I've made a search in google with the words "quantum" "interactions" and "consciousness" and spotted this work, that's how I reached the Journal:
Quantum Consciousness is Cybernetic by Gordon Globus
PSYCHE, 2(12), August 1995
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-12-curran.html
ABSTRACT: Classical mechanics cannot naturally accommodate consciousness, whereas quantum mechanics can, but the Heisenberg/Stapp (H/S) approach, in which consciousness randomly collapses the neural wave function, leaves the conscious function unrestricted by known physical principles. The Umezawa/Yasue (U/Y) approach, in which consciousness offers superposed possibilities to the match with sensory input, is based in the first physical principles of quantum field theory. Stapp thinks of the brain as a measuring device, like a Geiger counter, and overlooks that the brain upholds second-order quantum fields that are symmetry-conserving with respect to reality. Consciousness is cybernetic rather than having a random function.
Deep huh?
Hope you enjoy!]]>
Dr. Harold Medford, THEM!
They understood...
a half century ago.
Even pop scifi movie makers appeared to understand...
That a threshold had been crossed, a new world found, a new reason to both hope and fear the future, that unmapped country.
When you look at those pop sicfi films from a half century ago - from the best to the worst - there is a common theme: we are not what we were, we have become something new, even as most of the old stays with us, even as our everyday appears mostly unchanged. We have become something new and we're not ready.
But there's no choice, they say, no choice at all. There's no going back.
Fundamentally, this is, I think, what sets the pop scifi of the 1950s - the source material for many of our machine dreams - apart from what we see currently: the mixture of hope and fear, warning and celebration, seems to have disappeared, like morning mist. Perhaps Blade Runner, that extended meditation on loneliness, was the last great filmed example.
What has taken the place of the old nightmares which once walked hand-in-hand with the old dreams?]]>
Everyone has said at some point - "I'm not good with names." or "I have a terrible sense of direction." But we rarely sit and examine why this is the case. After reading books on Evolutionary Psychology (such as The Blank Slate by Pinker) it's hard to deny the severe importance that genetics has on the construction of the individual, and yet when I come to examine how my life was 'developed' genes don't come in to the equation.
I find that I am terrible with people's names, place names and learning foreign languages. Was it a case of my genetics that lead me towards a brain not capable of remembering names? or is it simply that at some point in my life my brain specialised in other areas? I find that when I am reading a magazine I very often just skip the names of people and places - and indeed kick myself for it later. Neither my father or mother seem to be as bad at these feats of memory as I am.
Did I not get the genes they have or did I simply not train my brain in the right areas?
So firstly, what would you say are your weakest capacities of mind? Can you trace them back to a particular way you run your life, or perceive your environment? or more realistically can you see the same traits inherent in your parents and siblings?
I'd be fascinated to know...]]>
Panspermia is the hypothesis that the seeds of life are ubiquitous in the Universe, that they may have delivered life to Earth, and that they may deliver or have delivered life to other habitable bodies; also the process of such delivery.
Exogenesis is a related, but less radical, hypothesis that simply proposes life originated elsewhere in the Universe and was transferred to Earth, with no prediction about how widespread life is. The term "panspermia" is more well-known, however, and tends to be used in reference to what would properly be called exogenesis, too.
Stepping around the issue of whether this idea holds any weight, I suggest it makes a good model by which to project our current evolutionary status forward in time, rather than backwards.The seeding of life did not begin when the first bacteria evolved, or even when the first organic molecule coalesced in some giant gas cloud. It began much earlier than that, in fact when the first hydrogen atoms stabilised not long after the big bang. From that moment on evolutionary processes carved niches out of interstellar place for increasingly complex structural components to be built.
At the current stage of cosmic evolution systems composed of some trillion atoms can be said to maintain a semblance of order, where in earlier epochs it took many trillions of times more atoms to form any kind of higher level system. These trillion atoms are now capable of self awareness! Humans are surely one of the most complex systems in the universe, yet the complexity can only increase.
I believe that as we continue to digitise and mass produce the world around us into ever more minutely complex arrangements so the realm of self awareness will shift from entities of trillions of atoms in construct to billions, then millions and so on down to the nano scale. We are already seeing the 'seeds' of this all around us, exciting and utopian as it is I rarely see it as the precurser to mankind's evolution. We are but one stage in a whole chain of processes which will eventually permit a vast array of small scale systems in the universe to react to their environment consciously.
Could these tiny, self sufficient nano entities become so minute that they were capable of drifting off the planet Earth and out into space? Perhaps their interelations will permit them to communicate as conscious clouds of matter, to reform themselves in new arrangements of complexity thereby completely altering the nature of 'organic life'.Panspermia seems to me the way the universe is headed. Screw organic entities still governed by hormones and bundles of near inanimate cell arrangements. In the future the cells themselves will be conscious, independant and capable of matters of perception far beyond anything we can now comprehend.
"Cities are no more artificial than Bee-hives. The internet is as natural as a spider's web...
...We ourselves are technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival - we are part of an intricate network that comes from the original takeover of the Earth. Our power and intelligence do not belong specifically to us, but to all life..."
- John Gray, Straw Dogs
What do you reckon?]]>
WIRED: What's wrong with the traditional approach to how the brain works?Minsky: Physics gives us about five laws that explain almost everything. So we keep looking for those kinds of simple laws to apply to the brain. The idea in my new book is that you shouldn't be looking for a single explanation of how thinking works. Evolution has found hundreds of ways to do things, and when one of them fails, your mind switches to another. That's resourcefulness.
In The Emotion Machine, you argue that feelings result from switching on or off certain "mental resources."
Minsky: The traditional view of emotions is that they are something extra, like adding color to a black-and-white photograph. But to me, emotions are what happens when you remove other resources. Anger means you've turned off your social graces, you've turned off your cautiousness, you've turned off your long-range plans and most of your ambition, and you've turned on things that make you act more rapidly and less deeply. Recognizing this complexity adds dignity to the theory.
Dennett: Computer programmers have the luxury to create hierarchies of control. The systems, the subsystems, the sub-sub-subsystems are complete slaves. They never rebel. This gives you a model of the mind with the highest echelons of logic at the top. But if you think about a brain as a community of individually semiautonomous, even independently evolved agencies, as Marvin has, you realize that the agencies have to be browbeaten and they have to form alliances. Emotions aren't an add-on but rather the politics of the whole system.
So what would a machine that worked this way look like?
Dennett: Like us.
Minsky: A well-designed program that wouldn't be so hierarchical but more like a network with resources that make requests of other resources.
Dennett: The research world is going to be impatient with Marvin because they are eager for computational models that really work. Marvin is saying, "Wait a minute, let's work out some of the high-level architectural details in a way that's still very loose, very impressionistic. It's too early to build the big model."
Minsky: Actually, I could quarrel with that. I think the architecture described in The Emotion Machine is programmable. If I could afford to get three or four first-rate systems programmers, we could do it. You can get millions of dollars to drive a car through a desert, but you can't get money to try to do something that's more human.
Why is the idea of a thinking machine so compelling?
Minsky: I think there is a worldwide survival problem. As the population grows and people live longer, there won't be anybody to do the work. So there is an urgent need to make inexpensive mechanical people that are able to do all the things that moderately unskilled people do now.
Dennett: I don't find that very convincing, Marvin. I think we're interested in it for purely curious, scientific reasons. We want to know how we work.
Minsky: Or make machines that work better than us and can solve all the problems we wanted to but couldn't. As Hans Moravec used to say, "The machines will be us."
Dennett: Marvin, I have a slogan for you that came to mind while I was reading your book. I've used it myself as a paper title. "My body has a mind of its own, so what does it need me for?"
Minsky: [Laughs.] I once peeled a label off a London bus. It read: MIND YOUR HEAD.
- link]]>
The brain: that gathered walnut of grey matter, lodged inconspicuously in the skull cavity of each and every one of us. Peer deep enough into these zones of thought; feeling; memory; dreams and each tiny pulse of inherent beauty appears as nothing more than the electrical impulses of furry little neuronal nodes, each playing chaotic games of cause and effect with a handful of neighbours in a never ending stream of activity.Sidetracking for a moment the philosophical implications of this mass of electrical chaos one is faced with the insane realisation that thought equals electricity, a fact not lost at the cutting edge of neuroscience:
Recent research has undermined two basic assumptions about how the brain processes information. One is the view of neurons as drones single-mindedly carrying out specific tasks. Cells can be retrained for different jobs, switching from facial expressions to finger flexing or from seeing red to hearing squeaks...An analogy which springs to mind (excuse the pun) is that of music, and more specifically, the discursive patterns inherent in much of what we call music. From Wikipedia:
...Neuroscientists are also questioning whether the firing rate serves as a brain cell's sole means of expression. Rate codes are extremely inefficient.... What counts as a genuine signal is a surge in the firing rate of a cell from, say, 2 to 50 times a second; variations in the intervals between successive spikes in a surge are considered irrelevant. But just as some geneticists suspect that the junk DNA riddling our genomes actually serves hidden functions, so some neuroscientists believe that information may lurk within the fluctuating gaps between spikes. Schemes of this sort, which are known as temporal codes, imply that significant information may be conveyed by just a spike or two... - link
Discursive repetition is "at the level of the phrase or section, which generally functions as part of a larger-scale 'argument'."Yet it is not merely the notes and the combination of these notes which we are interested in here. It would appear, as in the creation of patterns in the brain, that the silence, the gaps between discursive phrases make as much impact on the overall 'argument' of music as the notes themselves. Here we find the character of the piece, in the very aspects of music the composer spent their time avoiding. Creativity in this sense, and consciousness in that of the brain, are as much formed from the lack of activity as they are from its summation.
There are further implications on the nature of consciousness which result from patterned activity in the brain. Epilepsy has long been known to arise from the synchronisation of groups of neurons in the brain which do not normally interact. As the firing of these neurons increases in chaotic complexity so the epilepsy sufferer will edge closer towards a seizure [ref]. During such attacks consciousness can seem gripped by waves of synchronicity shooting through regions of the sufferer's brain, waves which oftentimes lead to violent loss of control relating to most functions of thought. Here though is where my interest is sparked, for in the seemingly random chaos inherent in these seizures many sufferers have reported discovering portals into alternate realms of consciousness. It seems no coincidence that epilepsy and religious / spiritual visions appear to be linked. From V.S. Ramachandran's 'Phantoms in the Brain':"I had my first seizure when I was eight years old," [Paul] began. "I remember seeing a bright light before I fell on the ground, wondering where it came from." A few years later, he had several additional seizures that transformed his whole life.Could synchronicity hold the key to understanding how our minds work? It appears so, and as current research continues so the realms of this 'science of chaos' grow ever wider...
"Suddenly, it was all crystal clear to me, doctor," he continued. "There was no longer any doubt anymore." He experienced a rapture beside which everything else paled. In the rapture was a clarity, an apprehension of the divine - no categories, no boundaries, just a Oneness with the Creator. All of this he recounted in elaborate detail and with great persistence, apparently determined to leave nothing out...."
It's about the Aussie contribution to the debate between the above.
Is the mind the same thing as the brain, or is the mind a distinct entity that is different from, but acts through the brain? Yes, this old one.
I don't understand the question. We do not have anything like a complete physical description of the brain, maybe when we do we'll be able to explain consciousness, maybe not. And until then we can exercise our imaginations all we like about so called non-physical superstructures, but what's the point?
Thank the Manifold for that $8 Bill. large hadron crasher, because until we have the physics, we can't fully describe any physical system. Hang on, I think the uncertainty principle and Godels incompleteness thingy might demonstrate that a full description is impossible....
Anyway, what I was yelling at the radio was that the brain is made of matter, and matter is made of what? Why do reductionists insist on stopping at the atomic, or more likely, molecular level of organisation? Matter and energy are equivalent...it's made out of energy man...
On the other hand, why invoke icomprehensible crap that hovers about in our heads, feeding on brainwaves like a standard SF energy vampire?
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/cajal.pdf
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/ I think I'v e put this site up before, nevermind...I'm running out of glucose, the thing in my head is hungry.
I still drive myself crazy thinking about bloody photons/Em radiation let alone goddamn quantum jumping...
How does a black hole evaporate? Will Hawking metamorphose into Davros and turn us into Daleks? ... Suits me..grumble, mumble
What's that beautiful big german compound word that translates as something like ' the war between the mice and the frogs' meaning a conflict that ain't that grand?
This here is the wattle
It's the symbol of my land
You can stick it in a bottle
You can hold it in your hand
end rant]]>
Hearing voices in your head is so common that it is normal, psychologists believe. Dutch findings suggest one in 25 people regularly hears voices.
Contrary to traditional belief, hearing voices is not necessarily a symptom of mental illness, UK researchers at Manchester University say.
Indeed, many who hear voices do not seek help and say the voices have a positive impact on their lives, comforting or inspiring them. - BBC ArticleCould 'The Origin of Consciousness' still be lingering in their somewhere? Tell me what I'm thinking voice number 1...]]>
It's difficult not to see elements of the random and the indeterminate in all our experience, most striking in dreams but also present, as we have seen, in waking perception. There is a parallel here with the indeterminacy of particles. (And the indeterminacy of experience prevents it shaping our knowledge and behaviour no more than the indeterminacy of particles prevents them determining physical structure and chemical behaviour.)Then again, maybe there is an element of pure randomness in the apparently unlocatable deciding force at the heart of dreaming (and of all our thinking). Maybe this generative principle, which is both I and not-I, stems from the quantum behaviour of individual particles in the system, deflecting and shaping the throughput of information from external sources as fundamentally and massively as the random release of the beta-particle affects the state of Schrödinger's cat.
One way or another, we have lost the deterministic thread of the universe right here, inside ourselves. - The Guardian]]>
There couldn't be a better spot]]>
Using unusually rigorous scientific conditions and measures, Johns Hopkins researchers have shown that the active agent in "sacred mushrooms" can induce mystical/spiritual experiences descriptively identical to spontaneous ones people have reported for centuries.
The resulting experiences apparently prompt positive changes in behavior and attitude that last several months, at least. The agent, a plant alkaloid called psilocybin, mimics the effect of serotonin on brain receptors-as do some other hallucinogens-but precisely where in the brain and in what manner are unknown.
...
"Human consciousness…is a function of the ebb and flow of neural impulses in various regions of the brain-the very substrate that drugs such as psilocybin act upon," Schuster says. "Understanding what mediates these effects is clearly within the realm of neuroscience and deserves investigation."
...
The researchers' message isn't just that psilocybin can produce mystical experiences. "I had a healthy skepticism going into this," says Griffiths, "and that finding alone was a surprise." But, as important, he says, "is that, under very defined conditions, with careful preparation, you can safely and fairly reliably occasion what's called a primary mystical experience that may lead to positive changes in a person. It's an early step in what we hope will be a large body of scientific work that will ultimately help people."
The authors acknowledge the unusual nature of the work, treading, as it does, a fine line between neuroscience and areas most would consider outside science's realm. "But establishing the basic science here is necessary," says Griffiths, "to take advantage of the possible benefits psilocybin can bring to our understanding of how thought, emotion, and ultimately behavior are grounded in biology." Griffiths is quick to emphasize the scientific intent of the study. "We're just measuring what can be observed," he says; "We're not entering into 'Does God exist or not exist.' This work can't and won't go there."
...
"Mystical experience seems to be as old as humankind, forming the core of many if not all of the great religious traditions. Some ancient cultures, such as classical Greece, and some contemporary small-scale cultures, have made use of psychoactive plants and chemicals to occasion such experiences. But this is the first scientific demonstration in 40 years, and the most rigorous ever, that profound mystical states can be produced safely in the laboratory. The potential is great."
Smith also issued a caution and suggested that further research on the topic include social as well as neurological variables: "In the end, it's altered traits, not altered states, that matter. 'By their fruits shall ye know them.' It's good to learn that volunteers having even this limited experience had lasting benefits. But human history suggests that without a social vessel to hold the wine of revelation, it tends to dribble away. In most cases, even the most extraordinary experiences provide lasting benefits to those who undergo them and people around them only if they become the basis of ongoing work. That's the next research question, it seems to me: What conditions of community and practice best help people to hold on to what comes to them in those moments of revelation, converting it into abiding light in their own lives?" - link to full article]]>
Scientists believe they have found a way to probe the mysterious phenomenon of feeling you have witnessed something before - deja vu.
Leeds Memory Group researchers say they have gone some way to recreating the sensation in the lab using hypnosis.
New Scientist magazine reports the researchers hope their work will shed light on the fundamental workings of the human memory.
It is estimated that as many as 97% of people have experienced deja vu.
In some severe cases it can be distressing to the point of causing depression and some sufferers have been prescribed anti-psychotic medication.
However, experts suspect that many people who experience the sensation are unwilling to discuss it with their doctor.
Two stage process
Two key processes are thought to occur when someone recognises a familiar object or scene.
First, the brain searches through memory traces to see if the contents of that scene have been observed before.
If they have, a separate part of the brain then identifies the scene or object as being familiar.
In deja vu, this second process may occur by mistake, so that a feeling of familiarity is triggered by a novel object or scene.
The Leeds team set out to create a sense of deja vu among volunteers in a lab.
They used hypnosis to trigger only the second part of the recognition process - hoping to create a sense of familiarity about something a person had not seen before.
The researchers showed volunteers 24 common words, then hypnotised them and told them that when they were next presented with a word in a red frame, they would feel that the word was familiar, although they would not know when they last saw it.
Green frames would make them think that the word belonged to the original list of 24.
Peculiar sensation
After being taken out of hypnosis, the volunteers were presented with a series of words in frames of various colours, including some that were not in the original 24 and which were framed in red or green.
Of the 18 people studied so far, 10 reported a peculiar sensation when they saw new words in red frames and five said it definitely felt like deja vu.
Researcher Akira O'Connor presented the findings to an International Conference on Memory in Sydney, Australia.
He told New Scientist: "This tells us that it is possible to experimentally dissociate these two processes, which is really important in establishing that they are indeed separate."
Some people with temporal lobe epilepsy report frequent deja vu.
And previous work in France has found that electrically stimulating parts of the temporal lobe can trigger a sensation of familiarity with everything a person encounters.
Professor Alan Brown, an expert in deja vu at South Methodist University in Dallas, said: "Using hypnotic suggestion to either stimulate, or simulate, a deja vu experience could potentially be a very fruitful way to explore this phenomenon.
"I don't have a lot of detail about the Leeds project but from what I know it certainly seems to be solid work with an intriguing outcome."
link]]>
I´d love to be able to fully control this state of mind and be able to create my own reality with the power of my brain!
And you guys? have any insights about this subject?]]>
For many years I've depended upon the uber-geek site, slashdot.org for my (mostly Linux focused) information fix.
Slashdot.org accepts entries from users but there's a strong editorial filtering process – call it a council of gurus – performing quality control.
More recently, Digg.com has made a large splash, grabbing some attention away from slashdot.org.
Digg is built upon the community participation model – the hive – for its content. A friend refers to this type of content portfolio building (which services such as YouTube also depend upon) as a bake your own bread and circuses business model.
I still see tremendous value in the hierarchical, guru approach but I wonder for how long? The hive-mind technique appears to be growing in strength with each passing day.
In the not really distant tomorrow, will even corporate-created, top-down television, movies and music be, if not replaced, heavily subsidized by the hive-mind?]]>
New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.Contrary to what had been thought a cognitive universal among humans – a spatial metaphor for chronology, based partly on our bodies’ orientation and locomotion, that places the future ahead of oneself and the past behind – the Amerindian group locates this imaginary abstraction the other way around: with the past ahead and the future behind.
[....]
The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to mean “past” and recruits “qhipa,” the basic word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “future.” So, for example, the expression “nayra mara” – which translates in meaning to “last year” – can be literally glossed as “front year..."
The Aymara, especially the elderly who didn’t command a grammatically correct Spanish, indicated space behind themselves when speaking of the future – by thumbing or waving over their shoulders – and indicated space in front of themselves when speaking of the past – by sweeping forward with their hands and arms, close to their bodies for now or the near past and farther out, to the full extent of the arm, for ancient times. In other words, they used gestures identical to the familiar ones – only exactly in reverse.
“These findings suggest that cognition of such everyday abstractions as time is at least partly a cultural phenomenon,” (University of California, San Diego professor Rafael) Nunez said. “That we construe time on a front-back axis, treating future and past as though they were locations ahead and behind, is strongly influenced by the way we move, by our dorsoventral morphology, by our frontal binocular vision, etc. Ultimately, had we been blob-ish amoeba-like creatures, we wouldn’t have had the means to create and bring forth these concepts.
“But the Aymara counter-example makes plain that there is room for cultural variation. With the same bodies – the same neuroanatomy, neurotransmitters and all – here we have a basic concept that is utterly different,” he said.
- link to full article]]>
via MSNBC
If you've ever had a headache while trying to choose between a sure thing and a more risky option with higher rewards, it might be because conflicting parts of your brain are waging war against each other.
A new study found regions in the brain that are active when a person decides whether to exploit a known commodity or explore a potentially better option.
The finding, published in the June 15 issue of the journal Nature, suggests that in order to explore new and potentially rewarding options, the brain must override the desire for immediate profit.
More here
]]>
We Feel Fine describes its mission:
We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.
Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.
The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering
responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s?
What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.]]>
In a post titled "Rooms of algebraic theology" BLDGBLOG writes:
The supercomputers I'm showing here are powerful almost beyond human understanding," photographer Simon Norfolk explains, describing his extraordinary new images of supercomputers and their architectural settings.
"They can map every molecule of the billions on a human DNA string; scrutinise at the atomic level the collision between two pieces of plutonium in an exploding bomb; or sketch the gravitational pull of every star in the galaxy upon every other star in the galaxy. These are not questions that humans could grapple with given plenty of time, a notebook and a sharp pencil."
Norfolk has also photographed computers used for "mapping and predicting global virus outbreaks" and for "simulating automotive crash tests."
These computers, Norfolk continues, "are omniscient and omnipresent and these are not qualities in which we find a simulacrum of ourselves – these are qualities that describe the Divine. The problem is not that these computers might one day resemble humans; it is that they already resemble gods."
[...]
full at BLDGBLOG]]>
Why would I want to live indefinitely? Why not? Unless you are suicidal or wracked by some horrible pain, chances are you would turn down the opportunity to die and not see tomorrow. I have taken this simple logic and expanded it out to every tomorrow. Basically while I remain open-minded enough to acknowledge that there may be a set of circumstances that would cause me to not wish to continue to live, I cannot imagine what they would be. Until further notice I am alive and wish to remain so. That is not to say that I fear death, but rather that I love life.
But lets get down to the nuts and bolts of how this is actually done. Obviously no one any of us have run into has lived forever. Many people from way back to Gilgamesh have sought immortality to no avail. However I believe we passed a critical point in history when Robert C. W. Ettinger wrote "The Prospect of Immortality" in 1962. He laid out the idea of freezing people right after death in liquid nitrogen to preserve them until the point that medical science could restore the damage that had caused them to die as well as the damage of being frozen. Techniques have since improved at preserving the cryonically suspended and many brains are vitrified which is a technology that has been used to preserve organs while awaiting transplant.
Of course the ultimate proof of concept: the reanimation of a suspended individual is still a way off. However physicists have not been able to raise any reasons that it might not work.
There is much more to immortalism than just cryonics. Caloric Restriction with Optimal Nutrition (CRON) is the only known way to extend lifespan currently, but Aubrey de Grey has proposed Strategies for Negligible Engineered Senescence (SENS) which aims to obviate the effects of aging in humans. Some people think these developments could come about fast enough that even baby-boomers could take advantage of them.
The Methuselah Mouse Prize was created to allow people to contribute to a prize that will be awarded to scientists who develop methods to radically extend the lifespan of mice. It is hoped that it will achieve results similar to the Ansari X-Prize or the DARPA Grand Challenge which both pushed the limits and spurred greater investment in their persepective fields.
The Immortality Institute is an organization that is made up of those seeking to transcend the pathetically short lifes we have inherited and perhaps live forever. Being able to slow and eventually reverse aging is not enough alone to enable one to live forever. Eventually it will become advantageous to make backup copies of one's self that could alleviate the effects of being obliterated. Only once a person can be entirely distroyed and then recreated from off-site backups would I personally consider them to be "immortal".
A great book covering a possible future where many of these events take place is James Halperin's The First Immortal which can be downloaded for free or purchased on Amazon.
For more reading check out Alcor which is one of two currently operational cryonics institutes.]]>
Christian Nold - Oct 2005 - March 06
6 month artist commission hosted by Independent Photography as part of 'Peninsula', a series of artist commissions on the Greenwich Peninsula.
Artist Christian Nold has been invited to collaborate with local residents from the Greenwich Peninsula to explore the area afresh and build an emotion map of the area that explores people's relationship with their local environment.
The project is set up as a series of participatory workshops that invite people to borrow a Bio Mapping device and go for a walk. The device measures the wearer's Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is an indicator of emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. The resulting maps encourage personal reflection on the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. By sharing this information we can construct maps that visualise where we as a community feel stressed and excited.
[...]
full here]]>
Uncontrollable Semantics is a surprisingly addictive site. The content is interactive and consists of mouse cursor following animations dancing across the screen.
When I feel the need for a quick bit of the old ultra mesmerizing
this is where I go.]]>