What scientific concept would improve everyone’s cognitive toolkit?

This question from The Edge and the dozens of thoughtful answers make for some good reading. Basically, each author picks a single idea they feel is necessary for everyone to "get" in order to understand the world we live in; to have a successful technological civilization. I found this via Pharyngula, who suggested that the Mediocrity Principle may be The One. That is, the basic understanding that we are not the special reason for the existence of the universe. His argument is that basic math skills would help. We're talking about skills that even average college students seem to lack, but are nominally taught to most people who graduate secondary schools. Adjacent to PZ, Sue Blackmore argues for the primacy of understanding that CINAC (Correlation Is Not A Cause). Apparently this lesson is hard to drum into even college students who are nominally studying science. Most of the answers are direct explanations of ideas necessary to scientific understanding. But a few are more of the "what would be nice to discover" variety. But go see for yourself. There are many insightful replies to this question by 160 authors.

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Emergent consciousness

In the December, 2010 edition of Discover Magazine, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio sets forth his understanding of human consciousness. Damasio has recently published a new book on this topic, Self Comes to Mind. Here's a short excerpt from page 66 of his deeply thought-provoking article at Discover (not available yet online):

Conscious minds result from the smoothly articulated operation of several, often many, brain sites. The ultimate consciousness product occurs from those numerous brain sites at the same time and not in one site in particular, much as the performance of a symphonic piece does not come from the work of a single musician or even a whole section of an orchestra. The oddest thing about the upper reaches of a consciousness performance is the conspicuous absence of a conductor before the performance begins, although as the performance unfolds, a conductor comes into being. For all intents and purposes, a conductor is now leading the orchestra, although the performance has created the conductor--the self--not the other way around. Building a mind capable of encompassing one's lived past and anticipated future, along with the lives of others added to the fabric and the capacity for reflection to boot, resembles the execution of a symphony of Mahlerian proportions. But the true marvel is that the score and the conductor become reality only as life unfolds. The grand symphonic piece that is consciousness encompasses the foundational contributions of the brainstem, forever hitched to the body, and the wider-than-the-sky imagery created in the cooperation of cerebral cortex and sub cortical structures, all harmoniously stitched together, is ceaseless forward motion, interruptible only by sleep, anesthesia, brain dysfunction, or death.
Damasio, well known for his groundbreaking work in his early book, Descartes's Error, takes special care to describe the complexity of the mind, the marvel of this emergence of consciousness, and he specifically points out the importance of the emotions for a thorough understanding of consciousness: Emotions are complex, largely automated programs of actions concocted by evolution. The actions are carried out in our bodies, from facial expressions and postures to changes in viscera and internal millieu. Feelings of emotion, on the other hand, are composite perceptions of what happens in our body and mind when we are emoting. As far as the body is concerned, feelings are images of actions rather than actions themselves. While emotions are actions accompanied by ideas and certain modes of thinking, emotional feelings are mostly perceptions of what our bodies do during the emoting, along with perceptions of our state of mind during that same period of time. [More . . . ]

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Detailed construction of mouse somatosensory cortex

Brains are so incredibly complex that scientists struggle to express the complexity in words. But this visual reconstruction of the synapses in a mouse somatosensory cortex (sensitive to the stimulation of a whisker) is worth at least a thousand words. Enjoy the journey downward, thanks to the work of the Stanford Medical School.

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Why it matters that the Bible is not inerrant

In Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know about Them) (2010), Bible scholar Bart Ehrman explores many of the contradictions and inaccuracies found in the Bible, and then he comments on what his findings mean. Early in this excellent book, Ehrman invites us to consider the discrepancies in the four Gospels with regard to what happened on the third day after Jesus had been crucified.

Who actually went to the tomb? Was it Mary alone (John 20:1)? Mary and another Mary (Matthew 28:1)? Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome (Mark 16:1)? Or women who had accompanied Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem--possibly Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and "other women" (Luke 24:1; see 23:55)? Had the stone already been rolled away from the tomb (as in Mark 16:4) or was it rolled away by an Angel while the women were there (Matthew 28:2)? Who or what do they see there? An Angel (Matthew 28:5)? A young man (Mark 16:5)? Two men (Luke 24:4)? Or nothing and no one (John)? And what were they told? To tell the disciples to "Go to Galilee where Jesus will meet them (Mark 16:7)? Or to remember what Jesus had told them "while he was in Galilee," that he had to die and rise again (Luke 24:7)? Then, do the women tell the disciples what they saw and heard (Matthew 28:8), or do they not tell anyone (Mark 16:8)? If they tell someone, whom do they tell? The 11 disciples (Matthew 28:8)? The 11 disciples and other people (Luke 24:8)? Simon Peter and another unnamed disciple (John 20:2)? What do these disciples do in response? Do they have no response because Jesus himself immediately appears to them (Matthew 20:9)? Do they not believe the women because it seems to be "an idle tale" (Luke 24:11)? Or do they go to the tomb to see for themselves (John 20:3)?

[Page 48] Ehrman's book contains a 40-page chapter called "A World of Contradictions," in which he sets out hundreds of these contradictions and discrepancies. He goes to pains to remind his readers that this is simply a small sampling of the many more such issues one will find if one reads the Bible "horizontally," making a careful effort to compare each version of a story with other versions of the same story in other books of the Bible. Although in some of these differences are insignificant, one will find others that are substantial. One of the discrepancies that Ehrman finds more significant is the debate over the date Jesus dies.

In Mark, Jesus eats the Passover meal (Thursday night) and is crucified the following morning. In John, Jesus does not eat the Passover meal but is crucified on the day before the Passover meal was to be. Moreover, in Mark, Jesus is nailed to the cross at nine in the morning: and in John, he is not condemned in till noon, and then is taken out and crucified.

[Page 27] After producing enough evidence to convince anyone other than the fundamentalist that there are plenty of contradictions and inaccuracies, Ehrman proposes several conclusions we can draw:

1. The Bible is not completely inerrant. There are many errors. 2. Christians "of a certain persuasion--such as many of those among whom I live, in the American South--would ever think to ask such a question": Is it now impossible to be a Christian given these many discrepancies? Ehrman suggests that most Christian faiths will remain "unscathed" by the imperfection of the Bible. 3. It is important to let each author in the Bible "speak for himself and not pretend that he is saying the same thing as another." Urban points out that each of the authors has his own agenda, and these become visible when we read each author separately and carefully. Erhman goes to great pains to distinguish the writings of the four Gospel authors, and this careful analysis has the effect of humanizing these authors and their writings. 4. It is impossible to read the books of the Bible as "disinterested historical accounts. None of them is that." At this point, Ehrman offers this thought experiment: "what would you do as a judge in a court trial in which you have conflicting testimony from eyewitnesses? One thing you would certainly not do is assume that each witness is 100% correct."

If there is an overall theme of Ehrman's book, it is that people should stop reading the Bible with the assumption that each of the authors is basically saying the same thing. Ehrman contrasts this "harmonizing approach" to reading the Bible, which is based upon emotional reading, to the approach he recommends, the "historical-critical approach." This latter approach assumes that the Canon of Scripture--

"[T]hat is, the collection of the books into one book considered in some sense to be authoritative for believers--was not the original form in which the biblical books up.. When Paul wrote his letters to the churches he founded, he did not think that he was writing the Bible. He thought he was writing letters . . . . These books were written in different times and places, under different circumstances, to address different issues; they were written by different authors with different perspectives, beliefs, assumptions, traditions, and sources.

[Page 63] [Note: I've written another short post about other points Ehrman makes in this same book].

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