http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/neurophilosophy/2012/feb/05/1?CMP=twt_gu/spaghetti-western-reveals-differences-between-human-and-monkey-brains-mo-costandi-neurophilosophy-blog-science-guardiancouk Spaghetti western reveals differences between human and monkey brains | Mo Costandi http://t.co/EJH3VIO8 ]]> Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:21:10 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/neurophilosophy/2012/feb/05/1?CMP=twt_gu/spaghetti-western-reveals-differences-between-human-and-monkey-brains-mo-costandi-neurophilosophy-blog-science-guardiancouk http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/11/14/neanderthal-neuroscience/ As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and his colleagues managed to extract some fragments of DNA from a Neanderthal fossil–by coincidence, the very first Neanderthal discovered in 1857. The DNA was of a special sort. Along with the bulk of our genes, which are located in the nucleus of our cells, we also carry bits of DNA in jellybean-shaped structures called mitochondria. Since there are hundreds of mitochondria in each cell, it’s easier to grab fragments of… ]]> Mon, 21 Nov 2011 03:09:18 -0700 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2011/11/14/neanderthal-neuroscience/ http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us. Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The… ]]> Fri, 28 Oct 2011 10:32:53 -0700 http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article807136.ece http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/14/turner.php/cabinet-the-influencing-machine On Victor Tausk's 'The Influencing Machine' http://t.co/CBehMiY8 from #Cabinet, 2004 ]]> Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:21:41 -0700 http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/14/turner.php/cabinet-the-influencing-machine http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/23/explaining-the-neuroscience-of-the-zombie-epidemic//explaining-the-neuroscience-of-the-zombie-epidemic Neuroscience has shown that all thoughts and behaviors are associated with neural activity within the brain. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the zombie brain would look and function differently than the gray matter contained in your skull. Yet, how would one know what a zombie brain looks like? Luckily, the rich repertoire of behavioral symptoms shown in cinema gives the astute neuroscientist or neurologist clues as to the anatomical and physiological underpinnings of zombie behavior. By taking a forensic neuroscience approach, we can piece together a hypothetical picture of the zombie brain. ]]> Sun, 23 Oct 2011 15:08:02 -0700 http://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2011/10/23/explaining-the-neuroscience-of-the-zombie-epidemic//explaining-the-neuroscience-of-the-zombie-epidemic http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see is increasingly solicitous machines defining our environment -- machines that sense and respond to our needs "intelligently". But it will be the intelligence of the serving hand rather than the commanding brain, and we're only at risk of disaster if we harbour self-destructive impulses.We may eventually see mind uploading, but there'll be a holy war to end holy wars before it becomes widespread: it will literally overturn religions. That… ]]> Thu, 23 Jun 2011 02:48:28 -0700 http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/06/reality-check-1.html http://huffduffer.com/jshield/40206 Eleanor Longden started to hear voices in her head when she was at university and was diagnosed as a schizophrenic - a label she totally rejects. Now she is a high achieving academic. What started the voices and how did she get to a point where she not only lives happily with the voices that still exist but also works with others who have the same experience? With contributions from writer Graham Linehan and comedian Josie Long. ]]> Sun, 01 May 2011 11:43:38 -0700 http://huffduffer.com/jshield/40206 http://chronicle.com/article/The-Philosophy-of-Insomnia/127029 Philosophy is no friend of sleep. In his Laws (circa 350 BC), Plato platonized, "When a man is asleep, he is no better than if he were dead; and he who loves life and wisdom will take no more sleep than is necessary for health." Clement of Alexandria echoed, "There is no use of a sleeping man, as there is not of a dead man. ... But whoever of us is most solicitous for living the true life, and for entertaining noble sentiments, will keep awake for as long time as possible."
"The need of sleep is not in… ]]> Thu, 21 Apr 2011 02:44:52 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/The-Philosophy-of-Insomnia/127029 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=312 In science fiction, ghosts in machines always appear as malfunctions, glitches, interruptions in the normal flow of things. Something unexpected appears seemingly out of nothing and from nowhere. Through a malfunction, a glitch, we get a fleeting glimpse of an alien intelligence at work. As electricity has become the basic element of the world we live in, the steady hum of power grids and their flowing immaterial essences slowly replacing the cogs and cranks of everyday machinery, the ghostly rapport has also relocated into the domain of current fluctuations, radio interference and misread data.

Early telegraph experimenters… ]]> Sat, 09 Apr 2011 02:17:47 -0700 http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=312 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/24/can-brain-explain-your-mind/?pagination=false Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological functions—walking, breathing, digesting, reproducing, and so on—are closely mapped onto discrete bodily organs, and it would be misguided to study such functions independently of the bodily anatomy that implements them. If you want to understand what walking is, you should take a look at the legs, since walking is what legs do. Is it likewise true that if you want to understand thinking you should look at the parts of… ]]> Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:30:37 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/mar/24/can-brain-explain-your-mind/?pagination=false http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 Information flows everywhere, through wires and genes, through brain cells and quarks. But while it may appear ubiquitous to us now, until recently we had no awareness of what information was or how it worked. In his new book, The Information, science writer James Gleick documents the rising role of information in our lives and the way new technologies continue to increase its velocity, volume, and importance. Gleick—whose first book, Chaos, was a National Book Award finalist and whose biographies of Richard Feynman and Isaac Newton were both short-listed for the Pulitzer—spent seven years compiling his epic account. Wired spoke… ]]> Sun, 06 Mar 2011 04:43:51 -0700 http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/02/mf_gleick_qa/all/1 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/humans_version_3.0 This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep respect for our powers is sometimes lacking in the sciences, where many are taught to believe that our brains and bodies are taped-together, far-from-optimal kluges. In this view, natural selection is so riddled by accidents and saddled with developmental constraints that the resultant biological hardware and software should be described as a “just good enough” solution rather than as a “fine-tuned machine.” So it is no wonder that, when many… ]]> Sat, 05 Mar 2011 05:01:30 -0700 http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/humans_version_3.0 http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which… ]]> Thu, 03 Mar 2011 08:55:38 -0700 http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-ButFir-t1-g1-t1-g1-t4-body.html http://www.american.com/archive/2011/february/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-robot-overlords In case you haven’t heard, the newest champion of "Jeopardy!," the popular TV game show, is a computer. Watson, an enormous computer developed by researchers at IBM, was pitted against the two previous human champions, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. At the end of the first round, aired on Valentine’s Day, Jennings and Watson were tied for first place. But Watson trounced both humans in the next round, despite making some odd mistakes. And he won the second game, aired on February 16, suggesting the first victory was more than just beginner’s luck. When the IBM computer Deep Blue beat… ]]> Sat, 19 Feb 2011 18:15:04 -0700 http://www.american.com/archive/2011/february/i-for-one-welcome-our-new-robot-overlords http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:03:34 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/100216 Swimming around in a mixture of language and matter, humans occupy a particular evolutionary niche mediated by something we call 'consciousness'. To Professor Nicholas Humphrey we're made up of "soul dust": "a kind of theatre... an entertainment which we put on for ourselves inside our own heads." But just as that theatre is directed by the relationship between language and matter, it is also undermined by it. It all depends how you think it. ]]> Fri, 04 Feb 2011 03:46:10 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/100216 http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9373000/9373317.stm Neuroscientists have yet to find anything in the brain they are happy calling consciousness, and philosophers are far from agreement over a way of talking about what happens after we wake up.
Undaunted by history, one psychologist believes he has the answer. The problem, says Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, is that people have been looking in the wrong place.

"Scientists and philosophers have assumed all along that consciousness is somehow helping us think better, somehow improving our intelligence or our cognitive skills," he says.
Consciousness, he argues in his… ]]> Fri, 04 Feb 2011 02:59:51 -0700 http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9373000/9373317.stm http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks?currentPage=all We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the inner working of the human mind. Far from being dryly materialistic, their work illuminates the rich underwater world where character is formed and wisdom grows. They are giving us a better grasp of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, predispositions, character traits, and social bonding, precisely those things about which our culture has least to say. Brain science helps fill the hole left by the atrophy of theology and philosophy.
]]> Thu, 13 Jan 2011 03:17:38 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks?currentPage=all http://www.believermag.com/issues/201011/?read=article_necronautical The International Necronautical Society now entering its eleventh year, the First Committee has recently come under pressure to release, in keeping with the INS’s avant-garde demeanor, some kind of “statement” both assessing the organization’s achievements and prognosticating for its future. Both these impulses we reject.

As for the first: What would it mean to speak “of” the INS’s first ten years? To speak above them, overdub? The commentary might include an account of the distribution of the Founding Manifesto at London’s Articultural Fair of 1999; of swift uptake of the Manifesto’s propositions by the art world and… ]]> Mon, 01 Nov 2010 03:42:00 -0700 http://www.believermag.com/issues/201011/?read=article_necronautical http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/manguel_f10.html One day in December 1919, the twenty-year-old Jorge Luis Borges, during a short stay in Seville, wrote a letter, in French, to his friend Maurice Abramowicz in Geneva, in which, almost in passing, he confessed to Abramowicz contradictory feelings about his literary vocation: “Sometimes I think that it’s idiotic to have the ambition of being a more or less mediocre maker of phrases. But that is my destiny.”

As Borges was well aware even then, the history of literature is the history of this paradox. On the one hand, the deeply rooted intuition writers have that the… ]]> Thu, 21 Oct 2010 03:52:00 -0700 http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/manguel_f10.html