A fine choice for the House Committee for Science, Space, and Technology

[Sasaki Kojiro]

I can start out with my own profession, education:

1. Piaget's theory of cognitive development.
2. Vygotsky's zones(I'm sorry to say I don't know the english term for his theory, and the norwegian one won't help you).
3. Jerome Bruner showed how language is learned.
4. John Dewey's "learning by doing", and much more.

Thanks, I forgot all about this stuff. But I think it's in the same category as therapy. Children and people with mental illnesses are outside the normal humanities because we can't remember/don't know what it's like to be them. Scientific study is a very important assist to normal methods in both education and therapy.

Advances in measuring time, through advances in physics, have lead us to redefine length in terms of time (and speed of light) as opposed to being a "distinct" type of domain. That is we do not define speed in terms of distance over delta in time, but we define length in terms of a constant speed (of light) times a particular delta of time! So how tall are you is now officially defined in terms of how long would it take light in a vacuum to travel from top to toes?

Advances in physics in general have had striking implications for our day to day lives, including the questions "what are we made of?" and "where do we come from?"

This makes me curious...I don't find those questions interesting or significant, what do you see in them?

Herd mentality type things. Mass psychology is key to designing safe buildings and vessels, to building user friendly and desirable products, or effective marketing (people don't like going back for seconds so you make more by selling larger portions up front, for instance). Also it turns out that people are terrible with quantities: one, two, three, more, many is roughly what the average Joe can deal with. Questions like "which is bigger: 10^6 or 2^19?" are very hard to do correctly.

How the brain works, of course; and by extension how we might aid people with e.g. Alzheimer's to remain mentally able for as long as possible and correctly diagnosing brain damage. Additionally study of the brain also has application in information science, AI, and CS (algorithms, neural networks, distributed systems). Understanding our brain's response to audio and visual input can help us design places which are more "friendly"/"soothing" on the nerves.

I think people have had a pretty good understanding of mass psychology, difficulty with large numbers, and what made a building look nice before science. These benefits you describe are technological improvements or of simply utilitarian value. I'm not knocking technology, utility, better education, better medicine, etc etc...far from it...but this is exactly what I mean, we all know that there are so many improvements in our world due to science that we try to apply the method in areas where we should not apply it.

Are you praising science for making marketing more insidious by the way?


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I will say that after considering it I think you guys may be right in part--I'm probably undervaluing the destructive ability of science and reason, and the more rigorous ethos those can produce in some people. That would make an interesting historical question that I can't really answer.

That's with magnetic fields, and is temporary.

We now have the ability to semi-invasively target specific neural circuits and activate or deactivate them, using the installed genetic expression of neuronal structures sensitive to predetermined stimuli. As we understand more of the brain cell classes and their functions, we will learn more of how neural circuits operate, how they interact with other neural circuits to produce complex behaviors - enduce a subject to pull a lever over and over again through neural manipulation -, sensation - switch pain processing with pleasure processing and cause the subject to cut itself with a knife voluntarily - and abstract attributes - including thought, belief, memory, value, consciousness, etc. We would be able to directly and permanently manipulate these thing, even to specification.

This is being done now, at the level of behavioral patterns, with small mammals. How many years before we move up to the hominids? You can't see the implications, or possible applications, of all this?

So you are thinking about, say, giving someone endless willpower through technological manipulation? What should they do with that willpower? Should they choose willpower over endless contentment?

This is science fiction at the moment anyway