0522. Earthrise

One of the most compelling moments of the Apollo 8 mission in 1968 was the earthrise: When we contemplate this point-of-view, history becomes clear--from prehistoric, to world wars, to global warming--it all happened on that pale blue dot.

40 years later...

“Earthrise” showed us where we are, what we can do and what we share. It showed us who we are, together; the people of a tough, long-lasting world, shot through with the light of a continuous creation. (From op-ed 'Not-So-Lonely-Planet' NY Times 12/24/o8)

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0278. Systems on the edge of chaos

Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things. But it might not be clear just what the nudge was. By the time you decide on a cause, another avalanche will have occurred.

How Chaos Drives the Brain

0487. Fate Does All the Work

When you put yourself in a position of neutrality, fate does all the work. (Always prescribe to the philosophy “everything in moderation”. That way you can’t blame yourself if something bad happens. )

0488. The Place of Money

Money you can’t spend frees up the time that would have been occupied by the purchased objects.

0489. Try a Different Way

Something to tell oneself frequently: Stop and try a different way. One day the usual route we rely on no longer exists.

0088.

Every new technology stretches the social fabric.

Edit: Every new technology stretches the social fabric, including technologies developed deus ex machina, such as 'alternative energy' that reshuffle the use (and overuse) of natural resources.

0087. The Power of Context

Technology allows us to more freely associate all types of things, but the danger is always that similarities are too simplistic without seeing the larger context.

0086. 'Reality' TV

The only “reality TV” is a surveillance camera monitor.

0085.

Cell phones are really a different medium than a regular phone, and thus cannot transmit conversations in the same way. The old concept of the telephone usually included a quiet private space around it that constrained the conversation to two people. Now a telephone conversation is a performance with a captive (emphasis) audience.

0084. Machine Memories

Computer memory will more closely resemble human memory. In effect, the boundary between man and machine will be virtually transparent, as will lots of other boundaries such as good/evil.

0082. Easy War

TV makes war seem easy—like sitting down and watching a film or playing a video game. Coverage of war will eventually be an amalgam of cinema and video games.

0081. Age of Suspicion

In an age of suspicion, cameras become merely surveillance devices.

0080. Mobile Surveillance

The interesting thing about camera phones is that they put mobile surveillance cameras everywhere. The fact that they are digital devices increases the probability of the distortion of context and twisting of truth. (9/04)

0039. The Inner Cinema

Everyone has their own inner cinema, and we sit front and center. We have our own filmmaker that has been filming every day of our lives and our own projectionist, under our own direction what films to show. Sometimes people enter our cinema and watch our films, and sometimes show their own on the screen. Sometimes the films overlay and we don’t notice two separate films. (This is when we agree) Sometimes the two films are totally different (This is when we disagree) Sometimes thousands of people copy the same films and project them on the same screen and there is no perceptible difference between them (This is organized ideology, religion, blind faith)

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Can A Machine Read Your Mind

• The world of understanding, cognition and even action can be managed by manipulating atoms rather than arguments ("opium of the people" in reverse -- chemicals inducing meaning, instead of meanings acting chemically).
• Wittgenstein imagines a scenario in which scientists open someone’s head and observe his functioning brain, while he, by means of mirrors, observes it at the same time, all observers equally able to watch neurones firing, synapses opening, etc. In principle, why not? But, as Wittgenstein says, the brain-owner, unlike the scientists clustering round him, is observing, or experiencing, two things rather than one. He can observe that when he feels, or thinks about, certain things, certain activities occur in his brain at the same time. He experiences feeling or thinking in certain ways, and also he experiences observing his brain working in certain ways. The scientists only experience observing the brain working. What one could add to this is that if, at some time in the future, the subject whose brain has been observed were to see a video of what had happened during the brain-inspection, he (unless his memory were perfect or the experiment very brief) would be in the same position as the observing scientists were at the time – he would have to deduce what he had been thinking about or feeling then from what he now observes of his brain in the video.
  • It would be interesting to see how the videos would change future behavior once brain activity can be seen on the screen of one's self-awarness. comment by chilee
• Leibniz made the same point as Wittgenstein when asking us to imagine somehow being able to wander about inside someone else’s (or it could be your own) brain. You can observe all sorts of things pulling and pushing, he says, but cannot observe the thoughts.
  • But you could posit the thoughts based on the data available. comment by chilee
• Just as you couldn’t pick out the precise area in a brain where a practising Jew’s disbelief in the resurrection of Jesus (or a physicalist’s disbelief in mind-body dualism, or an enamoured man’s feeling of love) is located, or that becomes activated when Jesus’s resurrection (or dualism, or the beloved) is mentioned, nor more could you get the practicing Jew to believe in the resurrection while preserving his other beliefs, or convert the physicalist into a dualist, or get the man to fall out of love, by tampering with or obliterating specific parts of her or his brain activity.
• A belief is part of a whole theory or system of beliefs, a feeling of love part of life history, memories, beliefs, etc. Given what is called the holism of the mental, a holism both of abstract belief systems, and of concrete, personal life histories, you couldn’t alter either just by tampering piecemeal. (obviously you could by damaging the brain so severely that the person became incapable of coherent thought or speech, actually wiping out wholesale the capacity to remember, believe, feel as others normally do, and the person specifically had done.) Another reason why at best you get correlation or causation, not identity.
  • It is a full spectrum, but as with light 'filters' can be used to isolate 'frequencies'. David Eagleman touched on this in his book 'Sum' in the chapter 'Prism'. comment by chilee
• Water seems a certain way to us, and science, in its attempt to produce what Nagel calls ‘a view from nowhere’, ignores and extracts from the seeming, in order to get at what water really is, irrespective of the viewer's race, sex, age, or other subjective idiosyncracies, irrespective in fact of any viewer whatever. But we can't subtract the viewer when dealing with consciousness.
• Consciousness is unavoidably subjective and about how things seem, what things seem like to the conscious person. Of course another conscious person may deduce, or be informed about and thereby make deductions about the truth and quiddity of, another conscious person’s thoughts or feelings.
  • Context is everything.
    
    Idea: Make a video of a 'fair-and-balanced' debate where the actual deduced thoughts of the particpants are subtitles. comment by chilee
• A scientific description of what happens in the brain when someone has a certain thought or experience seems inevitably to leave out what the thought is about or the experience is like.
• The most irritating (to us lay people) aspect of philosophical and scientific attempts to reduce the mental to the neural, and to squash down human beings into being on all fours with other physical things, is that their proponents nearly always say that actually they are just putting the truth about consciousness more clearly and taking nothing away from our experience.
  • How we study this phenomenon can be approaced as either and art or science, but the best approach (and the most interesting one) would be cross-disciplinary. You'd need a whole social network to to analyze individual mental states. (crowdsourcing the acivity of one individual mind) comment by chilee
• Metaphor bridges the gap between secluded mental states by invoking physical things that are open to all
• If indeed ‘folk psychology’ could be eradicated, along with all the metaphor and poetry that has grown up around it, then surely, with the irrepressibility of weeds, metaphor and poetry would spring up again around brain state terminology. But how would we be induced to abandon ‘folk psychology’ in the first place.
  • The 'weed' metaphor is a good one because once it is used, it functions like one. comment by chilee
• Even more ridiculous, by the same token, is the idea that we could be taught about, and discuss, brain states.
  • Our brain states would be in perpetual therapy. comment by chilee
• Worse than this, would be the loss to morality and self-creation.
• Denial of anger may sometimes be dishonesty or self-deception, but may also, even while being both, be part of the suppression of anger that is so imperative in civilised life. What about if a man objecting to a situation of social injustice were subjected to Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to obliterate his present feeling of dissatisfaction and induce a feeling of pleasure? Surely what actually matters to him is the cognitive aspect of the dissatisfaction – the reason he was feeling it.
• The social consequences of the naturalistic program make it especially important to understand its philosophical limits. Not only do we become experimental subjects, but we very easily become subjected -- to the particular types of control that scientific understanding invites, especially the "medical model" of the expert which offers the 'patient' diagnosis, prophylaxis, prognosis and cure.
• in the world of meanings, its essentially metaphorical status needs to be always understood. A naturalised, rather than thoughtful and deliberative politics, is not only creepy, it is incoherent. Ironically, it substitutes a medical metaphor for meaningful argument.

0556. Data Uses

The more we model data, the more we embrace it, and see it as our own responsibility, rather than something that controls us--like nature. We have a tendency to see data that confirm our prejudices more vividly than data that contradict them.

0076. Decisions based on metadata

Prediction: Media will be driven by background metadata, and “choice” will be regulated by artificial intelligence and neural networks residing on the Internet that will ultimately influence the “choices” we make. It will appear that we are making choices by sheer volition, when in fact it will be driven by metadata.

0077. Gossip and opinion masquerading as fact

In the future, the Internet will be used as a place where people can go to see what everyone else is saying about them. (Gossip and opinion masquerading as fact.) (7/04)

clipped from www.examiner.com One thing we know is the people you encounter are likely looking you up. If I have a meeting, whether in person or by phone, my first preparatory step is to see what it says on Linkedin, on Social Mention, Google and Pipl. Yesterday public radio KPBS in San Diego noted employers are perusing Facebook for both direct and indirect references. Linkedin allows users to solicit and post references. With millions of pages added to the Internet every day it is likely you’ll find something on everyone. It is also likely that information will remain available forever.

0099. Software will obviate the need for natural abilities

Technology frees us from the tactile senses such that it is no longer necessary to play a musical instrument to make music. It also frees us from having to remember things, as they are relegated to stored data, rather than encoded as memories. Software will obviate the need for natural abilities, and consequently will devolve from the species. If there is no need for your brain to remember, it might forget how to do it altogether.

0094. Metaphors for living in the 21st Century

The metaphor for living in the 21st Century will be biology-based. Even computing will emulate living systems, cellular structure and DNA. In the design world, car design cross-pollinates with design of appliances, and redefines what a car is and its purpose in our lives.

0097. Media Memories

The bad thing about recorded media is that it prolongs bad memories.