14 OCT 2014 by ideonexus

 Robots and Nature

Our most powerful tool against the robots is the natural world. This fact is overlooked almost entirely in human/robot war literature because humans are the ones writing it, and humans tend to think of the natural world as basically a good thing to be in. Sure, we like our air conditioning, to be sheltered from the rain, and to avoid poisonous snakes, but in general we view the habitable zone of the Earth to be a pretty great thing to be in. This is no coincidence! Trillions of experiments co...
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08 JUL 2011 by ideonexus

 Psychological VS Mechanical Causality in Infant Understan...

As scientists we think that everything is mediated by physical causality of some sort, including our interactions with other people. There are, in fact, light and sound waves that go from one person to another even if we can't see them with the naked eye. But from our everyday point of view, it appears we are able to influence people without any direct physical contact at all. (It's probably that fact that makes telepathy seem plausible to so many people.) After all, just looking at someone a...
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Babies learn the differences between psychological and physical causality, before this they tend to make the mistake of using psychological means to influence the physical world... Magical thinking in adults may be a holdover of this habit.