2012-05-28

We’re creating a culture of distraction

all of us have a device in our pockets that is a very potent, addictive distractor
the more we train our brain to pay attention to this distractor, the more distracted we become.

2012-05-16

All our friends are ordinized.

“When condensed into two-liners and posted for the whole world to see, our thoughts and feelings cease to be so special.” - Sonya Lyubomirsky

“I killed my facebook page years ago because time clicking around is just dead time. Your brain isn’t resting and it isn’t doing. I think people have to get their heads around this thing. All this unmitigated input is hurting folks.” - Louis CK

2012-05-13

meme-meme:

Let me think…

Source: meme-meme

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Fear of being separated from your phone.

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The robot journalist: an apocalypse for the news industry?

A set of algorithms which take data and turn it into words began as an experimental lab, but now appear on Forbes.com

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If the parts of the brain we think of as being fundamentally human – not just intelligence, but self-awareness – are emergent properties of the brain, rather than functional ones, as seems likely, the computational theory of mind gets even weaker. Think of consciousness and will as something that emerges from the activity of billions of neural connections, similar to how a national economy emerges from billions of different business transactions. It’s not a perfect analogy, but that should give you an idea of the complexity. In many ways, the structure of a national economy is much simpler than that of the brain, and despite that fact that it’s a much more strictly mathematical proposition, it’s incredibly difficult to model with any kind of precision.

The mind is best understood, not as software, but rather as an emergent property of the physical brain. So building an artificial intelligence with the same level of complexity as that of a human intelligence isn’t a matter of just finding the right algorithms and putting it together. The brain is much more complicated than that, and is very likely simply not amenable to that kind of mathematical reductionism, any more than economic systems are.

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On the difference between mind and brain and why neither is a computer – a fascinating addition to the ongoing discussion of what is consciousness and what it means to be human.

(↬ The Dish)

(via explore-blog)

Source:

2012-05-09