#cognitive-science

[thepersonalwords]

The brain works in a holistic, cooperative way that makes our basest desire or most abject fear as expressive of who we are as abstract thinking of the highest order. That means that we are all equal part snakes, monkeys, and spacemen.

David Amerland, The Sniper Mind: Eliminate Fear, Deal with Uncertainty, and Make Better Decisions

[thepersonalwords]

Pathology can indeed cause experiences of the Kingdom of God, but not all God experiences are caused by pathology.

Abhijit Naskar

[rollypolymath]

...languages that have an actual word for “Crawling things” which, for us — for english speakers — when we extrapolate, something “crawling” evokes a “feeling” of sinuous motion relative to us in size. With this we see that the notion of “crawling” has this primordial symbology to it, in that it most fundamentally represents a compound set of visceral symbols — symbols that occur implicitly, encoded in thought.

Something “small and crawling” will most likely be oscillating faster than a “big and crawling” thing. A big and crawling thing might be something that is “big and slithering” a slither has more of a languorous vibration to it. It slows the crawl which reinforces its mass which reinforces its crawl ... and so on.

We expect that it’s entirely possible that in some locale, some small town, that people have complete opposite notions as to their literal mass-bias and this implies that something is big or small a priori unless otherwise stated, relative the frequency.

[bicentennialmanbangalore]

Summary of how studying cognitive science changed me

Summary of how studying cognitive science changed me

status illegibility about me, sufficient enough for me to create/gain social capital with ease. Not to mention the vocabulary i have acquired helps.

item The voice decibel level changes. The times when i sense a threat/challenge and rise to counter end{enumerate}

View On WordPress

[gampleman]

Probably the Deepest Essay on User Interaction Design Written this Year

This essay by Kathy Sierra examines the price we pay for decisions and the consequences of that on interface design. A must read for anyone in the field.

For those not in the field, this article describes the same cognitive process and the consequences on the judicial system and society at large. It's a bit long, but very much worth the read.

[openworm]

Extremely interesting write-up inspired by OpenWorm from Dennis Dollens (cross-posting from the original post on Google+)

I figure if I'm approaching openworm.org from cognitive science, philosophy, and architecture there may be others out there reading the blog for parallels with other directions and disciplines. I'm looking to biomimetic research in synthetic biology and AI for considerations of metabolic architecture derived from reformulating Alan Turing's question: "Can machines think?" (1950) into: can buildings think? (Dollens forthcoming 2014). Such a reformulation requires identifying architecture in the same phylum as machines. In this frame, the C. elegans, OpenWorm, 3D body already establishes a CAD architecture encasing performative systems. If further extrapolated OpenWorm's search for e-life may inform a synthetic vision of potential intelligent and/or metabolizing buildings. The benefit analogy in such a transformation (e-worm-to-building), resides in a potentially performative architecture simulation germane to domains of communication, materialization, computational architecture, bioremediation, and sustainability.

Related, Ezequiel Di Paolo's "Robotics Inspired in the Organism" (2010) generates discussion around intelligence, presence, environment, and "sense-making" via evolved autopoiesis (Di Paolo 2005. Maturana & Varela 1980. Weber & Varela 2002). With that mapping of autopoietic biological life, I think OpenWorm generates a way to envision a synthetic lifeform influencing intelligent architecture defined through theory but tested in virtual and generative models. Thereafter, I ask myself: why can't a building think? For example, Di Paolo reworks autopoiesis into the position of biologically supporting "sense-making" that, in turn, seems to me to be a link where discussion from OpenWorm may influence conceptual and theoretical modeling for metabolizing architectural systems. I think, simultaneous (OpenWorm-to-building) analogy and virtual-model comparison becomes thinkable as parallel experiments if the CAD worm body is considered stationary as a building would require, where skin/membrane functions manifest as a biological facade, and cognitive functions are seen addressing desired, programmed, and adaptive environmental remediation represented by the petri dish.

[bikeshed-blog]

"Intentionality is the characteristic of consciousness whereby that consciousness is aware of or directed toward an object." If you are thinking about what you had for lunch, trying to remember where your car is parked, or what your spouse's birthday is, you are being intentional. If you bark your shin on a coffee table in the middle of the night, you don't start being intentional until you begin to wonder why you persist in keeping the table in the path to the kitchen

Turing, Searle, and Thought

[gampleman]

Engineers at IBM performed one hell of an engineering feat. Essentialy they created a neural network of terrabytes in size. Interesting are some of the philosophical issues they encountered. They actualy created a model so complex that it is harder to understand then an original it is modelling.