The three pound universe......discuss.

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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby brainpanhandler » Sat Jan 02, 2016 2:11 pm

slimmouse » Sat Jan 02, 2016 12:33 pm wrote:Hey BPH thanks for the thoughtful reply. I have a lot of trouble posting around here these days, due to what could actually be genuine reasons. If I can trust my DNS for long enough I'd love to discuss this more. In the meantime , here's some neuroscientific context.



For those of us lucky enough to find the time to think about such stuff of course


"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby chump » Sat Jan 02, 2016 4:22 pm

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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby brainpanhandler » Fri Jan 08, 2016 3:10 pm



Thanks for that. Presumably you offer it in this context because of Satan's summation:

"Nothing exists: all is a dream. God-man-the world-the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars-a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space- and you!"

Strangely the last two pages are defaced and/or poorly scanned. One wonders if the original was defaced by someone who disagreed with Satan (Twain).
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity." - Martin Luther King Jr.
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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby chump » Sat Jan 09, 2016 4:48 pm

Quite a few pages of that PDF were blurred unreadable.


Yeah... Emily Dickinson melted my heart, and I read a lot of Twain throughout my youth, and even took a Twain class in college... The professor only briefly mentioned The Mysterious Stranger - and solipsism; which flew over my head at the time I first read it - even as I was fascinated by The Tao of Physics, and holographic type theories that were popular then. Then, (... Like now), the universe was kicking... Like the more I explore the link between our physical world and consciousness, the more grief I encounter to block my understanding of why I'm here... Like maybe I shouldn't be looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Anyway, when you mentioned solipsism, it reminded me of Twain, so I googled the word and Mark Twain together, and The Mysterious Stranger appeared at the top of the list.

Thanks for the suggestion... Here's a better link: https://www.shsu.edu/~eng_wpf/authors/T ... ranger.htm


Your name wouldn't be Traum now would it?
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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby Pele'sDaughter » Mon Jan 11, 2016 10:19 am

Don't believe anything they say.
And at the same time,
Don't believe that they say anything without a reason.
---Immanuel Kant
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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby chump » Tue Jan 12, 2016 11:54 am

Row, row, row your boat, life is but a...

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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby chump » Wed Jan 13, 2016 2:22 pm



The Mysterious Stranger narration


"DREAM OTHER DREAMS... BETTER ONES"
- Satan


=============================


http://aanirfan.blogspot.com/2016/01/david-bowie.html

...
http://www.gettheebehind.me/


https://youtu.be/kszLwBaC4Sw

How We Hid the Devil
Right Before Our Eyes:
Baudelaire at the Bataclan,
Our Baby Blues &
Bowie's BLACKSTAR

by Norman Ball


thou sun, of this great world
both eye and soul
- John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book V




(*authors note: I feel obliged to offer this analysis with a mild content warning as my speculations could trouble some readers. For those resistant to far flung Jungian excursions or too close to the tragic Le Bataclan incident, please either read with care or skip altogether. Though I am a mature Christian with deeply held beliefs, I do not seek to PROSELYTISE, CONDEMN OR CONVINCE anyone.)



Recent developments in cognitive science find common cause with David Bowie’s new short-movie Blackstar where the latter’s solipsism dating back to We Are the Dead (‘I wondered if you saw the things my way’) and Sound and Vision, among others, receives a fresh, dark airing. (Note: As the focus of this 'ranging essay' expanded beyond the new Bowie video-song, I went back and hot-linked some of the more obscure Bowie lyric references to assist a non-Bowie audience. It's also fairly burdened with links for those who wish to tumble down their own pet rabbit holes.)

The eyes, it turns out, are the center of it all. The challenge comes in sorting through the valances, good and ill, that lie behind all that our vision insists we see. This skepticism extends to the Bowie presentation itself. What forces does he herald? How does he come to know what he so clearly knows?

My fondness for the terms herald and heraldic device (the latter from poet Robert Duncan’s Letters XVII), which appear herein frequently, originates with Bowie himself. In fact I recall reading the Cameron Crowe interview as a kid ('David Bowie: Ground Control to Davy Jones', Rolling Stone, February 12, 1976) and registering a strangely durable mental note of one passage in particular long before it became a staple of Internet Bible thumpers:

"Rock has always been the devil's music, you can't convince me that it isn't. I honestly believe everything I’ve said—I believe rock and roll is dangerous...I feel that we’re only heralding something even darker than ourselves” (Rolling Stone, February 12, 1976)

I prefaced my essay (circa 2010) on the Jungian-Bowie blog Red Book Red Sail with the second bit, noting at the time how, “‘Herald’ is a startling, non-accidental word. Bowie typically exhibits an eccentric though careful vocabulary…Heraldry always points beyond itself, or is it behind itself?”

It's precisely the 'what’s behind what’s in front?' mystery that spurs my perennial, core interest. Inquiring eyes want to peer around dark corners, especially as so many of rock's own inner circle are quick to pose Satan's lair as their inspirational backstop. Occam's razor is blunter still: what the hell's going on if not Hell itself? Some serious 'splaining is in order.

The heraldic question is finding indirect resonance, not to mention a strange bedfellow, in cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman who may be on the cusp of a truly Copernican breakthrough with his Interface Theory of Perception. (See 'Objects of Consciousness', Frontiers of Psychology, by Donald D. Hoffman & Chetan Prakash, June 17, 2014; stalwart scientist Hoffman, who frequently rails against metaphysical 'hand-waving' would in all likelihood be distressed over the deployment of his theory in this manner. That's understandable.)

Noting how the process of vision utilizes billions of neurons and trillions of synapses and commands an astonishing one-third of the brain’s cortex, Hoffman suggests that objects are highly processed, representational icons of a far deeper reality which has been hidden (occulted) from us by evolutionary forces that propel our sensory processing toward more stylized renditions.

The truth of the matter is, truth be damned. Consistent with evolutionary processes, vision works very hard at producing fitting icons to ensure our survival. Thus the ‘true’ role of vision is to deceive (overlook?) and filter prodigiously so we might live, procreate and—with the advent of culture and leisure—believe. But in the sense of fashioning our belief systems, how disturbing it is to learn that we can scarcely believe our own eyes and that self-deception is an evolutionary 'advance'. (In the Monte Carlo simulations Hoffman performs, evolution kills truth in the laboratory every time.)

Seers die. Breeders lie.

It may also be that artists, wizards and philosophers subvert this reductionism with alternate visions that—in reality—stress enhanced 'truthiness' (or conceivably, competing brands of deception) over creaturely survival. What's most exciting though is how our venerable, metaphysical narratives are gaining fresh scientific credence via mathematical and probabilistic overlays. Of course there are antecedents to Hoffman's anti-materialist approach, even in science; Max Planck being an exceptionally significant one.

Analogizing the computer desktop, Hoffman notes that when we drag the blue folder to the trashcan, there is no trashcan nor blue folder lurking behind the screen. The Windows desktop is a highly representational, though quite useful, extended metaphor. The 'reality behind' the interface is vastly more complex, consisting of unseen microprocessors and electrical charges that defy most users' understanding. Indeed the subterrenean and surface worlds bear little resemblance to one another. However the iconic display provides a fitting enough interface such that a successful experience on the device is possible. As Hoffman says, though we take the interface reality seriously (deleting the folder would cost us a full week's work) we do not take it literally. This workspace icon description combines Bowie/Duncan’s heraldic devices and Freud’s and Ernest Beckers’ Vital Lie. (“It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.”—Denial of Death, Ernest Becker). Caveat emptor in all cases. A June 11, 2015 Hoffman TED talk is embedded below:



To expand on a Hoffman's 'blue folder' example...

Bill drops dead right in front of us. Nice guy, that Bill. Such a pity. We dispose of his body in short order, effectively scrubbing his icon from the workspace. While he was alive, it behooved us to sustain a qualified belief that he and his body were one and the same whenever we needed to interface with him. Indeed seeing his head occasionally bob up above the garden hedge, we'd often call out 'Hey Bill!' On every occasion he would respond back. Perfectly workable. But with the retirement of his 'icon', we can find ourselves plagued anew with thoughts about the depth and extent of his existence. Many of us realize his body was little more than a heraldic interface for a consciousness (or soul) that lurked behind or within his body. (Assuming you and he are like me, and not simply one of David Chalmer's zombies; but that's a whole 'nother level of solipsistic dread!)

Speaking as a Christian, I took Bill's body seriously but not literally. He was an embodied soul. When his body reached its expiration date, his soul—which precedes, inhabits and survives the former—departed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; so goes the body-icon. (The same cannot be said for atheists, materialists and physicalists who believe Bill has departed in all but our memory of him; for them, Bill is his body.) We cremate Bill's blue folder and offer some words of remembrance. Suddenly Hoffman's work, rooted in science, puts skeptics of transcendant existence on the defensive. They are forced to re-address the central question: where did the operative reality behind Bill go?

... http://www.gettheebehind.me


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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby chump » Wed Feb 17, 2016 3:26 pm

How algorithms shape our world

(Via Sofia):


https://youtu.be/TDaFwnOiKVE
Kevin Slavin: Uploaded on Jul 21, 2011

http://www.ted.com Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control...


==================


http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetar ... 1aba7c6b0a
The Zika Virus And How Algorithms And Media Effects Impact Our Understanding Of Global Issues
Kalev Leetaru , Contributor
Feb 14, 2016 @ 08:59 PM


According to the latest Google Trends data, the world has suddenly become very interested in the Zika virus. Though the virus has been known to infect humans for over half a century, its outbreak in South America and the Caribbean over the past year sparked global attention last month with the potential link of the virus and microcephaly in Brazil, along with the coming Summer Olympics. The suddenness of global interest in Zika in spite of its longstanding existence underscores the role technology and the media cycles of journalism play in shaping our understanding of global issues.

In today’s information saturated world it is all too easy to assume that if something happens anywhere in the world we will instantly find out about it and that the intensity with which it appears in front of us corresponds to its global importance. Yet, in reality, media effects and, increasingly algorithmic decisions, play a tremendous role in our awareness of the world around us.

Perhaps most famously this played out in 2014 when Twitter was filled with a moment-by-moment chronology of the Ferguson protests, while Facebook was instead a collage of ALS ice bucket challenge videos. Facebook’s algorithms determined that the ALS videos were of far greater interest and relevance to the Facebook community than the protests in Ferguson and apparently preferenced them for many users over reports of the Ferguson unrest.

Yet, this kind of prioritization also plays out every day in the myriad editorial decisions that determine what makes up the world’s news media reporting. When Nepal was struck with an earthquake, nearly a quarter of all global coverage in the first 24 hours was about the foreign tourists trapped on Mouth Everest. Moreover, the surge of coverage in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster reaches its peak in just 72 hours, before declining to half that much in one week and back to nearly original levels in less than two weeks. In fact, this pattern appears to hold across the entire world and is not influenced by how geographically proximate the countries are. While the 2010 Haiti earthquake has long since faded from headlines, the country is far from fully recovered, yet receives little coverage today.

Similarly, the November 2015 Paris attacks garnered more than nine times the global media attention as the April 2015 Kenyan attack, despite the Garissa attack involving the targeted killing of children at school. Less than 24 hours prior to the Paris attacks, attacks in Lebanon and Iraq prompted discussion of a double-standard for Facebook’s Safety Check service when Facebook defended activating its service in Paris, but not in “other parts of the world, where violence is more common and terrible things happen with distressing frequency.”

Similarly, despite taking thousands of lives in Africa, Ebola did not capture the global spotlight until the first Americans became infected and arrived back in the United States for treatment. Language barriers, low penetration of social media and the lack of Western journalists in the affected areas at the beginning of the outbreak all contributed to low international attention.

In the case of Zika, Google Trends shows that interest in the virus did not really begin until this past December and accelerated in January as the first American infection was confirmed and concerns rose over the potential of the Summer Olympics to create a global epidemic.

As reports began rolling in of infections in other countries, the media began paying attention with many outlets simply running stories that no cases had been found locally. In the United States, news outlets in South Carolina, Montana and New Mexico all reassured their readers that the disease was unlikely to reach them, while Texas outlets reported heavily on the state’s first case of sexual transmission of the virus. As the virus spread to cover more than 25 countries, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Oman and Egypt all announced increased border monitoring and screening of travelers. Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland all reported cases, as did Australia, while local authorities noted the same mosquitoes exist in Queensland and a case was confirmed on Sumatra Island. Venezuela’s medical community demanded the government resume publication of epidemic infection data, which it had halted more than a year ago. Each article published about Zika increased public awareness and in turn led to even further coverage, creating a cyclic effect of ever-growing volume.

Why does it really matter how algorithmic or human editorial decisions control what we see online? Perhaps the greatest promise of the Internet was that by virtue of instant access to information from all over the globe, the citizens of the online world would become global citizens, aware of everything happening in their global world. Yet, simply because we have the technical ability today using news aggregators and machine translation to watch events unfold in realtime from across the globe, few of us actually do.

The majority of what we know about the latest on the Syrian civil war, or reconstruction in Haiti or the spread of the Zika virus is determined by editorial decisions of what is “important” or “relevant” for us to know. As computer algorithms begin to play an ever-growing role in making these decisions for us, we are fast reaching a world where “likes” will become the new arbitrator of what is important in the world and where, in spite of more and more information, we will know less and less.


================


http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/ ... nt-people/

The NSA’s SKYNET program may be killing thousands of innocent people
"Ridiculously optimistic" machine learning algorithm is "completely bullshit," says expert.

by Christian Grothoff & J.M. Porup - Feb 16, 2016 1:35am MST

In 2014, the former director of both the CIA and NSA proclaimed that "we kill people based on metadata." Now, a new examination of previously published Snowden documents suggests that many of those people may have been innocent.

Last year, The Intercept published documents detailing the NSA's SKYNET programme. According to the documents, SKYNET engages in mass surveillance of Pakistan's mobile phone network, and then uses a machine learning algorithm on the cellular network metadata of 55 million people to try and rate each person's likelihood of being a terrorist.

Patrick Ball—a data scientist and the director of research at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group—who has previously given expert testimony before war crimes tribunals, described the NSA's methods as "ridiculously optimistic" and "completely bullshit." A flaw in how the NSA trains SKYNET's machine learning algorithm to analyse cellular metadata, Ball told Ars, makes the results scientifically unsound.

Somewhere between 2,500 and 4,000 people have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004, and most of them were classified by the US government as "extremists," the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported. Based on the classification date of "20070108" on one of the SKYNET slide decks (which themselves appear to date from 2011 and 2012), the machine learning program may have been in development as early as 2007.

In the years that have followed, thousands of innocent people in Pakistan may have been mislabelled as terrorists by that "scientifically unsound" algorithm, possibly resulting in their untimely demise.

The siren song of big data

SKYNET works like a typical modern Big Data business application. The program collects metadata and stores it on NSA cloud servers, extracts relevant information, and then applies machine learning to identify leads for a targeted campaign. Except instead of trying to sell the targets something, this campaign, given the overall business focus of the US government in Pakistan, likely involves another branch of the US government—the CIA or military—that executes their "Find-Fix-Finish" strategy using Predator drones and on-the-ground death squads...

Image
... http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/ ... nt-people/
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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby chump » Sat Jul 01, 2017 3:23 pm



(from above)
https://youtu.be/xLqrVCi3l6E#t=1h7m
1:07:00

Heinz von Foerster is one of the pioneers of the theory of Constructivism, according to which we human beings construct our own reality. No objective reality exists independent of the observer.

During the 60's, Heinz von Foerster is head of his own research labratory, the "Biological Computer Lab" at the University of Illinois. Here, commissioned by research departments of the US Navy and Air Force, he works on, among other projects, the merging of digital and biological systems.

Heinz von Foerster has never owned a computer of his own because he apparently believes himself to be a more sophisticated machine...

---------------------


Foerster: What I see, and what I believe lies beneath your questioning, is that science, or "scientia" in Latin, has been amazingly successful in the 2,000 years since Aristotle. But, what does "scientia" derive from? The Indo-European word for "scientia" is "scy", and that is found in "science" and "sciencia" and in "schizophrenia", and in "schism", that is the word meaning "to separate". And so "systemics" is a parallel development, only it's the exact opposite of "science", for it integrates.

When you think about it today, all this system theory and systems research which crops up in both art and science... I wouldn't call that "science" any more, I would call it "systemics". Today's science has moved on to an approach that sees things together: "Systemics". So I would see the steps taken today as being from science to systemics.

In the course of my life, the more I concerned myself with physics, I realized that I was actually a "meta-physicist", and then I increasingly played with that idea, and if you ask me, "My dear Heinz von Foerster, what is a meta-physicist?", I would say the following:

There are questions among those we ask about the world that it is possible to answer: "Heinz von Foerster, how old are you?" Well, you can look that up in a catalog: Born in 1911, that means he is 90. Or you can ask questions which cannot be answered, like for example: "Heinz von Foerster, tell me, what was the origin of the universe?" Well, then I could give you one of the 35 different theories. Ask an astonomer, and he says: "There was this Big Bang about 20 million years ago." Or ask a good Catholic: "Everyone knows that God created the world, and after seven days he was weary and took a break, and that was Sunday... " So there are different, very interesting hypotheses about the origins of the universe. That is, there are so many different hypotheses because the question cannot be answered. So all that is relevant is how interesting the is the story that someone invents to explain the origins of the universe.

Question: If it's a matter of inventing a good story, a poetic story...

Foerster: Exactly, exactly... That's what it is. There is a struggle between two or three or even ten different poets. Who can invent a funny, amusing or interesting story so that everyone thinks: "That's exactly what happened!" ?

Question: But science, and your own research... those are not just inventions or good stories? Surely they're based on mathematics, on numbers, on provability, on indisputable scientific data?

Foerster: Well, yes, but these days there is already so much data that it is no longer possible to include all the different data in your "story". And then artificial data is invented, for example "particles"... Then, "particles" are invented that do whatever it is we don't understand. So in my opinion particles are always the solutions to problems that we can't solve any other way... They replace a hole in my theory. So I maintain that each particle we read about in today's physics is the answer to a question that we can't answer.

Question: But that's terrible. How can we let a world-wide network system of machines grow, more or less into infinity, if it is based on theories that apparently have holes or are only "good stories", I mean on such shaky foundations? Isn't that dangerous?

Foerster: Well, in this world-wide, functioning system of machines, all theories are correct, and of course that's what people want. Why are they correct? Because they can all be deduced from other theories and "stories" ...

Question: But what will it lead to? How does it go on?

Foerster: It goes on deducing indefinitely.

Question: But there have to be limits somewhere?

Foerster: No, not at all, that's the the good thing about it. You can go on forever.

Question: In logic?

Foerster: Yes, Precisely.

Question: But in reality?

Foerster: Where is reality? Can you show it to me?



------------------------



^^


Psychographics 101
corbettreport
What do you get when you combine behavioural science with big data and use the new Frankenstein hybrid to better influence people’s thoughts, opinions and desires? Why, psychographics of course! Join James today as he delves into the murky world of billionaire hedge fund owners, creepy thought manipulators and the Trump campaign.


https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-3 ... phics-101/
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Re: The three pound universe......discuss.

Postby Grizzly » Sun Jul 02, 2017 11:37 pm

“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

― Joseph mengele
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