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Asimo:
The Honda Humanoid Robot
ASIMO, the world's most advanced humanoid
robot, features the ability to pursue key tasks in real-life environments.
The
Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online
The complete evolutionary works of Charles
Darwin have gone online, including the stolen notebook he
carried in his pocket around the Galapagos Islands. Tens of thousands
of pages of text and pictures and audio files have been made
available, including some previously unpublished manuscripts
and diaries of the great British scientist.
Heading
Backwards: The American Rejection of Science (140 kb
pdf)
by
Dr. Marcia Angell
In this speech – presented at Columbia
Univesity on March 15, 2006 – Dr. Angell articulates her
concerns about the
decline of science education in America, coinciding with
the growing exceptance of religious fundamentalism.
Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness
by
David Chalmers
Consciousness poses
the most baffling problems in the science
of the mind. There is nothing that
we know more intimately than conscious experience,
but there is nothing that is harder to explain.
Why
Won't God Heal Amputees?
by
Marshall Brain
If God promises to answer prayers,
and if God is healing cancers and solving all of these
other problems in response to prayer, then why can't
we also pray to God to restore amputated limbs?
Resource: 2573 Online Papers on Consciousness
By David Chalmers
Here
Chalmers has compiled a the best directory of online
papers on consciousness and related topics to date.
Most papers are by academic philosophers or scientists.
The listings are divided into three separate categories:
Part I: Philosophy
of Consciousness [934 papers];
Part II:
Other Philosophy of Mind [1067 papers];
Part III:
Science of Consciousness [574 papers].
The
Contents of Conscousness: A Neuropsychological Conjecture
by
Jeffrey A. Gray
A neuropsychological
hypothesis is proposed for the generation of the contents
of consciousness. It is suggested that these correspond
to the outputs of a comparator that, on a moment-by-moment
basis, compares the current state of the organism's perceptual
world with a predicted state.
TED
Inspired
talks by the world's greatest thinkers and
doers.
Harmonic
Resonance Theory: An Alternative to the "Neuron
Doctrine" of Neurocomputation to Address gestalt
Properties of Perception
By Steven Lehar
The conventional view of neuroscience, known
as the neuron doctrine, is based on the assumption that neurocomputation
involves discrete signals communicated along fixed transmission lines
between discrete computational elements. This concept is shown to
be inadequate to account for invariance in recognition, as well as
for the holistic global aspects of perception identified by Gestalt
theory. A Harmonic Resonance theory is presented as an alternative
paradigm of neurocomputation, that exhibits both the property of
invariance, and the emergent Gestalt properties of perception, not
as special mechanisms contrived to achieve those properties, but
as natural properties of the resonance itself.
The
Dimensions of Conscious Experience: A Quantitative
Phenomenology
By Steven Lehar
Psychology was originally
formulated as the science of the psyche, i.e. the
subjective side of the mind / brain barrier. However
time and again it has been diverted from this objective
in the supposed interest of scientific rigor. This
paper proposes a quantitative phenomenolgy to express
the dimensions of conscious experience in information
theoretic terms.
The
Dimensions of Visual Experience: A Quantitative Analysis
(50 MB Powerpoint presentation, with audio narration)
By Steven Lehar
In a presentation given
at the Tuscon 2006 Consciousness Conference, Steven
Lehar asks: What are the dimensions
of visual experinience? Is it possible to express
the content of consciousness in quantitative terms?
Evolution
Shift
Strategic advisor/blogger
David Houle examines the Ultra-Trends that are reorganizing
human society, combined with the ever accelerating
technological
and electronic connectedness that could well be creating
the possibility for a coming Evolution Shift.
Mr.
Science
A delightful general
science blog.
Intelligent
Machines
A blog dedicated to machine
learning and artificial intelligence. It aims at providing information
about up-to-date tools and methods of the domain to the casual
user.
SENS
A
practical approach to developing real anti-aging
medicine.
New
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