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But if you take away the rod on one hand, and these little encouragements, which they are taken with, on the other; how then (will you say) shall children be governed? Remove hope and fear, and there is an end of all discipline. I grant, that good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational…
Here are some examples of the principles that teachers can use to expand concepts presented in formal course material. These principles don't have to be taught in the context of any particular class. It's an empirical question. This is a comment that ought to terminate many more conversations than it does. For many of…
Whenever a Metroid player aquires a new power-up, her mind races back in time in a way not unlike what happens at a turning point in a movie. When a secret is revealed we are forced back through the story to mentally review everything we've seen so far, sometimes changing the interpretation of entire scenes. [...]…
...the human organism is linked with an external entity in a two-way interaction, creating a coupled system that can be seen as a cognitive system in its own right. All the components in the system play an active causal role, and they jointly govern behavior in the same sort of way that cognition usually does. If we…
An evolving cyberspace becomes effectively ever more capacious and long lasting, and so can support ever more minds of ever greater power. If these minds spend only an infinitesimal fraction of their energy contemplating the human past, their sheer power should ensure that eventually our entire history is replayed…
Transhumanists’ commitment to technologically mediated transformation naturally generates great interest in the nature and limits of the self. The high level of interest in philosophy and neuroscience among transhumanists has led to a wide acknowledgment that the simple Cartesian view of the mind or self as a unitary…
Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul — let us go…
How large bandwidth is needed? We can estimate a lower bound from the bandwidth of speech and body language, which appears to be on the order of 10-100 bits/s. A highest upper bound would be total interconnection at the same signal density as the human mind, or roughly 10^18 bits/s, quite an extreme range. However…
How large bandwidth is needed? We can estimate a lower bound from the bandwidth of speech and body language, which appears to be on the order of 10-100 bits/s. A highest upper bound would be total interconnection at the same signal density as the human mind, or roughly 10^18 bits/s, quite an extreme range. However…
I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they'd implanted it, but that didn't make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories: shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not…
http://theweek.com/article/index/214732/do-girls-like-pink-because-of-their-berry-gathering-female-ancestors
Alan Turing, the father of the modern computer, began by thinking about the highly conscious and deliberate step-by-step calculations performed by human “computers” like the women decoding German ciphers at Bletchley Park. His first great insight was that the same processes could be instantiated in an entirely…
Inculcating a belief is like charging a battery. The battery is thenceforward disposed to give a spark or shock, when suitably approached, as long as the charge lasts; similarly the believer is disposed to respond in characteristic ways, when suitably approached, as long as the belief lasts. The belief, like the…
How would we know if there was an autonomous conscious superorganism? We would need a Turing Test for a global AI. But the Turing Test is flawed for this search because it is meant to detect human-like intelligence, and if a consciousness emerged at the scale of a global megacomputer, its intelligence would unlikely…
Suppose that I'm locked in a room and given a large batch of Chinese writing. Suppose furthermore (as is indeed the case) that I know no Chinese, either written or spoken, and that I'm not even confident that I could recognize Chinese writing as Chinese writing distinct from, say, Japanese writing or meaningless…
The Human Cognome Project was an academic research venture to reverse engineer the human brain, paralleling in many ways the Human Genome Project and its success in deciphering the human genome. The HCP was a multidisciplinary undertaking, relevant to biology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, artificial…
Under certain given circumstances, and only under those circumstances, an agglomeration of men presents new characteristics very different from those of the individuals composing it. The sentiments and ideas of all the persons in the gathering take one and the same direction, and their conscious personality vanishes…
We can see that there is only one substance in the universe and that man is the most perfect one. He is to the ape and the cleverest animals what Huygens's planetary clock is to one of Julien Leroy's watches. If it took more instruments, more cogs, more springs to show or tell the time, if it took Vaucanson more…
As modern physics started with the Newtonian revolution, so modern philosophy starts with what one might call the Cartesian Catastrophe. The catastrophe consisted in the splitting up of the world into the realms of matter and mind, and the identification of 'mind' with conscious thinking. The result of this…
Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. An insurrection has consequently begun of science talents and courage against rank and birth, which have fallen into…