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Causality itself is an evolved conceptual tool that simplifies, schematizes, and focuses our representation of situations. This cognitive machinery guides us to think in terms of the cause—of an outcome’s having a single cause. Yet for enlarged understanding, it is more accurate to represent outcomes as caused by an…
Another delightful pastime is overtransforming an information artifact through digital algorithms—useful, if used sparingly—until it turns into something quite strange. For instance, you can use one of the online machine-translation services to translate a phrase through a ring of languages back to the original and…
The archenemy of scientific thinking is conversation, as in typical human conversational discourse, much of which is BS. I have become rather fed up with talking to people. Seriously, it is something of a problem. Fact is, folks are prone to getting pet opinions into their heads and thinking they’re true to the point…
In thinking about hidden layers, it’s important to distinguish between the routine efficiency and power of a good network, once that network has been set up, and the difficult issue of how to set it up in the first place. That difference is reflected in the difference between playing the piano (or, say, riding a…
The proliferation of subcults is most evident in the world of work. Many subcults spring up around occupational specialties. Thus, as the society moves toward greater specialization, it generates more and more subcultural variety. The scientific community, for example, is splitting into finer and finer fragments. It…
Memes and genes may often reinforce each other, but they sometimes come into opposition. For example, the habit of celibacy is presumably not inherited genetically. A gene for celibacy is doomed to failure in the gene pool, except under very special circumstances such as we find in the social insects. But still, a…
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…
IN 1583 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), a youth of nineteen attending prayers in the baptistery of the Cathedral of Pisa, was, according to tradition, distracted by the swinging of the altar lamp. No matter how wide the swing of the lamp, it seemed that the time it took the lamp to move from one end to the other was the…
Not the flowing waters of time but the falling sands of time have given modern poets their favorite metaphor for the passing hours. In England, sandglasses were frequently placed in coffins as a symbol that life's time had run out. "The sands of time are sinking," went the hymn. "The dawn of heaven breaks." But the…
A thought is a system, and is inherently conceptual-though often only dimly and confusedly conceptual at the moment of first awareness of the as yet only vaguely describable thinking activity. Because total universe is nonsimultaneous it is not conceptual. Conceptuality is produced by isolation, such as in the…
The name "ideonexus" is not an English word, but it is a combination of two words: "ideo" and "nexus." The "ideo" is a version of the word "idea" (想法) that we use in compound words, like "ideology." The word "nexus" means "intersection" (路口), "relationship" (关系), or "connection" (连接). So the name "ideonexus" is…
A most fundamental problem, for thousands of years wholly obscured by its complications, is that of motion. All those motions we observe in nature that of a stone thrown into the air, a ship sailing the sea, a cart pushed along the street are in reality very intricate. To understand these phenomena it is wise to begin…
Where power intervenes, transparency fails to provide accountability. This is the main fact that the residents of the Planetary Consortium and their ilk must grasp. Public-accessible cameras and citizen sousveillance of police is not enough. To truly hold the people at the top accountable, publicams should be placed…
Yu-Gi-Oh! demonstrates how pervasive media technologies in everyday settings integrate the imagination into a wider range of sites of social activity. Far from the shut-in behavior that gave rise to the most familiar forms of antimedia rhetoric, this media mix of children’s popular culture is wired, extroverted, and…
The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads…
So if you want to find a name in a phone book of a million names you can actually find any name by doing this at most 20 times. In comparing search algorithms we decide that this comparison is our 'n'. For a phone book of 3 names it takes 2 comparisons (at most). For 7 it takes at most 3. For 15 it takes 4. ... For…
When you say exergasia, synathroesmus, and incrementum together in a list, it seems to me that you have thereby given an example of all three devices in that same phrase.” Swan snorted at this. “How so, Socrates?” “ ‘Exergasia’ means ‘use of different phrases to express the same idea,’ ‘synathroesmus’ means…
Here’s a current example of the challenge we face... At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When…
My own opinion is that AI has failed to fulfill its promise because we are using the wrong kind of computers. We are using digital computers, and the human brain is probably analog rather than digital. So my guess is that AI will succeed only after we move from digital to analog computing. This is a tough intellectual…
I shall here insert a problem of that very ingenious and studious promoter of real knowledge, the learned and worthy Mr. Molyneux, which he was pleased to send me in a letter some months since; and it is this:- "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere…