Minds on FF

"The Dynamic Core and Global Workspace hypotheses were independently put forward to provide mechanistic and biologically plausible accounts of how brains generate conscious mental content. The Dynamic Core proposes that reentrant neural activity in the thalamocortical system gives rise to conscious experience. Global Workspace reconciles the limited capacity of momentary conscious content with the vast repertoire of long-term memory. In this paper we show the close relationship between the two hypotheses. This relationship allows for a strictly biological account of phenomenal experience and subjectivity that is consistent with mounting experimental evidence. We examine the constraints on causal analyses of consciousness and suggest that there is now sufficient evidence to consider the design and construction of a conscious artifact." - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

"Why do people travel? Is it only, as Philip Larkin suggested, 'a deliberate step backwards' in order to create a new objective, namely homecoming?" - Christopher Galtenberg from Bookmarklet

"Despite its promotion into the serious league of literature, travel writing has remained something like the opera of letters: inherently bourgeois, faintly redolent of its imperialist past. The traveler here is emphatically not a tourist; he (usually not she) is a connoisseur of place whose aesthetic is other people’s lives. Contemporary travel writing still has the occasional reek of leather armchairs and gin, of old colonial maps." - Christopher Galtenberg

“When we look at technology we see pipes and blinking lights. But in the cosmic view, technology is the acceleration of evolution. (...) It is a way for an adaptive system – in this case life – to search for new survival forms in the universe of all-possible forms. (...) Of all the tricks that evolution came up for increasing its evolvability none compare to minds. Minds – and not just human minds – bestow on life a greatly accelerated way to learn and adapt. (...) The discovery of mindness has driven evolution in many new directions while also creating a new territory to explore – the territory of possible minds. The most recent extension of this expansion is technology. Technology is how human minds explore the space of possibilities. We power our minds via science and technology to make possible things real. More so technology is how our society learns and introduces change. It is almost a cliché to point out that technology has brought as much change on this planet in the last 100... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"What is needed is a renewed humility. We are not the masters of the sources of happiness; they ever elude the appointments we make with them, springing up when we least expect them and fleeing when we would hold them close. The excessive ambition to expunge all that is weak or broken in body or mind, to control moods and states of soul, sadness, chagrin, moments of emptiness—all this runs up against our finitude, against the inertia of the human species, which we cannot manipulate like some raw material. We have the power to avoid or to heal certain evils, yes, but we cannot order happiness as if it were a meal in a restaurant." - Christopher Galtenberg from Bookmarklet

"Cognition is not a little processing program that takes place inside your head, Robby the Robot style. It is a constant flow of information, memory, plans, and physical movements, in which as much thinking goes on out there as in here. If television produced the global village, the Internet produces the global psyche: everyone keyed in like a neuron, so that to the eyes of a watching Martian we are really part of a single planetary brain. Contraptions don’t change consciousness; contraptions are part of consciousness. We may not act better than we used to, but we sure think differently than we did. (…) the Internet is just a loud and unlimited library in which we now live (...) Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Perhaps the instrument of the new connected age was already in place in fantasy. For the Internet screen has always been like the palantír in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”—the “seeing stone” that lets the wizards see the entire world. Its gift is great; the wizard can see it all. Its risk is real: evil things will register more vividly than the great mass of dull good. The peril isn’t... more... - Amira

"Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world. Our philosophy is that ideas are NOT selfish, ideas are NOT viruses. Ideas survive because they fit in with the rest of life. Our position is that ideas are energy, and should interconnect and re-connect continuously because by linking ideas together we learn, and new ideas emerge. Our goal is to encourage life-long learning, and we have created this website as a portal of possibilities. A democratic space where people can listen and engage with ideas that inform contemporary history. Ideas that we believe will empower everyone to be a part of today’s cultural conversation." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Inside each of us there is a thing that thinks and feels and wants and decides. Each of us is that thing. This is the traditional view of mind, the view that has dominated establishment research into cognition and consciousness for the last 500 years. Contemporary scientists — neuroscientists as well as other cognitive scientists — by and large take this basic schema for granted no less than Descartes did. Of course, today’s thinkers believe that thing inside us, which is the self we are, is a bit of our flesh (the brain). Descartes, for his part, could not conceive of how mere meat could produce mind, so he supposed that mind was an immaterial something. But this difference, it turns out, and as I argue in Out of Our Heads, is merely technical. Despite having learned so much about the anatomy and physiology of the human brain in the last century, we don’t actually have a better account of how consciousness and cognition arise in the brain than it arises out of immaterial soul-stuff.... more... - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

Rainbow Sky by Hanna Wiszniewska, 5 Jul 2010

"A massive new project to scan the brains of 1,200 volunteers could finally give scientists a picture of the neural architecture of the human brain and help them understand the causes of certain neurological and psychological diseases. The National Institutes of Health announced $40 million in funding this month for the five-year effort, dubbed the Human Connectome Project. Scientists will use new imaging technologies, some still under development, to create both structural and functional maps of the human brain. The project is novel in its size; most brain-imaging studies have looked at tens to hundreds of brains. Scanning so many people will shed light on the normal variability within the brain structure of healthy adults, which will in turn provide a basis for examining how neural "wiring" differs in such disorders as autism and schizophrenia. The researchers also plan to collect genetic and behavioral data, testing participants' sensory and motor skills, memory, and other... more... - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

"A new study co-authored by MIT researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups’ individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group. Many social scientists have long contended that the ability of individuals to fare well on diverse cognitive tasks demonstrates the existence of a measurable level of intelligence in each person. In a study published Thursday, Sept. 30, in the advance online issue of the journal Science, the researchers applied a similar principle to small teams of people. They discovered that groups featuring the right kind of internal dynamics perform well on a wide range of assignments, a finding with potential applications for businesses and other organizations. “We did not know if groups would show a general cognitive ability across tasks,” said Thomas W. Malone, the... more... - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

"Many of us have grown up thinking that if we are properly self-punishing then we are somehow being responsible. "What, I'm a nervous wreck — how could I possibly take on more?"" - Christopher Galtenberg from Bookmarklet

"On the other hand, if, God forbid, we are feeling carefree, we have this nagging sense that we're being downright irresponsible, certain that if we don't get right back to self-flagellation then the other shoe is going to drop. And hard." - Christopher Galtenberg

"We don't correlate our sense of responsibility with what we are actually producing. We correlate it with how hard we are being on ourselves." - Christopher Galtenberg

=((((( - crazycalimero

Thanks - good list of gems. isbn://0691123896 was an especially good share I never heard of before. - Joel Kotarski

"From vibrator sales to troubles with monogamy, evidence aboundsthat Homo sapiens is an exceedingly sexual species. A new book argues that understanding how this sexuality evolved helps to explain our unique creativity inside — as well as outside — the conjugal bedroom." - Spaceweaver from Bookmarklet

"...in 1902 the first home-use vibrator was patented and approved for domestic use in the United States. Fifteen years later there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes." - Goran Zec