From Bacteria to Bach and Back "Brains .. are composed of billions of idiosyncratic neurons that developed to fend for themselves, the brain's functional architecture is more like a fee market than a politburo hierarchy where all tasks are assigned from on high. The fundamental architecture of animal brains (including human brains) is probably composed of Bayesian networks that are highly competent expectation-generators that don't have to comprehend what they are doing. Comprehension - our kind of comprehension - is only made possible by thee arrival on the scene quite recently of a new kind of evolutionary replicator - culturally transmitted information entities: memes." - page 176 Among many implications flowing from this statement is the idea that our "minds" float in a sea of "culture". They are a virtual machine running the memes installed in the brain, simulating a small part of the affordances on offer in the culture we are born into. To pu...

I have a coffee cup in front of me (I usually do). If I rotate it or move or see it in different light it my brain automatically makes me experience it as the same cup. If you have ever tried to make a computer figure this out, you will see how astonishing this is. What's more, the cup will be seen as the same cup tomorrow and the same as the cup that I washed a week ago (or is it two weeks? The point is, that doesn't matter). This is symmetry under a transformation in time and space . It takes place so automatically that most of us will go through our entire lives without thinking of it at all. There is another, related, trick that the brain does. It makes me "see" the cup as a form . A form is a bunch of "stuff" that is more or less arbitrarily treated as the "same thing". My dog is quite capable of seeing a flying tennis ball as a "thing" that can be snatched out of the air, but she seems to be uninterested in the "things" sh...

Here is a quick, painless introduction to the kind of symmetry that you probably learned in school. In that lesson, we learn that there are different kinds of symmetry: Rotational Translational Mirror and so on. What this video (and your teacher) did not explain was what symmetry is in general.  If you learned about symmetry in University Math, your idea was  expanded a bit  to come closer to what symmetry is  in general . The first step is to think of symmetry as a set of transformations (rotate, move, flip) rather than a property of whatever it is that is being transformed. And that's just the start. For example, in physics, you learned the Lorentz Transformation  is a symmetry group in the "real world" that leaves the laws of physics unchanged. Newton's laws are not symmetric in this sense but with a bit of tweaking (Special Relativity) they can be fixed. In  physics , the Lorentz transformation (or transformations) are  coordinate tr...

Intuitively speaking, a good idea applies to more than just one situation. Bad ideas don't apply to any situation or they apply to one situation but get applied in "analogous" situations where they don't really "fit". A good example of the latter is the idea of "God the Father" who acts like a very strange father indeed. An example of a really good idea is Maxwell's equations that did the job of explained electromagnetic fields. But then it "dropped out" of the equations that the vibration between the fields would travel at the speed of light and that there were many other vibrations with different frequencies that also traveled at the speed of light. This is an example of a relatively simple idea that returns a lot more than what you put in and applies to a lot more situations than the one you applied it to in the first place.

\ Quick and dirty definitions, to be clarified as we go along: R Refers to the "real world" . Accepted wisdom is that we have no direct access to R.  It turns out that we actually do have quite a good access to the R domain - the M/R interface, also known as "Science". For the individual, the I domain is tiny compared to the vastness of both M and R. However, with effort and training, it is possible for the individual to open a tiny peephole into R - at least so far as to put to rest the notion that R does not exist at all - that it's all an illusion. M refers to "meme space" or the entire set of ideas, actual and possible. For example, all of Science exists in M, uncomfortably with all religions, past, present and future. It is everything we know, could know, or think we know, possibly including all those things that may be conceivable by some alien intelligence or even "God." M happily accommodates all the wrong ideas and the opposite of ev...

I must apologize to the reader in advance for what will seem to be a rather difficult set of ideas laid out in this post. At the outset, I want to lay out some ideas that are basic to me but strange to many. These ideas are developed more fully in other posts in the series and specifically in Zen philosophy an the Western version of it (Mindfulness). I am deeply influenced by Hofstadter and Dennett, whose ideas are strange, radically new and far from obvious. I take it that "mind" and "soul" both refer to the experience we all have of being "something". An essential idea of all religions is that this "something" survives death and is therefore separable from the body. I believe this to be mistaken, but I am left with the problem of "locating" the mind. Skeptics who reject the religious view tend to take it for granted that the mind is an "epiphenomenon" of the brain - somehow arising from the interaction of billions of neurons...

I just watched " Arrival " - not a bad SF piece. Possible spoiler - these days conquest of time seems to be a favorite theme. as it is in " Back to the Future ", one of the best movies on the theme which appropriately makes a joke of the concept of time travel. We are obsessed with time. Can we "travel" in it aside from the 60 seconds per minute pace we are stuck with? Does the future exist or has fate laid it all out like the road ahead? Does it all exist in one "eternal now"? You would think Science is immune to such fantasies, but there are serious scientists who would seem to say that time is an illusion. We supposedly live in the "eternal now" - whatever that could possibly mean. Others say time is basic. Lets face it, they are dreaming and guessing like the rest of us. The skeptical part of me suspects that if we paid our physicists better they would not need to write books for the general public challenging the reality of time. A...