in space, or they can discriminate simple patterns, but they do not know that they can do it. This phenomenon became known as “blindsight”. Apparently there is a lot of implicit processing going in our brain that lacks an explicit representation, but which usually is associated with conscious experience. Interestingly, the phenomenon of blindsight not only made a “career” in the neurosciences, but also in philosophy.

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PÖPPEL’S UNIVERSAL We take life 3 seconds (3s) at a time. Human experience and behavior is characterized by temporal segmentation. Successive segments or “time windows” have a duration of approximately 3s. Examples: Intentional movements are embedded within 3s (like a handshake); the anticipation of a precise movement like hitting a golf ball does not go beyond 3s. If we reproduce the duration, we can do so accurately up to 3s but not beyond. If we look at ambiguous figures (like a vase vs. two faces) or if we listen to ambiguous phoneme sequences (like Cu-Ba-Cu-Ba-.., either hearing Cuba or Bacu) automatically after approx. 3s the percept switches to the alternative. The working platform of our short term memory lasts only 3s (being interrupted after 3s most of the information is gone). Spontaneous speech in all languages is temporally segmented, each segment lasting up to 3s. This temporal segmentation of speech shows up again in poetry, as a verse of a poem is embedded within 3s (Shakespeare: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”). Musical motives preferably last 3s (remember Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), decisions are made within 3s (like zapping between TV channels) and there are more examples. Thus, the brain provides a temporal stage that last approximately 3s, which is used in perception, cognition, movement control, memory, speech, or music.

HUMA N EX PERIENC ES OCCUR IN TIME WIN D OWS

DEC IDE TO C HANGE FR OM ONE C HANNEL TO T H E N E XT = 3 S E CON DS

HITTING A GOLF B ALL = 3 SECONDS

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HAND SHAK E = 3 SECONDS

LAW OF COMMUNICATION

RUDY RUCKER Mathematician, Computer Scientist; CyberPunk Pioneer; Novelist; Author, Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to be Happy

RUCKERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S LAW OF MORPHOGENESIS Most biological, social, and psychological systems are based on interactions between an activator and an inhibitor. The patterns which emerge depend upon the relative rates at which the activator and inhibitor spread. Three main cases occur, depending on whether the activatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s diffusion rate is much less than, roughly equal to, or greater than the rate at which the inhibition spreads. In these three cases we observe, respectively, isolated patches like zebra stripes or leopard spots, moving complex patterns like Belusov-Zhabontinsky scrolls, or seething chaos. Applying this to the activator-inhibitor patterns in the human brain, if you inhibit new thoughts, you are left with a few highly stimulated patches: obsessions and fixed ideas. If you manage to create new thought associations at about the same rate you inhibit them, you develop creative complexity. And too high a rate of activation leads to unproductive mania. Exercise: apply this notion to spread of good and bad news in society.

ESTHER DYSON Catalyst, Information Technology Startups, EDventure Holdings, Former Chariman, Electronic Frontier Foundation and ICANN; Author,

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Release 2.1

DYSON’S LAW Do ask; don’t lie.

Rationale: How can we find the happy medium between disclosure and prying, between transparency and overexposure? The last thing we want is a law saying that everyone should disclose everything: vested interests, negotiating strategies, intentions, bank account, marital status, whatever.

How can we instead devise some rule that fits the best qualities of the Net decentralized, more or less self-enforcing, flexible... and responsive to personal choices? The idea is to create a culture that expects disclosure, rather than a legal regime that requires it. People can decide how much they want to play, and others can decide whether to play with them.

First of all, it’s two-way. It’s not for a single person; it’s for an interaction. The first person has to ask; the second person, to answer truthfully or refuse openly to answer.

It drives the responsibility for requiring disclosure down to where it belongs — to those most likely to be affected by the disclosure. It decentralizes the requirement and the enforcement to everyone, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few at the top. (If that’s an awkward use of “requirement,” it’s because we don’t even have a word for “decentralized command.”)

As an individual, you are not commanded to answer; you may want to protect your own privacy or someone else’s. But if you do answer, you must do so truthfully.

Then it’s up to the people involved to decide whether to engage — in conversation, in a transaction, in whatever kind of interaction they might be contemplating. The magic of “Do ask; don’t lie” is that the parties to any particular interaction can make a specific, local decision about what level of disclosure is appropriate.

KARL SABBAGH Writer and Television Producer; Author, Remembering Our

Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us

All the mistakes I have made in my life — not that there are that many, of course — have been because I failed to follow my own law.

SABBAGH’S SECOND LAW The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred. I think this is the more original and far-reaching of the two laws but I have put it second because it’s not really mine. It was said to me by Alan Mulally, an inspiring Boeing manager (and they need inspiring managers at the moment).

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SABBAGH’S FIRST LAW Never assume.

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STEVEN LEVY Senior Editor for Newsweek

it might be.

In journalism, this means that the best practitioners should not have the stories written out in their heads before they report them. Preconceptions can blind you to the full, rich human reality that awaits you when you actually listen to your subjects and approach the material with an open mind. It wouldn’t surprise me if the same tabula rasa principle applies when scientists try to answer the big questions.

JOHN MCWHORTER Linguist; Cultural Commentator; Senior Fellow, Manhattan Institute; Author, Doing Our Own Thing

MCWHORTER’S LAW OF SOCIAL HISTORY In a context of widespread literacy, easy communications, and a large class of people with ample leisure time, the social movement that begins by addressing a concrete grievance will, after the grievance has been largely addressed, pass into the hands of persons inclined for individual reasons towards the dramatic and self-righteous, who will manipulate the movement’s iconography and passion into a staged indignation difficult for outsiders to square with reality, and with little actively progressive or beneficent intention.

HOWARD RHEINGOLD Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs

RHEINGOLD’S LAW Communication media that enable collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiply the power available to civilizations and enable new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the Internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of urban info-nomads.

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LEVY’S LAW The truth is always more interesting that your preconception of what

ANDRIAN KREYE Editor, The Feuilleton (Arts and Essays), of the German Daily

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Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich

KREYE’S LAW OF LITERALISM When devaluated information makes opinion an added value, the law of literalism is permanently questioned, while remaining the last resort of reason.

The inflation of available information has devaluated word and image to mere content. The resulting perception fatigue is increasingly met with the overused rhetorical tool of polarizing opinion. It’s based on an old trick used by street vendors. In the intellectual food court of mass media, opinion appeals to reflexes just as the fried fat and sugar smells of snack food outlets activate age-old instincts of hunting and gathering. In the average consumer opinion triggers an illusion of enlightenment and understanding that ultimately clouds the reason of literalism.

Literalism is freedom from credo, dogma and philosophical pessimism. It’s a process of finding reality driven by an optimistic faith in its existence. It tries to transcend the limits of the word, by permanently questioning any perception of reality.

Belief and ideology, the strongest purveyors of opinion, have long known the language of science and reason. Creationists use secular reasoning to demand that schools stop teaching the laws of evolution. Right-wing radicals and religious fundamentalists of all creeds tone down their world visions to fit into an opinionated consensus. Economic and political forces use selective findings to present their interests as fact.

Literalism can become an exhausting effort to defend the principles of fact and reason in a polarized world. The complex and often boring nature of factual reality makes it an unglamorous voice amid a choir of sparkling witticisms and provocations. Devoid of the ecstasies and spiritual cushioning of religion it denies age old longings. It can be decried as heresy or simultaneously accused of treason by all sides. It must sustain the insecurities brought on by the absence of ultimate truth. Having been the gravitational center of enlightenment, it must be defended as the last resort of reason.

SIR JOHN MADDOX Royal Commissions on Environmental Pollution and Genet-

ic Manipulation

most eager to see their own manuscripts published quickly and given wide publicity — and the least willing to see their length reduced.

MADDOX’S SECOND LAW Reviewers who are best placed to understand an author’s work are the least likely to draw attention to its achievements, but are prolific sources of minor criticism, especially the identification of typos.

MADDOX’S THIRD LAW Just as nature is supposed to abhor a vacuum, so scientific opinion abhors questions unlikely to be answered soon, whence the general belief that the origin of the Universe is now nearly understood.

RAPHAEL KASPER Physicist; Associate Vice Provost for Research, Columbia University; Former Associate Director of the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory

KAPER’S LAW One should never blindly accept things as they are.

Jose Saramago writes in The Cave with his usual quirky punctuation and sentence structure, “... we often hear it said, or we say it ourselves, I’ll get used to it, we say or they say, with what seems to be genuine acceptance..., what no one asks is at what cost do we get used to things.”

KASPER’S SECOND LAW Try to know where and how your thoughts arise and always give credit to your teachers.

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MADDOX’S FIRST LAW Those who scorn the “publish or perish” principle are the

JAMSHED BHARUCHA Psychologist; President, The Cooper Union for the

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Advancement of Science and Art

BHARUCHA’S LAW To understand what people are thinking and feeling, look beyond what they say. Language does not capture the full range and grain of thought and experience, and its unique power enables us as easily to mask our thoughts and feelings as it does to express them.

STUART PIMM Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology, Duke University; Author, The World According to Pimm: a Scientist Audits the Earth

PIMM’S FIRST LAW No language spoken by fewer than 100,000 people survives contact with the outside world, while no language spoken by more than one million people can be eliminated by such contact.

PIMM’S SECOND LAW With every change in language (including first contact with humanity), a region’s biodiversity shrinks by 20 percent.

SPOKEN LA NGUAGE: SURVIVA L A FTER CONTACT WIT H OUTSID E WOR L D

L ANGUAGE SP OK EN BY 100,000: WILL B E ELI M I N AT E D

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LANGUAGE SPOKEN BY 1,000,000: WILL NOT BE ELIMINATED

LAW OF TECHNOLOGY

DAVE WINER Blogging & RSS Software Pioneer; Editor, Scripting News Weblog

WINERâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S LAW OF THE INTERNET Productive open work will only result in standards as long as the parties involved strive to follow prior art in every way possible. Gratuitous innovation is when the standardization process ends, and usually that happens quickly.

Think about the process of arriving at a standard. Someone goes first with something new. Assume it catches on and becomes popular. Because the person did it in an open way, with no patents, or other barriers to competitors using the technology, a second developer decides to do the same thing. The innovator supports this, because he or she wants a standard to develop. At that point the second person has the power to decide how strong a standard it will be. If the new implementation strives to work exactly as the original does, then itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more likely the standard will be strong, and there will be a vibrant market around it. But if the second party decides to use the concept but not be technically compatible, it will be weak.

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One would assume that the second mover would make every effort to do it exactly the same way as the first, but over the years, but this has not been the case. As soon as a standard becomes popular, market forces lead to multiple incompatible ways forward. Microsoft called this Embrace & Extend, but all technology vendors are driven to break standards. Standards can only go a short distance before forking defeats the standardization process.

This is an extension to Postel’s Law (the late Jon Postel was one of the key players of the development of the Internet), which says you should be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send. It goes further by saying that we should all collectively be conservative in what we send. This keeps the technology small and the market approachable by developers of all sizes. The large companies always try to make the technology complicated to reduce competition to other organizations with large research and development budgets.

MARK HURST Founder of Internet Consulting Firm, Creative Good

HURST’S LAW Any unbounded bitstream tends to irrelevance.

Bits are so easy to create, copy, and send that without some filtering process, the worth of the entire bitstream decays rapidly. A good example is the e-mail inbox. Many e-mail users have no discipline about deleting or filtering their mail, and thus the bits that flow in — spam and legitimate mail together — clutter the inbox to an extent that the worth of the inbox overall tends to zero.

Stated another way, the worth of a bitstream is proportional to the accuracy and usage of the filters and meta-bits applied to the bitstream.

IZUMI AIZU Research Director of Hyper Network Society

As was the case for the Internet, or the PCs, unless you use it, you cannot understand its real significance. To put it the other way around, if and when you use it, it will prevail.

Instead of “seeing” from afar, you must use it to understand. So many people denied the potential and the impact of the Net simply because they never tried to use it.

AIZU’S SECOND LAW What changes the world is communication, not information.

We are living in a world where we can exchange ideas and emotions freely and inexpensively, the first time in the history. Information piled up, or disseminated one way down, never makes people happy or feel compelled to act that much, while communication, just a single line or word from your friends or beloved, or even from a total stranger, that catches your heart, often results in collective actions.

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AIZU’S FIRST LAW Using is believing.

JARON LANIER Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, You Are Not A Gadget;

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Who Owns The Future?

LANIER’S LAWS FOR PUTTING MACHINES IN THEIR PLACE They are all stolen from earlier laws that predate the appearance of computers by decades or centuries.

LANIER’S FIRST LAW Humans change themselves through technology.

Example: Lanier’s Law of Eternal Improvement for Virtual Reality: Average human sensory perception will gain acuity over successive generations in tandem with the improving qualities of pervasive media technology.

LANIER’S SECOND LAW Even though human nature is dynamic, you must find a way to think of it as being distinct from the rest of nature.

You can’t have a categorical imperative without categories. Or, You can’t have a golden rule without gold. You have to draw a Circle of Empathy around yourself and others in order to be moral. If you include too much in the circle, you become incompetent, while if you include too little you become cruel. This is the “Normal form” of the eternal liberal/conservative dichotomy.

LANIER’S THIRD You can’t rely completely on the level of rationality humans are able to achieve to decide what to put inside the circle. People are demonstrably insane when it comes to attributing nonhuman sentience, as can be seen at any dog show.

LANIER’S FOURTH LAW: LANIER’S LAW OF AI UNRECOGNIZABILITY You can’t rely on experiment alone to decide what to put in the circle. A Turing Test-like experiment can’t be designed to distinguish whether a computer has gotten smarter or a person interacting with that computer has gotten stupider (usually by lowering or narrowing standards of human excellence in some way).

53 LANIER’S FIFTH LAW If you’re inclined to put machines inside your circle, you choose. These metrics have no objectivity.

For just one example, consider Lanier’s retelling of Parkinson’s Law for the Postdot-com Era: Software inefficiency and inelegance will always expand to the level made tolerable by Moore’s Law. Put another way, Lanier’s corollary to Brand’s Laws: Whether Small Information wants to be free or expensive, Big Information wants to be meaningless.

LANIER’S SIXTH LAW When one must make a choice despite almost but not quite total uncertainty, work hard to make your best guess.

Best guess for Circle of Empathy: Danger of increasing human stupidity is probably greater than potential reality of machine sentience. Therefore choose not to place machines in Circle of Empathy.

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can’t rely on metrics of technological sophistication to decide which machines to

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SHERRY TURKLE Psychologist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ; Inter-

net Culture Researcher; Author, Alone Together

side, what the technology does for us and a subjective side, what the technology does to us, to our ways of seeing the world, including affecting our ways of thinking about ourselves.

So the Internet both facilitates communication and changes our sense of identity, privacy, and sexual possibility; gene sequencing both gives us new ways of diagnosing and treating disease and new ways of thinking about human nature and human history. On an instrumental level, interactive, “sociable” robotics offers new opportunities for education, childcare, and eldercare; on a subjective level, it offers new challenges to our view of human nature, and to our moral sense of what kinds of creatures are deserving of relationship.

TURKLE’S LAW OF HUMAN VULNERABILITY TO AN ACTIVE GAZE If a creature, computational or biological, makes eye contact with a person, tracks her gaze, and gestures with interest toward her, that person will experience the creature as sentient, even capable of understanding her inner state.

The human has evolved to anthropomorphize. We are on the brink of creating machines so “sociable” in appearance that they will push our evolutionary buttons to treat them as kindred. Yet they will not have shared our human biological and social experience and will thus not have our means of access to the meanings of moments in the human life cycle: a child’s first step, an adolescent’s strut, a parent’s pride. Yet we will not be in complete control of our feelings for these objects because our feelings will not be based on what they know or understand, but on what we “experience” them as knowing, a very different thing.

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TURKLE’S LAW OF EVOCATIVE OBJECTS Every technology has an instrumental

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We don’t know what people and animals are “really” thinking but grant them a “species pass” in which we make assumptions about their inner states. It is a social and moral contract. Contemporary technology has put us close to the moment when we shall be called upon to make this kind of contract (or some other kind) about creatures of our own devising. We are called upon to answer the question: What kinds of relationships are appropriate to have with a machine? Our answer will not only affect the instrumental roles that we allow technology to play but the way technology will co-create the human psyche and sensibility of the future.

NIELS DIFFRIENT Industrial Designer

DIFFRIENT’S LAW The improvements derived from technological advances have an equal and opposite effect on culture and the environment magnified by time and scale.

W. BRIAN ARTHER Citibank Professor at the Santa Fe Institute

player — product, company, or country.

The reason: Such markets are subject to increasing returns or self-reinforcing mechanisms. Therefore an initial advantage — often bestowed by chance — leads to increasing advantage and eventually heavy market domination. (Absent government intervention, of course).

ARTHUR’S SECOND LAW As technology advances it becomes ever more biological.

We are leaving an age of mechanistic, fixed-design technologies, and entering an age of metabolic, self-reorganizing technologies. In this sense, as technology becomes more advanced it becomes more organic — therefore more “biological.” Further, as biological mechanisms at the cellular and DNA levels become better understood, they become harnessed and co-opted as technologies. In this century, biology and technology will therefore intertwine.

ARTHUR’S THIRD LAW The modularization of technologies increases with the extent of the market.

Just as it pays to create a specialized worker if there is sufficient volume of throughput to occupy that specialty, it pays to create a standard prefabricated assembly, or module, if its function recurs in many instances. Modularity therefore is to a technological economy what the division of labor is to a manufacturing one — it increases as the economy expands.

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ARTHUR’S FIRST LAW High-tech markets are dominated 70-80 percent by a single

LAW OF HUMANITY

EDWARD O. LAUMANN Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago

LAUMANNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S FIRST PROPOSITION Moderation in levels of partnered sex activity is the mode for the bulk of humankind and is consistent with high levels of subjective well-being.

LAUMANNâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S SECOND PROPOSITION Low levels of subjective sexual well-being is associated with poor physical, emotional, and mental health.

These propositions (they are empirical associations and not established as causal) are based on my extensive international work on human sexuality. They are based on surveys I have conducted in the United States and China as well as the Pfizer funded Global Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Behavior (N = 27,500) which interviewed equal numbers of men and women 40 to 80 years old in 29 countries world wide. The real question is the nature of the causal link between these variables.

PO WE R DI ST R I B U T I ON OF MA JOR EVENTS THROUGHOUT HUMA N H ISTORY

Major Event Degree of Catastrphic and Cascading Consequences

AQUI SI TI ON OF POWER

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TIME

SCOTT ATRAN Anthropologist, National Center for Scientific Research, Paris; Author, Talking to the Enemy

ATRAN’S POWER LAW OF HISTORY (A COROLLARY TO THE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES) The major events that determine human history follow a power distribution (a more or less straight line on a log-log scale), with catastrophic and cascading consequences (economic and health crises, political and cultural revolutions, war and terrorism, etc.), because people naturally prefer to act upon the future based on their modeling of past occurrences. People do not repeat the catastrophes of history because they forget it; people build up self-destructing ideologies and behavior patterns that continue history’s catastrophic path because they remember the past too well (e.g., “the maginot effect” for war and the soonto-be “box-cutting effect” for terrorism).

Ancillary: For politics, history’s most well-developed and self-assured “isms” (e.g., colonialism, communism, globalism) are those most prone to radical collapse.

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ATRAN’S LAW OF BARE COUNTER INTUITION (FOR THE CULTURAL SURVIVAL OF ABSURD IDEAS) Natural selection endowed humans with an intuitive ontology that includes folkbiology (e.g., biodiversity divides into mutually exclusive groups of beings, and each group has a proprietary essence), folkpsychology (e.g., intentional and emotional beings have bodies, and have knowledge of other like beings by observing and inferring how other bodies act), and folkphysics (e.g., two bodies cannot simultaneously occupy the same place at the same time, and no body can occupy different places at the same time). Barely counterintuitive ideas, which violate universal constraints on intuitive ontology (e.g., a bodiless being) but otherwise retain most commonsense properties associated with intuitive ontology (a bodiless being who mostly acts and thinks like a person), are those fictions most apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration (e.g., sphinxes and griffins, spirits and crystal balls, ghosts and gods).

Ancillary: For religion (i.e., for most humans in all human societies), the more costly one’s commitment to some factually absurd but barely counterintuitive world (e.g., afterlife), the more others believe that person to be sincere and trustworthy.

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, Poly-

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technic Institute of New York University; Author, Antifragile

TALEB’S FIRST BLACK SWAN LAW The risk you know anything about today is not the one that matters. What will hurt you next has to look completely unplausible today. The more unplausible the event the more it will hurt you.

Consider that had the World Trade Center attack been deemed a reasonable risk then we would have had tighter control of the skies and it would have not taken place. It happened because it was improbable. The awareness of a specific danger makes you protect yourself from its precise effect and may prevent the event itself from occurring.

TALEB’S SECOND BLACK SWAN LAW (COROLLARY) We don’t learn that we don’t learn. We don’t learn the First Black Swan Law from experience, yet we think that we learn something from it. Abstract subject matters (and metarules) do not affect our risk avoidance mechanisms; only vivid images do. People did not learn from the World Trade Center (and the succession of similar events in history such as the formation of financial bubbles) that we have a horrible track record in forecasting such occurrences. They just learned the specific task to avoid tall buildings and Islamic terrorists — after the fact.

MARK JAY MIRSKY Writer, Founder and Editor of Fiction Magazine

To imagine the universe is to fear it, even as one feels the power and pleasure of trying to find its furthest boundaries. To meet that fear one has to seek consolation whether in scientific theory or intuitive vision.

As a corollary to that, the return of past time in the present, as death comes steadily closer, if not unique to the human mind, is certainly one of the consolations of consciousness, and of the shadow realm of dream. If there is hope it is in our ability as men and women to imagine ourselves not only in other worlds but as an “other,” as an opposite. Robert Musil, Proust, Kafka, Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri together with the anonymous scribes of the religious epics, Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, were uncanny in their ability to imagine in this way.

Imagination precedes what we call reality. I would propose this as a law of daily life and suspect that it plays a large part in our evolution. Trying to preserve and recreate what was best in my past and the past of distant ancestors is part of what keeps me balanced before a future in which I want to hope.

To imagine is not just to exist, but to prolong existence. At the last moment Spinoza could not surrender the idea that somehow memory of what had happened would not be lost in the vastness of the universe. Spinoza needed that consolation. Whether it does or not, we need to believe that memory persists, and that we are capable of influencing just what memory will be valued and given predominance.

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MIRSKY’S LAW Imagination precedes reality.

SCOTT SAMPSON Dinosaur Paleontologist and Science Communicator; Author,

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Dinosaur Odyssey: Fossil Threads in the Web of Life

SAMPSON’S LAW OF INTERDEPENDENT ORIGINATION Life’s unfolding is a tapestry in which every new thread is contingent upon the nature, timing, and interweaving of virtually all previous threads.

This is an extension of the idea that the origin of new life forms is fundamentally contingent upon interactions among previous biotas. As Stephen J. Gould described it, if one could rewind the tape of life and let events play out again, the results would almost certainly differ dramatically. The point of distinction here is a deeper incorporation of the connections inherent in the web of life. Specifically, the origin of new species is inextricably linked both to evolutionary history and to intricate ecological relationships with other species. Thus, speciation might be aptly termed “interdependent origination.” So, for example, it is often said that the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years ago cleared the way for the radiation of mammals and, ultimately, the origin of humans. Yet the degree of life’s interconnectedness far exceeds that implied in this statement.

Dinosaurs persisted for 160 million years prior to this mass dying, co-evolving in intricate organic webs with plants, bacteria, fungi, and algae, as well as other animals, including mammals. Together these Mesozoic life forms influenced the origins and fates of one another and all species that followed. Had the major extinction of the dinosaurs occurred earlier or later, or had dinosaurs never evolved, subsequent biotas would have been wholly different, and we almost certainly wouldn’t be here to contemplate nature. An equivalent claim could be made for any major group at any point in the history of life.

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GEORGE LAKOFF Fellow, The Rockridge Institute; Author, The Little Blue Book

LAKOFF’S FIRST LAW Frames trump facts.

All of our concepts are organized into conceptual structures called “frames” (which may include images and metaphors) and all words are defined relative to those frames. Conventional frames are pretty much fixed in the neural structures of our brains. In order for a fact to be comprehended, it must fit the relevant frames. If the facts contradict the frames, the frames, being fixed in the brain, will be kept and the facts ignored.

We see this in politics every day. Consider the expression “tax relief” which the White House introduced into common use on the day of George W. Bush’s inauguration. A “relief” frame has an affliction, an afflicted party, a reliever who removes the affliction and is thereby a hero, and in the frame anyone who tries to stop the reliever from administering the relief is a bad guy, a villain.

67 “Tax relief” imposes the additional metaphor that Taxation Is an Affliction, with and the Democrats are bad guys for opposing him. This frame trumps many facts: Most people wind up paying more in local taxes, payments for services cut, and debt servicing as a result of the Bush’s tax cuts.

There is of course another way to think about taxes: Taxes are what you pay to live in America — to have democracy, opportunity, government services, and the vast infrastructure build by previous taxpayers — the highways, the internet, the schools, scientific research, the court system, etc. Taxes are membership fees used to maintain and expand services and the infrastructure. But however true this may be, it is not yet an established frame inscribed in the synapses of our brains.

This has an important consequence. Political liberals have inherited an assumption from the Enlightenment, that The facts will set us free, that if the public is just given the facts, they will, being rational beings, reach the right conclusion. It is simply false. It violates Lakoff’s Law.

LAKOFF’S SECOND LAW Voters vote their identities, not their self-interest.

Because of the way they frame the world, voters vote in a way that best accords with their identities and not in accord with their self-interest. That is why it is of no use for Democrats to keep pointing out that Bush’s tax cuts go to the top 1 percent, not to most voters. If they identify with Bush because they share his culture and his world view, they will vote against their self-interest.

We saw this in California in the recall election, when, for example, union members overwhelming favored Gray Davis’ policies as being better for them, yet voted for Schwarzenegger.

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the entailments that the president is a hero for attempting to remove this affliction

HELENA CRONIN Co-Director of LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science; Author, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection

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from Darwin to Today

CRONIN’S LAW OF DUAL INFORMATION STORAGE Adaptations stockpile information in environments as well as in genes.

The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos used to describe himself as a “machine for turning coffee into theorems”. In much the same way, genes are machines for turning stars into a bird’s compass; carotenoids into males of dazzling beauty; smells into love-potions; facial muscles into signals of friendship; a glance into uncertainty of paternity; and oxygen, water, light, zinc, calcium and iron into bears, beetles, bacteria or bluebells. More strictly, genes are machines for turning stars into birds and thereby into more genes.

This reminds us that adaptations weld together two information-storage systems. They build up a store of information in genes, meticulously accumulated, elaborated and honed down evolutionary time. And, to match that store, they also stockpile information in the environment. For genes need resources to build and run organisms; and adaptations furnish genes (or organisms) with the information to pluck those resources from the environment. So stars and carotenoids and glances need to be there generation after generation no less reliably than the information carried by genes.

Thus genes and environments are not in opposition; not zero-sum; not parallel but separate. Rather, they are designed to work in tandem. Their interconnection is highly intricate, minutely structured; and it becomes ever more so over evolutionary time.

And thus, without environments to provide resources, genes would not be viable; and without genes to specify what constitutes an environment, environments would not exist. So how could biology not be an environmental issue? And, conversely, how could environments not be — necessarily — a biological issue?

69 CRONIN’S LAW OF ADAPTATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTS What constitutes an organ-

What constitutes an organism’s environment? The answer is that it is the organism’s adaptations that stake out which are the relevant aspects of the world. An environment is not simply a given. It is the typical characteristics of a species, its adaptations, that specify what constitutes the environment for that species.

Think of it this way. Adaptations are keys to unlocking the world’s resources. They are the means by which organisms harness features of the world for their own use, transforming them from part of the indifferent world-out-there into the organism’s own tailor-made, species-specific environment, an environment brimming with materials and information for the organism’s own distinctive adaptive needs.

And so to understand how any species interacts with its environment, we need to start by exploring that species’ adaptations. Only through adaptations was that environment constructed and only through understanding adaptations can we reconstruct it.

And, similarly, within a sexually reproducing species, differences between the sexes should be the default assumption. In particular, the female’s adaptations should not be treated as mere adumbrations of the male’s. On the contrary, if a rule-of-thumb default is needed, turn to the female. After all, the ‘little brown bird’ is what the entire species — males, females and juveniles — looks like before sexual selection distorts her mate into a showy explosion of color and song. When it comes to environments, males perceive them as platforms for status games. Females most certainly do not.

IMHO L A W OF H U M ANITY

ism’s environment depends on the species’ adaptations.

GERALD HOLTON Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University; Author, Einstein for the 21st Century:

IMHO L A W OF HUM A N I TY

His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture

HOLTON’S FIRST LAW The turning points in individual and national life are most probably guided by probabilism.

Examples: You are one of about a billion possible yous, since only one spermatozoon [or sometimes two] make it to the ovum, out of about a billion competitors, none that are the same. Or on the national/international scale, the availability of a Churchill in 1940.

THE SECOND LAW The probability of a right answer or a beneficent outcome is usually much smaller than that of the wrong or malignant ones. (This is not pessimism, but realism — an amplified analogue of the Law of Entropy.)

THE THIRD LAW In the limit of small numbers, the previous two Laws may not rigorously apply. Therefore if you need only one parking place when driving your car, look for one first right where you want to go.

DAVID BERREBY Journalist; Author, Us and Them

Human differences and human similarities are infinite, therefore any assortment of people can be grouped together according to a shared trait or divided according to unshared traits. Our borders of race, ethnicity, nation, religion, class etc. are not, then, facts about the world. They are facts about belief. We should look at minds, not kinds, if we want to understand this phenomenon.

BERREBY’S SECOND LAW Science which seems to confirm human-kind beliefs is always welcome; science that undermines human-kind belief is always unpopular.

To put it more cynically, if your work lets people believe there are “Jewish genes’” (never mind that the same genes are found in Palestinians) or that criminals have different kinds of brains from regular people (never mind that regular people get arrested all the time), or that your ancestors 5,000 years ago lived in the same neck of the woods as you (never mind the whereabouts of all your other ancestors), well then, good press will be yours. On the other hand, if your work shows how thoroughly perceptions of race, ethnicity, and other traits change with circumstances, well, good luck. Common sense will defend itself against science.

IMHO L A W OF H U M ANITY

BERREBY’S FIRST LAW Human kinds exist only in human minds.

T HR E E S I DE S TO E V E RY STORY

IMHOâ&#x20AC;&#x192; L A W OF HUM A N I TY

HUSBAND

DEBATE POINT 1

o Tw so me

ra Ty nn y

DEBATE POINT 3 BABY

DEBATE More Interesting

POINT 2

More Interesting

WIFE

DELTA WILLIS Paleontologist; Author, Hominid Gang

DELTAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S LAW There are three sides to every story.

The Greek letter delta is a symbol for change in formulas. This triangle can be taken personally to create a philosophy that can be used as laws. For example, the 3 points of a triangle create a possibility space for change. Two points in a debate provide nothing more than a tyranny of dichotomies, whereas adding a third possibility is always more interesting, and closer to the true complexity of life. This rule of favoring 3s instead of 2s also works in any design to please the eye, such as three pictures on a wall instead of two. A couple become more interesting when they go beyond their own twosome to create a third focal point, whether a child, a book or a business.

As Yale paleontologist Dolf Seilacher put it, Symmetry is boring. The next time you are confronted with only two choices, create a third, and see the possibility space expand and become that much more interesting.

JOHN R. SKOYLES Researcher in the Evolution of Human Intelligence in the

Light of Recent Discoveries About the Brain

exists because the brain’s neural plasticity allows learned symbolic associations to substitute for the innate inputs and outputs of already evolved ape cognitions, a process that extends greatly their functionality.

SKOYLES’ LAW OF LITERACY A society develops democracy to the degree that it writes social, legal and religious ideas using the syntax, vocabulary and pronunciation of everyday speech, rather than that of a dead language.

IMHO L A W OF H U M ANITY

SKOYLES’ LAW OF CULTURE AND THE BRAIN Human culture and human cognition

INDEX

Academics

12, 45

Catastrophy

Addiction

30, 71

Computer

14, 51 21, 24, 28

Alarm 23

Cognitive Science

Algae

Crimnal records

Crystal ball

14, 26, 32

Atoms 25 ATP

8, 15, 65

Axis 58

B Background Bacteria

23, 56

D Danger 23

23, 54, 70 24, 45

Defense

27, 33

Democrates

66, 67

Desires

7, 18, 35

Beauracracy 62

Dinosaur 44

Beethoven 66

Disaster

Behavior

9, 15, 49

Dogma 52

11, 22, 38, 55

Dynamics 21

Biological

Biophysical 27 Black Box Brain

60 7, 13, 40

19, 28, 41

IMHO I N D EX

Economics

18, 23, 46

Education

12, 17, 29, 49

Hatred 15 Humanity

23, 59

Electronics

25, 28

Human-kind

Emotion

17, 44

Hunger 34

Empathy 8 Endorsment 45 Energy

42, 46

Environment

24, 39, 51, 66

Evolution

23, 26, 28, 31

Experiment

21, 43

Extraterrestrial

14, 67

52, 56, 68

I Ignorance

23, 34, 44, 57

Infancy 16 Internet

21, 24, 29

F Journalism 67 Failures

15, 65

Faith

59, 72

Fields 19 Flaws

Juvenielles 70 Justice

9, 37, 55

11, 47

Food courts

Key 33

Football games

Kinetic energy

Frame

12, 54, 68

Freedom 51

G Genes

24, 35, 66

Geometry 25 Globalization

15, 48

Goals 63 God Golden Rule Golf ball

14, 32, 47, 64 23 36, 37

Grievances 19

25, 31, 42

Kinds 68 Knowledge

11, 37, 69

O Observation

Law

Omnipotence 55

45, 48, 56, 68

Law of Entropy

Opinion

21, 32, 44 23, 41, 56

Layman 64

Organisms

Liberty

Origin 19

Light

15, 55 22, 24, 37

Literary 65 Love

17, 54, 71

Outcome

24, 46 23, 27, 48

Ovum 70

M Paradox

12, 59

Managers 9

Pedestrians 69

Mathmatics 33

Personhood

Microtubules

Pharmacological

34, 44

8, 13, 34, 55, 72 27, 43, 51

Mnemonist 12

Philosophy

Morals

Photograph 64

48, 51, 67

Molecules

26, 28

Motor processes

Music

13, 56

Physics

9, 14, 56 23, 28, 34, 57

Politics 53

N Quantum Nature

11, 14, 26, 49

Neurobehavioral development Newtonian Normal Form

16 24, 30 50

13, 22, 35

Qubits 13

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Language 70

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R Race Regular

U 17, 25 13, 42, 57

UCSD 52 Universe

11, 33, 61

Relationship 29

Urban 37

Relativity

Utilitarian 68

Religion Retinal image Revolution

25, 36 52, 64, 71 9 23, 59

Robots 63

V Variation

Vibrant 16 Visual information

Sensory systems Sex

16 18, 21, 57

Shakespeare 63 Software

35, 47

Spermatozoon 71 Stock 42 Superposition

34, 70

Symmetry 72

Visual System Votes

Texture

14, 56

Theory 35 Time

22, 25, 31 28, 32, 36, 48, 51

Transparency 61 Truth

14, 19, 22, 52

TV 71

29, 66

W White House

Wimbleton 9 Women World Trade Center

25, 29

12, 21 44, 57, 58

Vomit 23

World

Telephone

Thought

15, 27, 41, 55

Veil 8

11, 32 24, 33, 65 34

Z Zebra stripes

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