The Pleasure of Finding Things Out – Richard Feynman 1981 Interview
BBC Horizon/PBS Nova THE PLEASURE OF FINDING THINGS OUT, Richard Feynman Interview (1981) Fifty minutes of PURE Feynman! This is the original Horizon Nova interview – essential for any Feynman fan… and for everyone else too! “I’m an explorer, OK I like to find out!” Richard Feynman, physicist and adventurer extraordinary… THE PLEASURE OF FINDING THINGS OUT was filmed in 1981 and will delight and inspire anyone who would like to share something of the joys of scientific discovery. Feynman is a master storyteller, and his tales — about childhood, Los Alamos, or how he won a Nobel Prize — are a vivid and entertaining insight into the mind of a great scientist at work and play. “The 1981 Feynman Horizon is the best science program I have ever seen. This is not just my opinion – it is also the opinion of many of the best scientists that I know who have seen the program… It should be mandatory viewing for all students whether they be science or arts students.” – Professor Sir Harry Kroto, Nobel Prize for Chemistry
Possible clarity is provided by building off the ideas of Holmes (2000) who theorized that there is an inverse relationship between learning for performance and learning for identity-building. Learning for performance is typical in settings like schooling and the workplace, but it also occurs in a number of freechoice learning contexts such as sports and the arts, as well in traditional cultural practices such as weaving and hunting. However, learning can also be motivated for purely intrinsic reasons that have little to do with performance and everything to do with the process of identity-related self-satisfaction. According to Kelly (1983) leisure time free-choice learning, like other activities that have a large measure of choice and control, are particularly amenable to the self-affirmation process since they are self-defined, intrinsically motivated activities. The perception of choice and control appears to be fundamental to a heightened sense of self-actualization (Bem, 1972; Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Samdahl & Kleiber, 1989; Steele, 1988; Williams, 2002), which in turn sustains the integrity of personal identity. However, leisure situations are also amenable to learning for performance. Haggard and Williams (1992) stated, ‘‘Through leisure activities we are able to construct situations that provide us with the information that we are who we believe ourselves to be, and provide others with information that will allow them to understand us more accurately (p. 1).’’
-Journal of Research in Science Teaching article.
Science cafes entertain audiences motivated by social as well as intrinsic factors. Insight into the psychology of visitors to informal science centers may allow science cafe organizers to entertain and provide meaning to a diverse audience of learners.
BBC News – China condemns ‘groundless’ US criticism of web control.
‘Information imperialism’ is an interesting concept. Consider the effect of an open internet on China’s population. Is China saying that if people are exposed to predominately Western values, that this will overwhelm their sensibilities and become a threat to national stability?
Can the same argument be made in the US, regarding television programming? I think it can. If most Americans watch several hours of TV every week, and if that programming is shown to affect behavior (it does – violence, generational attitudes, smoking/drinking, external political efficacy, the list goes on) then at what point does national stability, or the ability of a democracy to flourish in spite of coercive consumerist propaganda, compel the US government to intervene? Unfortunately, once the people are disconnected from the political process, they lose traction and lose the voice that provides feedback to a political machine.
Challenge for the day: Engage in a political discussion about the cost and benefit of a completely corporate controlled mass media in the US. Discuss the democratic and propagandistic potentials of the internet.
We have begun to outline a consciousness-centered perspective on mental disorders, both those determined by defects in large-scale brain connectivity, and possibly by related failures of embedding goal contexts to constrain the topological dynamics of the global workspace. Further work in this direction might well focus on characterizing specific disorders from this viewpoint, and designing experiments to test such characterizations.Equation 9 and the arguments surrounding it, however, already provide, in the context of mental disorders, quite a ‘hard science’ basis for the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Boyd’s oft-repeated assertion that “culture is as much a part of human biology as the enamel on our teeth.”Not only culture and socioeconomic status, but historical trajectory, power relations between individuals and groups, and the effects of public policy, will write images of themselves onto the fundamental topology of individual consciousness, too frequently defining paths of debilitating developmental disorder which can blight lives.
via Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling | Full text | A Global Workspace perspective on mental disorders, by Rodrick Wallace, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 2005, 2:49.
