consciousness » meanderings

Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

Susan Sontag’s life in film.

“… formal exploration stretched to its limits may lead not just to a dramatization of the means of making art but to the dissolution of such means, and the dissolution of consciousness, too.”

David Denby. Sept. 12.2005. The Moviegoer : The New Yorker

Converging Intracranial Markers of Conscious Access

“…consciously perceived words were accompanied by long-lasting effects (>200 ms) across a great variety of cortical sites, with a special involvement of the prefrontal lobes. This sustained pattern of neural activity was characterized by a specific increase of coherence between distant areas, suggesting conscious perception is broadcasted widely across the cortex.”

Gaillard, Raphaël et al. 2009. “Converging Intracranial Markers of Conscious Access.” PLoS Biology 7(3): e61 EP -.

David Chalmers : The Conscious Mind

“Physics requires information states but cares only about their relations, not their intrinsic nature; phenomenology requires information states, but cares only about their fundamental nature.”

Hofstadter, ”I am a Strange Loop”

“My argument in I Am a Strange Loop is spelled out clearly. If a person’s soul is truly a pattern, then it can be realized in different media. Wherever that pattern exists in a sufficiently fine-grained way, then it is, by my definition, the soul itself and not some kind of “mere simulation” of it.”

media-neutral cognition
& substrate-neutral emotion
equals immanence

PEAR

Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) Lab.

The Great Ape Project

We demand the extension of the community of equals to include all great apes: human beings, chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orang-utans.

The community of equals is the moral community within which we accept certain basic moral principles or rights as governing our relations with each other and enforceable at law.

PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts.

“PsyArt is an online, peer-reviewed journal featuring articles using a psychological approach to the arts. We provide a rapid publication decision and a large and international readership. The journal is open to any psychology and any art, although PsyArt specializes in psychoanalytic psychology and literature or film.”

the ne plus ultra project: good memes for better genes

“…you have the biggest gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel process that gave us all existence, and the gift of revulsion against its implications…”

TED | Talks | Sir Martin Rees: Earth in its final century? (video)

“…this uniquely crucial century…”

Species Slaves

Chimera: these sheep have 15 per cent human cells and 85 per cent animal cells

res-Qualia

huge-entity

“What is the book?
What is mind?
How can one bridge the two? “

Marvin Minsky:

No one finds it surprising these days when we make machines that do logical things, because logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily use. But Love, by its nature, some people would say, cannot be explained in mechanical ways — nor could we ever make machines that possess any such human capacities as feelings, emotions, and consciousness…”

“…emotional states are not especially different from the processes that we call ‘thinking’…”(p.6)