Month: June 2010

Having concluded positively that Christopher Hitchens does know what he’s talking about in the faith vs science debate, I have to say that the rhetoric here is unnecessarily dirty.

The prince is an easy target without coherent argument, or necessarily the expertise for such argument, but he is expressing a real concern for soulless scientism.

Or is that Stupidly Rational ? Neat. From Elizabeth Pisani.

And morally rational ? A good one from Michael Sandel. Essential ethics at the core of difficult debate.
(And Sandel’s Harvard teaching lectures from 2005 – and the ongoing online justice harvard resource – see also last year’s Reith lectures.)

True of much mainstream media in fact IMHO – infantilized – even apparently serious reporting of serious subjects.

Another sequence from Doug Hofstadter responding with scepticism to Ray Kuzweil at the Stanford Singularity Summit (2007 or 2009 ?) – singularity as in machine intelligence or machine aided intelligence overtaking human intelligence. Sceptical in terms of short predicted timescales, immortality, time travel, hockey-sticks, etc … losing credibility … but concerned that mainstream science is not taking the core ideas seriously and finding any serious arguments against the plausible possibilities.

Kurzweil, Wolfram, Hameroff, Chalmers all the usual suspects at the 2009 Summit – need to listen to Chalmers and Scmidhuber – this community needs some philosophical injection into all the exponential processing power hype – intelligence and intellect are far more than processing power. (Thanks to Krim over on MD for the report on the 2010 H+ event.)

Schmidhuber is excellent – a German with a sense of humour – as well as the explicit jokes, his take on the psychology of seeing exponential approaches to points of significance is a very clever dig at Kurzweil (my ’twas ever thus meme) – truly excellent talk – compression is key.

Chalmers is also excellent – does philosophy proud – basic logical argument, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. His controlled simulation and gradual upload consciousness and identity cases are pretty much the Hofstadter and Dennett’s “Brain in a Vat” thought experiment.

Interesting even Hameroff, though he mentions microtubules at length – in dendritic gap connectors and in internal neuronal networks – he doesn’t major on quantum coherence – brain as a quantum computer – as a mechanism for distributed coherence of consciousness, until the light-hearted Spielberg-AI moment towards the end. Much of this stuff does indeed seem like valid (testable) science. Though the first question – cut-off immediately by the mediator – brings him back to this unpopular Hameroff-Penrose topic.

Ben Goertzel too, came over well (these are all 2009) … integration … cognitive synergy …. interoperation … lifting & lowering of knowledge too – from communication language to semantic nodes and links of knowledge and back to communication language.

The word that jumps out at me from all of this is Integration. (ie not processing power.)

Never did get to Bonnaroo despite living pretty close to the site for 3 years. I guess it’s that time of year again. Anyway the name sticks thanks to a line in Tommy Womack’s Alpha Male and the Canine Mystery Blood track on There, I Said It. Strangely, in reading the NYT article a phrase from the preceding line also sticks.

“post-hippie jam-band”
bangin’ those skins at Bonnaroo

BP & Deepwater Horizon will have massive ramifications – industrial and global macro-economic. This is no local difficulty as Robert Peston explains.

Currently topical in the day job beyond blogging, this discussion may prove interesting on whether splintering / undermining any unity is a real issue or just a little paranoia.

Comparing GoDaddy with others in the comment thread.

(Old news from 2007, but …) The ingenuity, and effort, for the cleric to come up with the breastfeeding suggestion, in the face of the inconvenient rules, even if the mind boggles at the rules in the first place. (Rules being for the guidance of wise men and the enslavement of fools, after all.) More promising that the minister of religious affairs …

called for future fatwas to be
“compatible with logic and human nature”.

No mention of the word of gods or prophets. Progress.

Think I just experienced an original band, Norwegian too.

OK so the usual heavy grunge punk metal vocal delivery – indistinct monotonic screaming growl – I’ll never quite get.

But visually & stylistically different. Again all blues based rock is “derivative” and original is always relative, but not many give me that same sense that Devo did. Musically more than competent. Not too muddy for a catchy melody to escape, twin pedal drummer to double the pace when needed.

Oh, and yes, when they took off the cardboard box disguises, the square suits were indeed art school persona. I think I would have been disappointed if they weren’t. Ones to watch ?

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