MachineMachine /stream - tagged with mind http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net What Is the Future of Knowledge in the Internet Age? http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=big-data-future-knowledge-internet-age/what-is-the-future-of-knowledge-in-the-internet-age-scientific-american What Is the Future of Knowledge in the Internet Age? http://t.co/sRP1qCUf ]]> Tue, 29 Nov 2011 07:37:06 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=big-data-future-knowledge-internet-age/what-is-the-future-of-knowledge-in-the-internet-age-scientific-american Neuroscience Challenges Old Ideas about Free Will: "Human knowledge can’t help itself in the long run." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-and-the-brain-michael-gazzaniga-interview Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists. Now it is attracting the attention of neuroscience, explains Michael S. Gazzaniga, director of the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of the new book, “Who’s In Charge: Free Will and the Science of the Brain.” He spoke with Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. ]]> Wed, 23 Nov 2011 03:53:13 -0700 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=free-will-and-the-brain-michael-gazzaniga-interview Neanderthal Neuroscience 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/ The King of Human Error http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112.print%22 The paper that resulted five years later, the abovementioned “Prospect Theory,” not only proved that one of the central premises of economics was seriously flawed—the so-called utility theory, “based on elementary rules (axioms) of rationality”—but also spawned a sub-field of economics known as behavioral economics. This field attracted the interest of a Harvard undergraduate named Paul DePodesta. ]]> Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:36:37 -0700 http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112.print%22 Threshold science http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/12236448007/how-walking-through-a-doorway-increases/how-walking-through-a-doorway-increases-lapidarium-notes Threshold science: How walking through a doorway increases forgetting : http://t.co/npVLfW8H ]]> Wed, 02 Nov 2011 06:51:34 -0700 http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post/12236448007/how-walking-through-a-doorway-increases/how-walking-through-a-doorway-increases-lapidarium-notes Electrical Model illustrating a Mind having a Will but capable... http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/12159601444

Electrical Model illustrating a Mind having a Will but capable of only Two Ideas

Lewis F. Richardson

]]> Mon, 31 Oct 2011 06:42:00 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/12159601444 Is mental time travel what makes us human? 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 On Victor Tausk's 'The Influencing Machine' 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 Poor memory? Blame Google http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/15/poor-memory-blame-google/poor-memory-blame-google Poor #memory? Blame #Google #ExtendedMind #science #technology #mind #Internet #fb ]]> Sat, 16 Jul 2011 06:27:34 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/jul/15/poor-memory-blame-google/poor-memory-blame-google Three arguments against the singularity 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 Jon Ronson On… Voices in the Head 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 Radical Ethology: Jussi Parikka's Insect Media http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/apr/20/radical-ethology-jussi-parikkas-insect-media/ In a fundamental sense, technology is deeply non-human. While we might apply a humanist logic to the function and workings of technological systems, and view technological objects as extensions of the human body and its capacity for adaptive prosthesis, the very purpose of technology is to be that which the human is not or to achieve that which the human could not otherwise do. As such, technology exists beyond the humanist understanding of the individual, the body, and the subject, particularly in contemporary network culture in which technology is in part transformed from concrete and material objects into molecular, adaptive,… ]]> Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:25:08 -0700 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2011/apr/20/radical-ethology-jussi-parikkas-insect-media/ The Unbearable Wholeness of Beings http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you resort to a language reflecting the artfulness and grace, the well-coordinated rhythms, and the striking choreography of phenomena such as gene expression, signaling cascades, and mitotic cell division — you will almost certainly hear mutterings about your flirtation with “spooky, mysterious, nonphysical forces.” You can expect to hear yourself labeled a “mystic” or — there is hardly any viler epithet within biology today — a “vitalist.”
This charge reflects… ]]> Wed, 06 Apr 2011 13:48:39 -0700 http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-unbearable-wholeness-of-beings Can the Brain Explain Your Mind? 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 ‘World Wide Mind’ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15scibks_excerpt.html?_r=1 Imagine it: a flower blossoming inside the brain, nanometer stalks splitting away from a micrometer stem. Expanding into every available capillary, touching every cubic millimeter of the brain, collecting terabytes of data in every second. By the same token, it could send in terabytes of data every second. It would be the most intimate interface ever invented. If you connected one person’s wired brain to another person’s, you could literally connect them together; they would have a real corpus callosum joining them (albeit with links of radio waves rather than wires.) And if you connected a number of people to… ]]> Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:40:27 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/science/15scibks_excerpt.html?_r=1 The Library in the New Age 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 The Soul Niche 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 Explain yourself: George-Lakoff, cognitive linguist http://explainer.net/2011/01/george-lakoff/ As part of our research on explanatory journalism, we’re interviewing experts in fields outside journalism about their approaches to explaining complex systems to non-specialtists.

Our first expert is cognitive linguist George Lakoff, who did groundbreaking research on the embodiment of thought and language and the way people think using metaphors. For Lakoff, language is not a neutral system of communication, because it is always based on frames, conceptual metaphors, narratives, and emotions. Political thought and language is inherently moral and emotional. The basic phrases journalists use every day—words like “liberty” “freedom” “immigrant” “taxes”— are essentially contested concepts that have radically… ]]> Fri, 04 Feb 2011 03:26:37 -0700 http://explainer.net/2011/01/george-lakoff/ The Soul Niche 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 What the science of human nature can teach us 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.
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