Consulting for Red Hat
Just a random update.
This week I've taken a vacation from UIC to do a week of consulting and I'm scheduled to do it again the week of Jan 8th. It's kinda weird being back in the classroom. I forgot how exhausting it can be. I've been working on UIC stuff still during my breaks here. My Docbook managment program, docmunger, is getting close to ready for distribution. I think I may have just decided to make one more major revision to the file layout in the svn repository... I'm gonna think more about it on the train.
In other news I've picked up a book on mind and brain I've owned for a while and started reading. I was just reading the bits on mind/brain dualism... from viewpoints kinda close to old Descartes nonsense to complete denial of the existence of subjective experience. For my $.02 on the issue right now, my opinion is some sort of hybrid of many of these positions. I pasionately reject the concept of an immaterial existence. I think the nature of the mind can be totally understood through the workings of matter, well matter and energy... and quantum mechanics, and there's the rub. Matter and energy get real interesting at the quantum level. If we really understood the nature of matter I think we'd also get at the nature of consciousness. Again, just my hunch at the moment, but it seems to me that the nature of consciousness is fundamentally nothingness, that is an undetermined state. Anyway, I do feel I'm getting closer to where I want to be, now that I'm pursuing these lines of thought again.
Another random thought... most innovative thinking comes from young people. Yes, there are the old masters, but they don't tend to be innovaters. Might the reason young people come up with the most innovative ideas be simply because youth is when most of us encounter new ideas? Would you see the same rate of new ideas throughout life among people who constantly shift fields of study?
This week I've taken a vacation from UIC to do a week of consulting and I'm scheduled to do it again the week of Jan 8th. It's kinda weird being back in the classroom. I forgot how exhausting it can be. I've been working on UIC stuff still during my breaks here. My Docbook managment program, docmunger, is getting close to ready for distribution. I think I may have just decided to make one more major revision to the file layout in the svn repository... I'm gonna think more about it on the train.
In other news I've picked up a book on mind and brain I've owned for a while and started reading. I was just reading the bits on mind/brain dualism... from viewpoints kinda close to old Descartes nonsense to complete denial of the existence of subjective experience. For my $.02 on the issue right now, my opinion is some sort of hybrid of many of these positions. I pasionately reject the concept of an immaterial existence. I think the nature of the mind can be totally understood through the workings of matter, well matter and energy... and quantum mechanics, and there's the rub. Matter and energy get real interesting at the quantum level. If we really understood the nature of matter I think we'd also get at the nature of consciousness. Again, just my hunch at the moment, but it seems to me that the nature of consciousness is fundamentally nothingness, that is an undetermined state. Anyway, I do feel I'm getting closer to where I want to be, now that I'm pursuing these lines of thought again.
Another random thought... most innovative thinking comes from young people. Yes, there are the old masters, but they don't tend to be innovaters. Might the reason young people come up with the most innovative ideas be simply because youth is when most of us encounter new ideas? Would you see the same rate of new ideas throughout life among people who constantly shift fields of study?