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El Blog de Carlos Alberto Montaner
Es uno de los periodistas más leídos del mundo hispánico. La revista Poder calculó en seis millones los lectores que semanalmente se asoman a sus columnas y artículos
Carlos Alberto Montaner
LIFE at the moment seems full of questions where everyone has an opinion, but few can supply a convincing answer. By way of diversion, let us instead consider a question that invites few coherent opinions, but screams what seems to be a correct answer.
Ask “is the universe conscious?”, as we do on this week’s cover, and the brain-jerk answer is “no”. Consciousness is a case of the haves and have nots. Humans clearly have it; a rock, a star or other agglomeration of physical matter, such as the wider cosmos, doesn’t. The venerable philosophical idea of universal sentience, or “panpsychism”, says otherwise when it comes to inanimate things, but it seems to have no more place in modern science than a belief in fairies at the end of the garden.
However, an enquiring mind does well to leave its intuitions at the door. How certain arrangements of matter such as the neuronal circuits in our brains give rise to felt experience, while others don’t, is a “hard problem”. It is difficult to set boundaries on consciousness when we don’t really know what it is. Does an octopus have it? A tree? A bacterium? A sentient robot?
“Mathematics has an extraordinary way of leading us to enlightenment by subverting our intuitions”
Propose that all matter has consciousness in some form, differing only in degree, and you go some way to setting aside such basic problems. That still isn’t an argument. But the realisation that our mathematically most mature theory of consciousness, integrated information theory, gives succour to panpsychism, could well be (see page 40).
Mathematics has, in physicist Eugene Wigner’s phrase, shown an “unreasonable effectiveness” in tackling hard problems of science, and has been an extraordinary way of leading us to enlightenment by subverting intuitions. Just ask any student of quantum theory or relativity where those theories lie in relation to the grain of our brains.
Of course, there are more things on heaven and Earth than are dreamed of even in mathematical philosophy. It may be that, as a tool developed by consciousness, mathematics reaches a limit in describing the phenomenon itself. Who knows – but what a delightful distraction it is to consider such esoteric questions at a time like this. ■
BIGGER, BETTER BRAINS?
YES.
Moral rebels certainly have a tendency toward certain traits, but are their brains anatomically different from the rest of the population?
In 2014, a Georgetown University study examined differences in patterns of brain activity in 19 people who had engaged in a quite extraordinary act of generosity: donating a kidney to a total stranger. The donors’ amygdala — a part of the brain that processes emotions — was found to be 8 percent larger than it is in most people, and it also showed greater activity.
But we need to be cautious about interpreting this finding. It’s possible that these kidney donors were born with larger and more active amygdala, which caused them to care more about other people. It’s also possible, though, that engaging in this type of extreme altruism could actively rewire the brain. Regardless of the causal connection, it does appear that extraordinary altruists show distinct patterns of neural activity that are associated with a greater responsiveness to emotion. People who demonstrate this type of selfless giving may experience the costs of helping differently from the rest of us. Not helping may actually make them feel worse.
There is also evidence that people who engage in extraordinary acts of altruism show distinct patterns of neurological responses to two types of painful experiences: experiencing pain themselves and watching someone else experience pain.
In one study, researchers measured empathy in nearly 60 people, half of whom had donated a kidney to a stranger and half of whom had not. Each participant was then paired with a stranger to complete a series of trials. In one set of trials, participants watched their partner receive painful pressure to the right thumbnail while researchers recorded their brain activity using fMRI imaging. In another set, the participants themselves received the thumbnail pressure, again while their brain activity was assessed. Researchers then compared the two sets of brain activity.
For most of us, experiencing pain ourselves feels far worse than watching a stranger experience pain. But the brains of those who had demonstrated extraordinary altruism responded in almost the same way to their own pain as to that of others, suggesting that they were experiencing someone else’s pain as though it were their own. For people who feel others’ pain so deeply, the choice to donate a kidney to a stranger may therefore make sense: If they feel pain themselves from knowing that someone else is in pain, helping that person would make them feel better.
Donating a kidney to a stranger may be an extreme example. Few people will think less of you for not choosing to do so, and it does have physical risks. But the discoveries of these studies have much broader implications, since the ability to feel empathy is an important characteristic of those who are willing to face social consequences for doing the right thing.
Catherine A. Sanderson is the Manwell Family Professor in Life Sciences at Amherst College, where she has been researching social norms for the past 20 years. She is also the author of THE POSITIVE SHIFT: MASTERING MINDSET TO IMPROVE HAPPINESS, HEALTH, AND LONGEVITY.
Adapted excerpt from WHY WE ACT: TURNING BYSTANDERS INTO MORAL REBELS by Catherine A. Sanderson, published by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2020 by Catherine A. Sanderson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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fue uno de los enfrentamientos más destacados en Guerra de los Cien Años. En él, una joven campesina francesa de 17 años de edad llamada Jeanne d’Arc (Juana de Arco), lideró en mayo de 1429 el Ejército francés en la guerra de los Cien Años, liberando la ciudad de Orleans, asediada por los ingleses desde el mes de octubre.
Gilles de Rais, un noble amigo personal de Juana de Arco y “heroe” también de la guerra de los cien años, fue el mayor asesino (de niños) en serie de toda la historia de la humanidad. Dios aguanta todo. Saludos.
O.J.: Made in America, a magnificent five-part documentary series about the life of O.J. Simpson
In the longer term, virologists cannot predict how SARS-CoV-2 will evolve. It may continue to cause severe illnesses for some years yet, especially among older people. However, it seems likely that one day it will be just another common cold coronavirus. These are hit-and-run viruses, says Esper. “They infect you, make a million virus babies and spread them all out”, but our immune system usually kills them off within five days. If the viruses are too deadly, they won’t get a chance to spread, so it is in their interests to become more benign. “If SARS-CoV-2 persists, which I expect it will, it may get milder over time,” says Esper.
Anthony King is a freelance science journalist based in Dublin, Ireland. He tweets occasionally at @antonyjking ■
https://www.elclarin.cl/2020/04/23/holandeses-avanzan-en-el-escenario-pospandemia-y-proponen-un-modelo-economico-basado-en-el-decrecimiento/?fbclid=IwAR0NhdleAC8maumDWY0ZlOh02kT9SZR30SoVMcuKnmbLEvvZDFo9V39FFB8
Corona: Dos países ponen 40% de los muertos contados apuntados a ese virus hasta hoy
3 países la mitad de esas muertes: usa, uk e italia: 157k muertos de 315k en total
lo que demandó el encierro y cese de la economía no fueron las muertes,
dado que hay 19 asesinos mas metales que corona y algunos se ellos
matarían menos si se encierra a la gente y se paran los
servicios, aglomeraciones y demás.
Fue La incapacidad de los sistemas sanitarios.
Inexistente un ejército de control epidémico, el virus entró
Silencioso y golpeó con la fuerza de medio millon de
Tiburones blancos.
Nadie los vio llegar, nadie los vió atacar donde a quienes,
Nadie para decir que lugares cerrar, que personas aislar dónde
Sólo nos quedó la debacle, los más de 300k muertos y una
Economía nueva de la que nadie tiene puta idea.
Se dice que hay años “malos”, cada dos o tres años, en que el flu
Puede llegar a matar 650k en una temporada. Lo dicen estimados
De la OMS, véanlo aquí:
https://www.who.int/influenza/surveillance_monitoring/bod/en/
“How could 1.5 kilograms of jelly generate thought and feeling?” asked Henry Marsh in the New Statesman. That question has bedeviled scientists and philosophers for centuries, and though we may appear to be on the brink of a breakthrough that will answer every question about the brain, we are actually far from it. With his new book, British zoologist Matthew Cobb seeks to entwine a history of neuroscience with a cultural history of the metaphors we’ve used to describe the brain, and “he succeeds magnificently.” The Idea of the Brain is “an intellectual tour de force” that brilliantly demonstrates why there’s no better way to explain the scope of a difficult scientific challenge than to show how people have wrestled with the problem over time.
Fortunately for Cobb, “there is not much to say about the ancient past,” said James McConnachie in The Times (U.K.). No one considered the brain central to thought until the idea was raised by Hippocrates’ circle around 400 B.C. But Aristotle backed the prevailing theory that the heart was the seat of human consciousness, and that concept held sway for almost another two millennia. It was in the 17th century that a Danish anatomist first posited that the brain should be thought of as a machine, and that opened the door to a series of metaphors, each tied to breakthrough technologies. René Descartes speculated that the human nervous system was powered by hydraulics, like the automatons then being built by clockmakers. During the 19th century, the brain was likened to a telegraph network or telephone exchange. And since about 1950, we’ve referred to it as a kind of complex computer. But Cobb’s “electrifyingly skeptical” account gets even stronger as he explores how inadequate our grasping for knowledge of it has turned out to be.
Even the brain of a maggot turns out to be “mind-bogglingly complicated,” said Carol Tavris in The Wall Street Journal. And despite neuroscience’s many recent advances, “we still haven’t the foggiest idea of how the billions of neurons interact and connect to produce the brain’s activity,” particularly how that activity produces consciousness. But Cobb is optimistic that understanding is possible, and his book’s final section “offers glimmers of the dazzling possibilities.” Maybe new technologies will provide a new metaphor that will unlock the brain’s secrets. Maybe the key will be provided by further study of the simple neural networks in maggots or lobsters. Though we still know so little, “our ignorance, as all who labor in science know, is not a defeat but a challenge.”