The Human Spark, episode 1 | john hawks weblog - 0 views
The Evolution of Language - 0 views
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Language is an innate faculty, rather than a learned behavior. This idea was the primary insight of the Chomskyan revolution that helped found the field of modern linguistics in the late 1950s, and its implications are both simple and profound. If innate, language must be genetic. It is hardwired within us from conception and evolved from structures and genes with analogues existing throughout the animal kingdom. In a sense, language is universal. Yet we humans are the only species with the ability for what may rightly be called language and, moreover, we have specific linguistic behaviors that seem to have appeared only within the past 200,000 years-an eye-blink of evolution.
Does the Internet Change How We Think? - Sharon Begley - Newsweek.com - 0 views
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The ways the Internet supposedly affects thought are as apocalyptic as they are speculative, since all the above are supported by anecdote, not empirical data. So it is refreshing to hear how 109 philosophers, neurobiologists, and other scholars answered, "How is the Internet changing the way you think?" That is the "annual question" at the online salon edge.org, where every year science impresario, author, and literary agent John Brockman poses a puzzler for his flock of scientists and other thinkers.
Algorithmic Inelegance - 0 views
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There's something deeply appealing about making logic manifest and producing tools that do intense computational work for you at the click of a button; there can also be something deeply obsessive about being able to hone software to make it more elegant and efficient and, to the programmer's eye, more beautiful. The designers of software usually aspire to economy of code, clarity in its operation, and powerful algorithms that, with mathematical and logical beauty, do the work of generating a sophisticated result. We tend to look down on the "kludge," the clumsy addition to fix a problem, or the brute force approach of working case by case to force a desired result (although, to be sure, I've seen enough code to know that the awkward hack is ubiquitous). § SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
How to Improve on Heterophenomenology - 0 views
Gorillas 'ape humans' over games - 0 views
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Dr Tanner said: "Though the age at which gorilla games begin may be later in gorillas than in humans, and may depend on the challenges and artefacts available in a particular group's habitat, gorillas definitely enjoy the same kind of sporting competition we do."
Meat may be the reason humans outlive apes - 0 views
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humans apparently evolved unique variants in a cholesterol-transporting gene, apolipoprotein E, which regulates chronic inflammation as well as many aspects of aging in the brain and arteries.
Evolution of Adaptive Behaviour in Robots by Means of Darwinian Selection - 0 views
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These examples of experimental evolution with robots verify the power of evolution by mutation, recombination, and natural selection. In all cases, robots initially exhibited completely uncoordinated behaviour because their genomes had random values. However, a few hundreds of generations of random mutations and selective reproduction were sufficient to promote the evolution of efficient behaviours in a wide range of environmental conditions. The ability of robots to orientate, escape predators, and even cooperate is particularly remarkable given that they had deliberately simple genotypes directly mapped into the connection weights of neural networks comprising only a few dozen neurons. PLoS Biology
The origin of concepts - 0 views
Ned Block on Consciousness - 0 views
The Moral Behavior of Super-Duper Artificial Intelligences - 0 views
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David Chalmers gave a talk today (at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson) arguing that it is fairly likely that sometime in the next few centuries we will create artificial intelligence (perhaps silicon, perhaps biological) considerably more intelligent than ourselves -- and then those intelligent creatures will create even more intelligent successors, and so on, until there exist creatures that are vastly more intelligent than we are. The Splintered Mind
Multiple drafts model - 0 views
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Our conscious experience is of events that can usually be objectively timed quite precisely
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there must be a quite specific moment at which each item makes its entrance in our experience.
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the timing represented in consciousness
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"The multiple drafts model of consciousness (Dennett, 1991, 1996, 1998, Dennett and Kinsbourne, 1992) was developed as an alternative to the perennially attractive, but incoherent, model of conscious experience Dennett calls Cartesian materialism, the idea that after early unconscious processing occurs in various relatively peripheral brain structures "everything comes together" in some privileged central place in the brain-which Dennett calls the Cartesian Theater --for "presentation" to the inner self or homunculus. There is no such place in the brain, but many theories seem to presuppose that there must be something like it." (Dennet & Akins, Scholarpedia)
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