Open Intelligence / Consciousness (Knowledge + Information)

I love the idea of “catchment in webs of trust” – Blais’ idea that extended networks of trust can begin to harness flows of energy within a group of people. The community can then become a generative social infrastructure for all sorts of amazing endeavors. Blais urges to go even a step further, however, by recognizing that we must somehow “move beyond the logic of commons/enclosed, of free/private” so that the intrinsic dynamics of nature – beyond human control – can have their play. She cites the Six Nations of the Lakota, who suggested in the late 1940s that even the very notion of human rights needs to evolve: - There is a hue and cry for human rights – human rights, they said, for all people. And the indigenous people said: What are the rights of the natural world? Where is the seat for the buffalo or the eagle? Who is representing them here in this forum? Who is speaking for the waters of the earth? Who is speaking for the trees and the forests? One can imagine the commons being the crucible for an enlarged conception of human rights — one that more closely integrates human needs with those of the rest of the bio-physical world.”

However, the bigger lesson in Aboujaoude’s book is that the internet does play a very causal role in our lives and well being – and thus it is important to be very mindful of our online behavior. In addition to his case studies and anecdotes about patients and friends, Aboujaoude shares a lot of compelling research in psychology, neuroscience, economics, and sociology that seems to indicate that in many ways the internet is a unique kind of environment that creates a very different kind of self-perception (one which can affect both our online and offline behavior).

Delusions of Grandeur

– who needs to carefully process feelings and logically organize thoughts before finally communicating a state of mind, when a simple hieroglyphics can convey everything…and nothing?”

Collaborative tagging has been quickly gaining ground because of its ability to recruit the activity of web users into effectively organizing and sharing vast amounts of information. Here we collect data from a popular system and investigate the statistical properties of tag cooccurrence. We introduce a stochastic model of user behavior embodying two main aspects of collaborative tagging: (i) a frequency-bias mechanism related to the idea that users are exposed to each other’s tagging activity; (ii) a notion of memory, or aging of  resources, in the form of a heavy-tailed access to the past state of the system.  Remarkably, our simple modeling is able to account quantitatively for the observed experimental features with a surprisingly high accuracy. This points in the direction of a universal behavior of users who, despite the complexity of  their own cognitive processes and the uncoordinated and selfish nature of their tagging activity, appear to follow simple activity patterns.

Decision fatigue is the newest discovery involving a phenomenon called ego depletion, a term coined by the social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister in homage to a Freudian hypothesis. Freud speculated that the self, or ego, depended on mental activities involving the transfer of energy. He was vague about the details, though, and quite wrong about some of them (like his idea that artists “sublimate” sexual energy into their work, which would imply that adultery should be especially rare at artists’ colonies). Freud’s energy model of the self was generally ignored until the end of the century, when Baumeister began studying mental discipline in a series of experiments, first at Case Western and then at Florida State University.

To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants' memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. "There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task," Gabrieli says (NeuroImage, DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.07.063).

The MIT team is now working on a way to monitor this "preparedness to learn" using electroencephalography (EEG) - a more portable and much cheaper brain-monitoring technique. Gabrieli's idea is to make learning more efficient by selectively teaching the prepared brain. "You could imagine a computer-based learning system which would stop when the brain is not prepared to learn and restart when it is," he says.

"Optimising these brain regions would provide a more sophisticated way of approaching a learning task," says Cohen. "It's a very exciting idea."

Especially we, people with an IT-background, live too much with the illusion that we can capture our reality in bits. Unfortunately, what we are capturing is only a poor representation of a far deeper and far more complex reality.

By definition, language is a poor representation of our thinking and it gets only worse when we write it down. Whatever we had in our mind while writing this post, you will only capture a fraction of it and hopefully, not the wrong fraction. Especially we, people with an IT-background live too much with this illusion that if we can capture our reality in bits, that we can own it, re-use it, replicate it. Unfortunately, what we are capturing is only a very poor representation of a far deeper and far more complex reality where the real meaning is often only visible in a smile or an uneasy gesture. If we really want to succeed, we must improve our ability to capture meaning instead of bits.

Western science has had remarkable success in explaining the functioning of the material world, but when it comes to the inner world of the mind, it has very little to say.

There is nothing in physics, chemistry, biology, or any other science that can account for our having an interior world.

In a strange way, scientists would be much happier if minds did not exist. Yet without minds there would be no science.

"We are a people who never made singing or dancing an unrespected way of knowing. All of the five-fingered ways of knowing remained open to us."

Pat McCabe, a Navajo writer and scholar, spoke those words at the 12th Language of Spirit Conference. That means the 13th annual conference -- a dialogue "exploring the nature of reality," among aboriginal scientists, scholars, healers and artists and their Western counterparts in a wide array of fields -- is coming up soon.

This year's event, sponsored by the SEED Graduate Institute, will be held Aug. 14-16 in Albuquerque, N.M. The topic under consideration: Science, Technology and Creativity.

“Collective unconscious, a pool of shared experiences among our species, is a term of analytical psychology coined by Jung. Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international collaboration of scientists and engineers recording data from over 65 sites around the world since August 1998 in an attempt to measure subtle correlations that reflect the presence and activity of consciousness in the world.” Source: globalbrainpaint.com

Probing a machine for consciousness need not require an elaborate mathematical construct. In fact, it might derive from something as simple as a street photo snapped with a cell phone camera, or you could use photo editing software to devise an image that just about any human would recognize is irrational or nonsensical, but that even today’s smartest computers might pass over as reasonable.

A computer might be able to win at Jeopardy, but it doesn’t have the basic common sense to understand that something is just plain wrong with the off-kilter juxtaposition of an iMac paired with a geranium. Koch and Tononi describe similar examples in their article, "A Test for Consciousness," available to readers free of charge. Even a six-year old, for instance, can pinpoint the fundamental improbability of an ice skater on the rug in the living room, a transparent cow or a cat chasing a dog. Yet a computer doesn’t "know” these things about the world.

In his new book, Aping Mankind – about which he was talking this week at the British Academy – he describes the cultural disease that afflicts us when we assume that we are nothing but a bunch of neurons.Neuromania arises from the doctrine that consciousness is the same as brain activity or, to be slightly more sophisticated, that consciousness is just the way that we experience brain activity.If you think the brain is a machine then you are committed to saying that composing a sublime poem is as involuntary an activity as having an epileptic fit. You will issue press releases announcing "the discovery of love" or "the seat of creativity", stapled to images of the brain with blobs helpfully highlighted in red or blue, that journalists reproduce like medieval acolytes parroting the missives of popes. You will start to assume that the humanities are really branches of biology in an immature form.

Tallis doesn't claim to know. He described himself as an "ontological agnostic", the nature of consciousness being a tremendous mystery. "We just don't know how we should think about being and how mind fits into nature. But we'll never learn if we start out taking all the wrong paths."

As we now aim to tame the beasts of unstructured data using text analytics focused data processing, Claussen suggests that there are multiple steps or phases needed to make sense of the chatter and help acquire business insight. Phases here will include: Collecting and preparing the dataCleansing and 'tokenising' the dataCategorisation of the dataRunning analytics on the repository of now 'enriched' dataReporting and delivery on the data Claussen rounds out by commenting that text analytics as exercised by machines is not nearly as sophisticated as the functions possible inside our human brains.

Which company can claim the largest journalistic workforce in the world?

It’s Reuters, with a stable of more than 2,900 journalists at last count, and still growing. That’s right: No single company now tops 3,000 journalists, though AP, at 2,300 — and Japan’s Yomiuri — are closer to Reuters’ total. Most of the other companies are closer to a third to a half of Reuters’ size.

Reuters — a household name in the U.K., where it was born 160 years ago — is now an emerging force in the U.S. That push is fueled by the 2008 Thomson Reuters merger, by the great disruption of the U.S. news business, by the launch of Reuters America (“Reuters America Claims New Territory: First Stop, Chicago and Tribune”), and by the rapidly moving effort to make over Reuters News itself

"For centuries thinkers have assumed that the uniquely human capacity for reasoning has existed to let people reach beyond mere perception and reflex in the search for truth. Rationality allowed a solitary thinker to blaze a path to philosophical, moral and scientific enlightenment. Now some researchers are suggesting that reason evolved for a completely different purpose: to win arguments. Rationality, by this yardstick (and irrationality too, but we'll get to that) is nothing more or less than a servant of the hard-wired compulsion to triumph in the debating arena."

Questions that I have asked myself throughout my career are largely ones about self-knowledge and the role of the conscious mind versus unconsciousness; the limits of introspection; and the problems of introspection. For example, how it can sometimes get us into trouble to think too much about why we're doing what we’re doing. These are questions I began asking in graduate school with my graduate advisor, Dick Nisbett, and they have concerned me ever since.

There has been a question lurking in the back of my mind for all those years, which is how can we take this basic knowledge and use it to solve problems of today?

One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it's not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. You have to get inside people's heads and see the world the way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they're doing what they're doing. What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way.

The cost of collaboration: Why joint decision-making exacerbates rejection of outside information (article here

Existing research asserts that specific group characteristics cause members to disregard outside information which leads to diminished performance. In the present study we demonstrate that the very process of making a judgment collaboratively rather than individually contributes to such myopic disregard of external viewpoints. Dyad members exposed to the numerical judgments made by another dyad gave significantly less weight to those judgments than did individuals exposed to the judgments of another individual. The difference in the willingness to use peer input shown by individuals versus dyads was fully mediated by the greater confidence that the dyad members reported in the accuracy of their estimates. Consequently, although dyad members made more accurate initial estimates than individuals, they were less able to benefit from peer input

The cost of collaboration: Why joint decision-making exacerbates rejection of outside information

I've been reading Peter Singer's 3rd edition of Practical Ethics, trying to see what's new.  One new thing is the discussion in chapter 5 (see here) about what we ought to be aiming for--a Peopled Universe, a Non-sentient Universe (a la David Benatar), or a Happy Sheep Universe, crammed with the maximum amount of happy life.  He picks the Peopled Universe, based partly on premises from 2e, but also on ideas new to 3e.

The old ideas:  (1)  The "total view", rather than the "prior existence view."  We must take into account the total result of our choices, not limit our focus to the impact on those who exist prior to, or apart from, our decisions.  Both views lead to problems, but the second to worse problems. (2)  Preference utilitarianism, not hedonistic utilitarianism.  The good is desire-satisfaction, not simply happiness.  People have vastly more desires than sheep, so potentially more satisfied desires, so potentially more good in their lives.

Take the total view plus preference utilitarianism together.  Which universe should we aim for, based on that package?  It depends how we evaluate preference satisfaction.  We could take every chunk of preference satisfaction as a positive good.  In that case, the Peopled Universe is best, because there's the most preference satisfaction in it.  There's none in the empty universe, and less in the Happy Sheep Universe, because of the more limited potential of sheep to have preferences.

Grace Lee Boggs has taken part in just about every progressive movement in modern America – civil rights, labor organizing, women’s rights, global justice, and more. At 95 and now often confined to a wheel chair, the Detroit-based activist and visionary shows no signs of slowing down, at least intellectually. Her new book The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century sets out her ideas for making real that other world the slogans tell us is possible. Indeed, based on her experience as recounted in her book, that world is already happening and in some of the most seemingly unlikely of places.

Along with C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya, Boggs was a founder of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a theoretical perspective within the American left that in the 1940s identified the Soviet Union under Stalin as constituting an example of state capitalism, i.e., a system in which the state functions in essence like a gigantic corporation, therefore keeping conventional capitalist relations of production and labor alienation intact.

Boggs, the daughter of early twentieth-century Chinese immigrants, begins by setting out the problem and the opportunity for those of us living in the end times, that is, in the wake of the Apocalypse of the modern capitalist world-system that was the 2008 economic meltdown. And there are arguably few better places in the Western world from which to view the devastation than from the postindustrial wilderness of Detroit. Yet, Boggs argues, “the D,” as it is known especially to the young folk now that the “motor” of the Motor City has run out of gas, isn’t a site of despair but of hope.