Alternate Minds

Deus Est Machina | MetaFilter

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 15:36:00 +0000

Why an omniscient foe will always lose a game of chicken

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 16:01:00 +0000

Why an omniscient foe will always lose a game of chicken:

Find out how omniscience can let one opponent make a chump of another in one paradoxical game but get completely trounced in another. Game theory at its weirdest, folks.

Pontypool (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 19:29:00 +0000

Pontypool (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Splintered Mind: Is the United States Conscious?

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 20:45:00 +0000

The Splintered Mind: Is the United States Conscious?:

It would be bizarre to suppose that the United States has a stream of conscious experience distinct from the streams of conscious experience of the people who compose it. I hope you'll agree. (By "the United States" here, I mean the large, vague-boundaried group of compatriots who sometimes act in a coordinated manner.) Yet it's unclear by what materialist standard the U.S. lacks consciousness.

The Most Horrifying "Crawling Over a Pile of Your Dead Alternate Selves" Scene Ever Filmed

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:40:00 +0000

From io9.com: The Most Horrifying "Crawling Over a Pile of Your Dead Alternate Selves" Scene Ever Filmed:

The clip actually comes from 2009's Triangle, which I'd actually thought was just a standard "trapped on a boat with a killer" movie, with a bit of weirdness here and there. The movie starts out that way, and then turns into a trippy film about a time-loop in which a woman keeps running into her slasher self from another version of the loop. (That's Jess, watching her alternate self kill another alternate self in the clip above.)

Vernor Vinge’s Children of the Sky: bootstrapping high-tech civilization from hive-mind Machiavellis – Boing Boing

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 21:03:00 +0000

Vernor Vinge’s Children of the Sky: bootstrapping high-tech civilization from hive-mind Machiavellis – Boing Boing:

In this, the humans are aided by the Tines, a race of doglike hive-intelligences. Three or more Tines come together and form a collective consciousness, synchronizing with high-speed, ultrasonic chirps. A literal society of minds, the Tines are essentially immortal -- they need merely replace injured or killed individuals with new members. But the Tines are sorely limited in ways as well: if two Tines get to close to one another, their "mindsounds" will mingle, and their consciousness dissolve. Adding new Tines to a pack-individual can change its identity, sometimes creating new and unrecognizable packs.

Anatomy of a d-dimensional Rubik's Cube

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 13:26:00 +0000

Anatomy of a d-dimensional Rubik's Cube

New Scientist TV: One-Minute Physics: How do we know our world is 3D?

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:41:00 +0000

New Scientist TV: One-Minute Physics: How do we know our world is 3D?:

How do we know we live in three dimensions? In this One Minute Physics episode, animator Henry Reich explores the concept of multiple dimensions and shows one way to test that we live in a 3D world.

Quantum minds: Why we think like quarks - life - 05 September 2011 - New Scientist

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 13:32:00 +0000

Quantum minds: Why we think like quarks - life - 05 September 2011 - New Scientist

The Splintered Mind: On Bostrom's Argument That You May Well Be a Computer Simulation

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:55:00 +0000

The Splintered Mind: On Bostrom's Argument That You May Well Be a Computer Simulation

The Splintered Mind: Strange Baby

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 01:32:00 +0000

The Splintered Mind: Strange Baby

Spacetime pixels probably smaller than predicted | Blog | Futurismic

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 15:48:00 +0000

Spacetime pixels probably smaller than predicted | Blog | Futurismic

Overview : Google Consciousness

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Overview : Google Consciousness

Drawing on their experience as pioneering social media strategists, Rome Viharo and Maf Lewis have created a new phenomenon with their proposal that Google has a form of consciousness. Originating as little more than a passing comment between friends, the idea has attracted the attention of academics, philosophers, and most recently, the TED organization.
The Google Consciousness TED talk, given on April 9 of 2011 and officially released on June 9, rocketed to the top of the TEDx “most popular” site and was picked up as an Editor’s Choice on the main TED site. With well over 100,000 YouTube views just weeks after launch, the talk is rapidly changing the way we think about both Google, consciousness, government and social media.
Google Consciousness itself is just one of several fascinating and forward-thinking ideas proposed by Lewis and Viharo during the talk. From the plant-whispering Ayahuasca shamans of the Amazon rain forest to the future of social media and democracy, “the two coolest philosophy professors you never had” cover an amazing range of topics in just 18 minutes.
While not everyone is convinced that Google is conscious, the seemingly-improbable journey of this simple idea from the ears of a few friends all the way to TED and the world stage shows that it represents a discussion whose time has come. We invite you to join that discussion, and help shape the future of how consciousness and society are understood.

Can there be a Singularity without superintelligence (or vice versa)?

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 12:14:00 +0000

Can there be a Singularity without superintelligence (or vice versa)?
Mitchell Howe:

Strictly speaking, it is possible for there to be both a Singularity that does not entail the creation of superintelligence, and for supertintelligence to not trigger the onset of a Singularity. Both are improbable, regardless of the specific criteria used to define Singularity or superintelligence, but some of the potential "loopholes" are worth discussing.

The potential for Singularity without superintelligence depends largely on which variant of the Singularity is being used. A predictive horizon, for example, can be reached if it is anchored at some particular date (which it never really is, in my experience.) In fact, if this date is sufficiently far back in our past, one could argue (uselessly) that we are living in a Singularity now. Also, if a Singularity is considered reached when the distance to the predictive horizon becomes sufficiently small, our own lack of foresight, not the arrival of superintelligence, may turn out to be the cause. If the idea of a developmental Singularity is used, it is possible that existing trends in automation will result in sharply spiking productivity without the need for any greater intelligence. Finally, even the "greater intelligence" definition of Singulairty need not neccessarily mean the arrival of superintelligence -- which implies minds vastly more intelligent than we are now. In each of these cases, however, one must wonder how long exponentially spiking rates of progress, foreseeable or otherwise, could contiune before superintelligence appeared as one of the many new products of such an age -- or before slightly greater intelligence helped design superintelligent successors. So, the Singularity has a very reasonable chance of preceeding superintelligence, but probably not by much. As other parts of this Q&A discuss, it would be very surprising if greater intelligence proved to be impossible or limited.

On the flip side of this question, that of superintelligence without Singularity, the salient concern is for just how "super" and involved superintelligence would be in our own affairs. If superintelligence were surprisingly unimpressive, malicious, or apathetic, its creation would not do much to initiate a Singularity for the rest of us. There are, in fact, a host of such concerns people tend to have about superintelligence, and the most important of these have their own extended responses in this Q&A. For now, let it be said that most of the common concerns are groundless -- based on flawed, if understandable ideas about intelligence -- and that the rest can probably be dealt with through responsible approaches to research and design.

the human hive-mind covers Radiohead

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:20:00 +0000

A version of "Paranoid Android" made using only clips of Youtubers covering the song. Pretty amazing.

ht: @keith_wilson

The Doctor explains how time works

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:09:00 +0000

People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... time-y wimey... stuff.

Dennettian Zimboes

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:38:00 +0000

From Cosma Shalizi's review of Daniel Dennett, Brainchildren

The standard objection to Dennett's view of the mind is that it makes no allowance for the difference between creatures with inner lives, namely us, and those without, namely zombies. Zombies might have quite sophisticated dispositions and sensitivities to their external environment, and even to their own information-processing (so the objection goes), but they'd have no inner experience --- they might be able to discriminate red roses from yellow roses, but they'd have no experience of redness, no red qualia. Dennett's quite characteristic response to this objection is to argue that there is no defensible difference between sufficiently nuanced sensitivities and qualia. Consider the case, he asks us, not of zombies per se but of zimboes, who are behaviorally just like us conscious human beings, but have no inner lives. Zombies are the mindless malevolent minions in a Boris Karloff movie; zimboes, when villainous, are more in the Sidney Greenstreet line but, by hypothesis, they show just the same range of heroism, vice, and moral muddle that we do. They'd certainly talk and act as though they thought they had qualia. Maybe brain damage can make people into zimboes --- only they'd insist nothing was wrong! Maybe lots of people (all, of course, normal-seeming) are zimboes --- John Searle, for instance, or this reviewer, or your landlord. They could be everywhere. Consciousness could be a genetic abnormality. Even your best-beloved could be a mere zimbo. In fact, how do you know that you are not a zimbo?

Dennett's answer is that you don't, because, as it happens, you are. Turned around: zimboes, creatures with sophisticated sensitivities to the external world and their inner environment, enjoy just as much consciousness as there is to be had.

Blink (Doctor Who) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:28:00 +0000

Blink (Doctor Who) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Doctor explains that he and Martha Jones were transported to the past by the Weeping Angels, beings that feed off the potential time energy of others. The Angels are 'quantum locked', allowing them to move incredibly fast when unobserved but when they are seen, they literally turn to stone. They cover their eyes to avoid looking at each other, giving them their 'weeping' appearance. He warns Sally not to look away or even blink when they are around."

The Quantum Mind?

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:55:00 +0000

From Chris Brand:
The Quantum Mind?:

Quantum Smell

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:54:00 +0000

From Cosmic Variance:

Quantum Smell: "

Over on the Facebooks, Matt Strassler points to a BBC story about the role of quantum mechanics in explaining our sense of smell. There aren’t any equations in the article, and I haven’t read the research papers, but the idea seems to be that electrons move from one part of a protein to another part via quantum tunneling. The potential that allows this to happen is only set up if you have the right chemical involved, which is how the protein purportedly “smells” the existence of this chemical. The resulting mechanism is just absurdly sensitive — apparently fruit flies can smell the difference between hydrogen and deuterium (chemically identical, but tiny differences in atomic energy levels from having an extra neutron in the nucleus).

It’s still a controversial theory, but apparently not crackpotty. The question of how important quantum mechanics (as opposed to just its classical limit) is for biological processes was brought up in our earlier post on quantum photosynthesis. Which reminds me in turn of this worthwhile talk by Seth Lloyd, on the basic topic of “quantum life” and photosynthesis in particular. In between learning about how quantum phenomena might remain relevant in the hot, warm environment of a plant, you can enjoy Lloyd’s principled stance not to use PowerPoint under any circumstances.

Would You be Willing to Enter the Matrix? | Psychology Today

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:53:00 +0000

Would You be Willing to Enter the Matrix? | Psychology Today

These are the biggest numbers in the universe - io9

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:52:00 +0000

These are the biggest numbers in the universe - io9

How the Experience Machine Works

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 15:22:00 +0000

How the Experience Machine Works:

from experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com:

Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine counterexample to hedonism is one of the most famous thought experiments in contemporary philosophy. It has convinced many that there is more to prudential value than the felt quality of our experiences. Yet it is often misunderstood, and too easily dismissed. Most recently, Felipe de Brigard’s ingenious experimental study, whose results he and others, including Josh Knobe, take to cast aspersions on the Experience Machine argument, is based on a misunderstanding of what is at stake in it, as I will argue below. The key points concern the structure of Nozick’s argument and the nature of the relevant comparison. (I’m afraid this’ll be rather long, but it does meet my criterion for a blog post, namely being written in the course of a day in a fit of inspiration.)

Empirical Arguments for Group Minds: A Critical Appraisal | manwithoutqualities

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 21:50:00 +0000

Empirical Arguments for Group Minds: A Critical Appraisal | manwithoutqualities

?sdrawkcab gnivil

noreply@blogger.com (Pete Mandik) — Tue, 24 May 2011 11:43:00 +0000

@keithfrankish: How do you know you're not living backwards, with amnesia and precognition?