a beaver and a fox are contemplating an immense man-made structure and the beaver is saying
"yeah but it's based on an idea of mine"
do you know who ray kurzweil is?
he's a guy that figured out how to make really cool keyboards, and he is also one of the world's leading authorities on Artificial intelligence (which sci fi has totally contorted).
his book "the age of spiritual machines" is one of the most important books i've ever read (i started highlighting it and realized i highlighted over 3/4 of the passages).
so the guy is really into developing artificial intelligence (it's already been created)
this is for ray:
"brains cannot become minds without bodies, that two-way interactions between mind and body are crucial to thought and health, and the brain may partly think in terms of the motor actions it encodes for the body's muscles to carry out.
We've probable fallen for disembodied brains because of the academic tendency to worship abstract thought. If we take a more democratic view of the whole brain we'd find far more of it being used for planning and controlling movement than for cogitation. Sports writers get it right when they describe stars of football or baseball as "geniuses"! Their genius requires massive brain power and a superb body, which is perhaps one better than Einstein."
Interactions between mind and body come out strongly in the surprising links between status and health. For Marmot, the answer lies in "the impact over how much control you have over life circumstances". The important message is that state of mind - perceived status - translates into state of body.
The effect of placebos on health delivers a similar message. Trust and belief are often seen as negative in science and the placebo effect is dismissed as a kind of "fraud" because it relies on the belief of the patient. But the real wonder is that faith can work. Placebos can stimulate the release of pain-relieving endorphins and affect neuronal firing rates in people with Parkinson's disease.
Body and mind interact too in the most intimate feelings of love and bonding. Those interactions have been best explored in voles where two hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, are critical. The hormones are released as a result of the "the extended tactile pleasures of mating", as researchers describe it, and hit pleasure centres in the brain which essentially "addict" sexual partners to one another.
Humans are surely more cerebral. But brain scans of people in love show heightened activity where there are lots of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors.
If bodies and their interaction with brain and planning for action in the world are so central to human kinds of mind, where does that leave the chances of creating an intelligent "disembodied mind" inside a computer? Perhaps the Turing test will be harder than we think. We may build computers that understand language but which cannot say anything meaningful, at least until we can give them "extended tactile experiences". To put it another way, computers may not be able to make sense until they can have sex."
****************this quote is from alun anderson, taken from the website "the world question center" which is AMAZING!!! this is from the 2006 question: what's your dangerous idea? all the coolest people in the world answered.
do you know who ray kurzweil is?
he's a guy that figured out how to make really cool keyboards, and he is also one of the world's leading authorities on Artificial intelligence (which sci fi has totally contorted).
his book "the age of spiritual machines" is one of the most important books i've ever read (i started highlighting it and realized i highlighted over 3/4 of the passages).
so the guy is really into developing artificial intelligence (it's already been created)
this is for ray:
"brains cannot become minds without bodies, that two-way interactions between mind and body are crucial to thought and health, and the brain may partly think in terms of the motor actions it encodes for the body's muscles to carry out.
We've probable fallen for disembodied brains because of the academic tendency to worship abstract thought. If we take a more democratic view of the whole brain we'd find far more of it being used for planning and controlling movement than for cogitation. Sports writers get it right when they describe stars of football or baseball as "geniuses"! Their genius requires massive brain power and a superb body, which is perhaps one better than Einstein."
Interactions between mind and body come out strongly in the surprising links between status and health. For Marmot, the answer lies in "the impact over how much control you have over life circumstances". The important message is that state of mind - perceived status - translates into state of body.
The effect of placebos on health delivers a similar message. Trust and belief are often seen as negative in science and the placebo effect is dismissed as a kind of "fraud" because it relies on the belief of the patient. But the real wonder is that faith can work. Placebos can stimulate the release of pain-relieving endorphins and affect neuronal firing rates in people with Parkinson's disease.
Body and mind interact too in the most intimate feelings of love and bonding. Those interactions have been best explored in voles where two hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, are critical. The hormones are released as a result of the "the extended tactile pleasures of mating", as researchers describe it, and hit pleasure centres in the brain which essentially "addict" sexual partners to one another.
Humans are surely more cerebral. But brain scans of people in love show heightened activity where there are lots of oxytocin and vasopressin receptors.
If bodies and their interaction with brain and planning for action in the world are so central to human kinds of mind, where does that leave the chances of creating an intelligent "disembodied mind" inside a computer? Perhaps the Turing test will be harder than we think. We may build computers that understand language but which cannot say anything meaningful, at least until we can give them "extended tactile experiences". To put it another way, computers may not be able to make sense until they can have sex."
****************this quote is from alun anderson, taken from the website "the world question center" which is AMAZING!!! this is from the 2006 question: what's your dangerous idea? all the coolest people in the world answered.