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laodan

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laodan is a guy from Milford, Pennsylvania, USA

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THE WAY THINGS ARE: The meaning of life is to be found in thinking about what is reality and the beauty of reality is to be found in our DNA's memorization of all forms that have been successfully retained along the four billion years of evolution of the principle of life on Gaia our earth. In the end what I mean to say is that beauty is something objective and what we call ugliness is then simply our unconscientious feel of something evolution did not retain.
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  • Singularity Summit 2007 | The Singularity Institute for...

    Rated Sep 21 2007 • 5 reviews • ai, ideas, reality, archive, change, consciousness • singinst.org

    Singularity Summit 2007 audio
    via KurzweilAi.net, in The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

    Audio for all talks and panel discussions at the recent Singularity Summit 2007 is now available free online and via iTunes podcast.

    Singularity Summit 2007 audio

    What they say about what's coming along our way... a great archive.




    9,209 views
    Singularity Summit 2007 | The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence

  • thymos.com

    Rated Aug 02 2007 • 1 review • cognitive science, consciousness, reality • thymos.com

    Piero scaruffi's Studies on Consciousness, Cognition and Life
    by Piero Scaruffi. He studied Mathematics and Physics, but has recently focused his research on subjects related to Cognitive Science. He has been a visiting scholar at Harvard and Stanford, lectured in three continents, published several books, and pioneered practical applications of Artificial Intelligence.

    # The very fundamental idea of my research is that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical and that somehow the property that, under special circumstances, enables a particular configuration of matter (e.g., the brain) to exhibit "consciousness" must be present in all matter, starting from the most fundamental constituents.

    # I think that cognition is a property of all living organisms that comes in (continuous) degrees. Memory and learning can be said to be ubiquitous in nature, as long as we assume that they come in degrees.

    # There are striking similarities between the behavior of cognitive (living) matter and the behavior of non-cognitive (dead) matter (a piece of paper that is repeatedly bent will tend to "remember" of having been bent by "staying" bent).

    # The "degrees of cognition" that we find ubiquitous in nature can be expressed in the formalism of Fuzzy Logic, but modern physics is built on Quantum Mechanics, which is built on the Theory of Probabilities. A possible starting point for reconciling biological and physical sciences, i.e. for unifying Cognitive Science and Physics, would thus be to replace probabilities with Fuzzy Logic in Quantum Mechanics.

    THYMOS
    A History of Knowledge
    Paradigm shifts in modern science and the new science of the mind
    The Nature of Consciousness The Structure of Life and the Meaning of Matter" (2006). FREE PDF with excerpts from, or extensions to, the material published in the book "The Nature of Consciousness"

    A gold mine for all of us interested in better understanding what is reality, our consciousness of it, and our worldview about it...

    I particularly appreciate this idea that "the property that, under special circumstances, enables a particular configuration of matter (e.g., the brain) to exhibit "consciousness" must be present in all matter, starting from the most fundamental constituents."

    In other words the properties of the whole in which we are such tiny particles are inscribed in any one of its particles... and thus, logical conclusion, all particles are interconnected...

    Consciousness is first and foremost the awareness of this interconnectedness.

    What strikes me and puzzles me is that humanity shared this awareness along the whole timespan of animism and somehow lost that consciousness with the emergence of agriculture-kingdoms and empires-religion...

    Are we destined to close our societal evolutionary loop in animism? Is an elaborate version of animism the post-modern stage of societal evolution?




    547 views
    thymos.com

  • Columbia Magazine

    Rated Jan 20 2007 • 4 reviews • neuroscience, complexity, consciousness • columbia.edu

    Minding the Brain
    via 3QD, Samir S. Patel in Columbia Magazine

    Our minds are made of countless tiny connections between neurons, through which ions, proteins, chemical messengers, and electrical signals travel. At one time this language of the mind was mysterious and impenetrable, but now we see that the workings of the brain are complex, understandable, and based in natural laws.
    ...
    Among the important concepts that Kandel established was that short-term memory is created by changes in the function of cells, while long-term memory comes from changes in the structure of the cell, and requires gene expression. The resulting patterns of connections are products of the genetic hardwiring of our brains and environmental influences \u2014 decades of learning. Genes provide the fixed mechanisms and architecture, and superimposed on that is a malleable, plastic network of strong and weak connections, the overlay of a lifetime on a mind. "Our adult repertoire represents a combination and interaction of these two sets of behavioral inventories" says Kandel.
    ...
    "People are worried that if you really understand the mind, you'll take the mystery out of it"
    For all the questions neurobiology can answer, it will inevitably create more.

    Minding the Brain




    Systemic complexity involves the idea that the more you know about something the more fields you discover you don't know. The mystery of reality is contained in this notion of our inaccessibility of the whole through the accumulation of bits of knowledge or knowings. It's simply too vast.
    This does in no way imply that the bits of knowledge (knowings) that we can gain are not significant. They are functional. That means that they give us a better understanding of ourselves and the environment we are in, at least so far as we can perceive.
    Kandel's work sheds new light on the old question "free will versus determinism".




    2,441 views
    Columbia Magazine

  • New Challenges to Our Most Cherished Beliefs About Self...

    Rated Oct 17 2006 • 3 reviews • science, brain, consciousness • usnews.com

    Is There Room for the Soul?
    in US News and World Report by Jay Tolson
    This is a surprisingly good article on the nature of consciousness -- providing a survey of the current state-of-the-art in cognitive science research. It covers the question from a number of perspectives and interviews many of the leading current researchers.

    """ A mind is a tough thing to think about. Consciousness is the defining feature of the human species. But is it possible that it is also no more than an extravagant biological add-on, something not really essential to our survival? """

    URL: Is There Room for the Soul?


    DENIS POROY. AP
    Francis Cricksmiles while speaking after receiving an award from the British government at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego for his lifelong work with DNA.

    A thought provoking long article. Could we have been duped all along to think that we were so special because of our possession of consciousness? Is our consciousness no more than a non-essential add-on?
    Well to get the answers given by Francis Cricksmiles you'll have to make the effort to go read what he writes... it's well worth your time.




    2,219 views
    New Challenges to Our Most Cherished Beliefs About Self and the Human Spirit - US News and World Report

  • Minding the Brain - The New York Review of Books

    Rated Oct 14 2006 • 2 reviews • science, cognition, consciousness • nybooks.com

    Minding the Brain
    via 3QD, in the NY Review of Books by John R. Searle about "Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness" a book by Nicholas Humphrey published by Belknap Press/Harvard University Press
    Humphrey's account of mind concentrates on visual experiences. He asks us to imagine (and in the lectures at Harvard on which the book under review is based he actually presented the scene) that we are all looking at a screen in the front of the room. A uniform color of red is projected onto the screen. How are we to describe this situation? According to contemporary scientific common sense, when we look at the red screen the reflection of light waves sets up in us a series of neuronal events beginning at the retina and ending with a conscious visual experience of red. If we assume that there are no hallucinations or pathological conditions involved, the perceiver sees, and in that way perceives, the red object by having a visual experience. The perceiver sees the object, but he does not see the visual experience of the object. He consciously sees real things in the real world and not his experiences of those things. There are not two red things in the scene but just one, the red screen.

    Nicholas Humphrey agrees that there is a red object and a perceiver, and that light waves from the object stimulate the perceiver, but beyond that he disagrees with just about everything in the account I have just presented. He says that what I call the visual experience is really a "sensation" experienced in the eye and that the sensation is red, just as the screen is red. So there are two red things in the scene: the red object and the red sensation.

    His account of sensation and perception contains the following striking claims: perception and sensation are totally independent; all consciousness is sensation; perception is never conscious; and all sensation is really action. The arguments for these claims are complicated and I will not try to summarize all of them; but what follows gives the flavor of his reasoning.
    ...
    Perception is not only done by a different channel from that which produces consciousness, but more importantly, perception is unconscious. In Humphrey's view, the sensation channel is conscious; the perception channel is totally unconscious. Indeed all consciousness consists of sensations. Humphrey thinks that the only form our consciousness can take is sensation, which for him includes mental imagery and dreams.
    ...
    Humphrey suggests that in more evolved forms of animals, the response gets targeted at the incoming sensory pathway itself, and finally becomes internal to the brain. The response in his view becomes "privatized" within the brain as a conscious sensation. So according to his account, this is how we get to be consciousu2014not by consciously perceiving anything, but by "monitoring" our own internal responses to external stimuli.

    URL: Minding the Brain


    Illuminating critique. A must read for all who are interested in this central question of consciousness...




    120 views
    Minding the Brain - The New York Review of Books

  • Color Perception Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: Its...

    Rated May 02 2006 • 15 reviews • cognitive science, consciousness, perception • rochester.edu


    Color Perception Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: It's in the Brain
    via wwhitlock's SU pages, in University of Rochester News
    """ First-ever images of living human retinas have yielded a surprise about how we perceive our world. Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that the number of color-sensitive cones in the human retina differs dramatically among people--by up to 40 times--yet people appear to perceive colors the same way. The findings, on the cover of this week's journal Neuroscience, strongly suggest that our perception of color is controlled much more by our brains than by our eyes. """

    URL: Color Perception Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: It's in the Brain

    Photo credit: University of Rochester


    16K views
    Color Perception Is Not in the Eye of the Beholder: Its in the Brain : University of Rochester News

  • BBC - Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind

    Rated Apr 13 2006 • 5 reviews • cognitive science, consciousness, meditation • bbc.co.uk


    The emerging mind
    Five lectures by Vilayanur S Ramachandran who is Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Programme at the University of California, San Diego.
    via 3quarksDaily, in BBC.UK.Online
    """ In lecture 3- which is the most speculative one in the series of five - I'd like to take up one of the most ancient questions in philosophy, psychology and anthropology, namely what is art? When Picasso said: "Art is the lie that reveals the truth" what exactly did he mean? """

    URL: Lecture 1: Phantoms in the Brain
    URL: Lecture 2: Synapses and the Self>
    URL: Lecture 3: The Artful Brain
    URL: Lecture 4: Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese
    URL: Lecture 5: Neuroscience - the New Philosophy


    50 views
    BBC - Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind

  • George Ochsenfeld: Meditation: Inner Peace, World Peace

    Rated Feb 22 2006 • 1 review • meditation, consciousness • selvesandothers.org

    in Selves and others by George Ochsenfeld:
    """ Ancient spiritual practices can help us connect with an inner source of joy, wisdom, and compassion, thus liberating us from addictive dependence on consumption of material goods. """
    1 view
    George Ochsenfeld: Meditation: Inner Peace, World Peace

  • Entoptic Imagery in People and Their Art

    Reviewed Jan 30 2006 • 1 review • brain, consciousness, animism • comcast.net

    Entoptic imagery in art, associated with trance states in their broadest interpretation including dream states, is a pan-human phenomenon. Human biology is common to all of us; culture varies. Our ancestors 30-40,000 years before us surely shared our bio
    13 views
    Entoptic Imagery in People and Their Art

  • optic art science news article at entopticart.com

    Rated Jan 30 2006 • 2 reviews • arts, consciousness, animism • entopticart.com

    Entoptics, a term coined to indicate visual sensations arising anywhere within the optic system, comprise phosphenes, bright images seen in darkness or by pressing the eye (3), and form constants (4), that derive from the optic system, probably beyond the
    168 views
    optic art science news article at entopticart.com