In this article, Lee Billings riffs on Stanislaw Lem’s relatively unknown book of philosophical essays, Summa Technologiae (Electronic Mediations), written in 1964 but not fully translated into English until 2013. Lem is known primarily for his science fiction writing, especially the 1961 novel Solaris, adapted into a meditative film by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972. In … Read more
More than likely it didn’t. So then what? Is the universe cyclic, with no known beginning? Of course, this is the kind of model Roger Penrose proposed in Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe (2010). You can read more about Penrose’s conformal cyclic cosmology theory at Wikipedia. What If the Universe … Read more
Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman is one of my favorite science authors and has been ever since I read his novel, Einstein’s Dreams back in 1993. His most recent book (Jan, 2014) is The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew. [He is also the author of A Sense of the Mysterious: Science and … Read more
Mirror neurons, as Christian Jarrett has twice asserted, are the likely the most over-hyped concept in neuroscience. In the paragraph below, the solution to the mystery is stated, but it is not named. Despite her apt framing of the adaptation hypothesis, [Cecilia] Heyes actually argues against it. If she is right, then we’re all simply … Read more
Dissociation, derealization, and depersonalization have always been a coping mechanisms the human brain can employ when reality is too intolerable. Occasionally, this can result in the experience of seeing one’s double, or doppleganger. But what happens when it’s not part of mental illness, and not organic (often the insular cortex)? Can the experience of an … Read more
As my regular readers well know, I don’t think we will ever have human-like robots who can interact with us as though they are not machines. This article from Nautilus presents recent advances in what is known as subsymbolic approaches to AI, “Trying to get computers to behave intelligently without worrying about whether the code … Read more