Speeddating

一次就愛對：快速覓得心靈伴侶18法
Yaacov Deyo and Sue Deyo. Speeddating: The Smarter, Faster Way to Lasting Love.

01.欣賞對方重要的性格特質，是愛情持久的主要因素。分享人生的方向與目標（至少尊重對方的人生方向）與生理情緒上的反應，都是必須的。
02.如果不清楚自己的人生方向和追求的是什麼，就不可能知道多年以後，你愛的是什麼樣的人。
03.一個人永遠無法像聯結他的身體、思想或心靈那樣和外界聯結。一輛車是永遠也不可能成為某個人身體或靈魂的一部分。如果我們試圖以不屬於自己的事物來延伸自己的領域，將永遠以無法達成擴展自我真正領域的目標。矛盾的是，心靈的擴展是藉由對他人的付出與投入來達成的。一個善解人意的人付出愈多，精神上的領域愈大，他就愈感到滿足。
04.永恆愛戀的關鍵，是尋覓一個付出者來付出，讓自己也成為付出者。可惜，我們的社會將人訓練成獲取者，許多獲取者相信這是達到成功和圓滿的途徑。
05.生命中吸引的人，直接關係著每個人的為人－自己的品格和人生方向。
06.當你追求與另一個人建立心靈相契又長久的親密關係時，不容忽視的是領悟到你有更重要的一份關係：你與自己的關係。從一個人如何對待自己，大致可以看出他在兩性關係中會如何對待他人。
07.同時和一個以上的異性交往，造成的另一項複雜性，是你會不斷地比較這些對象，而這會扭曲你清楚判斷的能力。
08.借著了解「欲望創造思想，思想導致行為」，你就能更精準與快速地評估一份男女關係長久維繫的可能性。
09.注意將下列事項分清楚：一、你交往對象的行為表現；二、你對此行為的看法；三、對方的言詞話語；四、對方言行之間的一致性或相互矛盾。
10.因為每個人都有缺點，所以，重要的是認清哪些是你可以接受的，哪些是你無法忍受的－那就是你的破局關鍵。
11.當一個人積極努力改進他的性格，就是品格良好的特徵。
12.任何兩性關係都將面臨挑戰－這是無可避免的。然而，愈能察覺到潛藏的困難，就愈能掌握你的人生，最終，還能確保一份間強又健康的親密關係。

In Search of Time

Dan Falk. In Search of Time.

Chapter 01— Heavenly Clockwork: Time's natural cycles

Chapter 02— Years, Months, Days: The quest for the perfect calendar

Chapter 03— Hours, Minutes, Seconds: Dissecting the day

Chapter 04— In Time's Grasp: Time and culture

Chapter 05— The Persistence of Memory: A bridge across time

Chapter 06— Issac's Time: Newton, Leibniz, and the arrow of time
1. Why does Newton feel he has to define "time" if we all intuitively know what it is? He says that his aim is to distinguish "mathematical time" from the "common" notion of time that we all harbor, so as to eliminate "certain prejudices." And so we come to his famous definition: Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly.
2. In the 1960s, the philosopher Jack Smart gave a clear account of the problem: If time flows...this would be a motion with respect to a hypertime...If motion in space is feet per second, at what speed is the flow of time? Seconds per what? Moreover, if passage is of the essence of time, it is presumably the essence of hypertime, too, which would lead us to postulate a hyper-hypertime and so on ad infinitum.

Chapter 07— Albert's Time: Spacetime, relativity, and quantum theory

Chapter 08— Back to the Future: The science of time travel

Chapter 09— In the Beginning: The search for the dawn of time

Chapter 10— Beyond the Big Bang: The frontiers of physics and the origin of time's arrow
1. In fact, scientists have noted at least six different (though perhaps related) "arrows of time." Beginning with the one just mentioned, they are: the thermodynamic arrow of time, the radiative arrow of time, the quantum arrow of time, the kaon arrow of time, the cosmological arrow of time, and the psychological arrow of time.

Chapter 11— All Things Must Pass: The ultimate fate of life, the universe, and everything

Chapter 12— Illusion and Reality: Physics, philosophy, and the landscape of time
1. Even Paul Davies seems to have had moments of uncertainty. In spite of his many essays in support of the tenseless view of time–and in spite of his analogy of the spinning chair–he has also wondered if our description of time is missing something. Toward the end of About Time, he says: As a physicist, I am well aware how much intuition can lead us astray...Yet as a human being, I find it impossible to relinquish the sensation of a flowing time and a moving present moment. It is something so basic to my experience of the world that I am repelled by the claim that it is only an illusion or misperception. It seems to me that the physical universe.
2. Here is the crux of the problem: relativity makes all moments equal; but to be human is to declare them unequal. When Descartes said "I think, therefore I am," he could just as wall have said: "I think, therefore I am now." Everything about the human experience demands the special attention we pay to the present moment.
3. In his autobiographical essay, Rudolf Carnap relates a conversation that he had with Einstein in the early 1950s: Once Einstein said that the problem of the Now worried him seriously. He explained that the experience of the Now means something special for man, something essentially different from the past and the future, but that this important difference does not and cannot occur within physics. That this experience cannot be grasped by science seemed to him a matter of painful but inevitable resignation.
4. Carnap went on to say that physics could, of course, explain the sequences of events seen in nature; but it was up to psychology to account for "the peculiarities of man's experiences with respect to time, including his different attitude towards past, present, and future." Einstein listened, and eventually told his friend that "there is something essential about the Now which is just outside the realm of science."
5. "Now he has departed this strange world a little ahead of me," Einstein wrote of his friend's passing. "That signifies nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

The Art of Loving

愛的藝術
Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving: An Enquiry into the Nature of Love.

Chapter 1— Is Love an Art?
01. Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance , something one "falls into" if one is lucky? This little book is base on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.
02. Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one's capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to be lovable.

Chapter 2— The Theory of Love
(1) Love, the answer to the Problem of Human Existence
01. The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love—is the source of shame. It is at the same time the source of guilt and anxiety.
02. In contemporary capitalistic society the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality on refers to the equality of automatons; of men who have lost their individuality. Equality today means "sameness," rather than "oneness."
03. Men and women become the same, not equals as opposite poles.
04. The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love.
05. It is the knowledge that we shall never "grasp" the secret of man and of the universe, but that we can know, nevertheless, in the act of love. Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.
06. The problem of the male-female polarity leads to some further discussion on the subject matter of love ans sex. I have spoken before of Freud's error in seeing in love exclusively the expression—or sublimation—of the sexual instinct, rather than recognizing that the sexual desire is one manifestation of the need for love and union. But Freud's error goes deeper.
(2) Love between Parent and Child
07. Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved because I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
08. Furthermore, "deserved" love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used.
(3) The Objects of love
09. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty.
10. Because on does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object—and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.
a. Brotherly Love
b. Motherly Love
11. There are many ways of achieving this satisfaction of creation; the most natural and also the easiest one to achieve is the mother's care and love for her creation. She transcends herself in the infant, her love for it gives her life meaning and significance. (In the very inability of the male to satisfy his need for transcendence by bearing children lies his urge to transcend himself by the creation of man-made things and of ideas.)
c. Erotic Love
12. It seems that sexual desire can easily blend with and be stimulated by any strong emotion, of which love is only one.
d. Self-Love
13. These ideas on self-love cannot be summarized better than by quoting Meister Eckhart on this topic: "If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as on person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is a great and righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally."
e. Love of God
14. Secondly, the paradoxical standpoint led to the emphasis on transforming man, rather than to the development of dogma on the on hand, and science on the other. From the Indian, Chinese and mystical standpoints, the religious task of man is not to think right, but to act right, and/or to become one with the One in the act of concentrated meditation.
15 In short, paradoxical thought led to tolerance and an effort toward self-transformation. the Aristotelian standpoint led to dogma and science, to the Catholic Church, and to the discovery of atomic energy.

Chapter 3— Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society
01. Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience—yet willing to be commanded, to do what is expected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction; who can be guided without force, led without leaders, prompted without aim—except the one to make good to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.
02. The underlying idea was that love is the child of sexual pleasure, and that if two people learn how to satisfy each other sexually, they will love each other. It fitted the general illusion of the time to assume that using the right techniques is the solution not only to technical problems of industrial production, but of all human problems as well. One is ignored the fact that the contrary of the underlying assumption is true.
03. The complete satisfaction of all instinctual needs is not only not a basis for happiness, it does not even guarantee sanity.
04. Love as mutual sexual satisfaction, and love as "teamwork" and as a haven from aloneness, are the two "normal" forms of the disintegration of love in modern Western society ,the socially patterned pathology of love. There are many individualized forms of the pathology of love, which result in conscious suffering and which are considered neurotic by psychiatrists and an increasing number of laymen alike.

Chapter 4— The Practice of Love
01. The fact, however, is that modern man has exceedingly little self-discipline outside of the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants to be lazy, to slouch or, to use a nicer word, to "relax." This very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life.
02. Of course, there are important economic reasons for this. But, as in so many other aspects, human values have become determined by economic values.
03. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of our Western concept of discipline (as of every virtue) that its practice is supposed to be somewhat painful and only if it is painful can it be "good." The East has recognized long ago that that which is good for man—for his body and for his soul—must also be agreeable, even though at the beginning some resistances must be overcome.
04. Paradoxically, the ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love.
05. In terms of this discussion of the practice of the art of loving, this means: love being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, it requires the development of humility, objectivity and reason.
06. Then one will also recognize that while one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real, though usually unconscious fear is that of loving.

Free Culture

誰綁架了文化創意？：如何找回我們的「自由文化」
Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity.

INTRODUCTION
1. My hope is to push this common sense along. I have become increasingly amazed by the power of this idea of intellectual property and, more importantly, its power to disable critical thought by policy makers and citizens. There has never been a time in our history when more of our "culture" was as "owned" as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.
2. The two sections set up the core claim of this book: that while the Internet has indeed produced something fantastic and new, our government, pushed by big media to respond to this "something new," is destroying something very old.Rather than understanding the changes the Internet might permit, and rather than taking time to let "commonsense" resolve how best to respond, we are allowing those most threatened by the changes to use their power to change the law—and more importantly, to use their power to change something fundamental about who we have always been.

Part One: PIRACY
1. There's no doubt that "piracy" is wrong, and that pirates should be punished. But before we summon the executioners, we should put this notion of "piracy" in some context. For as the concept is increasingly used, at its core is an extraordinary idea that is almost certainly wrong. The idea goes something like this: Creative work has value; whenever I use, or take, or build upon the creative work of others, I am taking from them something of value.Whenever I take something of value from someone else, I should have their permission. The taking of something of value from someone else without permission is wrong. It is a form of piracy.
2. The burden of this law now vastly outweighs any original benefit—certainly as it affects noncommercial creativity, and increasingly as it affects commercial creativity as well. Thus, as we'll see more clearly in the chapters below, the law's role is less and less to support creativity, and more and more to protect certain industries against competition.

Chapter 01— Creator
1. Free cultures are cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon; unfree, or permission, cultures leave much less.Ours was a free culture. It is becoming much less so.

Chapter 02— Mere Copyists
1. But though we could imagine this system of permission, it would be very hard to see how photography could have flourished as it did if the requirement for permission had been built into the rules that govern it. Photography would have existed. It would have grown in importance over time. Professionals would have continued to use the technology as they did—since professionals could have more easily borne the burdens of the permission system. But the spread of photography to ordinary people would not have occurred. Nothing like that growth would have been realized. And certainly, nothing like that growth in a democratic technology of expression would have been realized.
2. But democracy has never just been about elections. Democracy means rule by the people, but rule means something more than mere elections. In our tradition, it also means control through reasoned discourse.

Chapter 03— Catalogs

Chapter 04— Pirates
1. The film industry of Hollywood was built by fleeing pirates. Creators and directors migrated from the East Coast to California in the early twentieth century in part to escape controls that patents granted the inventor of filmmaking, Thomas Edison. These controls were exercised through a monopoly "trust," the Motion Pictures Patents Company, and were based on Thomas Edison's creative property—patents. Edison formed the MPPC to exercise the rights this creative property gave him, and the MPPC was serious about the control it demanded.
2. The law soon resolved this battle in favor of the composer and the recording artist. Congress amended the law to make sure that composers would be paid for the "mechanical reproductions" of their music. But rather than simply granting the composer complete control over the right to make mechanical reproductions, Congress gave recording artists a right to record the music, at a price set by Congress, once the composer allowed it to be recorded once. This is the part of copyright law that makes cover songs possible. Once a composer authorizes a recording of his song, others are free to record the same song, so long as they pay the original composer a fee set by the law.
3. American law ordinarily calls this a "compulsory license," but I will refer to it as a "statutory license." A statutory license is a license whose key terms are set by law.After Congress's amendment of the Copyright Act in 1909, record companies were free to distribute copies of recordings so long as they paid the composer (or copyright holder) the fee set by the statute.
4. It took Congress almost thirty years before it resolved the question of whether cable companies had to pay for the content they "pirated."In the end, Congress resolved this question in the same way that it resolved the question about record players and player pianos. Yes, cable companies would have to pay for the content that they broadcast; but the price they would have to pay was not set by the copyright owner. The price was set by law, so that the broadcasters couldn't exercise veto power over the emerging technologies of cable. Cable companies thus built their empire in part upon a "piracy" of the value created by broadcasters' content.

Chapter 05— Piracy
1. For (1) like the original Hollywood, p2p sharing escapes an overly controlling industry; and (2) like the original recording industry, it simply exploits a new way to distribute content; but (3) unlike cable TV, no one is selling the content that is shared on p2p services. These differences distinguish p2p sharing from true piracy. They should push us to find a way to protect artists while enabling this sharing to survive.
2. This compromise, like the compromise affecting records and player pianos, served two important goals—indeed, the two central goals of any copyright legislation. First, the law assured that new innovators would have the freedom to develop new ways to deliver content. Second, the law assured that copyright holders would be paid for the content that was distributed. One fear was that if Congress simply required cable TV to pay copyright holders whatever they demanded for their content, then copyright holders associated with broadcasters would use their power to stifle this new technology, cable. But if Congress had permitted cable to use broadcasters' content for free, then it would have unfairly subsidized cable.Thus Congress chose a path that would assure compensation without giving the past (broadcasters) control over the future (cable).

Part Two: PROPERTY

Chapter 06— Founders

Chapter 07— Recorders
1. In theory, fair use means you need no permission. The theory therefore supports free culture and insulates against a permission culture. But in practice, fair use functions very differently. The fuzzy lines of the law, tied to the extraordinary liability if lines are crossed, means that the effective fair use for many types of creators is slight. The law has the right aim; practice has defeated the aim.

Chapter 08— Transformers
1. This privilege becomes reserved for two sorts of reasons. The first continues the story of the last chapter: the vagueness of "fair use." Much of "sampling" should be considered "fair use." But few would rely upon so weak a doctrine to create.That leads to the second reason that the privilege is reserved for the few: The costs of negotiating the legal rights for the creative reuse of content are astronomically high. These costs mirror the costs with fair use: You either pay a lawyer to defend your fair use rights or pay a lawyer to track down permissions so you don't have to rely upon fair use rights. Either way, the creative process is a process of paying lawyers—again a privilege, or perhaps a curse, reserved for the few.

Chapter 09— Collectors
1. Technologists have thus removed the economic costs of building such an archive. But lawyers' costs remain. For as much as we might like to call these "archives," as warm as the idea of a "library" might seem, the "content" that is collected in these digital spaces is also someone's "property." And the law of property restricts the freedoms that Kahle and others would exercise.

Chapter 10— Property
1. We have always treated rights in creative property differently from the rights resident in all other property owners. They have never been the same. And they should never be the same, because, however counterintuitive this may seem, to make them the same would be to fundamentally weaken the opportunity for new creators to create. Creativity depends upon the owners of creativity having less than perfect control.
2. While the contours of copyright today are extremely hard to describe simply, in general terms, the right covers practically any creative work that is reduced to a tangible form. It covers music as well as architecture, drama as well as computer programs. It gives the copyright owner of that creative work not only the exclusive right to "publish" the work, but also the exclusive right of control over any "copies" of that work. And most significant for our purposes here, the right gives the copyright owner control over not only his or her particular work, but also any "derivative work" that might grow out of the original work. In this way, the right covers more creative work, protects the creative work more broadly, and protects works that are based in a significant way on the initial creative work.
3. "Copies." That certainly sounds like the obvious thing for copyright law to regulate. But as with Jack Valenti's argument at the start of this chapter, that "creative property" deserves the "same rights" as all other property, it is the obvious that we need to be most careful about. For while it may be obvious that in the world before the Internet, copies were the obvious trigger for copyright law, upon reflection, it should be obvious that in the world with the Internet, copies should not be the trigger for copyright law.More precisely, they should not always be the trigger for copyright law. This is perhaps the central claim of this book, so let me take this very slowly so that the point is not easily missed.My claim is that the Internet should at least force us to rethink the conditions under which the law of copyright automatically applies, because it is clear that the current reach of copyright was never contemplated, much less chosen, by the legislators who enacted copyright law.
4. But when we see how dramatically this "property" has changed—when we recognize how it might now interact with both technology and markets to mean that the effective constraint on the liberty to cultivate our culture is dramatically different—the claim begins to seem less innocent and obvious. Given (1) the power of technology to supplement the law's control, and (2) the power of concentrated markets to weaken the opportunity for dissent, if strictly enforcing the massively expanded "property" rights granted by copyright fundamentally changes the freedom within this culture to cultivate and build upon our past, then we have to ask whether this property should be redefined.
5. In 1790, the law looked like this:
Commercial publish: copyright
Commercial transform: free
Noncommercial publish: free
Noncommercial transform: free
6. By the end of the nineteenth century, the law had changed to this:
Commercial publish: copyright
Commercial transform: copyright
Noncommercial publish: free
Noncommercial transform: free
7. Thus by 1975, as photocopying machines became more common, we could say the law began to look like this:
Commercial copy: copyright
Commercial copy: copyright
Noncommercial publish: copyright/free
Noncommercial transform: free
8. But the consequence of the emergence of digital technologies, especially in the context of a digital network, means that the law now looks like this:
Commercial copy: copyright
Commercial copy: copyright
Noncommercial publish: copyright
Noncommercial transform: copyright
9. The property right that is copyright is no longer the balanced right that it was, or was intended to be. The property right that is copyright has become unbalanced, tilted toward an extreme. The opportunity to create and transform becomes weakened in a world in which creation requires permission and creativity must check with a lawyer.

Part Three: PUZZLES

Chapter 11— Chimera

Chapter 12— Harms
1. Judges and lawyers can tell themselves that fair use provides adequate "breathing room" between regulation by the law and the access the law should allow. But it is a measure of how out of touch our legal system has become that anyone actually believes this. The rules that publishers impose upon writers, the rules that folm distributors impose upon filmmakers, the rules that newspapers impose upon journalists—these are the real laws governing creativity. And these rules have little relationship to the "law" with which judges comfort themselves.

Part Four: BALANCES

Chapter 13— Eldred

Chapter 14— Eldred II
1. Indeed, many recognized the obvious benefit of the registration requirement. For one of the hardest things about the current system for people who want to license content is that there is no obvious place to look for the current copyright owners. Since registration is not required, since marking content is not required, since no formality at all is required, it is often impossibly hard to locate copyright owners to ask permission to use or license their work. This system would lower these costs, by establishing at least one registry where copyright owners could be identified.

CONCLUSION
1. A sensible patent policy could endorse and strongly support the patent system without having to reach everyone everywhere in exactly the same way. Just as a sensible copyright policy could endorse and strongly support a copyright system without having to regulate the spread of culture perfectly and forever, a sensible patent policy could endorse and strongly support a patent system without having to block the spread of drugs to a country not rich enough to afford market prices in any case. A sensible policy, in other words, could be a balanced policy. For most of our history, both copyright and patent policies were
balanced in just this sense.

AFTERWORD
1. As journals become electronic, however, the publishers are demanding that libraries not give the general public access to the journals. This means that the freedoms provided by print journals in public libraries begin to disappear. Thus, as with privacy and with software, a changing technology and market shrink a freedom taken for granted before.
2. The line between the public domain and protected content must be kept clear. Lawyers like the fuzziness of "fair use," and the distinction between ideas" and "expression." That kind of law gives them lots of work. But our framers had a simpler idea in mind: protected versus unprotected. The value of short terms is that there is little need to build exceptions into copyright when the term itself is kept short. A clear and active "lawyer-free zone" makes the complexities of "fair use" and "idea/expression" less necessary to navigate.
3. But the legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so stonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.

Science and Music

"Science and Music." Nature 453-454, (2008)

Editorial— Bountiful noise
01. Schoenberg's composition deliberately defied all the prevailing standards of music. It was, in his own words, "devoid of architecture or construction, just an uninterrupted changing of colours, rhythms, and moods". But it did have an expressive purpose, he insisted: "The music seeks to express all that swells in us subconsciously like a dream."
02. What matters is that its true bounties are recognized, and then explored and analysed. That applies not only to noise-like music, but also to nature.

Essay 1— Facing the music
01. Arnold Schoenberg was right when he cautioned: "One day the children's children of our psychologists will have deciphered the language of music."
02. The early sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius ranked it as the least of his three classes of 'music', and agreed with Pythagoras that music should ideally be studied while "setting aside the judgement of the ears".
03. Even musicians are uncertain of what kind of art it is they are engaged in, and what, if anything, can be said about it.
04. Anthropologists have often struggled to understand how or to what extent cultures apply intellectual and aesthetic judgements.
05. Then you find that the original problem has evaporated: in this atomistic view, 'life' or 'music' ceases to be visible at all.
06. As nearly all natural sounds are harmonically complex, the brain attributes related tones to a single sound source, combining them into a single auditory object. This is one of the 'Gestalt principles' the brain uses to decode sounds.
07. Cognitive studies on infants and primates offer some evidence that the brain recognizes the octave, and possibly the fifth as 'special'. Indeed, these intervals feature in nearly all musical cultures that use scales.
08. Hermann von Helmholtz first did the maths in the nineteenth century and showed that sensory dissonance dips at the intervals corresponding to the Western scale, suggesting that physics does play a part in determining this scale.
09. This finding suggests that affective and cognitive processing of music might involve different neural pathways.
10. One says that the emotional content is inherent in musical cues; The other says that it is all about how the music unfolds in time.
11. Perhaps there will always be some fundamental limitation in connecting how our brains work with what we do with them.

Essay 2— The evolution of music
01. Music's perceptual basis could derive from general-purpose auditory mechanisms, its syntactic components could be co-opted from language, and its effect on our emotions could be driven by the acoustic similarity of music to other sounds of greater biological relevance, such as speech or animal vocalizations.
02. Babies notice when the notes of a melody are reordered, but not when they are shifted to a different pitch range. Infants, like adults, are sensitive to the relationships between notes, which is preserved in transposition, but altered by reordering. Infants also tend to be captivated by music relative to many other stimuli.
03. Lullabies seem to qualify as a rare universal — nearly every culture has a genre of music geared towards infants, and there is considerable consistency in how they sound, generally being slow, repetitive and featuring descending pitch contours.
04. Examining functional overlap with other domains can provide insight. Language is generally the most popular candidate; both faculties combine discrete elements (notes/phonemes) into complex structures according to rules.
05. Similarities between human and nonhuman animals can thus indicate that a trait did not evolve for music.
06. Animals, unlike adult and infant humans, have difficulty recognizing melodies that have been shifted up or down in pitch, for instance.

Essay 3— Lost in music
01. The casual listener hears a wealth of variety; the musicologist detects a rapidly spreading monoculture — albeit expressed in many forms.
02. Well, suppose that we find a musical behaviour present in all the world's cultures. This could reveal some universal in human behaviour. But if all the world's musics are influenced by a single dominant culture, universals become uninterpretable.
03. Emotionally, music and language seem to share a single code: a pitch contour that sounds sad when spoken will also sound sad played on an instrument3. Yet other research suggests that the neural mechanisms involved in rhythm are unrelated to language.
04. The objective organization of sounds is only loosely related to how minds interpret those sounds.
05. When we observe an objective pattern in the music of some culture, we cannot assume that the pattern has any significance for culturally knowledgeable listeners.
06. Variance is the lifeblood of empirical research. Without variability, data tell us little.
07. Comparable cross-cultural experiments in sound are rare. In fact, few of the most basic musical concepts proposed by scholars have been tested in non-Western cultures.
08. Regrettably, most cognitive scientists are ill-equipped to do remote field work, and few ethnomusicologists know how to do an experiment.
09. In the long span of music research, we live at a unique but fleeting moment.

Essay 4— The neural roots of music
01. Some powerful compositions were written in the serial style, but few are played regularly today. Asked in 1999 why this might be, Boulez responded: "Well, perhaps we did not take sufficiently into account the way music is perceived by the listener."
02. Music is conceived by our brains, played through our bodies, perceived through our sensory organs and then interpreted by our brains. Thus it is subject both to general constraints of our neural system and to specific constraints of our auditory processing capacities.
03. Experience also profoundly affects the neural connections formed.
04. Talking to people of all ages, we use falling pitches to express comfort; relatively flat, high pitches to express fear; and large bell-shaped pitch contours to express joy and surprise. Hearing music with an unfamiliar structure, listeners base their emotional reactions largely on such sound features.
05. Musical structures and styles vary enormously across cultures, and change as continually as languages, yet our biology constrains the possibilities.
06. Young infants can perceive complex rhythmic structure, but they lose this ability before they are a year old if not exposed to such rhythms.
07. Our capacity for processing rhythmic complexity is likely to underlie the comparative success of rhythmic experimentation over pitch experimentation in the twentieth century.
08. The frequency content of tones is also processed according to when neurons fire, and consonant and dissonant stimuli cause different types of firing patterns in auditory nerves.
09. Composers can choose to ignore the fundamental physiological power of the consonance–dissonance relation and the information-processing power of discrete pitch and unequal interval sizes in scales. But by doing so, they create music that demands more of the listener because it lacks some of the most powerful physiological organizing principles of our nervous system.
10. Scale and harmonic structures depend on learning. By contrast with sensory consonance and dissonance, there is more flexibility in how they are perceived.
11. For many listeners, this level of difficulty is not enjoyable. Equally, music that is too simple and predictable can be boring.
12. What has not changed recently is our evolutionary inheritance, the structure of our sensory organs, our basic encoding of information and our visceral responses to features of sound that unleash the emotional power of music in our lives.

Essay 5— Talk of the tone
01. What is universal across cultures is the use of a small and consistent set of pitches and intervals within the octave as a framework for performance and perception.
02. Music uses pitch to distinguish the notes and intervals of the scale; language largely uses timbre to distinguish phonemes.
03. However, recent research on non-Western rhythm perception shows that even this basic aspect of our interpretation of sound varies between cultures.
04. Again, whistled speech can convey original linguistic utterances even though to the uninitiated the sound patterns may seem more like music.
05. Yet they probably hold important clues to how the biological building-blocks of language and music can be fluidly and dynamically reconfigured, rather than being exclusively bound to one domain or the other from birth.
06. These findings bear on a wide range of debates, from the 'modularity' of linguistic mechanisms to the evolutionary origins of music.

Essay 6— Raising the roof
01. The downside of this localization is that, in effect, our hearing suppresses awareness of sound reflections. We notice early sound reflections but are often not conscious of their effects — such as making sound seem clearer than it would be otherwise.
02. The sound absorption by objects and building materials also had to be determined, and assessing the absorption by seating and audiences was (and still is) particularly difficult.
03. The current consensus is that there are five subjective dimensions for concert hall listening. These are clarity, or ability to hear musical detail; reverberance, or being able to hear reverberations; acoustic intimacy, which describes how involved we seem to be in the performance; envelopment, the extent to which we feel surrounded by sound, and loudness.
04. Perhaps such features will allow acoustics to be tailored to the music of different eras. The technology is there, less so the acceptance by musicians and hall managers.

Essay 7— Playing by numbers
01. This delicate balance — somewhere between the uniform ticking of a clock and the random pitter-patter of raindrops — is reminiscent of complex systems, in which an intermediate degree of internal organization maintains coherence, yet allows for rich dynamics and functional flexibility.
02. In 1955, social scientist Herbert Simon pointed out that Zipf's law can be quantitatively explained by assuming that the usage frequency of a word increases proportionally to its previous appearances — the more you use a word, the more you will use it.
03. Literary texts and musical compositions are created as organic entities, not series of isolated decisions. Nevertheless, the outcome is an ordered sequence of events conveying information: a message. As the message flows, a context emerges, favouring the appearance of some elements at the expense of others.
04. Happily, information theory provides other ways to analyse the organization of symbols in a sequence.
05. As a collection of symbols becomes larger and more sophisticated, each element's frequency decreases. When each symbol appears too few times to be statistically significant, a meaningful message becomes indistinguishable from a random sequence.
06. Indeed, how we integrate and elaborate sensory information into artistic experience may always be beyond quantitative description.

Essay 8— Beyond the notes
01. But much of what performers do, and what listeners respond to, falls between the notes as musicologists construe them. This is where science comes in.
02. To understand music as performance, we must use scientific and humanities approaches in tandem.
03. In the early 1990s, Henkjan Honing and Peter Desain suggested that the shaping of both tempo and dynamics in classical music performance can be explained in terms of three main components: note-to-note shaping, the composer's 'pulse', and hierarchical phrase arching.
04. What is considered 'musical' has varied throughout history, as have practices of performance.
05. We found that, for this piece (Chopin's Mazurka Op.63 No.3)at least, both tempo and dynamic phrasing were present in the earliest recordings, but that they began to be closely coordinated with one another and with the composed phrasing only after the Second World War. Different performers achieved this coordination in various ways, but the effect was a streamlined style that was still expressive, albeit less personal and subjective than pre-war interpretations.
06. But a musical performance isn't a pot of paint. It is a human action carried out at a certain time and place, normally in the presence of others and marked by the contingencies of the occasion.
07. Remove the communication from music and it rapidly becomes as pointless as it would be to spend time in the virtual world Second Life if there were no real people behind the avatars and speech bubbles.
08. Performance, then, is more than the communication of structural information about musical works.
09. Here the interest lies in the pattern of discrepancies between the model and the performance. The focus is on the unique features, and the criterion of success is: how far the model guides the ear towards an awareness of these qualities, resulting in a process of engaged listening and critical interpretation. Used thus, deterministic models of performance expression do not undermine values of human creativity, but locate them more accurately.
10. Scientific measurement and cultural approaches to performance can be linked usefully. But this is a marriage of complementary approaches, rather than a convergence towards a unified discipline.

Essay 9— The ear of the beholder
01. If research is to provide a satisfying account of how music and mind interact, it must embrace the full variety of musical experiences and contexts.
02. If science is to demystify music and explain its power to affect us, it must investigate music as it is actually experienced.
03. The modern perplexity with music may be a symptom of the loss of this natural connection to making music.
04. But music cannot achieve a prescribed psychological outcome because it is impossible to understand or predict its effects without accounting for two other significant areas of influence. The first relates to the listener: his moods, memories, intentions, attitudes, choices and experiences. The second is the social context in which the music is experienced: who else is there, what is going on, and the social or personal significance of the event.
05. Experimental science often inadvertently promotes the vitamin model. Scientists who study music are not, as a body, skilled in musical performance or composition. Our relationship to music is, like much of society, generally that of an outsider looking in, a consumer rather than producer.
06. Music is a constantly evolving product of human culture, whose forms, functions and discourses are not fixed. It is what we decide to make it.
07. Its effects in these different contexts can be quite different.
08. On this issue, musicians and scientists often line up on opposite sides, with musicians seeing scientists as naive over-simplifiers, and scientists regarding musicians as defensive 'obscurantists'.
09. Our responses are hugely influenced by our attitudes to particular musical styles, and whether we approve of or identify with them. They are equally influenced by our sense of whether the music is appropriate to the situation.
10. Studies of encoding and memory reveal musical intelligence in people's recall errors: they tend to substitute a note or chord that serves a similar musical function. This shows that they have subconsciously internalized the rules of musical grammar. Other studies show that the ability to sing in tune can be dramatically improved by simple well-targeted feedback, suggesting that many abilities are already in place but are masked by the absence of one simple cognitive component.
11. Experiments also show that listeners can acquire a complex and fine-grained appreciation of the link between the choices they make about what to listen to and the resultant psychological outcomes.

Inner Vision

腦內藝術館
Semir Zeki. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain.

Part One: A Function of The Brain and of Art

Chapter 01— The brain's quest for essentials
1. My primary aim to convince the reader that we are at the threshold of a great enterprise, of learning something about the neurobiological basis of one of the most noble and profound of human endeavours. Beyond that, I hope that the pages of this book will constitute a modest contribution and a small step in laying the foundations of a neurology of aesthetics or neuro-esthetics, and thus for an understanding of the biological basis of aesthetic experience.

Chapter 02— Art's quest for essentials
1. To describe the power of art in words constitutes, in the lines of T. S. Eliot, 'a raid on the inarticulate , with shabby equipment'.
2. Thus, Matisse once said that, 'Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of things and beings, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a truer, more essential character, which the artist will seize so that he may give to reality a more lasting interpretation'.
3. In 1912, the French critic Jacques Riviere wrote: 'The true purpose of painting is to represent objects as they really are, that is to say differently from the way we see them. It tends always to give us their sensible essence, their presence, this is why the image it forms does not resemble their appearance', because the appearance changes from moment to moment.'

Chapter 03— The myth of the 'seeing eye'

Chapter 04— A neurobiological appraisal of Vermeer and Michelangelo
1. This gives ambiguity—which is a characteristic of all great art—a different, and neurological, definition; not the vagueness or uncertainty found in the dictionaries, but on the contrary, certainty—the certainty of many different, and essential, conditions, each of which is equal to the others, all expressed in a single profound painting, profound because it is so faithfully representative of so much.
2. Writing of Cubism, Gleizes and Metzinger tell us that 'Certain forms should remain implicit, so that the mind of the spectator is the chosen place of their concrete birth'.

Chapter 05— The neurology of the Platonic Ideal
1. That art is a search for constancy is in fact implicit in the writings of artists and philosophers, though often couched in terms that make it difficult to elicit this essential message. It is especially interesting to contrast the views of Plato and Hegel, both of whom have had a profound influence on Western thinking. The views of the two on aesthetics in general and painting in particular were almost antipodean. Neither spoke about the brain, its functions or its functioning. Yet these views are perhaps best understood, and even partially reconciled, when viewed in the context of the brain.
2. What he only implied, Schopenhauer made explicit many centuries later, when he wrote that painting should strive 'to obtain knowledge of an object, not as a particular thing but as Platonic Ideal, that is the enduring form of this whole species of things', a statement that a modern neurobiologist could easily accommodate in describing the functions of the visual brain.
3. As John Constable put it in his Discourses: 'the whole beauty and grandeur of Art consists ... in being able to get above all singular forms, local customs, particularities of every kind ... [The painter] makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original', the 'abstract idea' being presumably Constable's term for the Platonic Ideal.
4. The brain is interested in particularities, but only with the broader aim of categorising a particularity into a more general scheme.
5. To Aristotle, these 'universals' depended upon repetitive exposure (sensations) which were stored in memory and which, collectively, constituted an 'experience'. Equally more acceptable neurobiologically, because implicitly more dependent upon brain function, are the views of Kant and Hegel. Their view, unlike the Platonic one, exalts art, which it sees as being able to represent reality better than the 'ephemera of sense data', since the latter changes from moment to moment.
6. Whether art succeeds in presenting the real truth, the essentials, or whether it is the only means of getting to that truth in the face of constantly changing and ephemeral sense data, the opposing views are at least united in suggesting that there is (Hegel) or that there should be (Plato and Schopenhauer) a strong relationship between painting and the search for essentials. And my equation, of both the Hegelian Concept and the Platonic Ideal with the brain's stored record, means that the difference between the two, from a neurological point of view, is insignificant. As we shall see, that stored information can become defective as a consequence of neurological diseases; these result in syndromes that are of profound interest in understanding the neurology of art and illuminate, at least in neurological terms, the concept of the Platonic Ideal and the Hegelian Idea, again without distinguishing between the two.

Chapter 06— The Cubist search for essentials
1. In a statement that does not explicitly mention Synthetic Cubism but must have referring to it, Malevich tells us that 'For an artist like Picasso objective nature is merely the starting point—the motivation—for the creation of new forms, so that the objects themselves can scarcely, if at all, be recognised in the pictures'.

Chapter 07— The modularity of vision
1. Perhaps most important of all, the discovery of functional specialisation has been instrumental in changing our minds about vision as a process, impelling us to consider it as an active process—a physiological search for constants and essentials that makes the brain independent of continual change, and the servility to it, and makes it independent too of the single and fortuitous view. The brain, then, is no mere passive chronicler of the external physical reality but an active participant in generating the visual image, according to its own rules and programs. This is the very role that artists have attributed to art, and the role that some philosophers have wished that painting could have.

Chapter 08— Seeing and understanding

Chapter 09— The modularity of visual aesthetics
1. Colour, as we shall later see, is a construction of the brain. There are no colours in the outside world. This was recognised a long time ago by Newton, who wrote that the 'Rays, to speak properly, have no Colour. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up a sensation of this Colour or that'.

Chapter 10— The pathology of the Platonic Ideal and the Hegelian Concept
1. So the philosophical question of whether there are ideal forms in nature, external to the human observer, is one to which neurology is indifferent because, in practice, an observer deprived of vision during a critical period after birth cannot recognise even a small number of objects by sight, let alone have a Platonic Ideal or an Hegelian Concept of them.

Part Two: The Art of The Receptive Field

Chapter 11— The receptive field

Chapter 12— Mondrian, Malevich and the neurophysiology of oriented lines
1. Piet Mondrian ended by emphasising the line too, but reached that end from a different beginning and with a different approach. 'Art', he wrote, 'has two main human inclinations ... One aims at the direct creation of universal beauty, the other at the aesthetic expression of oneself'. The first is more or less objective, the latter subjective. The first had to be objective because 'Since art is in essence universal, its expression cannot rest on a subjective view' even if 'our human capacities do not allow of a perfectly objective view'. Art, he believed, 'shows us that there are also constant truths concerning forms' and it was the aim of objective art, as he saw it, to reduce all complex forms in this world to one or a few universal forms, the constant elements which would be the constituent of all forms, to 'discover consciously or unconsciously the fundamental laws hidden in reality'.

Chapter 13— Mondrian, Malevich and the neurophysiology of squares and rectangles
1. The fact is that the new forms, consisting largely of lines, squares and rectangles, are admirably suited to stimulate cells in the visual cortex, and the properties of these cells are, to an extent, the pre-existing 'idea' within us.

Chapter 14— Perceptual problems created by the receptive fields

Chapter 15— The neurophysiology of the MetaMalevich and the MetaKandinsky
1. This is but another example in a more general theme that runs throughout this book: that different forms of art excite different groups of cells in the brain, which is one reason why there is a functional specialisation in aesthetics.

Chapter 16— Kinetic art
1. This is not the only example one can give of the brain going beyond the information given, and thus constructing the image according to its own rules.

Part Three: A Neurological Examination of Some Art Forms

Chapter 17— Face imperception or a portrait of prosopagnosia
1. Schopenhauer put it like this: The arts whose aim is the representation of the Idea of man, have as their problem, not only beauty, the character of the species, but also the character of the individual, which is called, par excellence, character, But this is only the case in so far as this character is to be regarded, not as something accidental and quite peculiar to the man as a single individual, but as a side of the Idea of humanity which is specially apparent in this individual, and the representation of which is therefore of assistance in revealing this Idea.

Chapter 18— The physiology of colour vision
1. Although some of them can perceive colours, and even shades of a colour, they are not able to distinguish the shapes to which the colours are attached; they are in the true sense blind to forms. This constitutes another line of evidence to show that colour and form, even though intimately linked together, are processed separately by the brain. But so intimate is the linkage between the two that only extreme pathological conditions can disentangle them. The result is the liberation of colour—the dream of the Fauvists.

Chapter 19— The Fauvist brain
1. The above experiment, by showing that viewing normally coloured natural scenes activates not only the same areas that are activated by viewing abstract coloured scenes but also additional areas as well, demonstrates that there really is a neurological difference between viewing coloured abstract and natural scenes, and abstract scenes do really seem to affect early visual areas without eliciting activity from areas which are active only when we view natural scenes. In a sense, it is an important neurological vindication of the efforts of Mondrian and others to put on canvas the constant elements of all forms and colours.
2. This finding supports the general view I have put forward here and elsewhere, that artists are neurologists, studying the organisation of the visual brain with techniques unique to them and that their work, when exploited scientifically, uncovers laws of cerebral organisation which scientists were previously ignorant of.

Chapter 20— The neurology of abstract and representational art

Chapter 21— Monet's brain

Epilogue
1. My aim in writing this book has been really to convey my feeling that aesthetic theories will only become intelligible and profound once based on the workings of the brain, and that no theory of aesthetics which does not have strong biological foundations is likely to be complete, let alone profound.
2. As a believer in that greatest sentiment of all, love, which holds sway above all else, which propels us towards the heavens and impels us to achieving the highest—a view immortalised in Plato's Symposium—my greatest regret or all is that, at my age and with my experience of the brain, I have to remain silent about the relationship between love and erotic impulses on the on hand and artistic creativity on the other, since they are both self reproductive processes.
3. Finally, I also hope that no one will think that knowledge of what happens in the brain when we look at works of art will demystify and etiolate art, thus reducing it to a formula and degrading the aesthetic experience. The brain is a beautiful organ, whose functioning and formidable feats are undoubtedly the greatest achievements of the slow process of evolution. Knowledge of its operations and of its products, including the works of art which have enriched our cultures and which we so admire, merely enhances the sense of wonder and beauty, because we then begin to admire not only the product but also the organ that is able to produce it.

What Is Life

生命是什麼？
Erwin Schrodinger. What Is Life?: The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell; With, Mind and Matter; & Autobiographical Sketches.

Preface
1. We have inherited from our forefathers the keen longing for unified, all-embracing knowledge. The very name given to the highest institutions of learning reminds us, that from antiquity and throughout many centuries the universal aspect has been the only one to be given full credit. But the spread, both in width and depth, of the multifarious branches of knowledge during the last hundred odd years has confronted us with a queer dilemma. We feel clearly that we are only now beginning to acquire reliable material for welding together the sum total of all that is known into a whole; but, on the other hand, it has become next to impossible for a single mind fully to command more than a small specialized portion of it.
2. I can see no other escape from this dilemma (lest our true aim be lost for ever) than that some of us should venture to embark on a synthesis of facts and theories, albeit with second-hand and incomplete knowledge of some of them — and at the risk of making fools of ourselves.

Chapter 1— The Classical Physicist's Approach to the Subject
1. The reason for this is, that what we call thought (1) is itself an orderly thing, and (2) can only be applied to material, i.e. to perceptions or experiences, which have a certain degree of orderliness. This has two consequences. First, a physical organization, to be in close correspondence with thought (as my brain is with my thought) must be a very well-ordered organization, and that means that the events that happen within it must obey strict physical laws, at least to a very high degree of accuracy. Secondly, the physical impressions made upon that physically well-organized system by other bodies from outside, obviously correspond to the perception and experience of the corresponding thought, forming its material, as I have called it. Therefore, the physical interactions between our system and others must, as a rule, themselves possess a certain degree of physical orderliness, that is to say, they too must obey strict physical laws to a certain degree of accuracy.

Chapter 2— The Hereditary Mechanism

Chapter 3— Mutations
1. Selection has no effect — because the small, continuous variations are not inherited. They are obviously not based on the structure of the hereditary substance, they are accidental.
2. The mutations are actually due to quantum jumps in the gene molecule.

Chapter 4— The Quantum-Mechanical Evidence

Chapter 5— Delbruck's Model Discussed and Tested.
1. The molecule presents the same solidity of structure as a crystal. Remember that it is precisely this solidity on which we draw to account for the permanence of the gene!

Chapter 6— Order, Disorder and Entropy
1. How would we express in terms of the statistical theory the marvellous faculty of a living organism, by which it delays the decay into thermodynamical equilibrium (death)? We said before: 'It feeds upon negative entropy', attracting, as it were, a stream of negative entropy upon itself, to compensate the entropy increase it produces by living and thus to maintain itself on a stationary and fairly low entropy level.

Chapter 7— Is Life Based on the Laws of Physics?
1. These facts are easily the most interesting that science has revealed in our day. We may be inclined to find them, after all, not wholly unacceptable. An organism's astonishing gift of concentrating a 'stream of order' on itself and thus escaping the decay into atomic chaos — of 'drinking orderliness' from a suitable environment — seems to be connected with the presence of the 'aperiodic solids', the chromosome molecules, which doubtless represent the highest degree of well-ordered atomic association we know of — much higher than the ordinary periodic crystal — in virtue of the individual role every atom and every radical is playing here.

Epilogue— On Determinism and Free Will
1. In itself, the insight is not new. The earliest records to my knowledge date back some 2,500 years or more. From the early great Upanishads the recognition ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self) was in Indian thought considered, far from being blasphemous, to represent the quintessence of deepest insight into the happenings of the world. The striving of all the scholars of Vedanta was, after having learnt to pronounce with their lips, really to assimilate in their minds this grandest of all thoughts.
2. Yet each of us has the indisputable impression that the sum total of his own experience and memory forms a unit, quite distinct from that of any other person. He refers to it as 'I'. What is this 'I'?
3. If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected.

MIND AND MATTER: THE TARNER LECTURES

Chapter 1— The Physical Basis of Consciousness
1. I would summarize my general hypothesis thus: consciousness is associated with the learning of the living substance; its knowing how is unconscious.
2. Our insight into the 'becoming' of the organisms makes it easy to understand that our conscious life — I will not say shall be, but that it actually is necessarily a continued fight against our primitive ego.
3. And thus at every step, on every day of our life, as it were, something of the shape that we possessed until then has to change, to be overcome, to be deleted and replaced by something new. The resistance of our primitive will is the psychical correlate of the resistance of the existing shape to the transforming chisel. For we ourselves are chisel and statue, conquerors and conquered at the same time — it is a true continued 'self-conquering'.

Chapter 2— The Future of Understanding
1. The question becomes of singular significance in its application to man, since we wish to infer that the striving and labouring of a man during his lifetime constitute an integrating contribution to the development of the species, in the quite proper biological sense.
2. The first is the biological importance of behaviour. By conforming to innate faculties as well as to the environment and by adapting itself to changes in either of these factors, behaviour, though not itself inherited, may yet speed up the process of evolution by orders of magnitude. While in plants and in the lower ranges of the animal kingdom adequate behaviour is brought about by the slow process of selection, in other words by trial and error, man's high intelligence enables him to enact it by choice. This incalculable advantage may easily outweigh his handicap of slow and comparatively scarce propagation, which is further reduced by the biologically dangerous regard not to let our offspring exceed the volume for which livelihood can be secured.

Chapter 3— The Principle of Objectivation
1. All science (Wissenschaft) however is a function of the soul, in which all knowledge is rooted. The soul is the greatest of all cosmic miracles, it is the conditio sine qua non of the world as an object. It is exceedingly astonishing that the Western world (apart from very rare exceptions) seems to have so little appreciation of this being so. The flood of external objects of cognizance has made the subject of all cognizance withdraw to the background, often to apparent non-existence. — Eranos Jahrbuch (1946), p.398.

Chapter 4— The Arithmetical Paradox: The Oneness of Mind

Chapter 5— Science and Religion
1. However, the supreme importance of Kant's statement does not consist in justly distributing the roles of the mind and its object — the world — between them in the process of 'mind forming an idea of the world', because, as I just pointed out, it is hardly possible to discriminate the two. The great thing was to form the idea that this one thing — mind or world — may well be capable of other forms of appearance that we cannot grasp and that do not imply the notions of space and time. This means an imposing liberation from our inveterate prejudice. There probably are other orders of appearance than the space-time-like. It was, so I believe, Schopenhauer who first read this from Kant. This liberation opens the way to belief, in the religious sense, without running all the time against the clear results which experience about the world as we know it and plain thought unmistakably pronounce. For instance — to speak of the most momentous example — experience as we know it unmistakably obtrudes the conviction that it cannot survive the destruction of the body, with whose life, as we know life, it is inseparably bound up. So is there to be nothing after this life? No. Not in the way of experience as we know it necessarily to take place in space and time. But, in an order of appearance in which time plays no part, this notion of 'after' is meaningless. Pure thinking cannot, of course, procure us a guarantee that there is that sort of thing, But it can remove the apparent obstacles to conceiving it as possible. That is what Kant has done by his analysis, and that, to my mind, is his philosophical importance.
2. To my view the 'statistical theory of time' has an even stronger bearing on the philosophy of time than the theory of relativity. The latter, however revolutionary, leaves untouched the undirectional flow of time, which it presupposes, while the statistical theory constructs it from the order of the events. This means a liberation from the tyranny of old Chronos. What we in our minds construct ourselves cannot, so I feel, have dictatorial power over our mind, neither the power of bringing it to the fore nor the power of annihilating it. But some of you, I am sure, will call this mysticism. So with all due acknowledgment to the fact that physical theory is at all times relative, in that it depends on certain basic assumptions, we may, or so I believe, assert that physical theory in its present stage strongly suggests the indestructibility of Mind by Time.

Chapter 6— The Mystery of the Sensual Qualities
1. Many helpful devices can facilitate this work, for instance photometric recording across the plate of its transparency, which yields a magnified diagram on which the positions of the lines can be easily read. But they must be read! The observer's senses have to step in eventually. The most careful record, when not inspected, tells us nothing.
2. Galenus has preserved us a fragment (Diels, fr.125), in which Democritus introduces the intellect having an argument with the senses about what is 'real'. The former says: 'Ostensibly there is colour, ostensibly sweetness, ostensibly bitterness, actually only atoms and the void', to which the senses retort: 'Poor intellect, do you hope to defeat us while from us you borrow your evidence? Your victory is your defeat.'
3. In this chapter I have tried by simple examples, taken from the humblest of sciences, namely physics, to contrast the two general facts (a) that all scientific knowledge is based on sense perception, and (b) that none the less the scientific views of natural processes formed in this way lack all sensual qualities and therefore cannot account for the latter. Let me conclude with a general remark.
4. Scientific theories serve to facilitate the survey of our observations and experimental findings. Every scientist knows how difficult it is to remember a moderately extended group of facts, before at least some primitive theoretical picture about them has been shaped. It is therefore small wonder, and by no means to be blamed on the authors of original papers or of text-books, that after a reasonably coherent theory has been formed, they do not describe the bare facts they have found or wish to convey to the reader, but clothe them in the terminology of that theory or theories. This procedure, while very useful for our remembering the facts in a well-ordered pattern, tends to obliterate the distinction between the actual observations and the theory arisen from them. And since the former always are of some sensual quality, theories are easily thought to account for sensual qualities; which, of course, they never do.

The Body May Age, But Romance Stays Fresh

Kate Zernike. Love in the Time of Dementia. The New York Times, November 18, 2007

1. So this, in the end, is what love is.
2. What culture tells us about love is generally young love. Songs and movies and literature show us the rapture and the betrayal, the breathlessness and the tears. The O'Connors' story, reported by the couple's son in an interview with a television station in Arizona, where Mr. O'Connor lives in an assisted-living center, opened a window onto what might be called, for comparison's sake, old love.
3. "This is right up there in terms of the cutting-edge ethical and cultural issues of late life love," said Thomas R. Cole, director of the McGovern Center for Health, Humanities and the Human Spirit at the University of Texas, and author of a cultural history of aging. "We need moral exemplars, not to slavishly imitate, but to help us identify ways of being in love when you're older."
4. "There's a difference between love as it is presented in movies and music as this jazzy sexy thing that involves bikini underwear and what love actually turns out to be," said the psychologist Mary Pipher, whose book "Another Country" looked at the emotional life of the elderly. "The really interesting script isn't that people like to have sex. The really interesting script is what people are willing to put up with."
5. "Young love is about wanting to be happy," she said. "Old love is about wanting someone else to be happy."
6. "As people get older, they seem to naturally look at the world through positivity and be willing to accept things that when we're young we would find disturbing and vexing," said John Gabrieli, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the researchers.
7. "As you get older you begin to recognize that this isn't going to last forever, for better or for worse," said Laura L. Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity and a research counterpart of Dr. Gabrieli's in the brain imaging research. "You understand that the bad times pass, and you understand that the good times pass," Dr. Carstensen said. "As you experience them, they're more precious, they're richer."
8. Still, for all those kinds of complications, those who study aging can only smile at young lovers who say they never want to become like an old married couple. Despite the popular preference for young love, the O'Connors' example suggests that we should all aspire to old love, for better and for worse.

浪漫不浪漫

平路，《浪漫不浪漫》。

01.男性家長制的權威操控，其實，正是儒家文化中被一再遵循的家庭模式。儒家的丈夫角色如父如兄，因此，最可以消受白紙白璧般無知無瑕的小女人：幼齒的「幼」、尚青的「青」、乃至雛妓的「雛」，對男人來說，意味著無須拼搏就可以輕鬆操控。更何況儒家文化對女性的訓育也著重在妾婦之德：所謂的婦德、婦工、婦言，都教女人及早放棄自己的自主性，甘願把心智停留在稚嫩的年齡。(P.20)
02.明明是在傳統架構裡鑲嵌得宜，卻名之為浪漫、名之為勇氣，而我擔心的尤其是這浪漫的「迷思」將影響深遠：它關係著女人繼續把皮相青春當作本身可欲與否的唯一標準。(P.22)
03.同樣的邏輯之下，我不是反對老夫少妻，我只是反對將名銜、地位、財富、容貌等表面的附麗，當成通往幸福的金光大道。這類媚俗的說法，既虛構了所謂的「浪漫」－那是需要間真勇氣與叛逆精神的精誠所致，它也遮蔽了人們清亮的眼睛，以及眼睛裡對人生實況的體察……以及悲憫。(P.26)
04.電影院裡，藉著《斷背山》的藝術化境，你一時淚光閃閃，你不安，但你依稀記得，你記得自己也經驗過無比強烈的情痴，飛鳥絕跡之地，萬丈懸崖之上，你回想那愛戀怎麼存活？後來為什麼不曾繼續下去？……模糊地、迷濛地，你設身處地，已經滑過了同性戀與異性戀的無形疆界。(P.38)
05.我們漢文化裡，曾經出現一過一些以色藝踰越倫常的女人。從魚玄機，薛濤，……詩詞餘韻可以想見她們當年的生命情調，或者顛覆、或者反叛、或者瘋狂……，夾雜著青春歲月的嘆惋、錯失機會的惘然「枝迎南北鳥，葉送往來風」的同時，早已經不是以愛上一個男人為歸宿的傳統女性角色。(P.49)
06.女性在這裡體系裡成長，一方面千方百計地妄想留住青春，另一方面，卻又清楚覺知到「青春是不希罕的」，這種自憐，其實是自厭自棄，更根本地，則代表我們性別的自我異化：努力塞進娃娃裝裡的身體與明辨世事的冷靜腦袋之間的分裂狀態。(P.58)
07.鏡子的角度重要，鏡子周圍的光線也極其重要。鏡子旁映著溫柔的燈影，打上玫瑰色的光暈，鏡中人自然有神采：毛孔消失，眼袋不見了，眼睛水汪汪的，光線甚至還會為女人補粉，幫女人修飾嘴角的細紋。(P.111)
08.原來，那時候是，最後的新年。原來父親忘記了，教過好多過年的規矩，就是沒教，怎麼過一個沒有他在的新年。(P.224)
09.詩對文字的要求，正是濃縮、精煉、澄澈、準確，以及最重要的音樂性，透過翻譯，不見了。(P.233)
10.總之，人們習慣於在政治框架前讓步，輕易讓政治思維來凌駕文化意義。(P.331)

How Things Are

庖丁解牛：科學家的思考藝術
John Brockman and Katinka Matson. How Things Are: A Science Tool-kit for the Mind.

01. Mary Catherine Bateson：自然愈來愈與人為相反了，然而，人類總是必須與自然的機率配合，才能創造他們的人造品，即使是製造夢想與幻想也一樣。
02. Lee Smolin：笛卡兒和萊布尼茲認為，在世界上真實事物和過程的關係中，時間只不過是其中的一個面向。
03. Lee Smolin：對於萊布尼茲和其他哲學家而言，節拍器不過是幻象，會矇蔽我們對真實世界的認識；時間只有一種，就是演奏者共同交織出來的節奏。
04. Augustine of Hippo（第五世紀基督教教父）：這個世界不是在時間裡創生的，而是隨著時間一起誕生。
05. Richard Feynman：一個理論能否帶來哲學上的愉悅，是否容易了解，或者從常識的觀點看來是不是完全合理，都不成問題。
06. Daniel C. Dennett：錯誤是學習的黃金良機：在某個重要的意義上，錯誤是學習某些全新事物的唯一機會。
07. Roger C. Shank：要成為受過教育的人，你必須主導自己的教育。
08. Roger C. Shank：尋找疑問以便從中學習，只花最少的注意力在學校，要記得，學校與學習關係不大。
09. Pascal Boyer：人們不是根據事情真實的樣子，而是根據他們認為事情應該有的樣子而採取行動。
10. Pascal Boyer：得出理論不表示考慮到所欲描述的現象所有可能的方面。相反地，它表示你把焦點放在描述可以得出抽象通則的方面。
11. Pascal Boyer：科學原則建立嚴謹的概念，反科學原則以揭露它們實際的差異來模糊概念。
12. Dan Sperber：人類溝通是人類後設表徵（meta-representation）能力的副產品。我們的祖先演化出對彼此的心靈狀態進行複雜推論的能力，把這種能力當成了解及預測彼此行為的工具。接著，這項能力提昇了藉由公開行動把想法傳遞給他人的機率。結果創造出語言演化的條件。
13. Sir Martin Rees：宇宙是一個整體，要了解我們自己，我們必須了解星體。我們是星塵－死亡已久的星體所留下的灰燼。

Real Moments

活在當下
Barbara De Angelis. Real Moments.

序、豐富生命之旅
1.最有效的自我發掘過程，始終是先靜默，並傾聽靜默，然後寫下我所聽到的。

第一篇、當下省思

一、你快樂嗎？
1.只有在你百分之百地經歷當下的那一瞬間，真實的剎那才能富含力量，才能完滿。
2.當你全神貫注，就能毫無遺漏地去感受自己當下所處的環境和正在做的事，而不是麻木地讓眼前這介於過去和未來的瞬間，成為又一個即將逝去，將會遺忘的時刻。
3.什麼時候我才會覺得夠了？夠了之後要做什麼？

二、世紀末的不安
1.麻木阻絕了我們體驗真實剎那的機會。只有靠我們不麻木，不背過身去，現代人的感情和心靈才能得救。

三、迷途
1.什麼東西能讓我快樂？真正快樂的時刻多久出現一次？我怎麼知道自己什麼時候很快樂？
2.快樂不賴獲得，快樂是一種技巧。快樂是在你每一刻所做的選擇－選擇如何體驗當下時刻，快樂不是有一天你會忽然到達的一種境地。
3.在我們能與對方易地而處之前，永遠不要批評。
4.凡從自己內心深處探索而得的，必能使你得救；凡留在內心深處不去發掘的，終能使你毀滅。

第二篇、生活憬悟

四、自我重生
1.唯有牢牢掌握著生命的目的和意義，我們脆弱的心，才可能忍受生而為人所必須面對的所有痛苦、劇變和挑戰。
2.放開依賴慣的安全感迎向新生活，需要很大的勇氣；但失去了意義的生活又何來真正的安全感呢？冒險和刺激或許更安全，因為激盪中才有生生不息，變異中才有萬鈞之力。
3.如果我們想要重新發現自己，想要過純真無偽的生活，就必須鼓起勇氣對不再有益於我們的事說「不」。

五、工作與差事
1.做一些你覺得很無聊的事是特別累人的，尤其是你知道，第二天你又得再做一遍的時候。
2.努力做事以換得財富，並不表示你活得有目的，也不表示你完成了上天賦予的工作；努力之後能獲得喜悅和滿足才是。
3.如果在謀生的差事上，你必須妥協你的信念，必須隱藏你的真我，或做出有違誠實原則的事，那麼那份差事就是你的靈魂每天死去八小時之處。

六、挑戰逆境
1.每天平靜愉快的生活，不會為我們帶來勇氣，勇氣激發自困境中的奮鬥，和對逆境的挑戰。

第三篇、人際體驗

七、關懷去愛
1.婚姻是日復一日、年復一年的抉擇；婚姻不是名詞，而是動詞；婚姻不是你要得到的東西，而是一件你要付出努力的事。
2.我們必須改變我們的觀念：值得紀念的，是生命，而不是死亡。為今天創造真實的剎那，不要等到明天才發現空留回憶。

八、讓靈魂自由奔放－給女性
1.女性要找回完整的自己，和發掘自我沒有多大關係，最要緊的是尋回散成碎片、分了出去的自己。

九、何不放下武士精神？－給男性
1.無法與其他男性靈犀相通，會是男人最致命的創傷。　－　美國詩人 Robert Bly。

十、與子女一同成長
1.我們常向孩子發出一些錯誤的問句：「那是做什麼的？」「你要拿它來做什麼？」「你為什麼要做這個？」。
2.我們大人的很多問題，其實正來自我們自己價值觀的扭曲，我們衡量自我價值時，總是捨本性而強調成就。

第四篇、用心實踐

十一、追求性靈生活
1.能使瑣碎平凡的事物變成不凡經驗的，是全神貫注的心。

十二、傾聽靜寂
1.靜默和獨處都會引爆衝突，它們能在瞬間把我們丟進到現實真相裡，也因為如此，二者對我們靈魂的健康影響至鉅。
2.內省使外發行為更具威力。

十三、儀典的啟示

十四、慈悲與感恩

十五、回歸心靈的原鄉

First You Build a Cloud

物理與頭腦相遇的地方
K. C. Cole. First You Build a Cloud: And Other Reflections on Physics as a Way of Life.

前言、生活在太空中
1.科學與人文之間已經遭受了令人心痛而且也不自然的隔離。然而，科學不僅是一些事實的綜合；科學更是許多理念的綜合體，這綜合體形成了我們的文化脈絡，我們透過這脈絡去看這個世界。
2.科學非但實用，科學也決定了我們如何思考及感受。
3.我們對自己的看法以及對我們世界的認知是什麼，這在文化中也應當占有同等的重要性及地位。
4.如果我們學習到的，會使我們對自己的限度及潛力感到些許暈眩的話，也只好認命。科學給了我們對尺度的認識、對限度的認識、對透視的讚美，以及對不確定性的感受。

第一部、求知的藝術

一、科學如隱喻
1.整個科學乃是把每日的想法加以精煉，日常生活中的常識僅是我們早期的教育訓練留在我們腦中的一層偏見。　－　Albert Einstein。
2.只有堅持，熟悉的知識一定要再次出現於不熟悉的事物中時，才會發生危險。　－　J. Robert Oppenheimer。
3.心像可以讓我們更快向前走，可是真理卻包含在數學之內。　－　Kip Thorne。
4.模型和隱喻唯有在我們知道意義及限度時，才有功用。

二、正確？錯誤？
1.當人們試著去做很艱難的工作時，總是預期有些結果會半途而廢，如果人們非常保守，如果他們只發表自己期望發現的東西，就很少會有新發現。　－　Roger Blandford。
2.最偉大的思想家都把他們信奉的主義認為是暫時性及沒什麼把握的，其暫時性的程度比歷史演義中聲稱的更小得多。

三、瞧出端倪
1.我們不能以為認知到的原始數據、不能假設所有認知到的「事實」，都是能成為知識基礎的堅實磚塊，所有的認知中都裝滿了理論。　－　格雷高利。

四、科學的審美觀
1.發現是來自被美感發動的好奇心，很少是來自實用的意圖。　－　C. S. Smith。

五、自然的互補

第二部、發動者及震撼者

六、力和贗力

七、量子躍遷

八、相對說來

第三部、線與結

九、波和四濺的水花

十、共振的魔力

十一、對稱性和影子

十二、有序及無序
1.不可逆性是我們付給複雜的代價。
2.在不可逆的過程中失去的不是能量，而是機會。　－　Richard Feynman。
3.在宇宙的任何角落中創造出有序度的代價，就是在其它某處增加無序度。

十三、因與果
1.「因」是能使某事以較高的機率發生的任何東西，因此機率也可能是因。
2.你不必知道因果關係中的方程中的每一項因素，才能測定出可能的結果。
3.在事物的結構中，嚴格的因果律及絕對的隨機都有它們各自的位置；一把它們放在一起，就會產生矛盾，就如波和粒子之間的矛盾一樣。事實上，如果你硬要把這兩種論點以邏輯（線性）串聯，得到的結論並沒有意義。

十四、差之毫釐，失之千里

The Universe and the Teacup

數學與頭腦相遇的地方
K. C. Cole. The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty.

一、數學和事物到底有什麼關連？
1.相對論已經給了我們答案：我們只能觀測到關係。而量子力學則給了另一個答案：我們只能觀測到機率。　－　Arthur Eddington, 1882-1944。
2.換句話說，我們所觀測到的就是數學上的關係。
3.科學式學習如何不為自己所愚的漫長歷史。　－　Richard Feynman, 1918-1988。

第一部、心靈與數學相會的地方

二、指數式放大
1.在某種程度上來說，導引我們社會的倫理原則的，一值都是基於我們對自然世界的瞭解。

三、預估風險
1.對風險的態度是在文化背景中培養出來的，深深受到從心理到倫理、到信仰的影響。
2.人們經常會冒很大的風險去防止某些損失，可是肯為了可能的得益去冒風險的意願就小得多。
3.總會有這麼一個風險，那就是：風險預估本身就是錯的。

第二部、對物質世界的解釋
1.就如資訊的其它性質一樣，訊號和雜訊的區別往往完全是由環境背景來決定的。

四、量度男人、女人及事物

五、尺度的問題
1.因為我們只能在我們的時間尺度中看到事物，因此失去了許多觀點。

六、突現的性質：多帶來不同

七、預測的數學
1.統計學上的預測，即機率，也許是所有二十世紀的科學發展中最典型的特性。它代表我們對現實的認清，我們不能聲稱我們知道所有事物的成因，因為這些成因太多、太多了。　－　物理學家莫里森。

八、稻草堆中的訊號
1.即使雜訊本身也能用來把訊號加強。這個叫「隨機共鳴（stochastic resonance）」的方法是利用以下的事實：有些隨機的背景起伏，有時可以把微弱訊號放大到可以觀測得到的地步。

第三部、對社會世界的解釋

九、選舉：吉尼爾是對的
1.可是我們很容易可以證明，選舉的結果直接和選舉制度有關。即使選民的偏愛不變，如果他們改變了選舉方式，仍然能選出不同的贏家。

十、公平的分配：所羅門王的智慧

十一、和藹體貼的數學原理：數學證明了金律

第四部、真理的數學原理

十二、事情因何發生？
1.機率的數學是一種必要的工具，藉以篩檢出那些純粹基於機遇而預期會出現的事物－可是這不等於說，這些事物並沒有一個發生的理由。

十三、舉證的重擔
1.嚴格來說，幾乎我們所有的知識都是有問題的；在這個我們能確知的小範疇中，即使是數學本身尋覓真理的方法（歸納及類比），都是基於機率的。　－　拉普拉斯，1814。
2.數學定律是否適用於現實世界，並不確定。就其確定的部分而言，並不涉及現實世界。　－　愛因斯坦。
3.數學家 Kurt Godel （1906-1978，奧地利數學家，後來遷居美國）證明了：有超越邏輯的真理，也有只依靠邏輯無法證明的真理。
4.形式演繹至高無上的成功，乃在證明自己在某種形式演繹的推斷上是無能為力的。　－　紐曼。
5.曾經有過一陣子，人們認為邏輯演繹法則以及它們所描述及解釋的自然律，都是銘刻在石碑上的經典。現在甚至數學家都知道有許多不同的邏輯體系了，知道邏輯法則有其限制，邏輯與自然律就像人家的法律一樣可因社會變遷而改變。
6.我們現在的知識中，最能讓我們感到有安全感的，就是知道我們不知道的是什麼。　－　紐曼。

十四、諾塞與愛因斯坦：真理的不變性
1.去看那些獨特現象裡的一般性，那些短暫現象裡的恆久性，就是科學思考的目標。　－　Alfred North Whitehead, 1861-1947。
2.當你的視野增加時，複雜的事物也能獲得優雅的簡單性。
3.自然律不是永恆而抽象的真理，它們是在某種經過選擇的場景中盛行的模式。　－　Ian Stewart。
4.科學之所以有用，正是因為不同的觀點能映照出世界不同的形貌。　－　Ian Stewart。
5.淺顯的真理，反面是虛假；深邃的真理，反面還是真理。　－　Christopher Morley。

Consilience

知識大融通
Edward O. Wilson. Consilience: the unity of knowledge.

一、愛奧尼亞式迷情

二、學識的主要分支
1.每個領域都有自己的研究人員、專門語言、分析模式和確認標準。這種劃分的結果是混淆，而培根早在四個世紀前，就正確預見這類型的混淆會是一種致命的錯誤：「每當我們將來自某一經驗世界的推論或證據，運用到另一個經驗式屆時，就會出現這種混淆的現象。」
2.只有當我們能夠流暢地跨越各個領域的邊界時，才可能對真實的世界產生真實的看法，而不再透過某種意識型態和宗教教條的鏡片觀看事物，或是受制於滿足立即需求的短視反應。
3.光憑學習各學門的片面知識，無法得到均衡的看法，我們需要追求這些學門之間的融通。
4.當各種學識間的思想差距變窄時，知識的多樣性和深度將會增加，主要是因為我們在各學門之間找到了一個基本的共通性。

三、啟蒙時代
1.人類心智往往在匆忙的狀態下，毫無選擇地吸收對事物的第一印象並加以珍惜，從此之後事情相繼而生，當初所犯的錯誤會永遠持續下去，未加以修正。　－　培根。
2.在蠟板上，你必須擦掉舊有的東西，才能寫上新的；然而在人類心智上，除非你寫上新的想法，否則無法抹去舊有的思緒。　－　培根。
3.科學進步的代價是讓我們謙虛地認識到，真理的架構並不是人類心智可以輕易掌握的。這是採用科學來處理事物時所面對的基本信條：人類的存在和人類所具有的思考方式，是演化的結果，而不是演化的目標。

四、自然科學
1.「愈快犯錯愈好」是科學研究的準則。
2.科學是一種有組織、系統化的企業，它蒐集和這個世界相關的知識，並且把這些知識凝聚成可以驗證的定律和定理。
3.為了快速抵達科學的前線，參與新發現的領域，科學家只學習他們需要的知識，而經常對世界上其餘的事物所知極少，大多數的科學領域都是如此。
4.自然科學的過程和產品之間存在一個基本的差異。這個差異可以解釋，為什麼這麼多有成就的科學家心胸狹窄而且愚蠢，又為什麼這個領域中有智慧的學者，竟被認為是無足輕重的科學家。
5.科學研究由以下的觀點來看是一種藝術：不論你如何產生新發現，只要你的宣稱是真實的，而且能夠可靠地被驗證就可以了。
6.科學界具有一種嚴苛的特質：一個新發現要等到通過評審並且出版之後，才算存在。

五、阿麗亞德妮的線索
1.生物學家尤其容易犯「矢志維護結論」的謬誤：只因為某個理論能夠產生正確的結果，就假設理論中的步驟必然和真實世界中的過程一致。
2.重要的問題是：第一、是不是有一般性的組織原理，可以用來完整地重組出有生命的生物體，而不需要以強硬刻板的方式來模擬其中所有的分子和原子？第二、同樣的原理可不可以用到心靈、行為和生態系統上？第三、有沒有一套數學能夠做為生物學的自然語言，而帶來數學曾在物理上造成的良好功效？第四、即使發現正確的原理，真實資料必須多麼詳細，才能把這些原理應用到期望中的模型上？

六、心靈
1.大腦這個組合機器的目標是求生存，而不是自我了解。這兩個目標基本上截然不同，所以如果沒有科學真實知識的協助，我們的心靈只會看到這個世界支離破碎的片段。對於世間種種，它只會照亮它必須了解的部分，以便存活到明日，而將其餘的部分遺棄在黑暗中。。
2.人類的熱情和理性是不可分割的；情緒並不只是對理性的騷擾，而是其中極重要的部分。心靈所具有的混何特性，也正是它令人難以捉摸的原因。
3.當有意識的情節受到外在刺激的推動，和記憶中景象的引發而出現時，會進一步受到情緒的權衡和修正。情緒是什麼？它是對神經活動的一種修飾作用，能使心理活動專注並且活躍起來。情緒是生理活動對資訊流程進行挑選的結果，能把身體和心靈的活動轉移到較高或較低的層次。
4.重要關聯的確存在：科學和藝術所具有的共同特性是傳遞資訊。

七、由基因到文化
1.除了少數的行為幾乎完全受到遺傳所決定之外，根據遺傳律預測個人在既存和未來環境中所具有的能力，最多只是冒險的猜測。
2.如果想要得到最佳的結果，栽培個人，而不是團體。
3.基因指定了外遺傳法則，也就是感知和心理發展的規律，也是產生文化的動力和管動。文化有助於決定哪一些基因能夠存活並且世代繁殖。新生的成功基因會改變族群中的外遺傳法則。受到更改的外遺傳法則會改變文化生成管道的方向和有效程度。
4.文化來自基因，並且永遠帶有基因的痕跡。同時，透過隱喻和新含義的發明，文化也會具有自已的生命。為了掌握人類的處境，我們必須同時了解基因和文化，但不是以劃分科學和人文學科的傳統方式來各別了解，而是在認知人類演化這項事實的情況下，共同來了解它們。

八、人性

九、社會科學
1.社會科學和自然科學如果要結合，就不能如以往那般，按內容來劃分學門，而必須根據學門各自涵蓋的時空範圍來定義。之後，還必須把各學門關連起來。

十、藝術和藝術的詮釋
1.科學和藝術在結合彼此的優點之前，都無法圓滿盡善；科學需要藝術的直覺和隱喻力，藝術則需要科學所提供的新血。
2.藝術創作透過心靈直接溝通感情，並不試圖解釋這種影響力為什麼發生。就這個特定的性質而論，藝術和科學恰好相反。
3.我們所追求的知識，在遠景上都居有普遍的一致性，但這些知識的威力則來自特殊的事件。我們採用的原理是可以分享的，但我們顯露的細節則是獨特的。　－　Edward Rothstein。
4.假設一個人不能理解某項事物，但他恰巧發現，這項事物和他深為了解的其它事物具有類似的性質，那麼，透過比較這兩項事物，他或許能夠對以往無法了解的事物有所理解。如果他的理解是恰當的，而且沒有別人曾經有過相同的理解，那他就可以聲稱自己的想法具有真實的原創性。
5.在這個千變萬化的世界中，我們如果能夠把注意力集中在人類的特殊本性上，那麼只要我們想要（其實我們迫不及待地期望著），就可以透過兆始之初就緊抓住我們的相同美感和神秘感，來參與藝術創作。科學的物質世界與狩獵者、詩人的感性之間，並不存在任何障礙。

十一、倫理和宗教
1.經驗主義者承認，道德規範的設計是為了服從人性中的某些慾望而壓抑其它慾望。「該不該」並不是由人性直接翻譯而成，而是一種共同意志，如果我們能對人性的需求和缺陷有更多了解，就可以讓共同意志變得更明智、更穩定。
2.如果歷史和科學曾經教導我們任何事情，那就是熱情和慾望與真理並不相同。
3.宗教能具有多少權威，要看它能把多少符合經驗知識的人類崇高價值編成法規，並變成持久的詩篇。
4.科學的角色是毫無保留地測試每一個人和人類處境相關的假設，並且及時地揭發道德和宗教情操的堅固基礎。

十二、為的是什麼？
1.在被資訊淹死的同時，我們迫切需要的是智慧。因此，能夠在恰當時刻把正確資訊組合起來，並嚴謹思考後做出明智重要決定的綜合者，將是未來主宰世界的人。
2.對於自以為真實世界主人的自傲經濟學家和商業領袖而言，現在該是承認「真的」真實世界存在的時刻了。我們需要採用新的成長指標來監測經濟體系，必須充分測度自然世界和人類福祉，而不僅是經濟生產。
3.追求知識上的融通，一開始看來似乎對創造力有所限制，然而事實剛好相反；利用統一知識系統辨識未探索的真實領域，是最踏實的方法。它為已知的事物提供了清楚的地圖，也為未來研究中最可能出現成果的問題，提供了一個架構。科學史學家在觀察中往往看到，提出正確的問題比產生正確的解得更為重要。一個不足為道的問題，解答也同樣不足為道；然而一個正確的問題即使不具有明確的解答，仍會導致重要的發現。因此，這類問題將永遠存在未來的科學探索和藝術想像的歷程中。

Nexus

連結：混沌、複雜之後，最具開創性的「小世界」理論
Mark Buchanan. Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks.

序、天涯若比鄰
1.其實像本書所宣揚的科學突破，多半不需龐大經費以及雄厚人力，只要敏銳的眼光與巧妙的實驗設計，再配備相當的電腦設備，就有小兵立大功的機會。反過來檢討會障礙跨學科進步的力量，十之八九肇因於維護既得利益的偏見。

前奏曲：你能否想像，人類的世界有可能依循著一些數學法則？
1.在物質世界及人類世界中運作的，竟是同樣的設計原則；因應不同需要、在不同條件下發展出來的網路，其架構竟然幾乎完全相同。

一、奇異的連結：這個世界在人際關係的意義下，要比我們所想的小得多。
1.小世界的奧秘不只是個令人好奇的東西，它還揭露了人際連繫最根本的原動力，而這種連繫，正反應出我們每個人的身分、思維與行為模式。

二、點頭之交的力量：如果謠言是經由弱連繫傳播，就會傳得更遠得多。
1.出色的科學家常常用由普通之處開始，利用人人皆知的事實及觀念，然後經由靈感所啟發的分析，設法由看來荒蕪的沙漠，開發出泉湧的洞見。
2.對孔恩（Thomas Kuhn, 1922-1996）這位深具影響力的科學史學家而言，革命性的科學和一般科學本質上的差異在於，前者牽涉到「打破傳統」的改變，而後者則是「維持傳統」的改變。在常態科學研究中，理論給擴展了，觀測結果更精確了，對事物的了解會隨著知識累積的過程而增長。相反的，科學革命意謂著拋棄原本鍾愛的想法，用新的見解來取代，科學家重新以不同的眼光看世界。

三、小世界：使世界變小的長途人際捷徑，在我們的社交生活中多半是隱形的。
1.我們在後面各章將會看到，他們的小世界幾何結構會出現在人體內重要蛋白質的結構中，會出現在生態系的食物網中，甚至出現在我們的語言的文法與結構中。這個幾何及架構上的新觀念，是網際網路架構裡的秘密，儘管看起來簡單，但是在各個層面上都極具重要性。

四、大腦的運作：小世界的模式，確保了大腦的各種功能區只相距幾步路。
1.小世界的結構不但可讓網路快速一致地反應，還能夠把眾多重要的資訊，井然有序的儲存在很小的空間裡。

五、「小世界」資訊網：網際網路居然有小世界的性質，這十分令人驚訝。
1.所有這些網路都沒有設計者，然而每一個都設法變出相同的花招，好像是精心雕琢出來的，以達到某個目的。究竟這些網路是怎麼變成這樣的？

六、意外的科學：由混沌及隨機之中，會不會也冒出秩序？
1.秩序及意義並不只取決於實驗的本質，也與觀看者的眼睛與心智有關。

七、富者愈富：弄了半天，它竟是小世界的天然引擎。
1.正如愛因斯坦說過的，科學思考的重點就在使事情「盡可能的簡單，到不能再簡單了」。
2.團體動力往往限制了團體合理考慮其它可能性的能力。

八、代價與後果：網路的小世界架構是有助於、還是有害於復原能力呢？
1.這如我們已經看到的，有這種小世界結構的網路，不管是平等式或貴族式的，都遠比具其它結構的網路更有能力，適應性更強。而當我們跳脫小世界理論來看，我們也將更通盤地看到，科學家對於「組織」如何在各種複雜網路中突現（不管是不是小世界網路），開始有了充分了解，科學的面貌也正因此而改變。

九、糾纏不清的網：透過小世界的觀點檢視生態系，只是個開始。
1.這種網路審視事物的角度，之所以會那麼強而有力，就是因為它超越了任何一種環境上的細節，超越了電腦、機場或生物，去找出「躲藏在幕後」的組織原理。本質上，最重要的往往不是網路中的個體的特質，而是存在網路中的整體秩序（或無序）。這實在說不上是新發現。物理學家早在一個世紀前，就知道冰和水的分子完全相同；當一座湖在冬天成了滑冰場時，反映的不是分子本身的改變，而是分子排列模式上的微妙變化－這是屬於網路的性質，是研究單一分子無從知道的。

十、引爆點：粗略地說，臨界態有點像是引爆點。
1.不要再「針對」人做行銷！把你的想法變成傳染病，讓顧客替你做行銷。
2.關於影響力如何傳播的各個細節，對事態的發展終究沒有什麼影響。結果，即使我們對思想傳播的心理學及社會學所知甚少，甚至接近無知，數學物理仍然能向我們保證，一定會有個引爆點。我們所不知道的那些細節，都與這個問題無關。

十一、小世界式的爆發：最重要的問題或許是，病毒能否利用「六度分隔」？
1.在貴族式的小世界網路中，疾病的傳播沒有門檻－低於門檻時，就不致於爆發大流行或開始出現疫情。因此，這些網路易於造成疾病的散播和持續傳染，不管傳播媒介帶有的毒性是大是小。
2.如果我們可以藉由藥物或教育，讓這些少數人有效地免疫，那麼這種連結者實際上已算不上是網路的一部份了，所以，剩下的網路不再是貴族式的小世界網路，因此就會具備一個引爆點。
3.說來諷刺，要阻止愛滋病這種並的散播，方法竟然不是廣加治療及教育，反倒是適當針對特別的少數而採行的特殊方案。由複雜網路理論所得到的這種洞見，要用在實際的應用上並不很容易，但是至少提供了流行病學家及衛生人員一個基本的作戰計劃及可能成功的策略，這不只是針對愛滋病，還可針對未來可能發生的新疾病。

十二、生存法則：最後總是由少數人占有大多數的財富。
1.一個系統可以經由其組成部分及各成分之間的互動來全盤瞭解。不過，我們也必須體認到，複雜系統中各組成部分之間的互動，常會導致組織的整體模式，而這些模式無法回溯找出發生作用的各部分。網路架構是整體的性質，而非組成部分的性質，存不存在引爆點也是如此。
2.社會現實不只依人們的期望而形成，也受盲目的行為和或多或少機械化的力量所影響，在這裡，這種力量是把個人看似無害的小小偏好，擴大為十分戲劇性而困擾人的效果。
3.錢的價值因個人所擁有的財富而不同，富人比窮人能做更大的投資。
4.我們看到，投資報酬的不規則性挑起財富的差異，而人與人之間各式各樣的交易，有助於消除這些差異。

十三、這可不是巧合：即使在排山倒海的紊亂無序之中，其實充滿了秩序。
1.在任何大都市擁擠的街頭，任何兩個人之間相隔不了幾個連結人物－我們就是有那麼親密。事實上，該驚訝的是我們怎麼會很少注意到這個小世界，卻常認為大多數人與我們關係甚遠。
2.軍事訓練的目的大部份就在使人接受他們只是整體中的小齒輪，而這個整體可以經由層次分明的共同結構來協調。權威關係在家庭、企業、政府、學校等場所，扮演了相同的中心角色，其中清楚定義而被接受的一連串權威關係提升了效率，野史人際磨擦減到最小。不過，對個人而言，接受成為這樣網路的一份子是要付出代價的，必須要放棄一部份的個人意志，壓抑個人的自由，使團體得以運作。
3.當然，這種我們稱為社會鑲嵌（social embeddedness）的網路效應（假如有這種效應的話），不一定會造成負面的後果。
4.在很多方面，社會資本（social capital）就是團隊能夠在不需要法規束縛的情形下，自主地成為團隊的能力，如果必須靠成文的規章，其實就代表欠缺效率。
5.在一個群聚中生活，可以免於規範上的差異，但也隔絕了標新的思考方式、行為模式及各式資訊。
6.如果觀察的角度正確，這個世界在許多方面確實比看起來要單純。
7.此外，小世界這個想法本身也出奇的簡單。它需要的只有幾個長距連結或超高度連結的集散點。毫無疑問的，這種簡單性解釋了為什麼這種類型的網路會出現在各式各樣的架構中，從人類大腦，到組成社會的人際關係網，還有我們用來溝通思考的語言。

ABC of Relativity

相對論ABC：哲學家羅素如何闡述愛因斯坦的理論精華？
Bertrand Russell. ABC of Relativity.

一、觸覺與視覺
1.我們日常所見的景物之所以會顯得相當穩定，是因為我們正好長著這麼大的體積，又生活在一個不太熱的行星表面。否則我們會發覺相對論以前的物理學實在講不通，甚而根本不會創出以前那樣的學說。

二、實情與觀察所見
1.觀察者的境況對於觀察所見事物造成的影響之大，其實超出以往假定的程度。相對論卻能教我們將這種影響完全減除。而這一點幾乎就是相對論令人驚歎的總源頭。

三、光速

四、時鐘與尺

五、時空
1.如今同步性已經變成與特定觀察者有相對性了，以前的方法也不可行了。
2.我們要注意的是「事件」，不是「物體」。
3.必須提及物體被觀察的時間，才是所謂的「事件」－在一定時間發生的事。

六、狹義相對論
1.不同的觀察者所見的距離和時間雖然不同，我們卻能從這些不同的判定取得叫做「區間」的數量，而區間不會因觀察者而變易。

七、時空的區間

八、愛因斯坦的重力定律
1.觀察者所見的不全然是被觀察的實在過程，也包含觀察者的觀點在內。度量距離和時間不會直接揭示被度量事物的性質，不過是顯示事物與度量者的相對關係。所以，我們以為自己藉觀察理解了物質世界，其實只形成了抽象的概念。

九、證明愛因斯坦的重力定律

十、質量、動量、能量、作用量

十一、宇宙正在擴張

十二、慣例成規與自然律

十三、廢除「力」

十四、何謂物質？
1.「物質」只是一群事件，每一事件都是我們想當然耳認為是這個物質「引起」的。我們只要不把物質的定義設想得超乎這個範圍，一切物理定律和事實都可以解釋明白。公式中的符號並不需要改動，要點只在怎樣解讀這些符號。

十五、哲學思維受的影響
1.物理學教給我們的物質世界的知識並不如我們原來想像的那麼多。
2.相對論呈現的世界比較不像是「事物」在「運動」的世界，而是一個有事件在發生的世界。
3.「事件」是相對論的根本要義所在。按廣義與狹義相對論，兩樁相隔不甚遠的事件之間有一種可以測量的相對關係，叫做「區間」。這間隔顯然是物理的事實，以前用時間的推移和空間的差距表述多少造成了觀念混淆。
4.推理愈精進，證明事實的把握反而愈小－相對論並不是唯一特例。以前認為邏輯能教導我們作推斷；現在邏輯卻教我們如何避免作推斷。
5.我倒以為，一點數學就能摧毀的情感既不夠真誠，也沒什麼價值可言。
6.最後的結論是：我們知道的非常少，而我們能知道了這麼多卻也令人稱奇。更令人稱奇的是，這麼一點點的知識竟能給我們那麼大的力量。

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

錯把太太當帽子的人
Oliver Sacks. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales.

01.人在神經功能喪失後，出現專家都會瞠目結舌的全新運作方式，這其實是極富啟發性的。暗示著人體更高整合功能所擁有的超乎意志之外的自動代償潛能。　－　劉絮愷
02.在疾病中，依然看到人之所以為人的精隨所在－動物會染患疾病，但唯有人才會身陷病態之中。
03.想明瞭記憶在我們一生有何等份量，就請讓你的記憶流失，即使只是零碎的片段也可。記憶讓我們思想連貫、明白事理、產生情感、也是我們行動的原動力。沒有它，我們將一無所有。　－　西班牙超現實主義的電影導演 Luis Bunuel
04.我們只不過是一連串不同類型知覺的組合。知覺以令人無法想像的速度，生生不滅地在流通運作。　－　蘇格蘭經驗論哲學家 Hume
05.事物最重要的一面，常因為它們太簡單、太熟悉，以致於我們看不見（人對經常出現在眼前的事物常會視而不見）。人類探究事物的真實意涵總引不起人的注意。　－　二十世紀英國哲學家 Wittgenstein
06.腦子幾近完美地保留了每個人一生每一筆經驗的記錄。人意識裡所有的涓滴細流都保存在腦中，也因此，不管是正常的需要或生活情境，或是因為癲癇或電流刺激所引發的特殊狀況，都能將這些記憶激發出來或喚醒。
07.從研究「自由聯想」上，我們很清楚地知道，一些看起來最不足為道、或是偶爾閃過的念頭，很可能有著我們所沒預料到的深刻與心靈的共鳴，而這只有透過深度的分析才會顯現出來。
08.他（Dmitri Shostakovich）說，由於碎片在裡頭，每次他將頭歪到一邊時，就可以聽到音樂。他的腦袋中充滿了旋律，每次都不一樣，他在作曲時就拿這些旋律來當素材。
09.我們都是「從我們的過去被放逐」，也因此，我們需要重拾過去。　－　二十世紀法國小說家 Proust
10.所謂的經驗，必須等到它按著每個人的特性而組織起來，才可能存在；若非如此，行動也不成之為行動。腦子對每件事的記錄，每件活生生的事，都必須是以個人為映照的。即使訊息初期的形式可能是電腦式的或程式型的，腦子最後記錄的，都是個人化之後的形式。大腦最後呈現的記錄，一定是「藝術」－經驗和行動的藝術化景象與旋律。
11.成為文明人，我們放棄了哪些東西。那些－那些所謂「原始」的能力，也是我們所需要的。
12.具象的能力同樣也能成為一種媒介，傳達神秘、美麗與深度；可以是一條通往感情、想像與靈性的道路－其圓滿的程度，不下於抽象的概念。具象本身已然充滿了感情與意義－或許，比任何抽象的概念更直接。它直朝著美學的、戲劇的、喜劇的、象徵的，也就是藝術與靈性世界的長闊高深而來。從概念上來看，心智的不足可能是缺陷－但從他們對於具象與象徵意義的理解力來看，他們可能跟任何一個「正常」人，同樣的正常。
13.雖然這兩者都是人心智發展中自然而本能的能力，敘事型的能力卻先出現，有著靈性上的優先性。很小的孩子極喜愛故事，也離不開故事，他們能從故事中了解複雜的事情；而在那時候，他們理解一般性概念與典型的能力幾乎還不存在。在抽象思考無法提供任何東西的時候，只有透過敘事性的或象徵性的能力，他們才能理解這個世界－以象徵或故事的想像形式，得到一個具體的事實。
14.音樂、故事和戲劇的力量，在理論和實際的層面，都具有最重要的份量。
15.他們掌握不了動作一步接一步的條理，但是透音樂、把動作配上音樂之後，卻能掌握得很好。
16.而戲劇還有更多的效果－戲劇中有角色的力量，可以幫助整個人格的組織，甚至持續下去，還能改變一個人的人格。能夠去表演、扮演，進一步成為角色本身，似乎是人類生命中的「天賦」，無關智商高低、不同。
17.我們從音樂得到的樂趣，乃是從計算而來，只不過是無意識的計算。音樂也不過就無意識的數學。　－　Leibniz
18.我也無法想像，有何智能不是多少帶著感覺的－事實上，「知覺」一詞，一直都存在著這雙重的涵義。它既是理性的，又在某種程度上是「個人的」。因為，若事物本身跟個人毫無關係，或牽不上關係，一個人不會感覺任何事情是「合理的」。

Und Jetzt

氣候經濟學：影響全球4/5經濟活動的決定性因素
Friedhelm Schwarz. Und Jetzt: Die Wirtschaftsaussichten.

前言、天外飛來的橫禍
1.如果是要為可能面臨的自然災害做準備，就不要太依賴統計資料。

一、經濟要素：天氣
1.天氣對自然界和人類的影響，比我們看到的那些天氣現象的表象更深遠；這尤其適用在對氣候變遷後果的探討。

二、氣候變遷是事實
1.雖然大家一直呼籲要減少排放量，卻沒有人知道該怎麼做，經費又從哪裡來。
2.人們並不希望氣候變遷的情況被過度渲染，而且我們也看見有人想利用這些科學方面的認知，達到個人的政治目的的危險。
3.有的科學家會利用他們的認知貫徹個人認為是「正確（好）」或「錯誤（不好）」的觀點。

三、對天氣的不同反應
1.大多數人都認為，社會愈是文明、技術愈是發達，天氣的影響、相關的程度和風險就會降低，但這是錯的。正由於共同生活在愈來愈多且愈來愈大的人口密集區，人口不斷成長，先進的技術，及全球社會的整體性和國際間的互賴，氣候在未來將成為最重要的影響因素。

四、天氣決定了我們的生活
1.當有人確定自己是最強的一方，就很容易將「適者生存」錯誤地解釋為「只有最強的人才能夠繼續生存」，而且還套用在經濟上。到今天，我們還會將成果和進步歸功於我們本身，或至少是一個個體或是小團體，而不是歸功於我們都無法影響的外部因素，都是拜社會達爾文主義之賜。

五、交通運輸和物流：扭轉經濟發展的關鍵
1.由於公司採用即時化生產和零庫存的策略，準時、安全的交通運輸也就益形重要。
2.全球化的結果，造成天氣對人類另一種新的影響。

六、天氣防護生意前景看好
1.只要是人類製造、又置於室外的東西，幾乎都要做些防護措施，以免受到天氣的影響，人類自身也一樣。
2.天氣防護已經深入我們生活，以致我們經常忽略了天氣與我們的關係。事實上，沒有一種天氣現象和天氣的作用是只會帶來好處而沒有壞處的。

七、汽車：機動性和氣候保護的站場
1.如果可以在中國成功地將使用的電池轉換為燃料電池，傳動技術才算真正開啟新的一頁。但若沒有把握住這個機會，我們就得有心理準備，中國的環保人士所預言的「全體人類的大災難」有一天將會發生。
2.雖然歐洲天氣的發展並不會減少汽車的數量，卻形成人們完全不同的汽車使用行為及態度，小客車將再度從日用品變成奢華與富裕的象徵。

八、天氣決定人們的休閒活動
1.因為氣候變遷的緣故，使亞洲更常出現極端的天氣形態，而在歐洲卻能預期會形成更為舒適的天氣條件，果真如此，那麼「美好的古歐洲」成為亞洲的遊樂園的想法，就會愈來愈真實了。

九、建築業：在昨日與明日之間躊躇
十、能源產業可從不同的天氣形態獲利
1.天氣直接影響了電價，人們只需看看有關天氣狀況的報導，就能夠預期未來價格變動的趨勢，做好應有的準備。
2.氣候保護相關政策已將關注的焦點從大型的能源製造者和目前仍蓬勃發展的風力發電業，轉移到個別消費者的需求。個別的解決辦法絕對可以取代大型的科技，不過企業集團和政治人物也必須將一部份的職權和權力回歸到民眾身上。現在有很好的機會，讓比以前溫暖的天氣不只能夠促進經濟成長，還能增強人民的責任感。

十一、水：流動的黃金
1.現今飲用水已成為地球上一種短缺的物資，不是因為水不夠，而是因為大家使用時過於草率。
2.不過由於氣候變遷和天氣推移的緣故，這一切只是時間的問題罷了，早晚會改變的。以後會用洗過衣服的水或是沖過澡的水來沖馬桶的人，將不只是具有環保意識的人而已。

十二、農業：世界糧食的基礎
1.透過這種做法（將雞肉的生產轉移到其它氣候條件更適合雞隻生長的地方）不僅可獲得品質好價格又便宜的雞肉，還可以將飼養雞隻造成的環境生態問題轉移到消費者看不到的地方。就氣候保護的角度而言，這當然不是個令人滿意的解決方式，但是只要公司無須另外負擔中間的差價，或是除了成分標示之外，還不用在速食餐點的包裝上加上對氣候影響的資訊，這個做法是不會改變的。

十三、醫療市場：天氣與疾病
1.天氣雖然不會直接致病，卻可能加重疾病的症狀。天氣對經濟的影響，除了由於健康受到天氣影響而造成的之外，還有間接因意外事故引起的。
2.全球製藥工業90%的研究經費是花在全世界10%的病患罹患的疾病上。
3.全世界80%的人民是以傳統療法治病的，因為他們無法得到先進的藥物。1

十四、金融市場：採取避險策略因應惡劣天氣
1.天氣選擇權的交易方式是，企業支付一比權利金後，若發生對業務有負面影響的天氣時，不管企業是否真的遭受損失，都有權力要求對方履行選擇權合約的內容，支付補償金。

十五、氣候變遷與災難：天氣對經濟的威脅有多大？
1.短時間內，氣候模型的模擬計算發生錯誤的可能性還是很大，所以Gerhard Berz認為發展出一套能調整的策略就更形重要了，減少能源消耗就是其中一項。另一方面，也必須改善並擴充預警系統，國際間彼此合作，以期能在極端天氣來臨時及時提出預警。

十六、氣象產業大幅成長
1.「只有壞消息也可以是好新聞。」這句從天氣的角度出發，在新聞界流傳的古老名言，一定適用在報紙的時事和電視新聞報導上，但對專門的氣象報導而言，就不適用了。套句新聞節目的行話，電台和電視的天氣預報，早就已經發展出一套獨立的模式。

結語、我們所知還太少
1.我們很喜歡注意一些普遍的趨勢和迫切的大問題，像是失業、經濟成長和人口統計上的發展等等問題，卻忘了很多問題其實早已預見，但一直延宕沒有解決。在經濟和天氣的關聯性上，我們不該再犯這樣的錯誤。只注意氣候保護，把減少排放二氧化碳當作唯一的解決方法是不夠的；真正必要的措施是小規模的，並且有特別針對性的。
2.氣候變遷不會像海嘯一樣向我們襲來，或許它已經向我們發出一些警訊，只是我們視之為特殊現象，而不是徵兆。經驗是好的，對天氣的經驗也是，原則上它可以縮短我們的決策過程；不過我們必須能夠意識到，經驗在什麼時候會喪失它的價值，必須用新的知識取代。只有那些新的知識才能回答我們的問題：當天氣改變，對我本身而言，什麼也會跟著改變？
3.只要受天氣影響產生的行為反應有絲毫的改變，整體影響是非常可觀的。
4.天氣會引發一連串的連鎖反應，最初的因果關係可能在這個過程中就喪失了。
5.每個人都是一個高度複雜系統裡的一部份，在這個系統裡只要有絲毫的改變，就會導致完全不一樣的結果。