sent2null space

I've been steeped in though regarding the causative biological truths that are behind the emergence of a cognitive agent in human and non human animals. In my past postings I've explored the idea that consciousness emerges from the dynamic inter play of memories stored in regions roughly allocated to processing the inputs from sensations across the human sensory landscape. This grossly is comprised by the 5 senses, olfaction, audition, visual sensation, gustatory sense, somatosensory sensation...(senses of balance and acceleration are also senses but not usually grouped with the above). The problem with trying to recreate a dynamic cognitive agent lies not just in simply reproducing how the brain stores away the sensory information gathered from the respective sensory organs and relayed to the processing regions of the brain, it also includes the problem (for purposes of emerging these abilities de novo say via an artificial substrate) of needing to emerge the hierarchy...

In previous posts on the subject of super mortality, I've prognosticated a bit on where the current technology can put us with regard to rejuvenation. In Love Post Supermortality I described a time where humans will be able to pay for and receive "intra genetic revigoration" that allows them to essentially age in reverse as their cellular repair mechanisms are restored system wide over a period of weeks or months. This morning I was thinking about what happens when this type of treatment is widely available. What will be the average age to which people revert themselves if it is possible to chose an age? Will all chose to be as young as possible? I propose that the age people will revert to the most can be inferred by taking a sufficient poll today of what age a person would chose to be reverted to if given the choice after they've become an adult. So the poll would include people aged from 25 and greater, and pose the question: "If you could be reverted ...

A friend posted this article responding to an article in the Washington Post making a case for stimulus' effectiveness when applied during times of economic malaise in the US. I often see arguments along the lines of those indicated and wanted to put down a formal rebuttal of those points here: A short bit on each of his objections : 1) On overstating degree of unanimity, this is an extremely subjective statement. He then goes on to point out a small sample of alternative reads from economists on the effectiveness of stimulus which only stand out because they are alternative reads. The consensus is that stimulus properly aimed and timed, consistently works. If there are opposing views on that statement they are in the minority...and stating that existence means that economists are not unanimous in their agreement as to the effectiveness of stimulus in general...is obvious and not really relevant. 2) On ignoring public choice, he has three issues: a) timing -- Th...

In a response to a friend on Facebook an interesting discussion on recent results that decidability of paths for particle transmission at the quantum scale is not assured similar to Turing's halting result in computer science and Godel's incompleteness in logic. This article was the original source of the discussion. Below I respond to comments made by my friend. "Making harder the conundrum is that Godel's Incompleteness and Turing's halting only apply to countable sets, not continua." -- Precisely, but the riddle being that an infinitely countable set is included in that definition...and it's possible to have infinite subsets of such sets! So discretization (of anything) seems to be fundamental to continuity...this truth of mathematics which stands apart from our present understanding of reality may point us in the direction of what reality really is about. If the pattern continues to apply it may provide a way to test validity of multiverse theories. ...

In a paper recently published by Mark Muhlestein in the journal Cognitive Computation the following conclusion is made: " In this computational framework, the distinction between a computation and the recording of a computation can be blurred arbitrarily, yet the physical implementation of the computation itself is unchanged. From this, we conclude that a purely computational account of consciousness is unsatisfactory." This conclusion I agree with but for a few reasons not directly addressed in the paper which I elaborate on below. On the objections, I'd say the ones that are most against this conclusion (that either computation is not all there is or consciousness is not what we think it is, roughly) are objections 3 and 4. The clarion call that was ringing in my head as I read was the condition that a random number generator was being used. Conscious states are intimately dynamic systems that do not have deterministic response as asserted in the thought expe...

I suppose at some point there will be found to be a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle between scales of "mind" (which I believe are fractal and scale in complexity with more and more integrated sensory information) and integration algorithm which can be either analog or digital or range between. The analog to h-bar being the constant interaction landscape of cognitive possibilities (qualia) emerged by variation across the other two fundamental attributes. So if I define scale of mind as  sM, and integration algorithm by iA and !Q as the invariant qualia landscape. relation will look something like sM = !QiA or sM/iA =!Q Observations: sM , will vary with dimension (orthogonal sensory inputs) as it does in living minds. Some biological minds integrate sensory dimensions humans can't experience...for example the dimension of electrostatic or magnetic field sensation that platypus and birds have respectively in addition to ones we can. This will modulate the pe...

The announcement by Facebook that it was going to buy Instagram, recent hot startup darling of the tech media for their app. that allows people to take photos and post them to Facebook with applied image filters and chat about the photos was met by accolades showered on Zuckerberg for his wisdom. The logic was that the fast growth of Instagram showed that it was a potential  threat for Facebook, particularly in the mobile space where the app. was growing so quickly. I greeted the announcement with a mixture of bemusement and disbelief. The main reasons were summarized in the thesis I put forward in this article from last year that I wrote to explain why Google created Google+ and why they didn't really care about stealing users from Facebook . I also, in a blog post from several years ago, before there was even a Google+ or Google wave... stated this: " The proof of all this consolidation is clear in the numbers, users spend incredible amounts of time on the Facebook n...