Aye, I made that one up. I remember my mom wouldn't stop teasing me telling me that "curiosity killed the cat". Well mama, I ain't no cat!

Why do we have an epigenetic rule that let's us be free, innovate and create? That is a question that has really concerned me. We're somehow hardwired to have this space for freedom. It is amazing, though it has helped us to survive.

But still, our human nature have that emotional fact that searches for beauty and mystery. The dialogue went around this topic, and it went amazing. There was a lot of "awe" and smiles. I really enjoyed it.

But one of the things that I really liked was, that when we're in a critical moment, we start creating. For this I'll say, we're in crisis if we don't create. An individual crisis.

The name of the chapter caught me from the very beginning.
"Neither science nor the arts can be complete without combining their separate strengths. Science needs the intuition and metaphorical power of the arts, and the arts need the fresh blood of science."
I can't help thinking in how imagination and wonderment is implicit in all scientific or artistic discovery. It isn't like we only have reason in one side to think of science or just emotion when we think on creating music. We're creative, by nature.

Some chapters before, Wilson claimed in how arts and documented work made culture evolve faster. In this chapter, he wrote "gene-culture coevolution is, I believe, the underlying process by which the brain evolved and the arts originated." and there is, culture documented through the years making our artistic works evolve more and more.

Also, the origins of our artistic brain is theorized as a mechanism that started off by putting meaning to things we didn't understand in our surroundings. We have an aesthetic instinct, and I would dare to say that it is also a search for human seal in things. We like to see our genes printed throughout nature. And also, we have idealized beauty characteristics that come from our instinctual search for fertility and powerful genes.

Between instinct and reason, there's tradition. AH, Hayek. I remembered him all throughout this chapter. I'll explain further.

The Social Sciences goes through how complex societies are, and how the researchers in this field haven't acquired a good amount of knowledge, because they separate biology and psychology from human behavior. This is an incredible misunderstanding of human nature. After all, we're part of all this complex system called universe.

But the fact is, that society isn't either a purely deterministic system or a full culture product. It is an interaction of epigenetic rules and an evolving culture. (See Hayek hidden here somewhere?)

And it is amazing, how natural sciences have grown to reach social matters. Biology or psychology for instance, have found characteristics applicable to the society. These are proofs of consilience.

Then, he gets to the prediction topic. For this, he says that math can be made in order to measure certain things in society. Is that something that can be done? I'm of the people that think that society is far too complex... but what if? Would it be helpful?

For this, I'll claim (with help from Wilson) that in order to understand the complexity of society, we have to also understand the environment and our mind. For that, we should claim consilience.

There are some imperatives in our human nature such as categories of choice or rational calculation. Wilson even quoted our friend Daniel Khaneman (Thinking fast and Slow) on how we make irrational choices according to our heuristics and how we tend to make certain decisions according to time and avoiding risk.

This song is wonderful, it is a set of mixes made by different conferences of TED. Definitely, ideas in a song this way made me feel extremely happy. This types of lyrics are amazing! I like them a little more abstract though, but the goal... that is what I really liked.

Besides this video, we took time to watch others that told us a little of economic theory:

And a little of history of Nikolas Tesla and Che Guevara. It is extremely funny that wrong idea we have of certain people, such as Thomas Edison and Guevara. These people just became famous for reasons that aren't really true or legitimate. People using Che Guevara shirts, pretending to be rebels. People crediting Edison in all of the textbooks not considering that he wasn't the actual inventor of so many things.

This was the first dialogue I enjoyed with the MPC talking about Words and Rules. Definitely, this experience was really cool.
We decided to understand the theories that were introduced in chapter IV "In Single Combat".

Pablito commented something that is really relevant in this chapter: It is not just a matter of understanding verbs, language or grammar. It goes beyond: it is a study of the mind, of the methods of thinking. Are we fully rational? Are we fully empiricists?

The dialogue evolved beautifully, and I was able to understand many things I didn't see before in the chapter. Those are written in my reflections of the chapter.

This chapter talks about the different methods of thinking that are introduced in the preface. Is the mental process in which our language conjunctions happen associative or pure memory?

Pinker describes the two different theories: Chomsky and Halle's, and Rumelhart and McClelland's. Chomsky and Halle talk about how our mind is full of memorized rules, while Rumelhart and McClelland talk about how our mind is a network of associations. This is a debate that brings the matter to a more profound field: philosophy. The two schools of thinking: empiricism and rationalism. Chomsky and Halle's theory would be the rational, therefore, etc. (As my friend Euclid would say.)

Pinker mentions that the way language works, is a combination these two methods of thinking:

"Prince and I have proposed a hybrid in which Chomsky and Halle are basically right about regular inflection and Rumelhart and McClelland are basically right about irregular inflection. Our proposal is simply the traditional words-and-rules theory with a twist. Regular verbs are computed by a rule that combines a symbol for a verb stem with a symbol for the suffix. Irregular verbs are pairs of words retrieve from the mental dictionary, a part of memory. Here is the twist: Memory is not a list of unrelated slots, like RAM in a computer, but is associative, a bit like the Rumelhart-McClelland pattern associator memory. Not only are words linked to words, but bits of words are linked to bits of words."

This was our last dialogue with Dylan this year, but, I have to admit we had lots of fun. This dialogue was primarily concentrated on the "Patterns" topic.

Humans search for patterns. Everywhere, (music. Yes.) Chaos and uncertainty are uncomfortable, and we like to know that things go on certain way. I think this uneasiness keep us in this process of discovering what is beyond our knowledge.

I wonder how this acquired taste for conceptual art, or experimental music came up. Is this a matter of searching for patterns? I think it is more about knowing the concept, so maybe in this case it's not the quest for patterns, but the quest for understanding what is going on with this is more about understanding meanings. So if we are presented to this cases in the future, we are able to find the pattern. To categorize this as conceptual.

Statistics, may be unreliable. Maybe we have a small number of samples or the incorrect number of samples. This type of information may blind the researcher. In order to make a good research, many different types of samples must be taken, according to the need. For this, we jump to conclusions.

But, we also fall in one of the things that are in our human nature: we're pattern seekers. Patterns make us feel safe, and make us feel that we can predict things. That comfort of finding patterns, where there aren't has fooled lots of people.

We tend to have answers to questions we really don't know the answer to. We tend to make connections, really abstract, with what we think we know.

Kahneman divides the types of existent questions as heuristic questions and target questions. The target questions are those that are complicated and require further and deep thinking. Heuristic questions are those that are answered more simply and that are correlated with our instant memories and responses. That is, System 1.

System 1 tends to make us feel overconfident. For this, I will say that some tend to stop learning. That comfort of being able to answer questions without considering alternatives, nor pushing to a further limit, is one thing that our mind tends to do. We can overcome this habit though.

Also, in this chapter Khaneman quotes to another psychologist, who said that based in our likes and dislikes we form our beliefs of the world. This is a huge mistake, for this is not taking reality as it is.

"Your beliefs, and even your emotional attitude, may change (at least a little) when you learn that the risk of an activity you disliked is smaller than you thought. However, the information about lower risks will also change your view of the benefits (for the better) even if nothing was said about benefits in the information you received."

This is the final chapter of the first part of the book. At the end, Kahneman introduces us to the characteristics of System 1:

Characteristics of System 1

• Generates impressions, feelings, and inclinations; when endorsed by System 2 these become beliefs, attitudes, and intentions operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort, and no sense of voluntary control
  

• Can be programmed by System 2 to mobilize attention when a particular pattern is detected (search)
  

• Executes skilled responses and generates skilled intuitions, after adequate training
  

• Creates a coherent pattern of activated ideas in associative memory

• Links a sense of cognitive ease to illusions of truth, pleasant feelings, and reduced vigilance
  

• Distinguishes the surprising from the normal

• Infers and invents causes and intentions

• Neglects ambiguity and suppresses doubt

• Is biased to believe and confirm

• Exaggerates emotional consistency (halo effect)

• Focuses on existing evidence and ignores absent evidence(WYSIATI)
  

• Generates a limited set of basic assessments

• Represents sets by norms and prototypes, does not integrate

• Matches intensities across scales (e.g., size to loudness)

• Computes more than intended (mental shotgun)

• Sometimes substitutes an easier question for a difficult one (heuristics)
  

• Is more sensitive to changes than to states (prospect theory)

• Overweights low probabilities

• Shows diminishing sensitivity to quantity (psychophysics)

• Responds more strongly to losses than to gains (loss aversion)

• Frames decision problems narrowly, in isolation from one another

Bert shared with us a set of rules for dialogue that his previous students in the U.S. made. The rules were really good and the ones that really we thought of adding to our rubric were:

• Speak to the question
• Do not fear rejection/controversy
• Don't steal the learning experience of others

The latter is of real importance, and we haven't thought as a culture much of it. It is really interesting to question people and let them explore their own understanding and mind. Just answering and telling people what they should think blocks the learning experience of the individual.

And that is one of the things that also a reader and learner should also know when they let Wikipedia steal their own understanding. (I'm not saying that Wikipedia is a bad source, but one must learn when sources are necessary or when they're just telling us the whole answer.)