Interesting discussion between leading atheists  Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris , Ayaan Hirsi Ali A wide-ranging discussion of subtle issues with atheism, including an unusually subtle treatment of why people accept religion - the process of assimilation and the difficulty in freeing people from assimilation. Risks associated with criticizing Islam; When to take the gloves off - being polite to people who have been indoctrinated; Vetting the authorities; How liberal kids get assimilated to radical Islam; Sam Harris speaks eloquently about the powerful meme of Islam; Dawkins doesn't understand that everyone doesn't think like he does; Dennett refers to the "narrative arc" in TV shows and movies, which primes a person for assimilation; The appeal of Islam to intelligent, liberal women; Ali calls Islam a form of madness; Dennett compares crime committed for religious reasons with drunk driving Harris points out that religious delusion is excluded in DSM  Ar

Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins share ideas on religion. The conversation is interesting because Dawkins is generally credited with the invention of the idea of the "meme" and Dennett is best known for making the idea more precise and useful. Interestingly, Dennett's grasp of evolution (and even memes!) seems to be more nuanced than Dawkins', even though Dennett is a philosopher and Dawkins' credentials are in biology. Dawkins focused originally on the idea that memes survived in a way analogous to evolution (In his preface to " The Meme Machine ", Dawkins admits that he's surprised that people took the idea seriously). The conversation struggles to keep this analogy going, trying to make the case that religion is a parasitic meme, surviving at the expense of the believer. It seems that Dawkins uses "meme" mainly as a rhetorical device -- part of his arsenal of weapons to attack what he imagines to be "religion". Dennett, on th

These slides are taken from  Susan Greenfield's presentation  concerning visualization of dynamic processes in the brain and her sweeping new theory of consciousness.  Greenfield tests her model against 5 different ways we think of consciousness, particularly our sense that there are "degrees" of being conscous Greenfield points out that Electrophysiology models the brain at tiny resolution and microsecond time intervals versus the commonly seen fMRI scans with poor resolution and long time scales. There is a huge gap between what these two models can say about what is happening in the brain. Greenfield's method bridges this gap using voltage-sensitive die imaging,  This method shows a mid-range number of cells ( a few million) at short time interval (18 ms in the above slide). This gives a mental model of consciousness that she compares to a stone being thrown in a puddle. In this talk, she extends that model in quite a bit of detail. From 1:34:17 onward, she present

I am particularly attracted to the idea of the "fractal", which is a scale-independent repetition of a theme. Nature seems to "discover" a few patterns then use them in endless patterns and variations. This is one of the building blocks of what is taking shape as a "theory of mind". To build a "super mind", it would make sense to design the largest scale of this mind in the cloud to tap the computational power of millions of volunteer machines (as in the cloud project to classify galaxies). However, perhaps this as already been done. At least to serve in my "thought experiment", Google may be enough. The "theme" that has me fascinated is the mapping of one brain state into another, using something similar to the Shrodinger Wave Equation. That equation describes the state of the universe in the "next instant" as a function of the state of the universe in the "previous instant". The mental equivalent would be

Roger Penrose is a guy who has a way of asking good questions and providing controversial answers. On page 20 of his monumental survey of applied mathematics, " The Road To Reality"  he explains an interesting theory about three "worlds": R*:The "real", physical world of "stuff" and phenomena, which he (quite reasonably) takes to exist apart from the other two worlds; M:The world of ideas - what I call the "meme space". In principle, this is all the theories, observations, direct or indirect perceptions that could ever be made by the human mind; F:The world of forms, mathematics and logic. While he contends is that each world "maps"  completely  to the others. In principle at least, each world can be explained in terms of the other.  But he allows us to imagine that the mapping is incomplete. It is the incompleteness that interests me: There may be aspects of reality that are "illogical" or cannot be described by mat

Roger Penrose is a guy who has a way of asking good questions and providing controversial answers. On page 20 of his monumental survey of applied mathematics, " The Road To Reality"  he explains an interesting theory about three "worlds": R*:The "real", physical world of "stuff" and phenomena, which he (quite reasonably) takes to exist apart from the other two worlds; M:The world of ideas - what I call the "meme space". In principle, this is all the theories, observations, direct or indirect perceptions that could ever be made by the human mind; F:The world of forms, mathematics and logic. While he contends is that each world "maps" completely to the others. In principle at least, each world can be explained in terms of the other.  But he allows us to imagine that the mapping is incomplete. It is the incompleteness that interests me: There may be aspects of reality that are "illogical" or cannot be described by math

A wider and more optimistic picture of assimilation can be found here . The progress of human thought, including technology, depends on the individual being "assimilated" into the way society "thinks".

The premise of " Dragon Theory " is that we get "assimilated" into intelligent machines - social structures based on mechanical rules - thereby losing our fundamental humanity. The assumption of Dragon Theory is that this "assimilation" is a "bad thing", even a dangerous thing. Perhaps even a threat to the continued existence of human beings on the planet. On the other hand, I have a thread of reasoning in Diary of a Christian Skeptic  that recognizes that there is little or nothing in my personal "meme world" that doesn't come from other people, many of which can be identified by name. According to this picture, my mind is simply a kind of eddy, through which the memes of mankind flow. According to Zen, there are no borders to the individual mind. Properly speaking, the mind is infinite and contains "reality". The mind of a modern intellectual "contains" a lot more "reality" than the mind of an educat

" Laws of Form " are the foundation for mathematics based on the fundamental idea of categorization. Any freshman course will show how all of mathematics is built up on the foundation of set theory - the logic of categories. Even in High School, we are taught that there is no such thing as a "real" circle - in the real world, things that we call circles are actually only approximately circular. But we are left with the idea that a circle is a "real thing". "More real", in fact, than the circles of actual experience. We take the form of distinction for the form." There is a circularity in bringing into words what is quite clear without them. And yet it is in the bringing forth into formalisms that mathematics is articulated and universes of discourse come into being. The elusive beginning, before there was a difference, is the eye of the storm, the calm center from which these musings spring. There is a delicious circularity in this idea - so

In  Swimming With the Sharks , Joris Lewindijk  provides a stellar inside look at the "City", London's financial industry. His work is remarkable in that he manages to tease out the differences between matters on a human scale and what happens to the system as a whole. He focuses on "perverse incentives", a key mechanism of "assimilation" whereby ordinary people surrender their humanity to the impersonal machinery of the investment banks. The book should be read with "The Real World of Technology", which describes the phenomenon of assimilation in an industrial society in general (not just banking). "Swimming" is a modern classic, to be compared with "The Corporation". At its heart we see acceptance of the fallacy: money as a proxy for value. "Swimming" presents the clearest case I know of how the "Dragon" created by the common efforts of very smart people takes on a life of its own. But the whole is s

There is one place in our field of vision where we are blind , due to the "Rube Goldberg" design of our eyes. Octopuses have better eyes (presumably "designed" by a more skilful God, but don't get me started). Even though there is a patch of our retina devoted to passing the optical nerve through the retina, we don't "see" the hole. Our brains paint it over with what "ought" to be there. We are born with another huge blind spot. We have a full, 360 degree view of the world, in which we are free to explore and move around, but at the very centre is a hollow hole. We seem to be peering out of the hole but cannot see inside. We know that what is really inside this hole is 3 pounds of gooey meat that is somehow responsible for everything we see, but, just like the optic nerve that penetrates our retina, this bundle of nerves thoroughly hides its presence. We are all like this, all looking out from hollow heads. It is incredibly difficult to s

The wave equation of Quantum Mechanics P'(U') = P(U) completely describes the Universe, or more precisely, what we think we can know about the Universe. I'm leaving out all the usual Greek letters here (P is usually "Phi"). U is a vector in Hilbert space, essentially an infinite list of "facts", including the value of every field (gravity, electromagnetic etc) at every point in the Universe. What you pay for rent is in there somewhere. This theory becomes useful if you add another variable, K, which represents a restriction on the wave function to a domain of concern or applicability. The equation then becomes an " effective field theory ", P'(U',K) = P(U,K). K will specify things like velocities much less than the speed of light, gravitational fields weaker than in a black hole etc. K may be so restrictive that things like gravity can be entirely ignored (as in a particle accelerator, where the effect of gravity is vanishingly small c

I have been blogging for over 12 years. This is an autobiographical sketch I wrote in 2004. It's a self-portrait that still rings true: Resume of a Born Skeptic People are occasionally amazed at my skeptical attitude and my tendency to "go for the jugular" so quickly. Was I raised by wolves? Was I abused as a child? I don’t think so. I think I can make a good case for being born this way. Here are a few highlights of my career as a skeptic: At age 4, I suspected the  terrible truth about Santa Claus . I couldn’t see how he could visit all those homes in one night. I mounted a successful sting operation that conclusively proved my Parents were behind the conspiracy. At age 5, a little girl explained the idea of God to me in the school playground. It was an interesting but implausible idea. I filed it with Santa Claus. Years of Sunday School did not change my mind. My term paper for Grade 12 English was “Is there a God?”  I concluded there wasn’t and outlined my reasons. I

"Growing" Brain Tissue A key insight is to take into account the fractal nature of how the brain  grows  (like any other tissue) from a single stem cell. Model structure should reflect the way cells grow and connect rather than relying on mathematical structures like matrices. Connections  look  random but have an underlying fractal structure. On the other hand, the model needs to reflect the well known principle that "cells that fire together wire together". The fractal structure "explains" this rule in a physical way (cortical columns) but the brain can wire itself up in a way that might be seen as 4 dimensional. Connections are formed due to "closeness" in space as well as some kind of time function.  The model should assume some level of continuous growth. In the brain, new neurons are being created and others are dying all the time. It's not known how these new neurons find their place in the structures of the brain. Similarly, we know

(The following is a messy draft. For technical reasons - a glitch in blogger software - the text was trashed. However, it seems that this idea is worth a more formal treatment). The following is based on correspondence with an old friend, John Heerema. We are both addicted to thinking about problems by imagining what a solution would look like, then "reverse engineering" the solution into a practical program.  What would a silicon brain look like? Cortical Column Model A 10,000 x 10,000 in-memory matrix (100 megabytes)  representing (i,j) connection strength would seem to be feasible for a column modelled on a single CPU), Matrix structure may work better in 3 dimensions, x,y,z where z is the vertical layer, between 4 and 10. In this structure, we may get away with a sparse matrix which supplies non-zero interaction only for neurons that are "close" in 3 dimensions or even a network  (rather than a matrix) that allows communication only with daughter cells of the sa