• hyperintelligence, left to its hypertrophic tendencies, will lead to a severe diminution of human intelligence.
• What will be new are the intensification and coordination of these presently incipient and scattered effects.
• It allows us to be in touch with everyone all the time.
• he nervous system of hyperintelligence will disconnect us one from the other. If everyone is indifferently present regardless of where one is located on the globe, no one is commandingly present
• To write a letter one needed to sit down, collect one’s thoughts and world, and commit them laboriously to paper. Such labor was a guide to concentration and responsibility.
• The extended network of hyperintelligence also disconnects us from the people we would meet incidentally at concerts, plays, and political gatherings.
• It cuts us off from the pleasure of seeing people in the round and from the instruction of being seen and judged by them
• Literacy has extended our command over the world and rendered it more precarious. It made it possible to deposit knowledge rather than command it.
• there are today people of sound minds who without their fledgling hyperintelligent support lapse into a helplessness not too far from amnesia.
• traditional knowledge has become absurd with hyperintelligent information.
• Today, computerized images and hypertexts allow the novice to summon and select, within hours or days, answers more complete and accurate than the recollections of a scholarly lifetime.
• Nor, accordingly, will hyperintelligence in either its peripheral or its central parts threaten humanity with extinction.
• Still, its power, if we indulge it, will be sufficient to attenuate our substance greatly.
• Hyperintelligence allows us to diffuse our attention and action over ever more voluminous spaces.

12 more annotations...

• In  a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added  a new essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," in which he optimistically  suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and  close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and  the scientists. In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals  would be on speaking terms with the scientists.
• Scientists  are communicating directly with the general public.

•   
    
   
    
    
  /// article
    
    
   
   
      
   
  •       Appreciate    (989)     
   
  •       Tweet    (512)     
   
  •       <!-- The following link must use the full qualified URL. DISCUS uses it to append a comment count to this string -->  Comment (106)    
   
     
  What Happened to Downtime? The Extinction of Deep Thinking & Sacred Space
   
    by Scott Belsky 
     
  <!-- .block-meta-->       
     
  <!-- .block-meta --> 
   
  Interruption-free space is sacred. Yet, in the digital era we live in, we are losing hold of the few sacred spaces that remain untouched by email, the internet, people, and other forms of distraction. Our cars now have mobile phone integration and a thousand satellite radio stations. When walking from one place to another, we have our devices streaming data from dozens of sources. Even at our bedside, we now have our iPads with heaps of digital apps and the world's information at our fingertips.
• Why do we crave distraction over downtime?



  
  

  Why do we give up our sacred space so easily? Because space is scary.
• It is now possible to always feel loved and cared for, thanks to the efficiency of our “comment walls” on Facebook and seamless connection with everyone we've ever known. Your confidence and self-esteem can quickly be reassured by checking your number of “followers” on Twitter or the number of “likes” garnered by your photographs and blog posts.
• Our insatiable need to tune into information – at the expense of savoring our downtime – is a form of “work” (something I call “insecurity work”
• five potential mindsets and solutions for consideration:
• 1. Rituals for unplugging.

• We need some rules. When it comes to scheduling, we will need to allocate blocks of time for deep thinking. Maybe you will carve out a 1-2 hour block on your calendar every day for taking a walk or grabbing a cup of coffee and just pondering some of those bigger things.
• 3. Meditation and naps to clear the mind.

• It is supremely important that we recognize the power of our insecurities and, at the very least, acknowledge where our anxiety comes from. Awareness is always the first step in solving any problem.



7 more annotations...

• The team lead by Dr Nina Kraus found that poor readers had reduced neural response (auditory brainstem activity) to rhythmic rather than random sounds compared to good readers.
• Structural equation modeling of the data revealed that music skill, together with how the nervous system responds to regularities in auditory input and auditory memory/attention accounts for about 40% of the difference in reading ability between children.
• These results add weight to the argument that music and reading are related via common neural and cognitive mechanisms and suggests a mechanism for the improvements in literacy seen with musical training."

1 more annotation...

• To guide us in our Mission, Vision and Strategy, the Mind & Life Institute has adopted a set of core values:

   
   
  • Love, Mindfulness and Compassion
   
  • Trust and Integrity
   
  • Teamwork and Collaboration
   
  • Impeccability and Continuous Improvement
   
  • Open Communication and Transparency

• Vision

   

  The Mind & Life Institute sees the potential of a world that fully understands the critical importance of training the mind in ways that reduce individual and societal suffering and promote individual and planetary peace, health, well-being and cooperation. Moreover, we envision a world where everyone has access to age-appropriate and culturally appropriate mental and emotional fitness practices.
• we implement a practical, results-oriented Mission and Strategy based on scientific research to understand how we, as humans, can train our minds
• promote and support rigorous, multi-disciplinary scientific investigation of the mind
• dissemination of practices that cultivate the mental qualities of attention, emotional balance, kindness, compassion, confidence and happiness
• rooted in an integrated way of knowing that combines the first and second person direct experience of contemplative practice with a modern scientific third person inquiry.

4 more annotations...

• The Problem of Consciousness^*

   John R. Searle 

   (copyright John R. Searle) 

   

   Abstract: This paper attempts to begin to answer four questions. 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of consciousness to  the brain? 3. What are some of the features that an empirical theory of consciousness should try to explain? 4. What are some common  mistakes to  avoid? 

   The most important scientific discovery of the present  era will come when someone -- or some group -- discovers the answer to the following question: How exactly do neurobiological processes in the brain cause  consciousness?  This is  the most important question facing us in the biological sciences, yet it is frequently evaded, and frequently misunderstood when not evaded.  In order to clear the way for an understanding of this problem.  I am going to begin to answer four questions: 1. What is consciousness? 2. What is the relation of consciousness to the brain? 3. What are some of the features that an empirical theory of  consciousness should try to explain? 4. What are some common mistakes to avoid? 
• If science is supposed to give an account of how the world works and if subjective states of consciousness are part of the world, then we should seek an (epistemically) objective account of an (ontologically) subjective reality, the reality of subjective states of consciousness. What I am arguing  here is that we can have an epistemically objective science of a domain that is ontologically subjective.

• In business we regularly have to consider what level of risk is acceptable to the organisation. Management control systems typically assume that people adhere to some rational decision rules and are able to estimate the probabilities and values of future outcomes.
• Pre-neuro behavioural studies have shown that this is most often not the case. Moreover, the way in which alternatives to a decision are presented to people affects their opinion about them and their choice between them.
• Behavioural economics shows that if alternatives are framed as gains, decision-makers usually opt for safer options, thereby exhibiting risk-averse behaviour, but they reverse their choice when alternatives are framed as losses.
• Management accountants need to consider what kind of presentation of information may reduce hidden fear and anxiety.
• Management accountants need to provide management with overviews of the inter-temporal consequences of managerial decisions
• People simply have such a strong preference for sooner rather than later (positive) outcomes that it appears to be hard to change that.
• people barely make a difference between two outcomes that lie in the distant future.
• Neuroscientific research may provide a starting point in the analysis and solution of this problem, as its results suggest that humans’ preference for short-term outcomes is the consequence of the emotional system’s strong response to immediate, rather than to delayed, rewards.
• When applying neuroscientific methods for fundamental or applied research, management accountants have to deal with at least four challenges.
• First, neuroscience requires a mastery of observation techniques that are not the normal repertoire of social researchers
• Second, given the technological complexities of neuroscientific research, it is crucial to develop cooperation in multidisciplinary teams consisting of neurologists, economists and psychologists, as well as management accountants.

9 more annotations...

• what will the UIs of the future look like?

• will they be made of atoms that you can reach out and touch?

    
• t's basically a fancy Pinscreen, one of those executive desk toys that allows you to create a rough 3-D model of an object by pressing it into a bed of flattened pins. With inFORM, each of those "pins" is connected to a motor controlled by a nearby laptop, which can not only move the pins to render digital content physically, but can also register real-life objects interacting with its surface thanks to the sensors of a hacked Microsoft Kinect.
• Creative professionals are a bit more likely than others to suffer from bipolar disorder.
• The healthy relatives of schizophrenics tend to enter creative fields.
• Fink and collaborators recruited study participants who were low or high in schizotypy measures. While inside a brain scanner, the participants completed an idea-generation task that asks people to come up with original uses for everyday objects--a common assessment of creativity.
• Fink and the others found some key similarities in the brain patterns of people who scored well on originality and those who measured high in schizotypy
• Fink and the others conclude that perhaps creative and schizotypal people share an inability to filter out extraneous or irrelevant material.
• our devices have been designed to simulate affordances--the quality which allows an object to perform a function, such as a handle, a dial or a wheel--but not actually have them. Follmer says that's not the way it's supposed to be. "As humans, we have evolved to interact physically with our environments, but in the 21st century, we're missing out on all of this tactile sensation that is meant to guide us, limit us, and make us feel more connected," he says. "In the transition to purely digital interfaces, something profound has been lost."
• The solution is programmable matter, and the inFORM is one possible interpretation of an interface that can transform itself to physically be whatever it needs to be

• Cognitive disinhibition is part of Carson's larger model of "shared vulnerability" between creativity and psychopathology. The idea here is that the presence and power of various cognitive factors will influence whether a person becomes creative, mentally unstable, or a little of both. These factors include cognitive disinhibition, of course, but also IQ, working memory, attention style, novelty preference, and more.

    
• the guys at the Tangible Media Group believe that interface of the future won't be skeuomorphic. They'll be supermorphic, growing the affordances they need on the fly.
• while the actual consumer implementation may very well differ, but both Follmer and Leithinger agree that tangible interfaces are coming.
• all creative people are a bit crazy and why not every mentally ill person is especially creative. "It's not a one-on-one correspondence," says Carson
• Whatever it ends up looking like, the UI of the future won't be made of just pixels, but time and form as well. And that future is only five or ten years away

13 more annotations...

• Aristotle's definition of God attributes perfection to this being, and as a perfect being can only contemplate upon perfection and not on imperfection, otherwise perfection would not be one of his attributes. God, according to Aristotle, is in a state of "stasis" untouched by change and imperfection. The "unmoved mover" is very unlike the conception of God that one sees in most religions. It has been likened to a person who is playing dominos and pushes one of them over, so that every other domino in the set is pushed over as well, without the being having to do anything about it.

• Hermeticism[edit]

   

  Main article: The All

   

  "The All" is the Hermetic version of God. It has also been called "The One", "The Great One", "The Creator", "The Supreme Mind", "The Supreme Good", "The Father" and "The Universal Mother".^{[citation needed]} The All is seen by some to be a panentheistic conception of God, subsuming everything that is or can be experienced. One Hermetic maxim states that "While All is in THE ALL, it is equally true that THE ALL is in All." (Three Initiates p. 95) The All can also seen to be hermaphroditic, possessing both masculine and feminine qualities in equal part (The Way of Hermes p. 19 Book 1:9). These qualities are, however, of mental gender, as The All lacks physical gender.

• Abrahamic religions[edit]

   

  Main article: God in Abrahamic religions

   

  See also: The nature of God in Western theology

   

  Judaism, Christianity and Islam (and also the Bahá'í Faith) see God as a being who created the world and who rules over the universe. God is usually held to have the following properties: holiness, justice, sovereignty, omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence and omnipresence. It is also believed to be transcendent, meaning that God is outside space and time. Therefore, God is eternal, unchangeable and unaffected by earthly forces or anything else within its creation.
• In the Abrahamic traditions, there are many differences in how these properties are expressed^{[citation needed]}. The importance placed upon those properties is often debated by each group. In the past, as well as in modern times, people^[vague] have suggested each group is speaking of a different god, or that each individual human has his own personal conception of god; thus god can only be approximately known.

• Buddhism[edit]

   

  Main article: God in Buddhism

   

  The non-adherence^[24] to the notion of a supreme God or a prime mover is seen as a key distinction between Buddhism and other religious views. In Buddhism, the sole aim of the spiritual practice is the complete alleviation of distress (dukkha) in samsara,^[25][26] called nirvana. The Buddha neither denies nor accepts a creator,^[27] denies endorsing any views on creation^[28] and states that questions on the origin of the world are worthless.^[29][30] Some teachers instruct students beginning Buddhist meditation that the notion of divinity is not incompatible with Buddhism,^[31] but dogmatic beliefs in a supreme personal creator are considered a hindrance to the attainment of nirvana,^[32] the highest goal of Buddhist practice.^[33]
• Despite this apparent non-theism, Buddhists consider veneration of the Noble Ones^[34] very important^[35] although the two main schools of Buddhism differ mildly in their reverential attitudes. While Theravada Buddhists view the Buddha as a human being who attained nirvana or arahanthood through human efforts,^[36] Mahayana Buddhists consider him an embodiment of the cosmic dharmakaya (a notion of transcedent divinity), who was born for the benefit of others and not merely a human being.^[37] In addition, some Mahayana Buddhists worship their chief Bodhisattva, Avalokiteshvara^[38] and hope to embody him.^[39]

4 more annotations...

• Which would you prefer: pain or boredom?

  Given the choice, many people would rather give themselves mild electric shocks than sit idly in a room for 15 minutes, according to a study published today in Science¹.
• “We lack a comfort in just being alone with our thoughts,” says Malia Mason, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York, who was not involved in the study. “We’re constantly looking to the external world for some sort of entertainment.”
• Wilson and his colleagues began by asking undergraduate students to stash their mobile phones and other distractions, and to sit in a sparsely furnished room for up to 15 minutes. Afterwards, nearly half of the 409 participants said that they did not enjoy the experience.
• repeated the experiment, this time allowing participants to perform the exercise at home. Nearly one-third of the study subjects later admitted to cheating.
• when they were placed in the room to sit alone with their thoughts, 67% of male participants and 25% of female subjects were so eager to find something to do that they shocked themselves voluntarily.
• Wilson thinks that the discomfort comes from a lack of mental control: that it is difficult to tell our minds to stay on one topic and keep it there for a long time. Subjects who reported a positive experience during the experiment tended to think about future events, often with loved ones. Those who did not enjoy the time for quiet reflection often thought about work.
• Wilson intends to pursue ways to tame what he calls “the disengaged mind”. “There are lots of times in our daily lives, when we have a little bit of time out, or are stuck in traffic or trying to get to sleep,” says Wilson. “Having this as a tool in our mental toolbox as a way to retreat or reduce stress would be a useful thing to do.”

5 more annotations...