IVVIT

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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

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.

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.