MachineMachine /stream - tagged with thought http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Philip K. Dick, Sci-Fi Philosopher, Part 1 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-1/ The fish pendant, on Dick’s account, began to emit a golden ray of light, and Dick suddenly experienced what he called, with a nod to Plato, anamnesis: the recollection or total recall of the entire sum of knowledge. Dick claimed to have access to what philosophers call the faculty of “intellectual intuition”: the direct perception by the mind of a metaphysical reality behind screens of appearance. Many philosophers since Kant have insisted that such intellectual intuition is available only to human beings in the guise of fraudulent obscurantism, usually as religious or mystical experience, like Emmanuel Swedenborg’s visions of the… ]]> Tue, 22 May 2012 03:05:11 -0700 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/philip-k-dick-sci-fi-philosopher-part-1/ Artificial Intelligence Could Be on Brink of Passing Turing Test http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/turing-test-revisited/artificial-intelligence-could-be-on-brink-of-passing-turing-test-wired-science-wiredcom Artificial Intelligence could be on brink of passing The Turing Test : http://t.co/oLsEJN33 ]]> Sat, 14 Apr 2012 08:37:53 -0700 http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/04/turing-test-revisited/artificial-intelligence-could-be-on-brink-of-passing-turing-test-wired-science-wiredcom When independent thought flourishes http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/03/when-independent-thought-flourishes/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GeneExpressionBlog+(Gene+Expression)/when-independent-thought-flourishes-gene-expression-discover-magazine When independent thought flourishes... (on change, but not too much) : http://t.co/jcKa2VOC by @razibkhan ]]> Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:25:06 -0700 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2012/03/when-independent-thought-flourishes/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GeneExpressionBlog+(Gene+Expression)/when-independent-thought-flourishes-gene-expression-discover-magazine A computer that thinks like the universe http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2011/11/25/computer-that-thinks-like-universe/g1FKng74ydOH2B802BPY3N/story.html For years, excitement about quantum computing has been growing among scientists and tech visionaries. Quantum computers, if they succeed, promise to make a whole new range of problems accessible to computers, from breaking difficult codes to unlocking complicated biological processes now out of reach for even the fastest machines. ]]> Sat, 03 Dec 2011 03:10:21 -0700 http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2011/11/25/computer-that-thinks-like-universe/g1FKng74ydOH2B802BPY3N/story.html 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 How Computational Complexity Will Revolutionise Philosophy http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8731851297

Since the 1930s, the theory of computation has profoundly influenced philosophical thinking about topics such as the theory of the mind, the nature of mathematical knowledge and the prospect of machine intelligence. In fact, it’s hard to think of an idea that has had a bigger impact on philosophy.

And yet there is an even bigger philosophical revolution waiting in the wings. The theory of computing is a philosophical minnow compared to the potential of another theory that is currently dominating thinking about computation.

@ Technology Review

]]> Wed, 10 Aug 2011 05:31:23 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/8731851297 Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7233736409 “All things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.”

- Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus ]]> Mon, 04 Jul 2011 11:02:43 -0700 http://tumblr.machinemachine.net/post/7233736409 How Catholicism made Marshall McLuhan one of the twentieth century’s freest and finest thinkers http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.07-media-divine-inspiration/1/ APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.

Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements, Mailer and McLuhan… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 09:16:25 -0700 http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2011.07-media-divine-inspiration/1/ 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 Japanese people need our solidarity, not a blame game http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10324/ The earthquake confirms that a pre‑Enlightenment urge to blame human greed for natural disasters is making a comeback.

The Japanese proverb ‘fix the problem, not the blame’ captures an attitude towards life that has served Japan well in the post-Hiroshima era. It makes a powerful point, which is that looking for someone or something to blame is often a time-consuming exercise that rarely has positive outcomes. Whereas nothing can be done about an unfortunate event that has already occurred, we can mobilise our creative powers to fix problems that stare us in the face. History shows that… ]]> Sat, 26 Mar 2011 13:48:19 -0700 http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10324/ RSA Animate - Language as a Window into Human Nature http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 11 Mar 2011 10:35:42 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU&feature=youtube_gdata Bacteria 'R' Us http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/bacteria-r-us-23628/ A few scientists noticed in the late 1960s that the marine bacteria Vibrio fischeri appeared to coordinate among themselves the production of chemicals that produced bioluminescence, waiting until a certain number of them were in the neighborhood before firing up their light-making machinery. This behavior was eventually dubbed “quorum sensing.” It was one of the first in what has turned out to be a long list of ways in which bacteria talk to each other and to other organisms.

Some populations of V. fischeri put this skill to a remarkable use: They live in the light-sensing organs… ]]> Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:00:00 -0700 http://www.miller-mccune.com/science-environment/bacteria-r-us-23628/ Manguel, Muse of Impossibility 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 Cosmology, Cambridge Style: Wittgenstein, Toulmin, and Hawking http://chronicle.com/article/Cosmology-Cambridge-Style-/124568 That headline flashed to all corners of the media universe this month. Of course, we don't know whether a universe has corners. Truth is, we don't know much about the universe that isn't astonishingly inferential. Alas, you'd hardly know that from listening to the retired Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and his media echo chamber.

The breaking news originated in the latest book by Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design (Bantam), co-written with physicist Leonard Mlodinow. It excited front-page editors as few science tomes do. Britain's Mirror exclaimed, "Good Heavens! God Did Not Create… ]]> Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:21:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Cosmology-Cambridge-Style-/124568 Language as Thought: Watch out for the Hype http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-mcwhorter/77631/dont-believe-the-hype-about-aborigines-yiddish-or-ebonics Judging from how the Times magazine’s excerpt from Guy Deutscher’s new book has been one of the most read pieces in the paper for over a week now, the book is on its way to libating readers ever eager for the seductive idea that people’s languages channel the way they think--that is, that grammar creates cultural outlooks.

“Oooh-mmmm!” I heard in a room once when a linguist parenthetically suggested that the reason speakers of one Native American language have prefixes instead of words to indicate mixing, poking, and sucking on food is because they are “culturally” attuned… ]]> Thu, 23 Sep 2010 05:05:00 -0700 http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-mcwhorter/77631/dont-believe-the-hype-about-aborigines-yiddish-or-ebonics Westerners vs. the World: We are the WEIRD ones http://www.nationalpost.com/Westerners+World+weird+ones/3427126/story.html It turns out the Machiguenga — whose number system goes: one, two, three, many — are not alone in their thinking. Most people from non-Western cultures introduced to the Ultimatum Game play differently than Westerners. And that is one clue that the Western mind differs in fundamental ways from the rest of humanity, according to Dr. Henrich. He and two other UBC researchers authored a paper shaking up the fields of psychology, cognitive science and behavioural economics by questioning whether we can know anything about humanity in general if we only study a "truly unusual group of people" — the… ]]> Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:10:00 -0700 http://www.nationalpost.com/Westerners+World+weird+ones/3427126/story.html Did Humans Make Tools, or Did Tools Make Humans? http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2010/08/26/did-humans-make-tools-or-did-tools-make-humans/ Is our species, Homo sapiens sapiens, the first cyborg species? Gizmodo/New Scientist has a fascinating article up about how humans evolved as a result of technology. Timothy Taylor, an anthropologist and archaeologist at the University of Bradford in the United Kingdom, submits a theory I am very inclined to believe: that humans evolved from tool-using proto-human primates. This evolutionary path resulted in a “survival of the weakest,” which Taylor explains:

Technology allows us to accumulate biological deficits: we lost our sharp fingernails because we had cutting tools, we lost our heavy jaw musculature thanks to stone tools.… ]]> Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:14:00 -0700 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/2010/08/26/did-humans-make-tools-or-did-tools-make-humans/ Ideas of the Century: Non-Critical Thinking http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1432 Back in 1981, R.M. Hare, in his book Moral Thinking, featured a distinction that today I still find useful. Hare admitted that the distinction was not original with him, but he argued that philosophers have not appreciated its importance. The distinction is between critical and “intuitive” (what I call non-critical) thinking. It is still important since it reminds us not to make the mistake of focusing too much attention on the critical level. Philosophers are prone to make this mistake because they like to look critically at the norms their society holds to. Their critical outlook leaves the impression that… ]]> Sat, 21 Aug 2010 15:16:00 -0700 http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=1432 'The Thing Itself' : A Sci-Fi Archaeology http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/08/the-thing-itself-a-sc-fi-archaeology.html

by Daniel Rourke

Mid-way through H.G.Wells’ The Time Machine, the protagonist stumbles into a sprawling abandoned museum. Sweeping the dust off ancient relics he ponders how his machine would allow him to watch them crumble further in decay. It is at this point that The Time Traveller has an astounding revelation. The museum is filled with artefacts not from his past, but from his own future: The Time Traveller is surrounded by relics whose potential to speak slipped away with the civilisation that created them.

Having bypassed the normal laws of causality The Time Traveller is doomed…

]]> Sun, 08 Aug 2010 21:05:00 -0700 http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/08/the-thing-itself-a-sc-fi-archaeology.html Smarter Than You Think - I.B.M.'s Supercomputer http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all For the last three years, I.B.M. scientists have been developing what they expect will be the world’s most advanced “question answering” machine, able to understand a question posed in everyday human elocution — “natural language,” as computer scientists call it — and respond with a precise, factual answer. In other words, it must do more than what search engines like Google and Bing do, which is merely point to a document where you might find the answer. It has to pluck out the correct answer itself. Technologists have long regarded this sort of artificial intelligence as a holy grail, because… ]]> Thu, 17 Jun 2010 03:31:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html?hp=&pagewanted=all