James Burke : "Re-Connections", 1 of 7

[wowkarl]

Excellent show. Excellent series. Thank you.

[rudemood2011]

How the hell did I end up here? I was looking for Jimmy Burke the gangster

[KarmaTiger]

James I first saw your programme Connections in the early 90s on Canadian television. My father and I would watch, then excitedly discuss the ideas presented (which would invariably lead to tangents... you know, connected ideas).

Now I've discovered these on YouTube and have spent the past couple of days watching them with my girlfriend, who like me greatly appreciates your efforts and style.

[Concreteowl]

This is why the current attack on the BBC is something that needs to be repelled.

Connections was a show I loved as a child and made a bit of an impact in Britain but it was just one of many. So many in fact that while it was kicking up a good stink on PBS it was largely forgotten at it's point of origin. While I love all the David Attenborough shows, it would have been money better spent if James was paid to keep a constant vigil on the changes in technology. Biology evolves so slowly.

[SallyMorem]

I adored Connections and The Day the Universe Changed. These shows catalyzed an already strong interest in science and technology in me. Burke is making a very strong point here on the nature of accelerating technology, one that Ray Kurzweil has relatively recently argued for in his seminal book, The Singularity Is Near, one that I recommend to all fans of Connections.

[HolyShadow180]

Thought he was Jimmy Bruke the Mafia guy haha

No idea who this guy is where his from what his done never heard of him!

[Raksasa187]

@HolyShadow180 same hear, but i like what he is saying though!

[eveningtsar]

Destroy their trust in the modern world? Really? I figured he just explained how the modern world came to be. . .

[superskwrl]

Its hard to believe that he murdered so many people...

[racistathiest666]

@superskwrl Ha ha ha ha!!! I don't think that this is the same James Burke from "Good Fellas" But I think you already knew. Funny shit though

[tejastiger61]

Every child should be exposed to these series .............. James Burke my hero, and one of the GREATEST teachers of human history.... in human history.

[rangeclerk]

When I was developing and presenting planetarium shows at Tessmann Planetarium, located on the campus of Santa Ana College (CA), I used and ref his series in the shows to the general public at the time his series first aired.

[Fredrika25m]

I am watching the entire series now...I missed it the first time around because I was living in a long cabin in Fairbanks....I absolutely adore his brilliance and feel like I must have been floating in a abyss to have missed this fantastic brain. Thank god for Netflix! I can watch the CD's over and over!

[jeremiahjacobs]

Burke's series was mindblowing when my friends and I first found it. Burke was one of the first people who made it ok to find *everything* interesting - that the value of knowledge wasn't in compartmentalization, but instead, the way it was connected (!) to its application.

Thank you, James Burke.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Yes, I agree. Which is why I put this site up. And why I'm even continuing with it now with the change of design... luckily I found a way to force people into these video + comments areas instead of watching "on channel". That was, and still is my main goal. To get people participating and talking instead of just "viewing". Luckily Google's new setup had a couple exploitable holes ;)

- JBW

[Nullbunker]

@JamesBurkeWeb James Burke effin' rewls! thanks for this channel!

[MoonEyes2k]

@jeremiahjacobs Indeed...but also that knowlegde was valuable, and worthy of collecting, just because. Not because you had use for it, or even because you MIGHT have use for it...but just because it interested you. Because you thought, 'hey, this is fun/cool/what-have-you'. And I have learned so very much, thanks to watching, both because of what I saw, and because of that mind-set.

[haxanthrobo]

Certainly the most inspiring sets of tv programming I can think of!

THANKYOU for all this great work!!

[DaveKovacs82]

I have a similar project called THE MAP OF BEING. It is rather philosophic, though. Being is the primary concern for ancient and medieval philosophy. I arrange philosophic ideas and theories according to their relation in the classifications of Being. DKK

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Obviously whatever you're referring to can't be explained in a simple comment. Do you have a link to your work?

[DaveKovacs82]

Unfortunately, no. The idea began during my last year of undergrad work in philosophy and is about to be resumed through my graduate work.

Here, let me show you this: You know of Gorgias the Sophist. He said, basically, there is nothing; if there is, you can't know; if you can, you can't communicate about it.

Intellectual history has followed his advice: From Plato to the Critical period the obsession was Being--what is there. Then it turned to epistemology. Then phil. of language.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Sorry for delay... machine died ;)

No I don't know Gorgias the Sophist, but I will have a look naturally. I think I get the gist of what he's saying though. Sort of Descartes' mind/body problem which has to do with "use of language". Questions about infinite knowledge being stored in a finite brain (ex. "How is it I can go on producing novel, coherent expressions w/o limit?") Phil. of Lang. doesn't deal with these issues directly either. There is progress elsewhere, which I shall mention soon.

[DaveKovacs82]

Gorgias is mentioned in the Burke book AXEMAKER'S GIFT. Though his relevance there had to do with the development of language as being able to express highly complex ideas.

I'm not sure Descartes would have maintained knowledge is stored in the brain. I'll have to check. I certainly do not hold this. Cartesian dualism seems to imply that the knowing part is immaterial.

I am fairly Aristotelian with a Thomist slant. The machines we build can calculate; I doubt they will ever learn.

[DaveKovacs82]

But not that I don't think we should try. If there is anything I learned from Connections it is that much progress comes from trying to do things which are supposedly impossible. 400 years ago I probably would have said a vacuum is impossible, yet because someone tried to disprove me, I am now forced to refine my terms and update my knowledge.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

This assertion was made by Prof. Noam Chomsky in discussing linguistics and philosophy (that of Descartes' "mind/body" problem). I think he may have used the phrase "infinite use of finite means", not necessarily the brain per-se (as in the gray matter in your head) but wherever the seat of knowledge and/or thought was thought to lie in those times. The only relevance was that, apparently, Descartes assertion was that it was contained in the body "somewhere"...

[DaveKovacs82]

You're right (once again). I forgot all about Descartes's obsession with the pineal gland and the seat of the soul.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Personally I see no reason why a machine cannot learn in exactly the same sense as human beings can learn. After all, humans are composed of the same material as inanimate objects at the atomic level, and even at the molecular level. I highly doubt that there's any special "stuff" externally added to the mixture that makes the human "machine" and it's abilities somehow un-duplicatable using the same substances, or otherwise.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

One of the papers I've come across recently, in the field of computational theory and computer modeling of "intentional" systems has to do with ART or "Adaptive Resonance Theory" which is (well I mean probably wrong) but at least making some attempt at identifying how such systems can arise, and differ from "automaton" systems in the way they respond to external stimuli by reinforcing "expected" outcomes and discarding unexpected ones. The paper I've read is referred to elsewhere but check desc.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

So I threw it in the video description here.

Although, as it is admitted, they have yet to devise a model that does not require a "helping human hand", the idea seems to be promising as it separates out automaton neural nets from non by virtue of their being adaptive or not (the latter being adaptive). Non-adaptive systems cannot give rise to cognition and learning, but that is their function - to NOT have top-down expectations or else they would be functionally useless.

[DaveKovacs82]

Surely someone is eager to do this work.

[PaulUmbarger]

Moores Law - the Quickening.....

[AgentJayZ]

James Burke is still brilliant.

That makes me glad.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

Me too.

If only he could teach someone the necessary skills to take over where he left off. We need many more shows like the ones he created and they are not forthcoming!

- JBW