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Der unabwendbare Anfang

Band 1 der Cybionic Trilogie erscheint am 31. Mai 2021

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Polarise / dPunkt

DNA is similar to a hard drive or storage device, in that contains the memory of each cell of every living, and has the instructions on how to make that cell. DNA is four molecules combined in any order to make a chain of one larger molecule. And if you can read that chain of four molecules, then you have a sequence of characters, like a digital code. Over the years the price of sequencing a human genome has dropped significantly, much to the delight of scientists. And since DNA is a sequence of four letters, and if we can manipulate DNA, we could insert a message and use DNA as the storage device.

THE NEUROLOGY OF SELF-AWARENESS

Vilayanur Ramachandran

What is the self? How does the activity of neurons give rise to the sense of being a conscious human being? Even this most ancient of philosophical problems, I believe, will yield to the methods of empirical science. It now seems increasingly likely that the self is not a holistic property of the entire brain; it arises from the activity of specific sets of interlinked brain circuits. But we need to know which circuits are critically involved and what their functions might be. It is the "turning inward" aspect of the self — its recursiveness — that gives it its peculiar paradoxical quality

One of the central metaphors of the third culture is computation. The computer does computation and the mind does computation. To understand what makes birds fly, you may look at airplanes, because there are principles of flight and aerodynamics that apply to anything that flies. That is how the idea of computation figures into the new ways in which scientists are thinking about complicated systems.

Nathan Myhrvold is chief technology officer at Microsoft corporation, reporting to Microsoft CEO Bill Gates as a member of the Executive Committee. This group is responsible for the broad strategic and business planning for the entire company. He also is responsible for the Advanced Technology and Research Group, which has a budget of more than $2 billion a year. Previously he was group vice president of Applications and Content, which comprised a number of Microsoft divisions, including Desktop Applications, Consumer, Research, and Microsoft On line Systems.

[Francisco Varela:] I guess I've had only one question all my life. Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is a key and eternal question.

Lee Smolin: Roger Penrose is the most important physicist to work in relativity theory except for Einstein. He's the most creative person and the person who has contributed the most ideas to what we do. He's one of the very few people I've met in my life who, without reservation, I call a genius. Roger is the kind of person who has something original to say — something you've never heard before — on almost any subject that comes up.

I got to know George Dyson by attending several of Esther Dyson's PC Forum conferences, annual gatherings for the elite of the personal computer and software worlds. He was not a speaker, not even an industry player, just the younger brother. So why was I spending most of my free time hanging out and talking to him and not to the powers-that-be in the digital world?

An answer to this question can be gleaned by a reading of his new book about the evolution of mind and computers that derives both its title and outlook from Samuel Butler's 1863 essay "Darwin Among the Machines." Observing the beginnings of miniaturization, self-reproduction, and telecommunication among machines, Butler predicted that Nature's intelligence, only temporarily subservient to technology, would resurface to reclaim our creations as her own. Updating Butler's arguments, George has distilled the historical record to chronicle the origins of digital telecommunications and the evolution of digital computers.

George views the World Wide Web as a globally networked, electronic, sentient being. In the evolution of mind in the electronic network, on a level transcending our own, he finds that nature is on the side of the machines. As Danny Hillis noted: "history with a future."

POWER OVER NATURE

What I’ve been thinking about today specifically is something of a potential breakthrough in understanding our fundamental theories of physics. We have something called a standard model, but its foundations are kind of scandalous. We have not known how to define an important part of it mathematically rigorously, but I think I have figured out how to do that, and it’s very pretty. I’m in the middle of calculations to check it out.

FRANK WILCZEK, currently the Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics at MIT

Onze data worden steeds vaker gebruikt om te bepalen welke rechten je hebt. Volgens de Amerikaanse onderzoeker John Cheney-Lippold gaan we toe naar een algoritmisch burgerschap.

Techbedrijven schetsen een aanlokkelijke toekomstvisie voor slimme steden. Welke prijs betalen burgers voor deze technologische droom?

Technologiebedrijven schetsen een aanlokkelijke toekomstvisie voor het toenemende aantal stadsbewoners. Een goed georganiseerd leven in zogenaamde smart cities waar bewoners en apparaten zijn aangesloten op The Internet of Things en alles en iedereen met elkaar verbonden is. Maar welke prijs betaalt de burger voor deze ambitieuze technologische droom?

What we need to do in artificial intelligence is turn back to psychology. Brute force is great; we're using it in a lot of ways, like speech recognition, license plate recognition, and for categorization, but there are still some things that people do a lot better. We should be studying human beings to understand how they do it better.

Ze vliegen in zwermen, bezorgen pakjes en kunnen zo klein zijn als een insect. Drones zijn veel meer dan alleen maar wapens. Ze duiken overal op in ons leven.

Happiness Strategies of Emotionally Intelligent People

3 Happiness Strategies of Emotionally Intelligent People How can you use your emotional IQ to bring you long-term joy and satisfaction? The author of Emotional Intelligence and A Force for Good explains. Read more: http://www.oprah.com/inspiration/Happiness-Strategies-of-Emotionally-Intelligent-People#ixzz440H79vtq

A lot of moral questions can be answered in terms of mattering. My intuition is that the concept of mattering bridges the is-ought gap. To determine that certain things matter is also to say that we ought to pursue them, so it’s a bridge concept.

The is/ought gap was first pointed out by David Hume. You’re reading along, says Hume, it’s some philosopher and he’s talking about “this is the case,” “that is the case,” and suddenly, there’s this move to “this ought to be the case,” “that ought to be the case.” In a very famous paragraph in A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume said, “How can you derive 'ought' statements from 'is' statements?” There’s a logical gap.

Baruch Spinoza (/bəˈruːk spɪˈnoʊzə/;[4] Dutch: [baːˈrux spɪˈnoːzaː]; born Benedito de Espinosa, Portuguese pronunciation: [benɨˈðitu ðɨ iʃpɨˈnozɐ]; 24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677, later Benedict de Spinoza) was a Dutch philosopher of Sephardi/Portuguese origin.[3] By laying the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment[5] and modern biblical criticism,[6] including modern conceptions of the self and the universe,[7] he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy.[8]

Spinoza's magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes' mind–body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important thinkers. In the Ethics, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely."[9] Hegel said, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."[10] His philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted 20th-century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him "the 'prince' of philosophers".[11]

What makes us different from all these things? What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are defined by our particulars—our particular biology, our particular psychology, our particular cultural history.

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