Pianos Make Music Accessible Like Computers Make Math Acc...

Though it has become a naturalized part of music-making since the first one was built in 1710, the pianoforte (its name means "soft-loud") was a technical marvel for its time, a machine that changed music in ways that are hard to imagine. Computer pioneer Alan Kay once observed that any technological advance is "technology only for people who are born before it was invented,' and in the case of the piano, this applies to no one alive today. Seymour Papert, the MIT researcher, concluded, "That...

 Technology Enables IA, but Culture Must Evolve for It

Look at what intellect would be without writing or the printing press—these primitive technologies already make such a difference. Just think of what the latest computer technology will be able to do to further augment the intellect! But this is a non-sequitur: what makes writing and paper powerful is technology to some extent, but it is mostly the rich culture that grew up around it. Let’s look at writing first. The earlies extant samples of writing are Babylonian clay tablets contai...

 The Problem with Reductionism

The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and natural objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organic bodies in their manifold forms—these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature which have been made during the last four hundred years. But this method of investigation has also left us as a legacy the habit of observing natural objects and natural processes in their is...

 Science Tames Nature by Understanding

Man masters nature not by force but by understanding. rhis is why science has succeeded where magic failed: because it has looked for no spell to cast over nature. The alchemist and the magician in the Middle Ages thought, and the addict of comic strips is still encouraged to think, that nature must be mastered by a device which outrages her laws. But in four hundred years since the Scientific Revolu tion we have learned that we gain our ends only with the laws of nature; we control her only ...

 Evolution from Inner-Philsophy to Natural Philosophy

There have always been two ways of looking for truth. One is to find concepts which are beyond challenge, because they are held by faith or by authority or the conviction that they are self-evident. This is the mystic submission to truth which the East has chosen, and which dominated the axiomatic thought of the scholars of the Middle Ages. So St. Thomas Aquinas holds that faith is a higher guide to truth than knowledge is: the master of medieval science puts science firmly into second place....